Below Mercury (38 page)

‘Fuck!’ he yelled, scrabbling to pick it up in the darkness. He opened the handset and read the illuminated display.

‘There’s no signal. The bastard robot’s cut the links.’

‘But they’re alive!’ Matt said, clicking his flashlight on. ‘Clare and Steve are still alive in the silo. If we can reach them, we can still escape.’

Bergman looked back at Matt, his face a mixture of hope and fear.

‘How are we going to get back to the silo? We can’t go back to the shaft, the robot’s behind us.’

‘We can get there by going up the return shaft.’ Matt spoke urgently. ‘There’s an air bypass duct that goes between the top of the shaft and the main return airway. It’s there to balance the air flow. It’ll take us directly to the silo.’ He stared at Bergman, willing him to believe in the chance.

‘Are you sure? I can’t remember the layout of the workings well enough.’

‘Trust me, it’s there. Come on, we’ve got to reach them before they lift off. They don’t know we’re still alive!’

Bergman switched his flashlight on, and set off after Matt. They ran on into the passage, their flashlight beams skittering over the walls.

It was utterly dark in the haulage way; not even the emergency lights were working. Behind them, a loud
boom
echoed down the passage, followed by another; the robot was beating down the pressure door.

The air grew chill; they were heading towards the ice workings. After a few hundred metres, Matt turned aside, down another wide passage.

‘Cross cut,’ Matt said. ‘Connects with the return airway.’ He halted by another open pressure door, about twenty metres in.

‘These should
never
be open. Any air flowing down here short circuits the entire mine ventilation.’

They stepped through, and Matt closed the door behind them, and locked it with the isolation switch. In the distance, the rhythmic pounding had stopped, which could only mean that the robot had broken through the doors, and was moving after them once more.

‘Second set up ahead.’ Matt pointed up the crosscut. Twenty metres further on, another set of open pressure doors formed an airlock, to allow men and materials to move between the intake and return airways without disrupting the mine ventilation.

They closed and locked the doors behind them. There were now two sets of locked pressure doors between them and the robot, and they felt slightly safer.

‘Come on, we’re nearly there.’ Matt led off down the crosscut, and a light grew ahead; they were approaching the return airway.

They clicked off their flashlights as they came to the end of the dark crosscut, and peered out cautiously into the brightly-lit passage. The return airway was quite different from the passages on the other side of the mine; this was the route through which the output of the ice mine came, on its way to the skip loaders that would hoist it up the return shaft to the refinery.

The passage was dominated by the support framework of the belt conveyor, which occupied over half the width of the passage. When the mine was working, the conveyor would have run constantly, transporting ice from the underground workings to the waiting skip loaders. The mud from the melting ice had dried to strange, circular patterns in the floor, and the walls were grey with dried mud and spray.

They looked carefully both ways before leaving the crosscut, and turned right, heading for the return shaft.

Inside the silo, Clare sat in the shuttlecraft, staring ahead. Her tears had dried on her face, and she knew she had failed. Her mission had been simple; to convey her passengers to Mercury, and return them home safely.

Now, every one of the passengers was dead, and she had to return to the shame and the investigation boards. It would have been better if she had died along with them.

Wilson sat next to her in the copilot’s seat, checking the flight plan as they waited for the launch window to open. They could not delay any longer; outside the silo complex, the security cameras showed two robots attacking the pile of rubble that blocked the airway. Every few minutes, a distant rumble reverberated through the silo as another large boulder was moved aside. Soon they would be through, and then it would be the end.

Clare almost wished they would break through, and that the air would rush out, so that she could die in her misery. It would be so much easier than going back.

She looked at her comlink for the hundredth time, to see if there were any messages. There were none, and she cast it aside. They were all dead, they were all dead an hour ago.

She cast a listless eye over the flight deck. The shuttle was fully prepped for launch. She had been so proud of being able to get it flightworthy, to provide a way to get everyone home. The fuel gauges and stripped-out cabin mocked her now; with only two people, there was more than enough fuel to reach orbit.

Wilson had been keen to salvage something from the mission, and she hadn’t stopped him from piling up some metal bars in the control room, ready to bring them aboard.

‘How long?’ She didn’t even turn her head to speak to him.

‘Launch window opens in twenty-six minutes. I’m going back to the control room to finish up.’

Clare nodded, and Wilson pushed back his seat and got up. She wondered if the robots would break through before they could leave, and decided she didn’t even care.

‘Did you hear that?’

Matt stopped and listened, and grimaced as another distant
boom
reverberated through the passage behind them.

‘Looks like they’re at the last pressure door,’ Bergman said. ‘We’d better decide what we’re going to do.’

Matt and Bergman stood at the edge of a small maintenance refuge at the base of the return shaft. Above them, their flashlights illuminated the walls of the huge shaft as it disappeared upwards above their heads. It was wider than the intake shafts; as well as being the main air reservoir for the mine, it was also the route by which the mined ice and ore was raised up to the refinery and smelters on the surface.

Below and to one side of the refuge, a skip loader hung by its wire ropes, waiting at the shaft station for the load that would never come. Its companion was at the shaft station high above them, and they operated as a pair; while this one was loading, the one up top would be emptying, and then the two skips would exchange positions. The two skips ran side by side in the larger shaft, and the shaft was filled with their guide ropes, suspension ropes, counterbalance guides, and balance ropes.

There were no manriding cages in the shaft; the skips were only used for carrying loads of ice and ore, and the hoists were automated, and operated by the mine computer. There had no way of commanding the hoists to run, and in any case Matt and Bergman were wary of using any system that was under computer control.

From somewhere high above, occasional droplets of water fell down the centre of the shaft, echoing as they plunged into the sump. The water surface far below them rippled with each drop.

To one side of the refuge, a metal ladder led straight upwards, bolted to the vertical wall of the shaft. It disappeared into the darkness above their heads.

‘We don’t have a choice. We have to climb,’ Matt said. He fastened his flashlight to his belt, leaned round, grabbed a rung, and swung himself sideways onto the ladder. ‘At least robots can’t follow us up these.’

‘How far?’ Bergman asked from below, as Matt started to climb.

‘Five hundred metres,’ Matt’s voice floated back down.

‘Shit,’ Bergman muttered, as he swung onto the ladder and followed Matt upward.

In the dark, by the swinging beams of their flashlights, it was difficult to appreciate the true size of the shaft; they could not see up its huge height, but the echoes of their footsteps on the ladder rungs rang around the chamber. Behind them, over their backs as they climbed, glistening specks of water raced downwards.

Bergman grabbed Matt’s ankle and signed urgently downwards. There, in the maintenance refuge that they had only just left, a robot leaned out, its red eyes staring up at the two men.

As they watched, it moved back in again, and disappeared.

Matt looked down at Bergman’s face, three metres below him on the ladder.

‘Is there another entrance halfway up?’ Bergman asked.

‘No, this one goes straight up without stopping.’

‘Where’s the robot gone, then?’

‘I don’t know, but I’m not hanging around to find out.’ Matt turned back to the climb.

The shaft rose up through the brecciated rock at the edge of Chao Meng-fu crater. Even though the gravity was only a third of Earth’s, the climb up the ladder was exhausting. Bend and raise a knee, push up, reach up, in a perpetual cycle, as they climbed higher and higher up the sides of the shaft. The ladder had no safety hoops round it; there was no room between the ladder and the passing skips, and they became increasingly aware of the long fall below them should they slip and fall off.

About two hundred metres up, there was another maintenance refuge, and Matt and Bergman threw themselves up and onto it, grateful for the chance to rest their aching leg and arm muscles.

They didn’t speak; there wasn’t anything to say, except to ask how much further it was, and neither of them wanted to know the answer.

Matt was anxious to keep moving; he felt that time was ticking away, and after a short rest, they set off up the ladder again. Their tired muscles protested with pain, and Bergman grimaced as he forced his aching arms and legs to bend and straighten. He felt as if his world had shrunk to the size of a narrow tube, and they seemed to be inching their way up it like spiders crawling up a plughole. He focused on the pain, trying not to think of the enormous length of shaft still above them.

Long minutes passed as they crawled steadily upwards. Bergman’s fingers ached from gripping on to the metal rungs. How far had they come now? He didn’t want to ask; he knew it would only be a few metres, and then he would have to steel himself to climb once more. Better just to keep going, mechanically moving arms and legs, keeping moving, steadily upwards.

Matt’s foot slipped, and he fell downwards a rung. He clung on with his hands, his legs flailing until he found a foothold again.

‘You okay?’ Bergman called up.

‘Sure. Just slipped, that’s all. Let’s take a minute here.’

They paused mid-climb, resting their tired limbs as best they could while clinging on to the ladder. They had covered just over half of the distance to the next refuge.

‘Okay,’ Matt said after a minute, ‘let’s keep going. Last push, then we’ll take a proper rest.’

Suddenly in the shaft, a deep groan rang out, and a shriek of seized metal. It echoed down the hollow chamber, and the two men looked round in alarm.

‘Okay, what was that?’ Bergman asked. ‘It isn’t going to be good, whatever it is.’

Matt said nothing. One of the wire ropes hanging in the shaft moved slightly.

‘I think this could be very bad, Rick’, he said softly.

The wire rope started to move, downwards.

‘Rick, climb, as fast you can!’ Matt yelled down, and set off again, his arms and legs moving quickly.

For a moment, Bergman didn’t understand, then he realised with a cold slide of fear that the skip loader high above them was heading
down the shaft
, straight for them. With hardly any clearance between the skip and the shaft ladder, it would slice them from the wall as it passed.

Bergman raced up the ladder, his muscles screaming. How far was it to the refuge? How fast did the skip move? Faster than he could climb, he was certain. As he climbed, he wondered what would happen when the several tonnes of the skip struck him. It would wipe him off the ladder without even noticing, and then there would be the long fall, down the shaft, to be smashed against the girders and metalwork of the skip loading stations far below. He wondered if it would hurt, or if it would be over with quickly.

A singing noise came from the four guide ropes, and the balance rope, hanging below the skip, hissed past. The skip was very close. In a few moments, it would be here.

Bergman looked up, and he saw the skip approaching; a rapidly expanding square of darkness against the gloom of the shaft.

Matt’s face appeared suddenly, looking down at him.

‘Grab the ledge, Rick!’

Matt was already in the refuge, up and to Bergman’s left.

Bergman couldn’t make it up the ladder and get into the refuge before the skip hit him. He reached up and to the left, gripped the ledge of the refuge with both hands, swung out and hung there, holding his body close to the shaft wall.

With a deep whoosh of air that pummelled his chest, the skip tore past the refuge, grazing one of his heels. The sudden blow pulled one of his hands from the ledge, and he was left dangling from one hand. Bergman yelled in terror as the fingers started to slip; he knew he was going to fall.

A hand grabbed his wrist, just as his last fingers slipped, and he hung there, terrified. The skip hissed away down the shaft.

‘Give me your free hand!’

Bergman reached up and grabbed the outstretched hand, and Matt pulled him upwards and onto the refuge, where they both lay, panting from the exertion.