Below Mercury (25 page)

‘Well, it’s fully fuelled - several days, I’d guess, depending on his activity level. We can always come back and get another one if we need to.’

‘Yeah,’ Bergman said, watching the robot come back to life. ‘It’s funny, I know he’s only a machine, but I’d be sorry if we couldn’t keep him going. If it wasn’t for old Bob Five here, we’d never have made it out of the hangar.’ He slapped the robot affectionately on its metal back as they moved off again.

As they passed down more aisles, they realised that there was more useful stuff here than they could possibly carry, and Clare told them to take only items that they would be likely to need in the next 24 hours. As she reminded them, they could always come back.

They had some debate over the electronics stores, however. Elliott discovered a store of field radio equipment, used by the roving teams of geologists who mapped the crater. As well as radios and data terminals, the kit included some folding antennas for use on the ice field.

Abrams asked if it could be used to make contact with Earth, but Wilson shook his head.

‘No, this is VHF kit; it’s the wrong frequency to try to make contact with the Deep Space Network, even if it had the power. And we’d need to be up on the crater rim to stand any chance. Might come in useful, though.’

Eventually, Clare stopped the search, and they found an empty cage and made a cache of useful equipment that they could not carry for the moment, including the field radios. She permitted a brief halt, and a little food for everyone, now that their most pressing needs had been met.

After they had rested, Clare led them out of the stores area, through the dark access ways that went from the hangars to the accommodation levels.

Nobody spoke much; they were thinking of what they were going to find there. So far, they had not encountered any bodies within the mine itself, but they all knew that the survivors had held out in the accommodation block, and their spirits, buoyed up by the find of food in the stores area, ebbed away as they walked through the echoing passages.

They were following the route that new arrivals to the mine would have taken when it was operational. From the vast hangars, the access ways ran deep into the mountain, staying roughly on the same level. More passages opened to the left and right as they walked, but the main route led straight on for about a hundred and fifty metres, before opening out into a large lobby area.

In front of them, the passage they had been following continued on its journey into the mountain. To the left, two large freight elevators lay dark and silent; these would have been used to move crew and materials to the accommodation levels above. To the right, a heavy door opened onto a set of fire stairs that climbed upwards to the accommodation levels, and downwards, to the sub-levels below the hangars.

Bergman tried pressing the elevator call button, but nothing happened, so they began the long climb up the fire stairs.

The robot was too large to manoeuvre round the turns in the staircase, or to manage the narrow risers, built for human feet, so they left it waiting in the lobby for their return.

As they climbed the staircase, the bobbing, weaving pools of their flashlights cast sudden shadows around them. The staircase rose upwards for about ten metres at a time, then reversed direction, zigzagging its way upwards into the body of the mountain.

They had been climbing upwards for about a hundred metres, when they came to a fire door that opened onto an elevator lobby similar to the one below. They spilled out into the lobby, their flashlight beams probing the darkness.

There was an identical set of elevator doors in front of them; this was the first car stop in the journey up into the mountain.

The lowest level of the accommodation block, the one they faced, contained the public rooms, kitchens and dining areas. Above them, the next two levels were devoted to crew accommodation, and the highest level, for the control centre and management offices.

Nobody spoke as the white light of the flashlight beams jumped over the scene in front of them.

One set of elevator doors were half-open; the elevator inside had stopped part way down. The main pressure doors to the level were wide open, and the usual piles of rubbish lay all around, telling another story of explosive decompression.

The white-painted walls, and the edges of the open pressure doors, were splashed with dark-brown stains and spatter trails.

‘This is where they held out, the last survivors,’ Bergman said quietly, breaking the silence.

‘Is that – blood on the walls?’ Elliott asked in a hoarse whisper.

‘Looks like it,’ Bergman said. ‘You know what we’re going to find here, people, we’ve trained for it. Just keep calm and stay focused.’

Led by Bergman, they advanced, and walked through the open pressure doors, their flashlights stabbing into the darkness. The pools of white light ran like liquid over the tumble of overturned chairs in the reception area.

More dried blood on the walls, and on the floors and carpets. Against one wall, a great splash and smear, as if someone had been hurled against the wall and slid down. Elsewhere, more tables and chairs overturned.

They passed through a set of inner doors – lightweight partition doors, unlike the heavier pressure doors in the lobby. The doors had been forced open, and swung aside on broken hinges as they passed.

The place was deathly quiet; the only sound was the scuffing tread of their spacesuit boots on the floor, and their breathing in the cold air, as they swung their beams from side to side.

‘Okay, so where are the bodies?’ Wilson spoke first, as they came to a halt in a wide atrium, with doors and corridors leading off in different directions. There were restroom signs to either side, and an abstract sculpture in the centre, carved from a solid piece of rock. The mineral inclusions in the rock matrix glittered in the flashlight beams.

‘Don’t jump to conclusions,’ Bergman cautioned. ‘We don’t know what happened here yet.’

Matt pointed straight ahead.

‘Let’s try the galley. We still need water.’

They moved past more overturned seating, towards a set of double doors, above which a sign announced:

welcome to the vulcan grill

the best food this side of venus

The doors swung aside easily, and they passed through, and stopped.

An incredible sight lay in front of them. The entire further side of the room was a set of windows that gave a panoramic view of the scene outside. Through the layers of thick, toughened glass, the floor of Chao Meng-fu crater lay in front of them like a huge amphitheatre.

One by one, they clicked off their flashlights, and stepped forward in the darkness to see the view better.

They looked out high above the crater floor. The accommodation levels, cut out of the rock of the mountain, faced toward the centre of the crater, and the wan sunlight on the high peaks to either side filtered onto the ice field that covered the crater floor. The ring of mountains swung out into the distance on either side and curved back again, before disappearing below the horizon on the far side.

In the middle distance, the central peaks reared their horns into the black sky, framed by the broken crescent of the crater, and spread out in front of them, the surface of the ice field undulated into the distance, like a great black lake disturbed by an unseen wind. It lapped at the shores of the mountains, barely three kilometres from where they stood.

The mine and its refinery, the landing pad, and other surface installations, had been built on a wide shelf on the foothills of the mountains, where they rose out of the frozen lake of ice.

As their eyes became accustomed to the darkness, the wreck of the spaceplane could just be made out below them, on the dry land between the ice and the mountains. It lay there like a crushed insect, at the end of a long scar cut into the dust. Their brains adjusted to the scale, and the landscape below them billowed out, taking on new and terrifying dimensions; a vast ice field that stretched away over the planet’s rim, and a ring of giant peaks, towering four kilometres above them, that stood guard over the hidden ice.

Further away, out into the ice field, a huge surface mine yawned in the crater floor, a gulf of deeper darkness, descending in wide, spiral terraces into the ice.

The haulage roadways wound down into the darkness and the cold, as the mining machines sought out the deep ice, rich in comet-borne volatiles and implanted helium from Mercury’s past.

More roadways led from the edges of the opening, across the surface of the ice to the waiting crushers of the ice processing plant by the fuel refinery. Halfway along one roadway, a huge mining vehicle lay abandoned, frozen in place after years in the cold.

Yet even this huge operation had not been enough to fulfil the insatiable demand for helium-3; the richest layers lay far below the reach of the surface mining operations, and there the ice was won by underground mining techniques.

Spreading out from the hidden underground shafts of the mine, a network of passages led out under the ice. In vast workings, invisible from the surface, the ice was mined out in a regular pattern, leaving wide pillars of ice to hold up the roof, in a technique dating back to Roman times. The ice was carried back to the bottom of the return shaft along long lines of belt conveyors, to be hoisted to the surface and tipped into the waiting jaws of the ice crushers.

Matt remembered the heyday of the mine, when he had first visited it as a young mining engineer. Back then, Erebus Mine had been the principal refuelling and resupply base for Mercury, and a daily stream of fuel tankers ferried processed chemicals from the refinery to the space tugs and long-range tankers, waiting in orbit high above. Manned spacecraft stopped off here to transfer passengers, or for maintenance in the huge hangars. It had been an awe-inspiring sight; the biggest planetary mine ever built.

Erebus had reigned supreme, dwarfing all the other mines, and its name had been on every sealed vault door, every tanker of liquefied fuel, and every cylinder of helium-3 that ever left the mine.

Even when the price of helium-3 fell and the other mines closed, Erebus had survived, expanding its operations to mine the rich deposits of precious metals that had been found deep down, two kilometres under the crater floor. The deposits were high in platinum and other rare metals, and for a while, the vacuum smelters had belched flame into the black sky, and the heavy ingots of precious metals joined the helium-3 travelling back to Earth.

Matt remembered the shuttles being loaded, and the continual takeoffs and landings out on the crater floor. Back then, the lights had filled the crater floor; they covered the refinery complex, illuminating the swirling vapours, and in the distance, the red glow from the smelters rose and fell, or flared in strange colours. Spotlights had lit up the shapes of spacecraft waiting on the pads, and out on the ice, lines of lights showed the mining vehicles, moving in their never-ending procession between the surface ice workings and the refinery.

Matt’s eye moved; the vision was lost, and the years flowed back like a dark tide, swallowing the light and movement in the crater, until it faded at last to the forgotten ruin that lay outside the grimy windows.

Clare snapped her flashlight back on, and the window became a mirror. Matt stared back at his reflection in the glass, his eyes sunken in their sockets, his face darkened by stubble, and he realised how exhausted he looked.

‘You okay?’ Clare said quietly. She was looking at him in the reflection from the window.

‘Yeah – yeah, I’m fine,’ Matt said. He hadn’t realised that she had been watching him.

‘Come on,’ Clare said, ‘we need to search this place.’

Matt tore himself away from the window, and his memories, and picked his way across the galley area, following the others.

Many of the tables and chairs had been pushed to the edges of the room, but several were in the centre, with oxygen cylinders and medical equipment lying about nearby.

‘This looks like it was used as an emergency hospital,’ Clare said. ‘Look at all this blood on the tables.’

‘Still no bodies,’ Elliott said, ‘I thought we would have found some by now.’

Someone’s light flickered behind the serving hatches of the kitchen, and there was a splashing sound.

‘Hey, there’s still water in the faucets,’ Wilson shouted, then a moment later added: ‘Smells a bit, though.’

‘Run it through for a few minutes and see if it clears,’ Clare said. ‘Is there any food in there?’ She stopped by one of the serving hatches and looked in. She could see Wilson, now joined by Matt, opening cupboards and rummaging about in them.

‘Some packaged stuff.’ Wilson pulled a box from a cupboard, and tore open the cardboard lid. ‘Huh. We’ve got dried pasta here.’

There were several large stainless steel cooking pots on the ranges in the kitchen. Above some of them, the contents had splashed on the ceiling when they had flash-boiled in vacuum; it looked like paint had exploded over the kitchen.

‘Freezer,’ Matt’s voice called, ‘I’m going to take a look.’

There was a thunk from deeper inside the kitchens, and a sudden sucking noise as a large door opened.

‘Shit!’ Matt’s voice came from across the kitchen, and the door slammed shut again. A strong smell of decay rolled across the kitchens, and the rest of the group stiffened in alarm.