Below Mercury (21 page)

‘What the hell happened?’ Bergman said at last, breaking the silence.

‘I don’t know. Something happened when we went to manual control for landing.’ Wilson continued to survey the scene. ‘We’re lucky to be alive after that. If the captain hadn’t got the engines restarted, we’d have made a new crater.’

‘Lucky to be alive,’ Elliott muttered under his breath, but they all heard him.

‘What’s the captain doing - shouldn’t she get out?’ Abrams asked, ‘The ship’s still leaking fuel.’

‘She’s coming now,’ Bergman said. A small figure had appeared at the top of the escape slide, and as they watched, she slid down to the surface, and began walking towards them.

Behind her, under the wing of the spaceplane, a bright blue light flickered.

Wilson’s voice yelled in their headsets.

‘Captain! There’s a fire!
Get away from the ship!’

Without looking back, Clare broke into a loping run, taking long strides in the low gravity.

‘Get down!’ she shouted at them, ‘Get behind some cover!’

As she ran towards the distant group, over a hundred metres away, she knew she only had seconds. The liquid propane and oxygen leaking from the tanks would not ignite on contact, but something had started the fire, some piece of hot metal or electrical short-circuit, and now the fuel was burning, spreading towards the ruptured tanks. She was moments away from becoming history. She spotted a low hummock in the crater floor just ahead of her.

‘I’m going to stop here,’ she gasped, ‘I think there’s a—’

There was a bright flash from behind her, and she dived forwards. The ground underneath Clare jarred with the sudden shock of an explosion, as the ship’s propellants detonated in a silent fireball of blue light.

Wilson and the others fell to the ground, sprawling in the dust. The light from the explosion burst over them, and smaller thuds echoed through the ground as some of the demolition charges went off.

The light flickered and faded. Several seconds passed. Bergman looked up.

‘Keep your heads down! The debris is coming!’ Wilson yelled.

As he said the words, something heavy fell in front of Abrams, shaking the ground. A piece of titanium wing spar whirled over Matt’s head, barely a metre away, and cartwheeled to a halt close by in a shower of dust.

‘Shit!’ Matt gasped. He shrank back as an even bigger piece of the wing landed, piling up the ground next to him. He squirmed behind it for some extra shelter, trying to make himself as small as possible. The intense cold of the surface clawed at him through the layers of the suit, sucking his body heat out into the ground.

Bergman cringed as a shower of small, hard objects fell on and around him. He expected the end any moment, as something big and jagged tore into his suit or smashed his helmet open. He opened his eyes and saw that the objects were frozen meal packs, and he was struck by the absurdity of being killed by flying food.

The thudding continued around them, but the objects gradually became smaller and less frequent, until it was just a rain of fine particles sifting down on them.

‘Okay, sound off, who’s there?’ Wilson demanded at last, raising his head and looking round.

‘Bergman here, I’m okay.’

‘Crawford.’

‘Elliott.’

‘Abrams here. I’ve got a flashing amber light in my helmet, does that mean my suit’s holed?’ His voice held a trace of alarm.

Wilson got up and went across to him quickly, and motioned for Abrams to stand up. Wilson held the older man’s shoulder firmly with one hand, and smacked the suit faceplate with the flat of his other hand.

The light inside Abrams’s helmet went out.

‘Faceplate seal,’ Wilson said, ‘they do that sometimes if they’re not fastened down tight.’

Abrams nodded his thanks, and they turned to face the wreck of the ship.

The fuel was still burning, but the fierce blue flames had faded to a sullen orange, as the materials and structure of the spaceplane burned in what was left of the oxygen. The fire had an ethereal quality, wavering and blowing in vacuum as the last few kilos of oxygen boiled away. As they watched, the pale flames wavered, went out briefly, flickered back, then were gone, and the ship could be seen as an eerie skeleton of red-hot ribs and spars, glowing in the darkness.

Nobody spoke as they watched the glowing remains of the ship. A part of the fuselage collapsed in on itself, falling to the ground in a shower of sparks.

‘Captain, are you okay?’ Wilson looked over to where Clare was standing some distance away, watching the ship.

‘I’m okay.’ Clare raised a hand. Her voice sounded a little unsteady. She stood there for several moments, before turning and walking over to where the others waited.

‘Right, we’ve got to get some more air,’ Clare said, her face impassive. ‘Matt, you know this place better than any of us. We need some ideas, and fast.’ She looked hard at him, getting him to focus.

Matt tore his eyes away from the ship.

‘Uh – there might be some air cylinders around here, in the debris field. There were some stored in the main hangar for the surface workers.’

‘Where’s the best place to start?’

‘I – think we should spread out and work our way back through the debris field, towards the main mine portal.’ He indicated the base of the nearby mountains.

Clare looked round at the group, her helmeted head swivelling from side to side. If she felt a rising panic at the desperate situation they were in, she didn’t show it.

‘Any other suggestions? Okay, let’s do it. Line abreast, five metres apart, and advance towards the mine entrance. Steve, you lead off in the centre, the rest of you, follow to either side.’

They set off, spreading out over the ground as they moved along, heads down as they searched for anything that looked like an air cylinder. The crash had taken them towards the mountains and the mine entrance, and they could see the access roadway on their right, snaking across the rising ground before it disappeared into the permanent darkness at the foot of the mountains. Wilson angled their route towards it as they searched the ground.

Clare moved to the left, out past Bergman, to make a wider search front. She tried not to look at her air gauge. With the ship gone, the only air they had was the emergency cylinders built in the suits; they weren’t designed to provide more than forty-five minutes of air at best.

She was also getting cold. Although the escape suits were insulated, they were unheated, and could not protect against the deep cold of the crater for very long. She had to keep everyone moving to keep them warm, and that just used up their air even faster.

Over to the right of the search line, Matt strode across the surface, inspecting anything he came across. He had rarely been on the surface when he had worked here; most of his work had been deep inside the mine, and he had only been out here when they needed to inspect the surface facilities. He could feel the ground crunching under his boots as he walked; the dust was coated in a faint hoarfrost of sublimated ice from the great ice field out on the crater floor. It sparkled in his helmet lights as he walked.

A little further on, he encountered the edge of the roadway; a metre-high embankment of compacted regolith, surfaced in vacuum-setting concrete. He strode up the embankment and stood on the ridged surface of the roadway, and set off along it as it plunged into the shadow of the mountains, the other searchers strung out on his left. A second darkness fell around them, and now there was only the light from their helmets to guide them in the blackness.

All around them now, as they drew closer to the mine portal, the signs of explosion, of ruin, and the death of a mine, became more frequent. A thin layer of grey dust, blown out from the mine, overlaid the darker dust of the crater floor. Scraps of paper, torn from desks, mingled with unidentified pieces of broken and twisted metal.

Clare kicked her way through the debris, looking for anything that looked like an air cylinder. More paper. A miner’s helmet. Plastic cups. Clothing. A piece of instrument panel from the console of some vehicle. A body.

A body.

‘Hey guys, I’ve found something,’ Clare said, in a neutral voice.

Elliott was nearest to her and stopped as he saw the body. It was in a spacesuit, lying face down in the dust, one leg twisted in a way that nature never intended.

‘Oh shit,’ Elliott breathed.

‘Help me see if there’s any air in the backpack, will you?’ Clare talked swiftly as she knelt down beside the body. It had frozen rigid in its final pose, one arm flung out, and Elliott had to help her turn it over. ‘That’s it, I can hold it there. Can you see the gauges?’

‘Yeah, I’ve got it, it’s reading empty, it must have –
oh Jesus fucking Christ!’

Elliott recoiled from the body and stood up. Too fast, and he fell over backwards in the low gravity, his arms flailing as he tried to regain his balance. His breath came in short, panicked gasps.

Clare glanced down.

For an instant, she saw what was behind the faceplate. The suit was intact, and had kept the decomposing corpse supplied with air and warmth until the backpack ran out. The ghastly ruins of the face leered at her through a veil of frost. With a shudder of revulsion, she let the body fall back, and stood up as fast as she dared in the low gravity.

‘Okay, resume the search. No air here.’ She tried to speak calmly, but a wave of nausea rose up, and she took several breaths with her radio muted. Bergman was helping Elliott up. Clare glanced to make sure Elliott hadn’t vomited in his helmet, and carried on. Keep everyone moving, she thought, we don’t have much time.

Ahead of them in the darkness, the roadway turned into a deep cutting in the mountainside. Over forty metres wide, the cutting plunged straight and level into the mountain, its sloping walls rising on either side, until it ended in a sheer vertical wall. This was the main portal to Erebus Mine. With nothing further left to search, the group mounted the edge of the concrete roadway and joined Matt. As they advanced, the sweeping beams of their helmet lights illuminated more wreckage, scattered across the floor of the cutting.

The cutting ended in a wall of blackness that their lights could not penetrate. They had reached the main entrance, a huge opening in the rock, ten metres high and thirty metres wide. Matt stopped in front of it, and the others came to a halt behind him, reluctant to go forward through the open doorway into the darkness.

Matt looked from side to side. ‘Where are the doors?’ he said, his voice almost a whisper. ‘They should be lying here …’

Then, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the opening, Matt realised that the two huge sliding doors, each weighing many tonnes, were
still there
. The two halves were retracted into the rock walls on either side, the huge locking pins on each edge poised and waiting for the command to close again.

‘No, I don’t believe it,’ he whispered. He suddenly felt weak, staggered, and fell to his knees in the dust.

The explosion out in the fuel refinery hadn’t caused the main doors to fail at all. This had been a deliberate act, one that had killed everyone working in the mine. The doors hadn’t failed; they had been unlocked and commanded to open.

How many safety interlocks had been overridden to do this, Matt couldn’t imagine. It just didn’t seem possible; nothing in his wildest dreams had prepared him for the evidence he was seeing with his own eyes.

‘The stupid bastards! They
opened the fucking doors
!’ Matt yelled into his radio, his voice quivering with anger and disappointment.

Bergman came over and dragged Matt to his feet.

‘Come on, we need to find some air, quickly.’

‘But don’t you see?’ Matt pleaded, grabbing Bergman’s arm, ‘They opened the doors! The stupid fuckers opened the doors, and everyone in the mine died!’

‘Yes, we all see it!’ Bergman said sharply, throwing Matt’s hand off, ‘But we need
air!
Where’s the air, Matt?’ Bergman turned away and walked through the entrance.

Matt steadied himself, and after a moment followed the others. He shivered as he passed through the huge open doorway and into the mine. He felt a sudden fear of what might be in the darkness, waiting for them, and he kept close to the others.

They reached the centre of the hangar, and swung their helmet lights round the huge, empty space.

All around them, the floor was strewn with wreckage from the explosion. Doors and smaller airlocks, dimly seen on the walls, led off deeper into the mine. Up above, a maze of gantries, crane tracks and servicing decks could be made out, running round the interior. Some were hanging off the walls, where they had been ripped away by the gale of air.

‘Guys, we need air, and fast. Essential conversation only. Keep searching.’ Clare’s voice reminded them of their desperate need, and they spread out and began searching among the debris on the floor.

‘Captain, I’m on amber reserve,’ Wilson called, trying to sound as calm as he could.

‘Okay, Steve, you need to conserve your air. Stop your search, lie down, and stay calm. We’ll keep on searching.’ Clare tried not to show her mounting anxiety. Their situation, already grim, was deteriorating by the minute, and there was still no sign of any air.