Below Mercury

by Mark Anson

  The voice of the centre that controlled the crowded orbit levels round the Earth sounded in their headsets.

  ‘Mercury Two Zero Seven, Earth Orbit Control, we have you in a circular orbit at three two zero kilometres. Clear climb to five zero zero kilometres, maintain inclination at plus two three decimal five, insertion point India Three at zero two two six Zulu. Report when ready for final approach to Space Tug Two One.’

  As Wilson read back the clearance, Matt could see the navigation display in front of the copilot, and the paths of the spaceplane and the unseen space tug moving in their respective orbits. Figures and angles, and a long, curved line between the two craft, popped us as Matt watched.

  A hollow rushing sound came from outside the cockpit walls, and the view outside shifted slightly; Clare was turning the ship to line it up for the manoeuvring burn.

  Matt looked up and out of the cockpit windows. The day below was ending; a wave of darkening could be seen to the right, spreading across the landmass towards them.

  ‘Coming up on terminator now,’ Wilson said, ‘nineteen minutes to orbital manoeuvring burn.’

  The light in the cockpit faded as dusk fell across the world below, and in moments, they flew into the darkness of space behind the Earth.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The room was empty except for a single table and chair. The blinds were drawn, but the evening sunlight still leaked into the room from outside, casting lines of golden light across the floor.

  A key turned in the lock, and Colonel Helligan entered the room, closing and locking the door behind him. He glanced around, as if checking that he was alone, then strode to the table and flung his cap down.

  A sophisticated portable satellite phone, similar to those used by the intelligence services, sat on the table. Helligan sat down and switched the phone on, and began keying in a long sequence of characters. He typed without pause, from memory, glancing at his watch once to check the date.

  He pressed the SEND key, and waited.

  A series of LEDs blinked furiously in different colours as the secure connection was set up. Finally, all the LEDs glowed green, and a subdued hissing came from the speaker.

  They were there.

  ‘Yes.’ The voice that came from the speaker was mechanical, distorted by filters and vocoders to render it unrecognisable. Over the last few months, however, Helligan had found that he could tell the difference between various speakers by the rhythm of their voices.

  He leaned closer to speak, as if afraid that someone might overhear him.

  ‘This is Mainstay.’

  ‘Report.’ The distorted voice was clipped and abrupt.

  Helligan licked his lips.

  ‘They’ve left orbit, and they’re on their way to Mercury. Everything’s on schedule.’

  ‘Has the code been inserted?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does anyone suspect that the flight software has been tampered with?’

  ‘No. It was hidden inside a routine update to the mission management software. I’ve seen the maintenance records. Nobody suspects a thing.’

  There was a pause. A different voice, a slower one, joined the conversation.

  ‘We don’t share your assessment of the situation. The captain was seen talking to one of the maintenance technicians yesterday. She may know something.’

  ‘Pilots talk to maintenance all the time,’ Helligan said, moving uneasily in the chair. ‘If Foster suspected anything, she’d never have taken off. All she wants is to get back into space, and this is her ticket.’

  There was a short silence, and the first speaker came back on the line.

  ‘Are you certain that this will work?’

  ‘Yes. They’ll be out of radio contact when it happens. There’s no chance of recovery.’

  ‘What if she can’t land, and returns to Earth?’

  Helligan smiled.

  ‘You’ve seen her psych profile. She won’t dare not land, not with her record. She’ll put that ship down all right, and that’s when it’ll get her.’ Helligan’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘They must not get into the mine, colonel, do you understand? If they find out what happened there, the consequences for you would be – severe.’

  Helligan swallowed, and a chill ran down his spine.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s been taken care of. They’ll just disappear, and never make contact again. Without any evidence, and with Foster’s record, it’ll be blamed on her screwing up the landing. They’ll never send another mission after that.’

  More silence.

  ‘I hope you are right, for your sake.’ Even through the distortion, the menace in the voice came across.

  ‘It’ll work.’ Helligan sounded confident, but he was hunched over in the chair, his expression tense.

  ‘This will be our last contact.’

  Helligan scrambled to get closer to the phone.

  ‘Wait! When do I get my—’

  ‘Don’t worry, colonel.’ A strange sound came from the speaker; it might have been someone laughing. ‘You’ll get your payment when they’re gone. Goodbye.’

  The other voice came back one last time before the contact was broken. It was quiet, but recognisable.

  ‘Sleep well, Colonel Helligan.’

  The line went dead.

  Helligan fell back in the chair. His face was covered with a thin sheen of sweat. They had never used his name before.

  Sleep well? Why shouldn’t he sleep well?

  He was doing the right thing. Without PMI and the other mining companies to charter spacecraft, there would be no operations in space. There would be no Astronautics Corps, and Andersen would just be another run-down Air Force base in the middle of the Pacific. What was good for PMI was good for the Corps.

  He picked up his cap and stood up.

  He thought of what he had achieved. It had been difficult to figure out how to keep the change undetected, and he had spent months poring over the problem, until he had spotted a way of doing it.

  He hadn’t been able to try it out in the simulator, but there was no way the bitch could recover from it. She and the rest of the SAIB snoopers would disappear into the crater and be forgotten.

  Helligan unlocked the door and stepped out into the deserted corridor, locking it behind him, and walked confidently down the corridor.

  He imagined Foster’s panic, and her frantic efforts to save the ship, but it wouldn’t be any use. He wondered if she would scream before the end, and he savoured the thought for a moment. Then he saw the other faces on the flight deck, and the terror in their eyes as they saw their death approaching, and he didn’t want to think about that any more.

  Halfway down the corridor, Helligan’s expression changed. His walk became hurried. He stumbled, and broke into a run towards the restrooms at the end of the corridor.

  He banged the door open, and fell into the nearest stall on his knees. His chest heaved, and he threw up copiously, the hot vomit spewing into the toilet bowl at the thought of what he had done.

  Picture: Space tug

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Ten days out from Earth, and the huge mass of the deep space tug Baltimore tumbled end-over-end through the empty wilderness of space between Earth and the Sun.

  The Earth was eight million kilometres away, still visible as a bright, blue jewel against the backdrop of stars, while the tug fell away sunwards in a long ellipse towards its appointment with Mercury.

  The Baltimore and its brethren were the biggest spacecraft in the Astronautics Corps, and they existed for one purpose: to transport crew and materials round the Solar System. Boosted into space in sections by huge launch vehicles, and assembled and fuelled in Earth orbit, the Baltimore could never land on any planet. It lived out its entire life in space, plying back and forth between orbits around planets and moons, hauling cargo modules, or ferrying crews to and from the manned bases. The tug could undertake even longer voyages entirely on automatic pilot, disappearing into the vastness
of deep space and returning with thousands of tonnes of liquid propellants from the refineries on the frozen outer moons of Jupiter.

  The Baltimore was enormous, stretching eighty metres from the exhaust nozzles of its giant nuclear engine to the docking adapter at the far end. As it fell through space, it rotated about its centre of mass at a leisurely three revolutions a minute, imparting a small apparent gravity to the manned parts of its structure.

  At the aft end of the tug was the large and heavy mass of the nuclear engine and power plant. Around it, swathed in reflective insulation, an intricate network of propellant and cooling lines ran between the engine and the generators that provided electrical power for the tug.

  Behind the engine and its heavy neutron shield were six huge solar panels for backup power, each over seven metres long. Arranged in a circle round the reactor mount like the petals of a giant flower, the solar panels supported a vast, circular sunshade of shimmering, reflective plastic. As the Baltimore rotated, the shadow of the sunshade raced out and over the long length of the tug, plunging it into darkness, and retreated again, in an endless cycle, as regular as a clock.

  In the final stages of the voyage, the tug’s rotation would be halted and the sunshade oriented permanently against the Sun, to provide continuous shadow for the tug’s structure. For now, though, the heating loads were low enough to allow the tug to rotate and create its illusion of gravity.

  Behind the sunshade, a cluster of seven giant cylindrical tanks, each one over thirty metres long, formed the middle section of the tug, and held the liquid ammonia propellant for the tug’s nuclear engine.

  Forward of the main propellant tanks, six smaller, heavily insulated tanks held the tug’s reserves of cryogenic fuels; hundreds of tonnes of liquid oxygen and propane for refuelling the manned vehicles that it towed through space.

  At the forward end of the tug, in front of the cryogenic tanks, was the crew module, providing two decks of living accommodation for the flight crew and passengers. Finally, locked firmly in place to the docking adapter at the end of the crew module, the spaceplane waited, its systems shut down until the tug reached Mercury.

  Matt Crawford stood by a porthole on the lounge deck, gazing at the stars wheeling past outside. He had found he needed to look outside at least once a day, just to affirm that there was an outside beyond the walls of the crew module, and to see the cold hardness of the stars in the jet-black sky.

  Staring at the scene for too long could induce motion sickness, though. Matt released the polarisation controls, and the view faded to black. He turned and walked over to the semi-circular couch in the centre of the lounge area. Weight bands on his wrists and ankles helped him to move normally in the low gravity, but he was careful not to hurry. The gentle acceleration produced by the tug’s regular rotation was only one-third that of Earth’s gravity, but sudden movements could still confuse the vestibular system.

  The circular room of the deck was deserted. Elliott and Wilson were asleep, the curtains drawn over their bunk areas. Clare was on duty on the command deck one floor below, and Abrams and Bergman were down there as well; Matt could hear their voices coming up through the ladder stairwell. At first, it had seemed odd that the forward end of the tug was ‘downwards’, but Matt had quickly got used to this apparent contradiction.

  The hourly news was playing on the link from Earth, but Matt had already watched it over breakfast. The small dishwasher swished and hummed in the background. It was easy to believe that he was in an apartment room on Earth, Matt thought, and not in deep space, eight million kilometres from home.

  Matt cast an eye round the nine-metre diameter circular lounge deck, to check that he had put everything back in its place before his watch started. Spacecraft became cluttered very quickly, with so many people living together in a small space. It was more than just courtesy to leave the rest area tidy for others; it was a necessity.

  The lounge deck was devoted entirely to the needs of the passengers, and the flight crew when they were off-duty. It housed eight individual sleeping berths arranged round the circular walls of the deck, each with curtains to create a private space. A bathroom housed the twin luxuries of a decent shower and a zero gravity toilet, and the rest of the deck held the kitchen facilities and a lounge area, for relaxing, reading, or watching movies. These home comforts would have seemed extravagant to the early space explorers, but for long voyages through the depths of space, they were essential for crew morale and well-being.

  In the centre of the deck was a circular opening with a narrow handrail, through which a vertical ladder ran, giving access to the command deck below. The ladder also led upwards into a conical chamber that contained food stores and other consumables.

  Above this, a heavy door opened into a narrower cylindrical section, five metres long, nestling in the space between the six cryogenic fuel tanks.

  Surrounded on all sides by thick, polyethylene radiation shields, and by the heavy mass of the liquid propellants in the fuel tanks, this was the innermost refuge for the crew in the event of a major solar radiation event.

  It was also where the twelve stasis chambers were located, for use on the long voyages to Mars and the outer planets. Spaced out around the walls of the refuge, each unit could maintain a healthy human being in a state of reduced metabolism for many months at a time, saving huge amounts of food and other consumables, and reducing the journey time to the blink of an eye.

  For the relatively short flights to Venus and Mercury, however, the stasis chambers were rarely used, and the coffin-like chambers, with their attendant medical consoles, were silent and dark. The effect was uncomfortably reminiscent of a tomb, and although the refuge could be used for additional sleeping space if needed, most crews tended to leave it alone.

  It was nearly time for Matt and Abrams to take over the night watch, and Matt climbed down the ladder into the command deck. It was noisier here; the hum of equipment and subdued sound of radio transmissions from distant bases filled the air.

  As well as the tug’s flight controls, the command deck housed communications and environmental equipment, a second bathroom, four further berths, and a small gym area, where Bergman was pedalling away vigorously on the exercise bike.

  Matt walked over to the flight deck, to where Clare Foster sat in the commander’s seat, facing the slope of the docking windows. The flight deck seats and control consoles were mounted on struts so that they could be reoriented for weightless flight, when a good view was needed over the tug’s nose. For now, though, the seats faced ‘outwards’. Matt could see Clare’s reflection in the window glass, looking back at him.

  ‘Morning.’

  ‘Hi.’ Clare stretched and smiled. ‘You ready to take over?’ Like all of them, she wore the standard dark blue flight overalls, with her name over the left breast pocket. Unlike the passengers, however, she carried the astronaut badge of the Corps over her name, and her rank insignia on the shoulders.

  ‘Sure. Anything I should know about?’ Matt got into the right-hand seat, and slid it forward to a more comfortable position.

  ‘Nope. We did a small correction of the rotation axis a few hours ago.’ She pointed at one of the displays. ‘It shouldn’t need any adjustment for a day or so. Looks like you’ve got a quiet watch.’

  The door of the bathroom, over by the gym area, opened and Abrams emerged. He sauntered over to the flight deck.

  ‘Mind if I take first turn?’ Matt asked.

  ‘Sure, be my guest,’ Abrams said, in his easy drawl, ‘I’ll just watch from here.’

  Clare pushed her seat back.

  ‘Okay guys, I’ll be upstairs if you need me.’ She got up, and disappeared up the ladder to the lounge deck.

  Abrams leant on the back of Clare’s vacated seat, watching Matt run through the checklist. Flight regulations required that one crewmember had to be seated at the flight deck at all times, so they took it in turns to keep watch, while the other got on with the rest of their duties.
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br />   ‘Any icebergs ahead?’ Abrams asked, wryly.

  Matt laughed. Sitting there, it was easy to imagine that they were the lookouts on some ocean-going ship, cruising in smooth seas at night. Instead of islands and shoals, however, the navigation display showed landmarks that truly belonged to the Space Age; distant planets, the location of the Sun, and the trajectory of the Baltimore; a gentle curve that arced out across the vastness of space.

  ‘Be back in an hour,’ Abrams said, and left Matt to the watch.

  Matt enjoyed being at the flight deck station on the watches; it felt like he was flying the tug, although in reality he could do very little. The autopilot would not allow him to make any changes, or fire any of the thrusters, without disconnecting, and that would sound an alert that would have Clare and Wilson down here in seconds.

  The checklist for the night watch was simple, and Matt was through most of it in a few minutes. The last item was the routine visual survey of the tug’s exterior, and Matt clicked through the various cameras, positioned at strategic points on the tug’s exterior.

  He started at the nuclear engine at the rear of the tug, panning the camera slowly over the cooling fins of the reactor chamber, and the cluster of engine nozzles. This was somewhere that no human could go while the engine was at full power; the radiation from the core was just too dangerous. Now, however, the reactor was just ticking over during the long cruise, its waste heat providing electrical power for the tug’s systems.

  Matt shifted to another camera, and started working his way along the length of the vast fuel tanks and space radiators. He took his time, panning the camera over every metre of the tug’s length. The tanks plunged into darkness, then emerged into sunlight again as the Baltimore turned over again in its rhythmic cycle.

  He moved over the surfaces of the giant tanks and the louvred vents of the space radiators, changing cameras as he went. It was rare to find any problem, but a stray micrometeoroid could sometimes punch a tiny crater into the thin alloy of the tanks, and he inspected the surfaces carefully for any signs of damage.