Below Mercury (32 page)

‘Bergman.’ He listened for a few moments, and a smile broke over his face. ‘Hey, that’s excellent news. Are you sure?’ He listened a few moments more. ‘No, throw out anything you need to. As far as I’m concerned, we don’t need to take anything back but ourselves. What? No, we’re not back at the shaft station yet. I still can’t believe it, this is fantastic. Did you get my message earlier?’

He spoke with Clare a little longer, letting her know that Abrams and Elliott were on their way to the peak.

‘No, I haven’t heard anything from them yet. They’re not due to report until one. Okay. Speak to you then.’

He flipped the comlink shut, and turned to Matt. ‘My friend, it looks like we might yet be returning home. The good captain and our trusty copilot are in the final stages of prepping a shuttle for flight, and it’s got just enough fuel to get us back to the
Baltimore
– if they strip everything out of it that isn’t welded down.’

Matt grinned. ‘Well, that’s the best bit of news I’ve ever had in my life. How long before it’s ready?’

‘She reckons several hours to take out all the unnecessary weight, but there’s no point in rushing; the earliest transfer window back to Earth isn’t for a few days.’ Bergman was grinning as well now.

Matt shook his head in disbelief. In less than a day, they had gone from being marooned in an abandoned mine, to figuring out a schedule for returning to Earth. It seemed too good to be true.

‘Is she sure? I mean, is the shuttle serviceable?’

‘That’s exactly what I asked. They’re going over its systems now, but she reckons it’s flightworthy, it’s just the fuel that’s an issue.’

‘Does she need any help? I mean, shouldn’t we go back there and give her a hand?’

‘They’re fine. We need to stay on plan. Come on.’

They set off again, with a new urgency in their step, and soon emerged from the passage, back in the main shaft station.

It was exactly as they had left it; the cage waited at the shaft head, its doors open.

Matt set the hoist controls so that they could control it from the cage. He turned to Bergman, who had picked up two mining helmets from the debris on the chamber floor and was dusting them off.

‘Look, before we go down there, there’s something we need to get straight.’

‘Sure. What?’

‘If anyone’s still alive down there, and they see us, we need to be watch what we say. If there’s been a mutiny, they might not want us to get any messages back to Earth, right?’

Bergman considered, and nodded.

‘So let’s get our story clear. We don’t mention the shuttle, or getting the radio to work. As far as they’re concerned, we’re just two mining engineers on a survey mission that crashed in the crater, and we’re looking for any help we can find, okay?’

‘So we don’t say anything about the others, right?’

‘Right. We say we were the only survivors. If they’re armed, we’ve got to keep something up our sleeve until we can figure out what to do.’

‘I’ll go along with that. But, you know, I’ve been thinking too. Here we are, we’ve turned on the emergency lighting in the mine, we’ve got the hoists working – they must have heard something. If there are survivors down there, surely they’d have come looking by now?’

Matt considered. He wanted to agree with Bergman, but the image of the gunfight in the control centre, and the ransacking of the mine manager’s office, kept returning.

‘I hope you’re right.’ He turned back to the control panel, and punched the selector buttons. ‘Okay, I’ve set the cage to go straight to the four hundred level. Are we ready?’

Matt took the mining helmet that Bergman held out, and the two of them clambered aboard the lower of the two cages, and stood on the short section of rail track in the cage floor. Matt held the interlock handle closed, and turned the control handle to DOWN.

The cage door slid down, the safety gate closed, and the bell rang twice. Matt and Bergman gripped the side rails inside the cage as the brake blocks released, and the cage squealed down its guide rails and into the darkness of the shaft.

The cage fell past the wind slit, a wide, dark opening in the shaft walls where the fresh air entered the shaft. Even though there was no forced ventilation in the mine, a rush of air surged through the open frame and wire mesh grilles of the cage.

It lasted only a moment, and then the cage fell past and out of the guide rails, accelerating down the shaft. It was utterly dark, and the cage turned from side to side in the four guide ropes as it picked up speed. Matt and Bergman switched on their flashlights in the rushing darkness, and the concrete lining of the shaft sleeted by, dark grey in the gloom. Pipes carrying water and compressed air, and heavy-duty electrical cables, snaked past in undulating streams.

The air grew dank, and the mine-smell filled their nostrils. Matt breathed deeply of the familiar air as the cage fell past a section of shaft that glistened wetly from some leaking joint in a water main.

The cage’s construction – an open metal framework, and wire mesh covering the outside – allowed Matt and Bergman to look upwards and see the diminishing square of red light from the shaft station that they had just left, and look down beneath their feet, into the blackness of the shaft.

‘Take a look,’ Matt said, pointing down, and clicking off his flashlight. Bergman did the same, and stared down into the darkness. Deep below the cage, he saw that the darkness was not absolute; there were small spots of red light, strung out like beads in the shaft below him.

One was coming closer, and as Bergman watched, it expanded towards him and flew past. Bergman had a moment’s glimpse of a wreckage-lined shaft station, and a large sign that read 100 METRES ALTITUDE, and then it was gone, vanishing upwards into the darkness.

Depths – and altitudes – in the mine were referenced to the surface of the ice field. Since the hangar levels were considerably higher than this, in the rising ground at the base of the mountains, they had some way to descend before they even reached zero level.

They went past two more shaft stations, at zero and one hundred metres depth. As they passed the 100 level station, a sudden whoosh close by the cage marked the ascent of the counterweight in its twin guide ropes, flying past on its journey to the surface.

After that, there were no more shaft stations, and the cage fell in darkness. Matt and Bergman stared at the walls sleeting by, mesmerised by the long fall down the shaft.

Eventually, the smooth motion of the cage was interrupted with a slight jerk, and the cage’s downward plunge slackened as the cage drew near to the final shaft station, on the 400 level, 600 metres below the hangars.

The cage slowed to walking pace, then slower still, so that it crept down the shaft towards the station. Guide rails moved inward from their parking positions at the walls of the shaft, and the cage slid into them. Red light flooded into the cage as it drew level with the station, and stopped.

The cage bounced slowly up and down as the long length of the wire rope absorbed the kinetic energy of their motion. The motion faded, and the brake blocks slammed home, locking the cage in the shaft.

The shaft station was a square cutout in the curved wall of the shaft, with the familiar heavy-duty mesh grille protecting the opening. The doors slid aside, and Matt stepped across the gap, not bothering to extend the short gangway.

Bergman followed, and he had a glimpse of the gulf still below the cage as he stepped across. He was acutely aware that there was nothing to stop him falling into the gap. The shaft did not stop here, but continued down for another fifteen metres or so, to provide a sump for any water that found its way into the shaft. Something glistened way below; the surface of a lake that had never seen the Sun, and Bergman shivered.

The two men started walking along the main haulage way, which led away from the main shaft station, heading towards the ice field. It was a major transportation route, and when the mine was operational, trains had shuttled back and forth along its length, carrying men and materials between the main shaft and the deeper parts of the mine.

The passage followed the familiar pattern, with roof supports at regular intervals and a rail track on one side. Pipes and cables ran along the walls, taking power, communications, water and compressed air into the mine.

Every 300 metres, the passage was punctuated by a set of sliding pressure doors in their heavy-duty metal frames. Matt stopped by the first set of doors and examined them.

‘Another set of doors wide open, that should have closed the moment the mine pressure dropped,’ he commented bitterly. ‘I wish Elliott could see this.’

‘No sign of any damage to the doors,’ Bergman observed. ‘What do you think stopped them from closing?’

Matt started walking again as he considered the question.

‘I can’t imagine a situation where the personnel would wilfully override the doors from closing automatically in an emergency. The only thing I can think of is that the doors somehow failed to close, and they didn’t realise in time.’ Matt looked down as he walked.

‘I suppose it’s possible they were distracted by the explosion, and everything else going on, so that they didn’t notice until it was too late. But, you know why I don’t buy any of this?’ He glanced at Bergman. ‘I
knew
these people. They took the mine integrity seriously. The very first action of the duty controller in any emergency – a breach, a fire, whatever – would have been to trigger all the pressure doors to contain any problem and prevent it spreading. I mean, you’ve been in plenty of space mines, would you expect any of these guys to not close the doors
immediately?
It just doesn’t make sense.’

They walked in silence for a while.

‘The mutiny theory worries me,’ Bergman said at last. ‘I mean, it’s clear that there was some kind of fight between two groups, and that wasn’t something that anybody expected, not PMI, not the relatives. Just suppose – just suppose none of this was PMI’s fault?’ He watched Matt’s face carefully for his reaction.

‘What about the hangar doors being open? Why would anyone want to deliberately
vent the mine?
And what about the sabotage to the ship!’ Matt was incredulous.

‘I don’t have answers for that,’ Bergman said slowly, ‘I guess all I’m saying is, we’ve got to keep an open mind. I mean, we’re only assuming that the ship crashed because of sabotage. I know you’re not going to like the idea, but what if Foster made some kind of mistake on landing? Misjudged the fuel or something? I’m sure she believes that she didn’t do anything wrong, but what if she did? You know she was on suspension before she was assigned to the mission.’

Matt felt anger rush through him at the suggestion that Clare could have done anything wrong. The strength of the emotion surprised him. He knew his feelings for Clare were getting the better of him, and he had to put them aside. None of them were infallible: not him, not Bergman, not Clare, nobody. If he could make a mistake, so could Clare.

They walked on, and eventually Matt said: ‘You’re right. We’ve got to consider every possibility.’ His voice was reluctant. ‘But that one doesn’t feel right to me.’

Bergman said nothing, and let the subject drop, but he stole a quick glance at his companion a few minutes later, and saw that Matt was still deep in thought.

They had been walking for some time, and had travelled nearly a kilometre along the passage, passing two more pressure doors along the way. Just after the last door, they came upon a lifeless mining robot, slumped against the wall of the passage, staring at the ground with its dead eyes. They debated if they should try to restart it or not, but couldn’t think of a use for it, and left it where it lay.

Three hundred metres further on, they came to a fork in the haulage way; one way continued ahead, through another set of pressure doors, while the other curved to the left. Matt took the left-hand turn, and after a few metres, the passage opened up into another shaft station.

‘Sub-main shaft,’ Matt announced, ‘let’s hope it’s working.’

There was no cage at the station, but the safety gate had been forced aside, and stood wide open. The noise of falling water came from the shaft.

They clung on to the sides of the opening, and looked down, their flashlights piercing the gloom of the shaft.

Immediately below the station, the guide rails for the cage extended down for several metres, then flared outwards. The wire rope that hauled the cage plunged down into the exact centre of the dark shaft. Just below the guide rails, a steady torrent of water flowed out from the wide opening of the wind slit, and cascaded down the shaft, bouncing off the pipework and fittings fastened to the sides. Sprays of escaping droplets disappeared down the shaft in an endless fall into the abyss. A warm, moist air welled up from the shaft, carrying a faint smell of stagnant water.

‘Oh, fucking hell,’ Matt groaned, ‘how long has this been running?’

Bergman stared down the shaft, and then moved his body back into the safety of the shaft station again.

‘Where’s it coming from?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. Meltwater from the ice mining levels, I guess. It must have overflowed somewhere and found its way into the ventilation airways. Without anyone to seal it off, this could have been running for years.’ Matt sniffed the breeze that rose into his face. ‘I don’t like the smell of that, either. There’s foul air down there.’