Below Mercury (9 page)

‘
Sub-optimal?’
Clare threw her pen down. ‘Have you
any idea
how little time that is when you’re looking for a landing site?’

Rawlings nodded, and opened his mouth to reply, but Clare carried on, her voice rising: ‘Let me spell it out for you. Even if we hit the de-orbit burn spot on, and we descend into the crater without wasting any fuel, we’ve got to locate the landing pad in the dark. There are
no landing lights
on the pad. Call that thirty seconds, if we’re extremely accurate with our navigation. A quick circuit round the pad to make sure it’s safe to land, and that there’s no obstacles to an abort. Another sixty seconds. And that’s it – we’ve used up our ninety seconds. That is just
not enough
margin. Minimum rules for manned missions are—’

‘—being revoked for this mission,’ Helligan’s voice cut Clare off. Helligan waved at Rawlings, and the lights came back up in the room.

‘This isn’t a routine flight, boys and girls,’ Helligan continued. He stood up and walked slowly round to the front of the room as Rawlings sat down. ‘This is a cutting-edge exploratory mission to an abandoned, probably wrecked, base with no operational refuelling facilities. You’re going to be close to the limits of fuel the whole way.’

He let his words sink in.

‘Now, the captain here—’ he managed a little smile as he paused, ‘—has reservations about what we’re asking her to do. I’d like to remind you that all of you are volunteers and you’re under no obligation to proceed. If any one of you wishes to leave the mission team, I for one will have no problem in accepting that.

‘But let me make one thing clear. You bail now – right now – or you carry on with the training. If we spend all this time and money in preparing you for this mission, and then you pull out at the last minute, then I will
personally
ensure that you never go into space again, and that your superiors are left in no doubt about your prospects for future advancement. Do I make myself clear?’

He looked at them all in turn, receiving answering nods and affirmations. He finished up with his eyes on Clare.

She stared back, hating Helligan with a seething anger that wouldn’t go away.

‘Yes, sir,’ she said, leaving the gap between the words as long as she dared.

Helligan’s porcine eyes narrowed.

‘You were saying, captain?’ he asked, his voice and gaze like steel.

‘I was pointing out that ninety seconds of fuel leaves barely any decision time, sir.’ Clare’s voice was quiet, but clearly audible in the hushed room.

What’s wrong, Foster, aren’t you up to it? Are you so worried you’re going to crash, that you’ll abort the landing unless you’ve got five whole fucking minutes to work yourself up to attempting it?

Helligan’s voice blasted back at Clare, but it was just in her head. Helligan hadn’t spoken. He was still looking at her, as if weighing her up.

‘Yeah, it’s not long, Foster,’ he said, ‘but we need someone who can deal with that. You told me you were up for this mission. Is that still the case?’

All around her, the other faces looked at Clare.

What was she to do? They were all waiting to see how she responded. Should she tell them how dangerous this landing could be, how there was a good chance that they could go past the point of no return, run out of fuel, and be stranded? Or that if she tried to land on rough ground and didn’t get it perfectly right, they could roll onto a wingtip, and it would all be over in seconds. Or would that put so many of them off that she would be replaced, with another, less experienced commander who would toe the Company line, and cheerfully fly them into disaster?

She started nodding, to no one in particular.

‘Okay. I accept that we’ve got little choice. Let’s work on finding ways to buy us some more time on the landing.’

Helligan looked back at her without speaking, knowing that if the exchange continued, she would put the wind up everyone.

He turned away.

‘Mr Rawlings,’ he drawled as he moved to the back of the room again, ‘please continue your briefing.’

The mission planner stood up again, and consulted his notes, turning pages over.

‘Okay, so you, ah, make the landing. The landing pad at Erebus Mine is less than two kilometres from the main mine portal, so it’s within walking range – you’ll need a motorised trolley for all your equipment, though. I’ll leave the details of the mine entry and exploration to my colleagues this afternoon, but – ah, yes?’

Matt had raised his hand to ask a question.

‘I know the mission has been planned on the assumption that we can’t refuel on the surface. But there were a lot of fuel stores at Erebus – it was a main refuelling base. Is there any possibility that some of them have survived?’

Rawlings shook his head emphatically.

‘Ah, no, Mr Crawford, even if the surface tanks have survived, they’ve had no power for their heaters. The temperature in the crater is so low that any liquid propane would have frozen solid.’

Matt nodded.

‘Uh, what happens if we exceed our hover time?’ Bergman asked, ‘do we run out of fuel and crash?’

‘No sir. If you exceed the margin, you’ll still be able to land, in fact you’d have plenty of fuel to make a landing. But you’d be left with too little fuel to take off and make orbit again. You’d climb up towards orbit, run out of fuel, and come back down to impact the surface of the planet before you had completed one revolution.’

‘Right,’ Bergman said, in a quieter voice.

The silence persisted, so Rawlings went on.

‘The return journey is the same in each case; you take off from the mine, rendezvous with the tug in orbit, and fire the engine to put you onto an Earth return trajectory. The timing of the return journey is flexible; we have prepared scenarios for three possible dates, depending on when your investigations are complete. The journey times range from ninety-four to a hundred and fifteen days, but we recommend the first window, which will get you back here by early December using a one-tangent trajectory.

‘The rest of the mission in standard stuff, margin calculations and so on; I can run over this later on an individual basis with anyone who’s interested.’

Rawlings stopped, and looked round.

More silence. They were still turning over the implications of what he had said earlier.

‘Any questions?’

‘Can we lighten the ship, or reduce the scope of the mission, so that we have some more margin for the landing?’ The voice belonged to Abrams.

‘I’m afraid not. We’ve already stripped all the mass we can out of the mission, just to get it to work at all.’

‘What about reducing the crew size, say from six to five, would that help?’ Abrams continued.

Rawlings shook his head.

‘We’ve already examined that. It helps, but nowhere near enough.’

There were several more questions, and Rawlings spent some time answering them.

Clare kept quiet for the most part. She answered one question that Rawlings passed to her, but for the rest of the time she feigned polite attention and asked no questions of her own. She was aware from the prickling on the back of her neck that Helligan was watching her. She glanced to her side at one point, and out of the corner of her eye she saw him stifling a yawn.

There came a time when there were no more questions. Helligan eased himself out of his seat and looked around.

‘Okay, boys and girls, if that’s it for questions, we’ll call it a day. We’ll be having a further session with Mr Rawlings later this week, if you think of any further questions. There are some more detailed handouts on the mission plan on the desk here. These are numbered and you are required to sign for your copy and keep them in your sight at all times, or in your personal safes.

‘Okay, that’s it; I’ll see you all tomorrow morning at oh eight thirty hours.’

Later that evening, the mission team was seated together at a large outside table, in a restaurant high up on Orote Point. From their elevated position, they could see down to Apra Harbour, and the ships moving in the evening light.

They had pushed back their dinner plates; scrunched napkins lay on the table, and they were enjoying the view as they finished their cokes and beers. A large liquefied gas tanker, its superstructure twinkling with lights, was nosing its way carefully through the narrow harbour entrance. They watched as tugs moved alongside, helping to manoeuvre the larger ship through the gap.

Clare had suggested that they go out for dinner together, to unwind after the first day, and had brought them here. It was one of Clare’s favourite places; lively but not too crowded, and sufficiently far away from the base to be free of Helligan’s cronies. Even so, she lowered her voice when talking about some of the more sensitive subjects; there was considerable media interest in the mission, and she didn’t want to read the mission plan in tomorrow’s news.

‘So, captain, I need to ask you something,’ Abrams said, looking up at Clare from under his brows. ‘I guess some of us are a bit concerned after that business this afternoon about the landing. Just how dangerous is it?’

Clare looked at Abrams in surprise; she had thought he would have understood the implications as well as anybody. Then she realised that he was asking the question to get it out in the open, and she nodded in understanding.

‘If there is any danger,’ she said, turning her beer round on the table, ‘it’s in having to make the decision quickly. Normally there’d be plenty of time to choose a suitable landing site, do a turn round it, check for any debris, whatever, before descending.

‘With so little hover time, we’ll have to commit to a landing site very quickly, and once we’re committed, we simply have to land – there’s no time to search about for another one if we find we can’t use it.’

‘Are you worried about it?’ Bergman asked.

Clare looked steadily at him for a moment.

‘Yes, I am. I think any – competent commander would be. My job is to try to maximise the time we’ve got, and one way of doing that is by accurate navigation. We don’t want to waste time looking for the landing pad.’

‘I’m not sure I understand why we have so little hover time,’ Abrams asked. ‘I mean, the base is wrecked and all that, but at some point people came in and set things up there, when there was nothing in the crater. Surely those guys had more than ninety seconds to decide where to land?’

‘Steve, why don’t you answer that one.’ Clare sat back in her chair, and took a long drink of her beer, as Wilson leaned forward to explain.

‘Well, the original survey teams had already landed fuel and other stores by unmanned landers, and they used those landers’ cameras to scope out suitable landing sites. When the manned landers put down, they had a cache of fuel waiting there for the return journey, so they could land relatively light, and still have plenty of margin. We’ve got to carry
all
our fuel for the return journey with us, which means we’re very heavy when we land, which means we burn more fuel, and our margins get used up really quickly.’

They digested this for a few moments.

‘Why can’t we do the same thing, then?’ Elliott asked.

‘Money. We’d need a bigger tug, one that could carry two landing vehicles, and one of the landers would have to be abandoned. Plus there’s the complexity of managing a manned and unmanned landing in the same mission.’

Abrams asked Wilson another question, and gradually steered the conversation away. Clare watched the faces round the table as they talked. Their reactions were typical; they didn’t want to know, but they needed to know. Like moths drawn to a candle flame, they had to hear what would happen to them if it all went wrong, in the black skies over Mercury.

For her part, Clare wasn’t put off by the risks; she had accepted these the day she joined the Corps, but these guys had wives, families. Futures.

Did
she
have a future? Less than two days ago, she had been staring at the end of her career. Tonight, despite her best efforts to stay disconnected, she felt the first stirrings of enthusiasm for the mission. These guys wanted the mission to be a success, they wanted to get back home again, and she was part of that. She rolled the thought around her head, and it felt good.

The mission planners had thought the mission through all right; they had explored all the alternatives. If she was honest with herself, the landing on Mercury was no more challenging than some asteroid landings she had pulled off.

There was the publicity, too, which had come as a surprise to her; she hadn’t expected so much interest in the mission. A superior officer who had blanked her for months had stopped her in a corridor this afternoon, asked her how it was going. What she had thought would be a dull ferry job looked set to be a high-profile mission that could help relaunch her career. All she had to do was complete the mission, and bring them all back safely.

Her glance flickered over them as they sat there, leaning forward, listening to Wilson. Abrams was solid and experienced. Bergman seemed competent, if a little too sure of himself. Elliott was clearly a PMI stooge. As for Matt – she flicked a look at him, and was surprised to find him looking straight back at her.