Below Mercury

by Anson, Mark

  Ahead of them now, the central mountains rose into the sky, growing with each minute as the spaceplane slid towards the heart of the crater. The peaks climbed out of the darkness of the crater and into the high sunlight, great spires of rock formed from the rebounding of the ancient impact flow, their tumbled lower slopes hidden in the darkness.

  Their course took them through a valley between two of the tallest peaks. As they drew closer, the sunlit heights soared up into the sky on either side until they were lost to view, high above the spaceplane. On the night vision displays, they could see the invisible ramparts and mountain buttresses that slid silently past alongside in the darkness. Great screes and boulder slopes fell down toward the hidden valley floor, the sheer rock faces softened from countless minor impacts.

  The sides of the valley rose and drew together, until it seemed that they would never make it through, but at the last moment, a gap opened between two great mountain buttresses, sharp-edged in the sunlight, standing like sentinels at the gates of night.

  The ship slipped through the gap, and sailed out again over the darkness of the crater plain, turning towards an outthrust spur of the far crater wall, just visible on the far horizon.

  ‘Passing waypoint, coming round to one eight zero. Sixty kilometres to landing site, descending through three thousand metres, slightly high on the approach path,’ Wilson said, his eyes flicking over the instruments.

  ‘Reduce speed to one four zero. Maintain descent to two thousand metres for final approach, call out range and altitude.’ Clare’s hand moved out to touch the sidestick, her eyes watching the landing approach display.

  Six slow minutes went by, while the invisible crater floor rolled past beneath them, and the far crater wall loomed closer, its dark ramparts rising to block out the stars.

  ‘Test landing thrust.’ Clare said.

  Wilson pushed the thrust levers forward, and the crew felt the ship push upwards, as the landing thrusters were tested to their roaring maximum, sufficient to make a lift-off for their return journey.

  ‘Full thrust, engine readings normal,’ Wilson reported. ‘Reducing to descent thrust.’

  The roar of the jets faded back to a hiss as the spaceplane continued its slow fall, sliding down into the depths of the crater. Outside the windows, the towering mountains had risen to block out the stars, and the ship floated in utter darkness.

  ‘Ten kilometres to landing site, altitude two thousand metres, approach checklist complete,’ Wilson announced, pressing a switch on the overhead panel. ‘Turning onto one three zero for final approach.’

  The spaceplane dipped a wing and banked to the left, until it was heading straight for the unseen base of the mountain spur.

  ‘Any nav signals?’ Clare asked.

  Wilson shook his head.

  ‘Negative. Not even a beacon. That’s one dead base down there.’

  ‘Reduce speed to five zero, increase rate of descent to ten metres per second,’ Clare said quietly. The spaceplane’s nose lifted as Wilson adjusted the autopilot, angling the landing jets to brake their forward speed and take them down on a steep descent towards the crater floor.

  ‘Eight kilometres range, altitude sixteen hundred metres,’ Wilson called.

  Clare thumbed the intercom to the passengers. ‘Everyone ready? Let’s have those faceplates down and locked now.’

  Behind her in the cockpit, there were thunking and clicking sounds as the crew closed their helmet faceplates, and the sharp hiss of suit air supplies taking over.

  ‘Five kilometres range, altitude one thousand metres.’

  Only the radar display showed them what was happening outside, its flickering green eye showing them the fuzzy outline of the mine complex, far below and ahead of them in the darkness.

  ‘Four kilometres range, altitude eight hundred fifty metres.’

  Clare reached for the landing gear control handle.

  There was a series of thumps below them as the landing gear doors opened and the wheels swung downwards and locked in position.

  Wilson kept focused on the descent, watching their forward speed and sink rate towards the landing pad. Clare turned her attention back to the approach display, trying to pick out individual features from the radar returns.

  ‘One kilometre range, altitude two hundred fifty metres.’

  Clare could see the landing pad in the distance, a sharp-edged rectangle on the floor of the crater, and some of the taxiways, but the rest of the image was confused and broken.

  ‘Reduce speed to ten, level off at one fifty metres.’

  The hiss of the landing jets increased briefly to a roar as Wilson arrested their descent and slowed their forward motion. Clare watched the displays intently as the ship moved slowly forward towards the landing pad.

  ‘Three hundred metres to pad, holding at one hundred fifty metres.’

  ‘Keep it coming, real slow now.’

  The spaceplane slid closer to the image of the landing pad on the approach displays.

  ‘One hundred metres.’

  ‘Okay, that’s close enough, bring us to a hover.’

  Wilson slowed the ship until it halted, hanging motionless, suspended in the darkness on its landing jets.

  ‘Hovering.’

  ‘Let’s have the landing lights.’

  Below the spaceplane, six powerful lights pierced the blackness, and on the night vision displays in the cockpit, the crater floor could be made out at last.

  It took a moment or two for the scene to sink in.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Matt let out, hardly able to believe what he saw.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  In the shimmering images on the cockpit displays, the landing pad and surface facilities of Erebus Mine lay spread out below them, like one of the models they had examined back on Earth. Instead of the tall towers of the refinery, and the ordered rows of storage spheres and fuel tankers, a scene of utter ruin was revealed.

  From the open portal of the mine, by the mountain wall, a wide swathe of wreckage splashed out more than a kilometre into the crater floor, as if the contents of the mine had exploded over the landscape. Unidentifiable fragments of all shapes and sizes were strewn over the crater floor, and a radiating, fan-shaped scar, hundreds of metres across at its widest point, had been blown into the dust of the crater floor by the force of the escaping atmosphere.

  Further out on the crater floor, there was just a wide, blackened crater where the ice processing plant and fuel refinery had been. The entire complex was gone, levelled to the ground by an enormous explosion in the fuel refinery. The shattered stumps of the refinery towers and gas processing plant could still be made out in the ruins, and twisted and blackened wreckage sprawled in a wide circle round the remains of the complex.

  Nothing had survived. The tank farm near the landing pad had been destroyed completely; every storage sphere had burst open, their thin metal walls bent outwards like half-peeled oranges, their contents gone forever into the ancient dust of the crater floor.

  The waiting line of fuel tankers lay askew on twisted and broken landing gear, their giant cargo tanks crushed like beer cans by the impact of wreckage hurled out by the explosion. Gantries and handling arms lay on the ground where they had been hurled, or at drunken angles in the darkness.

  Everywhere, there were the signs of smaller, secondary explosions; at several points on the crater floor there were gaping holes where service shafts and underground valve rooms had blown off their roofs and then collapsed, leaving sunken craters.

  And there, right in front of them, was the landing pad, a tribute to Clare and Wilson’s navigation and flying. The pad, however, was beyond use; a fuel tanker, caught by the explosion, lay sprawled across the wide rectangle of reinforced concrete, filling it with twisted and broken wreckage. The tanker had burst open, spilling its cargo over the pad’s surface; the liquid had frozen solid in the vacuum, and glistened darkly in the spaceplane’s landing lights.

  Clare’s voice br
oke in, speaking calmly despite the horror of the scene.

  ‘Okay, the primary landing site is out of action, we need to select another. We’ve just enough fuel to do one circuit of the complex. Steve, I have control. Count me down on the fuel margin.’

  ‘Roger that, captain. Eighty-four seconds before the decision call.’

  Clare punched the ALT HOLD button on the autopilot, took hold of the sidestick, and moved off in a careful, anticlockwise circle, watching an image of the ground move past on her head-up display.

  Deep down below them, moving and turning with the motion of the ship, was the large concrete rectangle of the landing pad. Years ago, before the accident, it would have been marked out with runway lights, and spotlights would have bathed the refinery towers and waiting tankers. Now, the whole complex lay in darkness, like the shattered ruins of a ship discovered in the lonely abyss of a deep ocean floor.

  The pools of light cast by their landing lights moved slowly over the scene. Clare scanned the area around the pad, looking for a clear area that she could land on. None of the fuel tanker pads was of any use; they were all blocked by wreckage from the explosion. The taxiways around the main landing pad were too narrow to attempt a landing on, but there was a wider, wedge-shaped space where two taxiways merged, and it seemed to be free of any wreckage.

  ‘Sixty seconds,’ Wilson warned, ‘we need a landing site.’

  As if to underline the point, the flight computer spoke. ‘Fuel margin. Decide now.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Clare’s eyes never left her display. ‘That’s our best place, on the taxiway junction.’ She pointed at the display.

  ‘It’s only just big enough. We’ll need to watch that crane.’ Just off the edge of the taxiway junction, a partly collapsed crane gantry leaned over, bent in the middle as if it had been punched in the stomach. If Clare put the spaceplane down right, the wing tips would clear it – but only just.

  ‘Other options?’

  ‘Can’t see anything else.’ He glanced back at the fuel displays, which showed the narrowing margin they had before they would have to abort the landing and climb back to orbit. ‘We’re getting really low on fuel. Fifty seconds.’ A drop of sweat trickled down the side of Wilson’s temple.

  Time seemed to slow to a crawl as Clare’s mind raced through the options and the terrible decision. Abort now, and they faced another hundred-plus days in space, and she would have to endure Helligan’s cynical smile on her return. There would be no chance the mission would be attempted again, after what they had found here.

  Land, and she would be a hero, pulling off a daring landing in the best spirits of the Astronautics Corps.

  But if she screwed it up, and piled the ship into the frozen crater floor, they would be dead, and nobody would be coming to recover their bodies, not this far down in the Sun’s gravity well. They would just be another statistic to add to the body count at Erebus Mine, and the Space Graves Commission’s register of the long toll of lives lost in space.

  ‘Fuel margin critical. Decide now,’ the computer warned them, its voice becoming more strident.

  ‘Forty seconds.’

  Behind the pilots, Matt and Bergman gripped the arms of their seats, and Elliott and Abrams behind them copied them unconsciously.

  To land, or not to land.

  The seconds ticking away now, eating into their safety margin. A few seconds more, and there would be no choice.

  Helligan’s mocking smile looked back at Clare from the darkness outside.

  She decided.

  ‘We’re landing. Lock altimeter on target – there, and read the checklist.’

  She swung the spaceplane round so that its wings were over the widest part of the taxiway junction, to give the landing gear as much room as she could. Gridlines and tick marks appeared on the displays, counting down the distance to the ground.

  Wilson ran through the final checklist items.

  ‘Radar altimeter locked on, one hundred fifty metres. Gear down and locked. Engine cutoffs armed. Landing checklist complete. Thirty seconds remaining.’

  ‘Fuel margin critical. If not landed, abort.’

  ‘I have it, just need to move her across – a bit more.’ Clare nudged the controls slightly, lining up the huge bulk of the Olympus exactly on the clear space.

  ‘Gently does it, come on baby,’ Clare muttered to the heavy ship, 120 tonnes of airframe and fuel, floating on the jets of superheated gas that sprayed out in a fan-shape below. Her hand moved fractionally, and the ship crept across until it was centred on the target spot.

  ‘Twenty seconds!’

  ‘That’s it. Landing now. Keep an eye on that crane.’ Clare pressed the red button on her sidestick, and a warning tone sounded in the cockpit as the autopilot disconnected, putting the ship under Clare’s control.

  The spaceplane rocked slightly as she adjusted its attitude and brought the wings level, the radar altimeter probing the distance to the ground.

  Clare’s right hand reached out to the thrust levers and pressed the disconnect button for the autothrottle, giving her command over the engines. She backed off the thrust slightly, keeping the wings level, to start the descent towards the landing site.

  The hissing of the landing jets reduced – then there was a loud thump, followed by another.

  The craft lurched, and below it, two huge jets of liquid sprayed out as the main propellant drain valves opened. Driven by the pressure in the tanks, tonnes of liquid propane and liquid oxygen poured out into space, tumbling down towards the crater floor.

  ‘Fuel pressure.’ The computer added its chilling warning to the repeated, insistent sound of the master alarm. The turbopumps, starved of fuel, whined and vibrated as thrust fell away. There were some muffled popping sounds as the engines expired, and the ship was falling.

  For a moment, nobody spoke or moved. They were falling, slowly at first in the Mercurian gravity, but accelerating, moving faster and faster towards the ground.

  ‘What the fuck—’ Clare exploded, and rammed the thrust levers forward. Nothing happened; the ship continued its sickening plunge, tilting over to the left as it fell, and the landing pad slipped away from underneath them.

  ‘Terrain, terrain. Pull up.’

  ‘Shit!’

  Clare could hardly take in what was happening; it seemed as if every system was screaming for attention. The caution and warning panel was a growing mass of red lights as their ship fell out of the sky.

  ‘Call the altitude!’ she barked.

  ‘One hundred ten – one hundred!’

  ‘Have they flamed out? What’s happening?’

  ‘No, I – I don’t know,’ Wilson stammered. His eyes darted over the instruments, looking but not seeing in his panic, as he frantically looked for the fuel displays that he had been reading off, only moments before.

  Without thinking why or making a conscious link, simply moving on instinct, Clare let go of the thrust levers, re-engaged the autopilot, and set the maximum climb rate.

  For a moment, nothing appeared to happen, but below the ship, the columns of escaping fuel shut off abruptly.

  Pressure rose again in the tanks, and the cabin shook from a series of jarring bangs as the landing jets re-ignited and stuttered into life. There was a rising push from below as the roar of the landing jets returned, slowing their fall, but it wasn’t enough, not nearly enough.

  Clare rammed the sidestick hard over, and the thrusters responded, rolling the spaceplane back towards level, but the crater floor was rising towards them, reaching up to smite them from the sky.

  ‘Altitude!’

  ‘Fifty!’ Wilson stared ahead, white-faced. Clare had the wings level, but the ship was still falling, and its forward slide was getting faster.

  ‘Forty!’

  ‘Terrain, terrain. Pull up.’

  ‘Main engines!’ Clare yelled above the noise of the alarms.

  ‘Too low! The mountains!’

  Clare saw the approaching hil
ls even as Wilson said the words. The landing jets were beginning to have an effect, but the ship was still flying forward, heading straight toward the outthrust spur of the crater wall.

  In a moment of clarity that seemed to stretch forever, she realised they weren’t going to make it. The ground was coming up towards them faster than they could climb away from it, and someone very far away said with Wilson’s voice, in words that sounded strangely unreal in her ears: ‘We’re going to hit the ground.’

  Wilson’s face turned to look at her and he said something else, but she couldn’t take it in. She pulled back on the sidestick, trying to slow them down and raise the nose. The ground hissed past below in a blur of bright light from the landing lights, and dust was blowing all around, they must be very close now, very close—

  ‘Crash landing – brace for impact!’ Clare shouted above the sound of the alarm and the icily calm computer voice that counted off the last few metres to their death.

  ‘Ten. Pull up.’

  The crater floor loomed directly in front of the cockpit windows, a carpet of swirling dust.

  ‘Five. Pull up.’

  Time seemed to slow to a crawl as the last moments stretched out in front of them.

  Bergman wondered what his wife would tell his son, when the news broke that they had been killed; he could see his son’s face, his wife trying to hold it together as she tried to tell him that his Daddy wouldn’t be coming home. The emotion rushed up like acrid smoke to suffocate him, hot tears welling up in his eyes.

  Clare was running through all the reasons for the landing jets failing, round and round, through mental pathways made lightning fast by the adrenaline, checking again and again if there was something she had missed. She must have forgotten something, something …

  Wilson was in shock, and he stared at his fingers, frozen uselessly on his armrest as he tried to remember what Clare had asked him to do. He was supposed to do something, he knew. His little finger jumped uncontrollably as he watched it, unable to move.

  Elliott scrabbled at the fastenings of his seat straps, trying in vain to release them. In the seat opposite, Abrams wondered how his wife would manage without him; she had taken the death of one of her friends last year so hard.