Below Mercury (5 page)

They would be pressing drinks on him all this evening, and it would be hard to turn them down, especially when they had so much to celebrate. Well, they were just going to have to understand.

He tilted the glass in his hand, and poured the contents slowly and deliberately into the basin, and watched as the foaming liquid ran round the plughole, and drained away.

‘Steady now.’

Captain Clare Foster’s voice was quiet and reassuring in the darkness of the cockpit. It was just loud enough to be heard above the constant hiss of air and the quiet hum of instruments from a spacecraft in flight.

In the pilot’s seat, the young lieutenant was tense with concentration as he completed the gentle roll to the right. His left hand moved slightly on the sidestick controller, halting the craft’s rotation. He glanced up briefly at the scene outside.

Clare sat in the right-hand seat, on the flight deck of the landing craft. She looked down to check the approach display, and the dim glow outlined the good bone structure of her face. Her dark blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail that fell past the collar of her flight overalls; it had grown longer in the last few months, and it needed cutting. She looked across at the pilot.

‘Try to relax your grip on the controls,’ she said, glancing outside as the enormous bulk of the asteroid turned against the stars above them. Its vast landscape rolled by, craters and old blowholes coming into sharp relief as they caught oblique rays from the distant Sun, then fading into inky blackness as they rolled into shadow.

They had spent the last half hour matching speed with the asteroid; now it was time for the final approach and landing.

‘Okay, you’re doing well. Now, on the next rotation, as your landmark comes up, get ready to fire the engines at the computed thrust. I’ve set the burn duration and thrust level in the MMS, so all you have to do is get the timing right. Okay?’

‘Yep.’ The pilot’s entire concentration was on the controls and the display in front of him, which showed a wire-frame model of the asteroid turning in space above them.

‘Here it comes.’ Clare pointed out the distant mountain peak that they had selected as a reference point on the first pass. ‘Now remember, there’s about half a second between hitting the button and getting ignition, so aim a little ahead. I’d suggest that outcrop just ahead of the peak, just coming into the Sun now. Got it?’

‘Yes, I see it.’

Clare glanced down at the checklist display on the cockpit console and selected some switches on the central console. ‘Fuel valves are – set to auto. Pre-ignition checklist is complete down to arming.’

The pilot’s breathing quickened as his fingers crept to the engine controls. He flicked the master arming button.

‘
Ignition sequence armed,’
the ship’s flight computer confirmed. The pilot’s eyes flicked from the asteroid rolling past above, to the navigation display, to the primary flight display, to the engine controls. The distant outcrop he was watching drew slowly closer. As it passed level with the ship, he pressed the firing button.

A distant whine, and a muffled thump, then a faint vibration came through the ship as the engines ignited and burned, slowing the ship’s forward speed until it matched the asteroid’s rotation. Clare gripped the arms of her seat as the thrust rose to full power.

The noise of the engines faded, as the short burn came to an end.

‘
Burn complete. Engine safed,’
the flight computer announced.

‘Quickly now, remember that we’re not in orbit. We have to descend while we’re moving at zero relative speed, but leave it too long and the surface will start to move under us.’

The pilot armed the thrusters, and turned the landing craft round, then pitched it forward until it was oriented for landing. The asteroid’s surface was below them now, filling their field of view.

‘Good. Now take us down.’

He fired the thrusters again, in one long burst that pushed them towards the landscape below.

‘Aim for a landing point now.’

‘I’ll go for that flat-bottomed crater just in front of that vee-shaped outcrop there,’ the pilot said. Clare nodded, without comment. There were some slightly better sites, but none so close or so easy to see, and it was important to choose the site early.

‘
Five hundred metres,’
the computer reminded them.

Another burst of thrust, slightly forward this time, and the crater-marked hills and ridges started to drift beneath them.

‘They’re moving,’ his voice contained a trace of panic.

‘Correct your relative speed. Thrust back a bit.’

The thrusters fired again.

‘
Four hundred metres. Sink rate.’
‘Don’t worry about that, you’re doing fine. Just keep the target steady below you.’

The crater they were aiming for slowed in its motion, then started to slide backwards, away from them. Quickly, the pilot applied forward thrust in one long burst.

‘No, that’s too much,’ Clare cautioned, ‘you’ll need to correct.’

The pilot hesitated. The landing point had moved again, and was now aligned perfectly.

‘Correct now,’ Clare’s voice was firm.

‘I don’t—’ he began, but then the crater started to move again, sliding underneath them and disappearing. A succession of rising hills rolled towards them.

‘
Two hundred metres. Sink rate.’

‘You’re moving towards the surface too fast,’ Clare said, pointing to the primary flight display. ‘You could abort the landing and try again.’

‘No, I’ve got the hang of it, and there’s another good landing site ahead.’

The pilot fired the thrusters briefly, braking their apparent forward speed, and pointed out a fresh site, close to a cliff-like ridge.

‘I’m going for that flat area by the far crater rim.’ He swung the ship round to line up with the new site.

‘Okay, you want to watch that ridge behind the site, though. Make your preparations for landing,’ Clare said.

‘Pressurise landing gear. Set landing mode,’ he ordered. Clare moved the landing gear selector and reached across to the mode control panel.

‘Set for landing. Four greens.’

‘
One hundred.’

The thrusters fired in a long, continuous burst, braking their movement towards the land below. At first, it looked like the landing was going well. The craft drifted closer to the landing site, losing altitude at a steady rate. Then the landscape started to slide past faster. The slide continued, and it was clear that something was going wrong; the ridge behind the landing site was moving towards them, faster and faster, looming higher and higher against the sky.

‘
Terrain, terrain. Pull up,’
the computer warned.

The pilot realised that they weren’t going to make it. He hit the abort button, and the main engines coughed into life, but it was too late. The craft started to rise away from the surface, but the cliff was rushing towards them. It expanded until it filled the sky; it became a mountainside, bearing down upon them to crush them. The terrifying sound of the collision alarm filled the cockpit.

‘Brace for impact!’ Clare shouted.

The pilot raised his arms in an involuntary attempt to protect himself from the crash, and the cockpit rocked with a massive blow as the ship flew into the cliff wall. Clare and the pilot were thrown forward into their seat straps.

Everything went black, and a sudden silence fell.

The view from the cockpit windows changed to the deep blue of the projection screens. Clare sat back in her seat as the cockpit lighting came on, and the simulator descended on its hydraulic rams.

A klaxon sounded outside as the simulator came to a halt, settling on its stand as the access gantry moved up.

They were back in the real world once more, at the US Astronautics Corps training facility on the island of Guam in the western Pacific Ocean, and it was the second week in February, 2151.

Clare turned in her seat to face the other two students sitting behind them, who had been watching the scenario unfold.

She had their complete attention.

‘So, important lesson. You cannot land on an asteroid as if you were in a normal gravity field. If you try, as Lieutenant DeSoto here has shown, the craft does not behave as you would expect. The view of the landscape tricks your senses into trying to fly a conventional landing, but we are still two separate bodies, moving independently, and your flying instincts can betray you. Once you’re set up for landing, with zero relative speed, you have to fly as if you’re docking – only the gentlest of touches on the controls, and don’t hesitate to pull away if your relative speed gets too high.’

She turned back to face the lieutenant, who was still staring at the flight controls, an expression of mixed surprise and disappointment on his face.

‘Okay, so we’re dead, but that was a good approach most of the way down, and the main thing you did wrong was not to recognise when the time had come to abort. Don’t take it too hard, we’ve all been there. You should be able to land without difficulty after a couple more attempts.’

She glanced at her watch. ‘Okay, let’s call that an early lunch; be back here by thirteen hundred hours. I’ll reset the simulator, and then you two can have a go this afternoon; we’ll try some landings on a different asteroid.’

The three students clambered out of the simulator, and clanked down the access gantry, their voices fading into the distance. Clare stayed behind in the copilot’s seat, resetting the controls and selecting a new scenario from the simulator’s computer.

As she worked, a head looked in briefly through the open door, and the substantial bulk of Group Commander Colonel Helligan manoeuvred himself into the cockpit. The smell of aftershave and stale sweat preceded him, and Clare knew who it was before she even turned round.

‘Good morning, Colonel Helligan.’ She turned to face him. Helligan was 52, with a heavy-set, footballer’s body that was well on the way to turning to fat, and his greying, wiry hair was cropped close in a crew cut that accentuated the hard line of his jaw. Small, close-set eyes under deep brows gave him a mean, unpleasant look. He was dressed in a short-sleeved uniform shirt and dark blue trousers.

She resented him being in here, his bulk filling the small cabin, intruding on her personal space with his presence, his aftershave, his …
body
.

‘Well, well, well. Another crash on an asteroid,’ he drawled lazily, as he leaned over the back of the pilot’s seat. ‘Are you teaching them how you did it?’

‘You know this is the first time for them, colonel. And I’d respectfully remind you that I never crashed any ship into an asteroid.’

‘Yes, but if you hadn’t pulled up at the last moment you would have.’ He paused. ‘Captain.’

‘The review panel completely exonerated me of any—’ Clare began, as patiently as she could, but Helligan cut her off.

‘I
know
what the panel said, Foster.’ He drawled the word. ‘It’s what they didn’t say that interested me. What’s between the lines, not what’s in them.’

Helligan glanced round the cockpit, looking for something to criticise, and, finding none, continued: ‘I’ll be watching how the others do. Let’s hope they aren’t too shaken by that little ride that you gave them.’

‘Is there something I can do for you, sir, I really have to get this set up again.’ Clare scarcely bothered to keep the contempt creeping into her voice. She knew it was unwise, but she wasn’t going to cave in to this bully of a group commander she had been landed with. Since her return from space six months ago, she had been seconded to the Training Squadron and to tanker duties while her case had been reviewed.

She had assumed that after the review panel had reached its verdict she would have been straight back out on another assignment. Month after month had passed without any word, however, and she was beginning to think that the Astronautics Corps intended to get rid of her by boring her slowly to death.

Helligan thrust a folder at her, which he had been keeping under one armpit. A faint whiff of his body odour accompanied the folder, and she saw that one edge of the paper had a patch of damp on it. The title on the cover of the folder read:
Erebus Mine Accident Investigation Team
.

‘I’ll save you the trouble of reading it. You’re being offered a temporary secondment to Deep Space Transportation while your case is being considered. I
strongly
advise that you take it.’ He paused to let the words sink in.

So that was it – the end of her career as an interceptor captain. Clare tried as hard as she could to look impassive, to be neutral, but she knew her face was leaking the crushing despair that she felt.

Helligan watched the emotions flit across her face. A slow half-smile broke his features. It had been worth it, he thought, putting up with this high-flying bitch for the last few months, just to see her brought down to earth.

She said nothing, just looking back at him.

Eventually, Helligan spoke again.