Below Mercury

by Anson, Mark

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.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  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.

&nb
sp; 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.

  Caught off guard, her eyes met his for a moment before she could look away.

  Matt had faced a ruined career too, of course; he was despised by the organisation he once worked for. But he had taken his decision after careful thought, not in some split-second judgement call over an asteroid’s tumbled surface. Did that give her a greater right to feel sorry for herself? Probably not. Matt had every right to feel aggrieved at his treatment, but he had continued to direct his energies into helping the relatives. Perhaps she should think more about other people, about being part of this mission, and less about herself.

  Despite her better judgement, she felt herself warming to Matt, and she risked a glance back at him when she was sure his attention was elsewhere. He looked tired after the long day, she thought, tired but happy.

  Perhaps she was starting to understand why.

  Later, and it was silent in Matt’s apartment on the base. Bergman and Matt had come back here after the meal, and they had stayed up talking for a while.

  Bergman was sitting in an armchair, drinking coffee; Matt was laid back on the couch. Matt’s mug of coffee lay untouched on the table beside him. It had been a long time since anyone had spoken.

  Bergman yawned, and glanced at his watch.

  ‘Well, my friend, I need to get back to my place.’ He stood up, and saw that Matt had fallen asleep where he lay.

  Bergman found his jacket, and went to the door to go.

  There was a pile of framed pictures on the hallway table. Evidently Matt was still in the process of unpacking. Bergman picked one up. A photograph of a younger Matt holding a roll of parchment, standing next to his parents, who were trying not to look too proud. An old building in red brick and stone was behind them.

  Another one. A photograph of Matt holding a surveyor’s staff to the roof, in some dark underground passage. The flash was reflected in pools of inky black water. It wasn’t possible to tell if the mine was on Earth, or on one of the planetary mines.

  Another photograph.

  Matt in a spacesuit, grinning behind the faceplate, as he stood on the top step of some aluminium stairs, poised to enter the body of some landing craft. It looked like it was from one of Matt’s early assignments.

  Another picture, and this one was grainier and poorer quality than the rest. It appeared to be a shot of a smooth, rectangular area set in a rough rock wall, but as Bergman peered closer, he saw that it was a set of gigantic pressure doors; there were some spacesuited figures at the base that revealed the true scale of the scene.

  Bergman peered closer to read the lettering on the doors, and realised that he was looking at the main portal of Erebus Mine, on Mercury. He couldn’t tell if Matt was one of the spacesuited figures in front of the doors, or the person taking the photograph.

  Bergman stared at the picture a long time, and then replaced it carefully on the table, before letting himself out into the cool night air.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  May 4, 2151, and the rain fell from a grey morning sky over Andersen Base.

  Drifting across the northern part of the island in great sheets, the clouds released their rain in a long, slow deluge that brought visibility down to a few hundred metres. It fell across the kilometres of grey concrete runways, the parking aprons and taxiways, collecting in great pools as it swirled down into the mouths of the overloaded storm drains.

  Heavy rain was unusual for Guam in early May, but a distant typhoon out over the ocean had flung a belt of storms across Guam and the long curve of the Mariana Islands. Distant thunder still boomed over the mountains to the southwest, but the high winds and thunderstorms of the previous night were moving on now, trailing a band of rain behind them to drench the island.

  It was three months after their initial meeting of the mission team, and if all went well, today would be the day they set off on their long journey to Mercury. The time between had been a continuous round of classroom lectures, training, simulations, physical fitness programmes and rigorous planning, so that every member of the team knew what they had to do to ensure the success of the mission.

  They had flown in fast jets to experience the effects of high g-forces during the orbital ascent, practised parachute landings for an emergency ejection, even what they had to do if the spaceplane ditched over water. While nothing could ever be like the real thing, the mission team felt well prepared for the challenges that lay ahead.

  In just a few short hours, the launch window would open for the space tug to set off on its long journey to Mercury. High above them, hundreds of kilometres above the clouds and weather of the Earth, the tug circled in its orbit, fully fuelled, waiting for the six-man mission team. Yet here they were, sat on the ground waiting for the weather to clear.

  The spaceplane with the mission team aboard stood in a fuelling apron at the end of a taxiway, off to one side of the immense runways. A liquid oxygen tanker stood close by the left side of the spaceplane, cold white vapour swirling from its fuelling hoses as it completed the initial fill. On the other side, by the open cargo bay door, a supply truck had just finished loading the last of the stores. A ground handler swung the heavy cargo door shut and closed the locking handle, as the truck started up. It pulled away, leaving two wide tracks behind it in the surface water; they disappeared swiftly in the falling rain.

  The ground handler ran his hand over the edges of the cargo bay door, checking that he had latched it securely. He lifted his head to the rain, and the graceful shape of the spaceplane above him.

  Nearly 36 metres from its nose to the rearmost edges of its twin tailfins, the Olympus spaceplane was a beautiful craft. Its white heat-resistant paint gave it the appearance of some exotic seabird, wings outstretched, waiting to leap through the rain clouds and soar into the sky.

  The long, streamlined fuselage was set into a swept-back delta wing, over 22 metres across its downturned wingtips. Under the wings, in two large, podded nacelles, the four main engines lay at rest, with just a wisp of white vapour trickling from their enormous exhaust nozzles. Together, the engines provided up to two million newtons of thrust; enough to hurl the spaceplane out of the clutches of Earth, or any of the inner planets.

  Brought back from Mars in January, the spaceplane had spent the last few months in Andersen’s maintenance hangars. As well as a thorough overhaul of its airframe and engines, it had been converted specially for its mission to Mercury. The landing gear, red with iron oxide dust from countless landings on Mars, had been replaced with strengthened units to cope with the higher landing weight. An improved night vision system had also been fitted, to assist them finding the landing site in the darkness of the crater.

  In the crew compartment at the front of the craft, the two un
occupied ejection seats at the rear of the cabin had been removed to save weight and provide more stowage space. Behind the crew compartment, the cargo hold was crammed with equipment for the mission: food, clothing, spacesuits, drilling equipment, tools, sealed canisters of blasting explosives, roof supports, medical supplies, portable radios with folding antennas, and a lightweight, battery-powered trolley for carrying it all.

  Two large bundles held the inflatable habitat modules that the mission team would use as their living quarters while they were on the surface. Pressurised and heated by umbilicals from the spaceplane, these would unfold and inflate into two self-contained living spaces, complete with a surface airlock and flexible room dividers.

  The rest of the fuselage – nearly 24 metres of it – was taken up by the two huge tanks for the liquid oxygen and liquid propane fuel. The spaceplane could not take off with its full fuel load; it was too dangerous in case of a rejected takeoff, and the landing gear was not designed to take the weight. Instead, it took off partly fuelled, and completed the bulk of its fuelling in mid-air over the Pacific Ocean.

  The spaceplane’s structure groaned and creaked as it adjusted to the weight of fuel and liquid oxygen. The insulated cryogenic tanks gave out faint, high-pitched shrieks as the super-cold liquids chilled the metal walls down to their operating temperature.

  Beneath the belly of the spaceplane, the refuelling operator disconnected the liquid oxygen hose from the filling point, and latched the cover hatch closed. White vapour streamed from the end of the hose and swirled around him as he coiled the heavy hose back on to the tanker.

  The ground dispatcher supervising the loading made the final checks of the spaceplane’s hatches and landing gear. He walked round each of the main landing gear bogies, running his hand over the pitted rubber surface of the tyres, and shining his flashlight over the landing gear struts and up into the wheel well bays. Satisfied that there were no fluid leaks or any tyre damage, he walked the length of the lower fuselage, checking every service hatch for security, and finished up at the twin wheels of the nose landing gear, where the ground power truck was plugged into the spaceplane by a heavy cable.