Below Mercury (20 page)

‘What the
fuck
—’ Clare exploded, and rammed the thrust levers forward. Nothing happened; the ship continued its sickening plunge, tilting over to the left as it fell, and the landing pad slipped away from underneath them.

‘
Terrain, terrain. Pull up.’

‘Shit!’

Clare could hardly take in what was happening; it seemed as if every system was screaming for attention. The caution and warning panel was a growing mass of red lights as their ship fell out of the sky.

‘Call the altitude!’ she barked.

‘One hundred ten –
one hundred!’

‘Have they flamed out? What’s happening?’

‘No, I – I don’t know,’ Wilson stammered. His eyes darted over the instruments, looking but not seeing in his panic, as he frantically looked for the fuel displays that he had been reading off, only moments before.

Without thinking why or making a conscious link, simply moving on instinct, Clare let go of the thrust levers, re-engaged the autopilot, and set the maximum climb rate.

For a moment, nothing appeared to happen, but below the ship, the columns of escaping fuel shut off abruptly.

Pressure rose again in the tanks, and the cabin shook from a series of jarring bangs as the landing jets re-ignited and stuttered into life. There was a rising push from below as the roar of the landing jets returned, slowing their fall, but it wasn’t enough, not nearly enough.

Clare rammed the sidestick hard over, and the thrusters responded, rolling the spaceplane back towards level, but the crater floor was rising towards them, reaching up to smite them from the sky.

‘Altitude!’

‘Fifty!’ Wilson stared ahead, white-faced. Clare had the wings level, but the ship was still falling, and its forward slide was getting faster.

‘Forty!’

‘
Terrain, terrain. Pull up.’

‘Main engines!’ Clare yelled above the noise of the alarms.

‘Too low! The mountains!’

Clare saw the approaching hills even as Wilson said the words. The landing jets were beginning to have an effect, but the ship was still flying forward, heading straight toward the outthrust spur of the crater wall.

In a moment of clarity that seemed to stretch forever, she realised they weren’t going to make it. The ground was coming up towards them faster than they could climb away from it, and someone very far away said with Wilson’s voice, in words that sounded strangely unreal in her ears: ‘We’re going to hit the ground.’

Wilson’s face turned to look at her and he said something else, but she couldn’t take it in. She pulled back on the sidestick, trying to slow them down and raise the nose. The ground hissed past below in a blur of bright light from the landing lights, and dust was blowing all around, they must be very close now, very close—

‘Crash landing – brace for impact!’ Clare shouted above the sound of the alarm and the icily calm computer voice that counted off the last few metres to their death.

‘
Ten. Pull up.’

The crater floor loomed directly in front of the cockpit windows, a carpet of swirling dust.

‘
Five. Pull up.’

Time seemed to slow to a crawl as the last moments stretched out in front of them.

Bergman wondered what his wife would tell his son, when the news broke that they had been killed; he could see his son’s face, his wife trying to hold it together as she tried to tell him that his Daddy wouldn’t be coming home. The emotion rushed up like acrid smoke to suffocate him, hot tears welling up in his eyes.

Clare was running through all the reasons for the landing jets failing, round and round, through mental pathways made lightning fast by the adrenaline, checking again and again if there was something she had missed. She must have forgotten something, something …

Wilson was in shock, and he stared at his fingers, frozen uselessly on his armrest as he tried to remember what Clare had asked him to do. He was supposed to do something, he knew. His little finger jumped uncontrollably as he watched it, unable to move.

Elliott scrabbled at the fastenings of his seat straps, trying in vain to release them. In the seat opposite, Abrams wondered how his wife would manage without him; she had taken the death of one of her friends last year so hard.

Matt’s eyes were clenched shut, and he held his breath against the impact. In his mind’s eye, he could see the undulating surface skimming past just below them, waiting to tear them from the sky.

At the last moment, Clare pulled hard back on the sidestick, lifting the nose clear of the impact.

The spaceplane’s main landing gear slammed into the ground and sheared off. It smashed down onto its belly with a bone-jarring crunch that tore off the nose gear, and slid along the crater floor in a shriek of tearing metal. The mission team were thrown about in their seats like dolls as the spaceplane ploughed its way into the dust, ripping its lower fuselage away. A deep
boom
came from the innards of the ship as the pressurised propellant tanks burst. Something arced briefly behind an instrument panel; there was a loud bang, and the flight deck went dark.

The ship ground itself deep into the crater floor, dust showering the windows.

And stopped.

Outside, the jets were silent, but the dust pattered down like rain, falling in graceful curves in the vacuum. Liquid propane and liquid oxygen gushed from the ruptured propellant tanks, steaming and bubbling in the vacuum.

The red glow of emergency lighting came on behind the cockpit windows.

The spaceplane was wrecked, nothing but scrap metal after the crash landing. It lay in the dust of the floor of Chao Meng-fu crater on Mercury, 150 million kilometres from any hope of help.

They were marooned on Mercury.

Matt’s head was ringing, and his vision had gone cold and distant, as if he was watching the red-lit scene in front of him unfold through someone else’s eyes.

Clare was running her hands over the overhead console, turning off the fuel pumps, shutting the power down. Wilson was looking back at Matt, shouting something behind the faceplate of his helmet, but Matt couldn’t hear. Why was he angry with him when he needed help?

Someone grabbed him by the arm and pulled him round, and Bergman’s face came into view. The eyes looked at him for a moment, and then Bergman reached over Matt’s shoulder. Bergman’s mouth moved silently behind his faceplate as he pushed at something.

‘—hear us. Matt, can you hear us?’ The words exploded in his ears, and Matt started.

‘Yes – I can hear you. I’m okay.’ Matt tried to move, but his suit felt strange round him; it had inflated and stiffened in the vacuum. A thin mist hung in the cabin from the sudden decompression; the ship’s pressure hull must have ruptured in the crash. Matt fought down a sudden rush of panic. They had crashed, they had to get out, they were—

‘Okay, can you all hear me now?’ Clare’s voice came over his headset, and suddenly Matt had something to hang on to – a voice, someone who knew what to do. It steadied him. He took a deep breath, and gave Clare a thumbs-up sign.

‘Peter? Dr Elliott? You with us?’

‘We’re a little shaken up back here, but we’re okay,’ Abrams responded.

‘Right, everyone listen carefully. We need to evacuate the ship. You’ve all done this before in training. Disconnect your air hoses first, then release your seat straps and get ready to move. Steve, get the door open, the slide down, and get everyone well away from the ship while I safe all the systems. I’ll follow behind. Quick as you can.’

Wilson was already out of his seat and moving towards the rear of the cabin. Elliott and Abrams released their straps and got up as soon as Wilson was past, followed by Bergman and Matt, in the evacuation sequence they had practised so many times, but never thought they would be using. Their suits switched over to a self-contained air cylinder the moment they unplugged their air hoses. The cockpit looked strange and alien in the blood-red light; all the colour and familiar shapes had drained away, adding to the sense of unreality.

‘Hold on to something, there might be some residual air,’ Wilson cautioned, and pulled the release handle downwards. The door unsealed, and he swung it out and away to one side. The faint mist in the cabin vanished; a scrap of paper blew out of the open doorway, and dropped away outside. The last of their air was gone, and they were in hard vacuum.

The escape slide tumbled out automatically, unfolding and inflating in the silence of space. Wilson looked out of the empty doorway into the blackness outside.

‘Okay, the slide’s inflated. Dr Elliott, you go first. Don’t wait at the bottom of the slide; just get away from the ship. Come on, let’s move it.’

They slid in turn down the silver fabric of the escape slide, first Elliott, then Abrams, Bergman, Matt, and finally Wilson. As each of them landed, they got up and stepped away from the bottom of the slide, moving carefully in the low gravity after so long in space.

Matt followed the others away from the ship for maybe twenty metres before he stopped to look back.

The spaceplane lay half-buried in the dust, tilted onto its left-hand wing. A large section of the centre fuselage had been torn open, and liquid propellants were pouring out into the dust and boiling in the vacuum. A cloud of vapour hung over the scene, spreading outwards as he watched.

‘Matt, keep moving!’ Wilson shouted on the radio, ‘Get away from the ship!’

Matt turned away, and followed Wilson and the others as they walked out into the darkness of the crater floor. One of the ship’s landing lights was still on, and the men’s colossal, stick-like shadows stalked over the ground in front of them. As they walked, the light behind them went out, and was replaced by the bobbing pools of light from their helmet lights. Wilson kept them going for about another hundred metres before he signalled that they could stop and look back.

The spaceplane lay at the end of a huge furrow that stretched away across the crater floor. A trail of wreckage lay scattered behind the ship; they could just make out the mangled remains of the landing gear, and one of the engine intakes lying nearby.

‘Shit,’ someone’s voice whispered over the radio.

Matt said nothing, but his heart sank as he took in the damage. Clare had managed to absorb some of the energy of the crash by keeping the spaceplane’s nose up as it hit, but it looked as if the cargo hold had been partially crushed. There was no way of telling how much of their supplies had survived until they could go back and investigate.

As Matt’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realised that the crater floor was not completely dark, as it first appeared; a faint, ghostly light illuminated the scene.

The five men stood on a gently undulating slope at the base of a colossal mountain range, a line of peaks that climbed up out of the crater floor in a succession of huge terraces, receding into the sky. Marching in an unbroken line from one horizon to another, they blocked out the stars as they rose, until their peaks caught the light of the unseen Sun, four kilometres above the crater floor. The reflected light, paler than any moon, filled the interior of the crater with its faint radiance.

As Matt looked around, he could make out the line of the main access roadway, snaking past them on its way from the landing pad to the mine entrance. The roadway disappeared into the black shadows at the base of the mountains; the feeble light from above could not reach into the Stygian darkness of their hidden valleys. Matt shivered at the thought, and turned back to the crash site in front of him.

The cloud of vapour from the ruptured propellant tanks was spreading out and falling, glistening in the ghostly light as it froze into billions of tiny crystals. Behind the ship, the crater floor disappeared into the distance, towards the huge, unseen ice field.

The sound of Matt’s breathing sounded harsh in his ears, and he realised he was hyperventilating. Maybe from the exertion, more than likely from delayed shock. He made a conscious effort to control his breathing, to make it deeper and slower, to conserve his air.

The others stood close by, staring at the wrecked spacecraft. The depth of their situation was only just sinking in.