Below Mercury (28 page)

Eventually, however, during a gap in the conversation, Clare knocked her mug on the table for attention.

‘Okay, guys, listen up. We’ve got a lot to do today, and the sooner we get going, the sooner we find out if we can get off this rock.’

She looked round the table.

‘We’ve already decided to split into three teams, so let’s review what each team needs, and make a plan. Team Radio – that’s Peter and Dr Elliott. Your primary mission is to modify one of the field radios, take it up to the transmitter arrays, and try to get a message through to Earth, or anyone else that can hear you. Your secondary mission is to realign the solar array to face the Sun, to give us some more power. You’ll need to take surface spacesuits, and some spare air cylinders.’

‘What about Bob Five?’ Elliott asked, ‘We might need him to turn the antenna and the solar arrays if they’re jammed.’

‘Good idea. Anyone else think they might need the robot for anything?’

Bergman looked at Matt, who just shrugged.

‘No takers? Okay, Team Radio gets the robot.

‘Second team – Team Silo. That’s Steve and myself. We go down a level, and out along the main return airway to the shuttle silos. Our mission is to locate Crew Shuttle Five, figure out if there’s any fuel left, and if it can be prepped for flight.’

‘We’ll divert as much power as we can to the silo systems, before we go,’ Bergman said.

‘Good. Now for yourself and Matt. You’re the Deep Team. Your primary mission is to get Team Radio to the service raise. Once they’re safely on their way, you’re to continue the search of the mine downwards, towards the last known location of the mine personnel, and report what you find.’

She paused.

‘Be careful. We don’t know what you’ll find down there, but if there are survivors of a mutiny, they could be hostile, and armed. If you find any evidence of life down there, don’t make contact; just get back to the rendezvous point, which will be the control centre.

‘Speaking of which, we all rendezvous back at the control centre at twenty hundred hours, whatever happens. I don’t want anyone spending the night in the mine workings; we’ve got plenty of time to carry on tomorrow.

‘Everybody clear? Okay. Peter, Dr Elliott – I want you to go back to the stores area and find two surface spacesuits that fit you, and some air cylinders. Steve and I will bring back one of the field radios, some more air cylinders, and some working comlink handsets if we can find them – we could do with some communications. Rick, Matt – do what you can to get more power to the silo systems and the transmitters. I want everyone back here in an hour, and we’ll tackle the radio modifications and assemble all the other kit we need. Okay, let’s move it.’

Two hours later, in the red-lit gloom of the lower elevator lobby, the silence of the mine was broken by the sounds of approaching footsteps on the fire stairs.

The robot waited, apparently lifeless, where they had left it the day before. As the noise of footsteps became louder, however, its eyes flickered back to life, and its internal systems powered up. Its head swivelled to watch Clare and the others emerge from the fire doors, lugging a heap of equipment with them.

‘Bob Five!’ Clare said, ‘can you carry these?’ She indicated the air cylinders, which Bergman, Abrams and Elliott were carrying by the valves.

‘YES, MISTRESS,’ the robot responded. It swung its arms together into a scoop, and waited as they loaded the six cylinders. The robot’s hydraulic arms, built to manhandle heavy mining equipment, didn’t move a millimetre as the cylinders clanked in.

‘Okay, I think we’re ready to split up,’ Clare said. She had a small backpack with food and drink, and one of the comlink handsets that she and Wilson had found in the stores. She glanced at her watch. ‘It’s eleven oh seven. We check in at twelve hundred hours, then every hour after that.

‘The comlink network is only partially working, so if you’re out of coverage, leave a message to send when you’re back in coverage again. If we haven’t heard from you for three successive check ins, we’re going to come looking, so don’t forget. Everyone clear on that?’

There was a murmur of assent.

‘Okay, everyone, good luck.’

Clare and Wilson turned away and went back through the fire doors, heading down the stairs to the level below, and the airway that led out under the crater floor to the shuttle silos.

Their footsteps disappeared into the silence of the stairwell.

‘Right, now for Team Radio,’ Bergman said, breaking the silence. ‘Bob Five! Follow us.’ The robot, carrying its load of air cylinders, swung into step behind Abrams, Matt and Elliott as they followed Bergman. He took them down the access way that opened directly in front of them, heading further into the mountain.

Nobody spoke for a while; the only sounds were the thump and scuff of their footsteps on the rock floor, and the steady, deep thud of the robot bringing up the rear.

Abrams and Elliott were both dressed in surface spacesuits; these were much more substantial than the lightweight escape suits they had worn for the landing, and had large backpacks for air cylinders and the environmental control systems, as well as comlinks built into the wrist consoles. They carried the suit helmets on slings, attached to their chests.

Matt and Bergman’s rucksacks contained the modified radio, and the lengths of cable and tools that would be needed to complete the linkup. Making the changes to the radio to allow it to work with the main transmitter had been tricky enough, but they all knew that the hard part would be when Elliott and Abrams got up there, to the antennas, and had to make the complex connections with spacesuited fingers. With that in mind, they had assembled an assortment of link cables and adapters, with a selection of connectors on their ends, to make the task easier. Elliott had some experience with communications equipment, and Wilson had briefed him carefully on what he would need to do.

They walked on, their flashlight beams piercing the darkness of the passage. Every 25 metres or so, a red emergency light burned overhead, but they did little to illuminate the dark stretches in between.

After about two hundred metres, they halted at a set of emergency pressure doors; two sliding sections in a metal frame that, when closed, would seal this section off. The red-painted doors were wide apart, and opened onto a wider passage that joined from the right.

‘Shouldn’t these be closed, if there was a pressure failure?’ Bergman said, ‘I thought they were automatic?’

‘They are,’ said a voice, and it wasn’t Matt, but Elliott. He sounded puzzled. ‘These should be closed. Even if they didn’t close automatically for some reason, the controllers had plenty of time to shut them with an emergency override.’ His gaze switched to the door control panel.

‘There’ll be time to investigate this when we’ve completed our mission,’ Bergman said, forestalling Elliott’s question. ‘Let’s just note it for now. Where are we, Matt?’

‘Uh, return air shunt from the accommodation levels. The spent air flowed through here, and joined the main air supply for the mine.’ Matt indicated the wider passage ahead.

Bergman led the way forward, through the open pressure doors into the larger passage, and the other followed. A faint breeze stirred their faces, coming from their right.

‘What’s up there?’ asked Elliott, swinging his flashlight beam into the darkness, in the direction the air was coming from. The light illuminated several No Entry signs.

‘Main ventilation fans.’ Matt said, ‘We don’t want to go up there. There are passages and shafts for balancing the airflow, and you won’t see them until you fall in. We need to go left, into the mine itself.’

They followed Bergman down the passage. It was five metres wide and three high, with a set of rail tracks near the right-hand wall for materials haulage. Heavy-duty power cables, and pipes carrying water and compressed air, ran along the walls on both sides.

The rough passage walls had a scalloped appearance, from the overlapping arcs of the cutter heads on the mining machine that had cut through the rock. At regular intervals, steel roof supports had been rock-bolted and grouted into place to further support the passage.

As they walked, the red emergency lights came and went, along with signs warning of high-voltage cables, compressed air lines, and other hazards in the passage. The detritus of the accident lay underfoot, but appeared to be less here than in the upper levels. Dust, however, was everywhere; it blanketed the floor like a grey snow, showing every footprint, and softening the outlines of the rail tracks alongside them.

After a brief level section, the passage angled downwards at a gentle grade into the mountain. There were occasional passages on either side that led into unseen machinery spaces, or that connected with further service passages boring into the mountain, but Bergman led them onward, following the main passage.

After about three hundred metres of gentle descent, the passage levelled off, and opened out into a large underground space. Ahead, the passage continued on its journey into the mountain, and on the right, a large chamber about six metres high ended in a vertical wall set with tall mesh grilles.

The rail track, which had followed them all the way here, continued into the far passage, while a branch led off to the right into a small marshalling siding filled with mine cars. An electric locomotive sat in the siding, an angular and functional design with a single seat for the operator. Like everything else, it was thick with dust and had clearly not been moved or touched since the accident.

They explored the chamber. Past the rail siding, there was a large confluence of pipes, cables and trunking, where they turned and dived abruptly into the ground, passing through the heavy-duty mesh grille that extended from floor to ceiling. There were two sets of sliding safety gates in the grille, set one above another, and a two-tier landing stage, with stairs that led from the floor to the upper set of gates.

Mining equipment and spare parts for routine maintenance lay stacked against the walls, loaded onto mine cars, or piled on the floor near the sliding doors.

A mess of small-diameter electrical cables hung down like vines from the roof of the chamber, where they had been torn from their mountings. There was comparatively little rubbish here; the hurricane of air that had emerged from the shaft appeared to have scoured the chamber clean of lighter debris.

They approached the grille. As they came closer, they heard the noise, a distant rush of air like the sound of a seashell held to one’s ear.

It was the sound of air moving in the depths of the mine, far, far below them, and with it came a smell, the faint scent that anyone who has worked in a large mine can never forget; the smell of broken rock, machine oil, and dank air in forgotten passages.

They had reached the main shaft of the mine.

Abrams hooked his fingers into the dusty wire mesh and peered into the circular opening of the shaft. A gentle breeze stirred the hair on the back of his head. His flashlight beam played on the far side, about five metres away, then plunged down into the darkness of the shaft. Metal guide rails at the sides of the shaft glistened wetly in the beam, their surfaces thick with grease.

‘So this is the intake shaft, right?’ Elliott asked.

‘Yep. Men and materials only, in this shaft.’

As Matt spoke, he could visualise the air circulation of the big mine in his mind’s eye.

Every underground mine always had at least two main shafts. Air was forced down the intake shaft, round the labyrinth of passages deep underground, and back out again through the return shaft. At Erebus, the return shaft was nearly two kilometres away, out under the crater floor beneath the fuel refinery.

In the mine workings, pressure doors, like the one they had passed through earlier, controlled the flow of air and prevented any misrouting of the air current, so that the clean incoming air was forced to travel round the entirety of the workings before being allowed to return. In this way, any poisonous or inflammable gases released during mining and blasting were diluted to safe levels and swept away.

In a space mine, the air could not be allowed simply to escape once it had done its job; it had to be circulated continuously, and this created unique challenges for ventilation design. In the case of Erebus, the ice released from its primordial prison deep under the surface of the ice field contained methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and other gases trapped in the icy matrix. Released from the confining pressure, and warmed on its lengthy journey along the underground haulage ways, the ice gave up substantial quantities of potentially dangerous gases before it reached the processing plant.