Below Mercury

by Anson, Mark

  ‘Come on,’ Clare said, ‘we need to search this place.’

  Matt tore himself away from the window, and his memories, and picked his way across the galley area, following the others.

  Many of the tables and chairs had been pushed to the edges of the room, but several were in the centre, with oxygen cylinders and medical equipment lying about nearby.

  ‘This looks like it was used as an emergency hospital,’ Clare said. ‘Look at all this blood on the tables.’

  ‘Still no bodies,’ Elliott said, ‘I thought we would have found some by now.’

  Someone’s light flickered behind the serving hatches of the kitchen, and there was a splashing sound.

  ‘Hey, there’s still water in the faucets,’ Wilson shouted, then a moment later added: ‘Smells a bit, though.’

  ‘Run it through for a few minutes and see if it clears,’ Clare said. ‘Is there any food in there?’ She stopped by one of the serving hatches and looked in. She could see Wilson, now joined by Matt, opening cupboards and rummaging about in them.

  ‘Some packaged stuff.’ Wilson pulled a box from a cupboard, and tore open the cardboard lid. ‘Huh. We’ve got dried pasta here.’

  There were several large stainless steel cooking pots on the ranges in the kitchen. Above some of them, the contents had splashed on the ceiling when they had flash-boiled in vacuum; it looked like paint had exploded over the kitchen.

  ‘Freezer,’ Matt’s voice called, ‘I’m going to take a look.’

  There was a thunk from deeper inside the kitchens, and a sudden sucking noise as a large door opened.

  ‘Shit!’ Matt’s voice came from across the kitchen, and the door slammed shut again. A strong smell of decay rolled across the kitchens, and the rest of the group stiffened in alarm.

  ‘What is it?’ Wilson said, grabbing Matt’s arm as he came stumbling past.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ Matt gasped, ‘it’s just the food in the freezer, it’s all gone off.’ He pulled free of Wilson’s hand. ‘I’m okay, let’s keep on looking.’

  Outside the kitchen, the other four relaxed, but the smell leaked out and started to fill the room.

  They grimaced and continued their search.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Nearly an hour later, they had completed their exploration of the first level without finding anything more unpleasant than the spoiled food in the freezer compartment. There was plenty of evidence of the disaster, however, and more grim reminders of the personnel’s fight for survival when they had retreated here. Blood was spattered on the walls and floor; personal items were strewn about, but there were no bodies.

  The water in the kitchen eventually ran clean, and they refilled their bottles, and some larger empty containers they found. They found more food to keep them going; most of the sealed packets of dried ingredients had survived, and the ranges worked, so they would be able to supplement the emergency rations with some hot food.

  They gathered together again at the entrance to the level, by the doors that had been torn off, and Clare directed them upstairs, following the fire stairs up to the second level lobby.

  The main pressure doors to the second level were wide apart, apparently undamaged.

  Matt’s heart sank as he saw them; it seemed as if the careful conclusions of the original investigation board were proving correct at nearly every turn.

  ‘Looks like it was deliberately opened,’ Bergman said carefully, but quite clearly.

  Elliott voice came from behind him.

  ‘Yes, I agree. The crew almost certainly opened it accidentally, due to their inexperience.’

  Something snapped inside Matt. The tiredness, the dark, and the endless repetition of Elliott’s position was too much, and Matt grabbed Elliott by the front of his suit and swung him round until they were face to face.

  ‘Listen, Elliott, will you do us all a favour and just keep an open mind for once, it’s like listening to some fucking PMI prick who doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up!’

  Matt knew he had lost it even as he yelled the last words, but he couldn’t stop himself, and he shoved Elliott away so hard that the smaller man stumbled in the low gravity, and would have gone down had not Abrams caught and held him.

  ‘Hey!’ Bergman grabbed Matt’s arm and tried to pull him away, but Matt shook him free and advanced on Elliott again.

  Clare stepped between the two men.

  ‘Stop it,’ she said in a firm voice. Something in her demeanour made Elliott and Matt blink, and they halted either side of her, glaring at each other.

  ‘If anyone endangers this mission,’ she said slowly, looking down at the ground, ‘I will personally handcuff them to the robot, and they can follow us about like that. I don’t give a shit about what anyone thinks about the fucking doors, all I care about is getting off this planet and going home.’ She lifted her gaze to look at them both. ‘All right?’

  Matt suddenly felt stupid and ashamed. After a moment, he nodded. He couldn’t even look Clare in the eye.

  ‘We’re going to explore this level, then the next, until we’re at the control centre level, and then we’ll decide what we’re going to do from there. Is that clear?’

  ‘Sure,’ Elliott said quietly, white-faced.

  ‘Right. Abrams, you stay with Dr Elliott. Bergman, keep Mr Crawford out of trouble, will you? Let’s keep moving.’

  As they advanced through the open pressure doors, Clare shot Matt a look of anger and disappointment. He cursed himself internally, and looked away.

  The second level was a regular array of corridors, and doors opening onto living quarters. Most of the doors on either side of the main corridor were open, and the familiar litter was lying all around, with clothes added to the paper and smaller objects strewn about the place.

  Clare stopped outside a room, and went inside. The others continued their search as she picked her way across the small apartment. Her flashlight beam picked out details as she went round the compact apartment, her spacesuit boots silent on the carpet.

  Clothes and paper everywhere. A framed photograph of a smiling man on the floor. Magazines spilled on the carpet.

  Bedroom. An alarm clock on the floor, its battery long exhausted. The bed, and the quilt lying in the doorway. Clothes on the floor. Wardrobe doors open, where the clothes had been torn out by the shrieking wind.

  Bathroom. A toothbrush lay abandoned in the sink, its bristles stiff with dried toothpaste.

  Clare shivered. In her mind, she could hear the sudden roar of the wind. She could imagine the confusion and noise as the air rushed out of the mine, and then there was just the terrible silence of vacuum.

  She had been in vacuum herself once, for a few brief seconds during training, and she remembered the utter silence that had fallen as the air vanished from the chamber. Her skin had prickled as her sweat percolated through the material of her jumpsuit; her open mouth had tingled as her saliva froze. The instructor had lifted a sheet of paper and let go, and she had watched it fall like a rock to the floor.

  But that had been a training exercise; moments later, the life-giving air had rushed back in. Out here, in the depths of the crater, there had been nothing, nothing except the last few gasps as her lungs emptied, and then the fifteen seconds of useless panting on nothing before her brain, starved of oxygen, started to black out—

  ‘You okay?’

  Clare jumped at the sound of Bergman’s voice.

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, sure.’ Clare moved a strand of hair from her face. ‘You find anything?’

  ‘No. It’s the same as this. No bodies, just lots of clothes and stuff. We’re going to skip the next level and go straight up to the control deck.’

  Clare nodded, and followed Bergman and the others back to the open pressure doors and the elevator lobby.

  They climbed the fire stairs to the next level, and found a similar situation there; the pressure doors were wide open again. They continued up the stairs without stopping to exp
lore, and the stairs finally came to an end at a final elevator lobby, on the control centre level.

  The pressure doors stood open, like the ones on the levels below, but here there were signs of a violent struggle. One wall had been damaged by what looked like an explosive charge; the lining cement had been blown off the rock walls, and there was the black smudge of fire up the wall. Several upturned chairs lay scattered round the lobby.

  ‘What the fuck happened here?’ Bergman asked, looking at the damage. ‘Is this gunfire?’ he added, pointing out with his flashlight places where small, round chunks had been taken out of the white cement lining of the lobby.

  ‘Yeah. Looks like small arms fire,’ Wilson said slowly. ‘Were there any weapons in the mine?’

  ‘Yes.’ Matt spoke up. ‘It wasn’t well known, but there was a gun locker up here, just in case there was a – problem that needed dealing with.’

  ‘Could there have been a revolt by the personnel?’ Elliott said, ‘Perhaps they vented the mine to try to gain control?’

  Matt stared at the wall, his face set.

  ‘I think that’s pretty unlikely,’ Abrams said, ‘none of the transmissions from the mine mentioned anything about a mutiny.’ His face didn’t show the same conviction as his words, though, and he looked troubled.

  ‘Let’s see what’s happened up here,’ Clare said, and stepped forward over the chairs, and into the control level.

  ‘Straight ahead,’ Matt prompted, as Clare hesitated in the branching corridors.

  They walked past a door that opened onto a room full of silent air-conditioning equipment, and past other doors to rooms filled from floor to ceiling with rack-mounted electronics. In one of them, it looked like someone had gone berserk with a hammer; all the equipment in several large racks had been smashed, and broken circuit boards lay strewn across the floor. They went inside to take a closer look.

  ‘Comms equipment,’ Matt commented, frowning. ‘Why would they destroy that?’ The feeling was growing in Matt’s mind that the possibility of some kind of revolt wasn’t so unlikely after all. He looked at Bergman, who shrugged, but looked equally concerned.

  ‘Whoever did this knew what they were doing,’ Wilson commented, crouching down to pick up a smashed circuit board. ‘There’s no way any of this can be got working again. Are there any other comms rooms?’ he asked, but Matt shook his head.

  Wilson tossed the circuit board aside and stood up.They left the comms room and continued down the main corridor, past other equipment rooms, and meeting rooms with overturned tables and chairs.

  A broken door, hanging off its hinges, opened onto the Mine Manager’s office. Clare pushed the door aside and they filed in.

  The far wall, behind the Manager’s desk, was a full-height window, opening onto the view of the crater. It had once been the office for the most important person in the mine, but the place had been ransacked; every desk and filing cabinet drawer had been pulled out, and its contents scattered over the floor. Mineral samples had been swept off their shelves, and some had been thrown against the walls, where they had shattered into pieces. All the pictures on the wall had been thrown down and smashed. A large globe of Mercury, that had occupied one corner of the room, lay like a crushed eggshell on the floor.

  ‘Looks like they were looking for something,’ Clare said, her flashlight beam probing the corners of the room. It came to rest on a large bloodstain on the surface of the desk. ‘What was kept in here, besides all this stuff?’ she asked Matt.

  ‘I don’t know. I just came in here for meetings. I’d imagined it was just files. Maybe some sensitive commercial stuff, ore grade reports, geological maps, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Anything vital to the functioning of the mine?’

  ‘Possibly some of the higher-level access codes for the critical systems; they might have been kept here. But they wouldn’t be in drawers; they’d be, in a …’ his voice trailed off, and he looked around.

  ‘In a safe?’

  They looked around, but Clare was right; there was no safe in the room. Clearly, whoever had been here before them, had also expected to find one there, and had searched the place without success.

  The uneasy feeling that they could be dealing with a mutiny was growing on Matt as they left the mine manager’s office and came to the end of the main corridor, to where another set of pressure doors stood half-open. They were covered with dents, as if someone had hammered at the doors to get them open.

  Bergman ran his fingers over the wavy and discoloured edges of the two door panels.

  ‘Welded shut,’ he commented. ‘They seem to have sealed themselves in here, but the doors were forced open.’

  They fell silent as they clambered through the gap, and the barricade of chairs, steel beams and equipment cabinets that lay beyond. Increasingly, it appeared that there had been some kind of battle between the mine personnel, and the evidence of a disastrous mutiny was mounting.

  Beyond the barricade, the deck split into two levels; a lower area that ran round in front of the main windows, for observing and managing the spacecraft traffic in and around the crater, and an upper deck accessed up a short stair, an elevated command area with monitor screens for controlling the operations of the mine. The place looked like a war zone, and the command deck had been the focus of furious fighting; there was more evidence of explosions and small arms fire, and monitors and consoles had been smashed and overturned. Dried blood was spattered heavily over the area.

  Matt picked his way through the wreckage and up the stairs to the command deck. Part of the ceiling had come down, and wiring and ventilation trunking lay across his path. He stepped over them, and clambered up to the semi-circular area.

  Some of the consoles appeared undamaged, while others were smashed beyond repair; someone had wanted to prevent the mutineers from gaining access to certain systems. Matt wished he knew more about the layout of the consoles; it might have told them something.

  Something caught his eye, and underneath one of the consoles, he saw a large circuit breaker panel. The metal cover was hanging off its hinges, and the master switch had been turned off.

  ‘Hey.’ Matt beckoned to Bergman, who had followed him onto the control level. ‘You reckon it’s safe to try switching this back on?’

  Bergman considered the panel, and the smashed equipment nearby.

  ‘Do it one circuit at a time. If you get any sparks, pull the breaker. Hey, everyone, we’re going to try to restore some power here. Stand clear of any exposed cabling.’

  ‘Okay, here goes,’ Matt muttered. He clicked all the breakers off, and turned the handle of the master switch to the on position.

  Nothing happened, which was what Matt had expected. He pressed the first breaker in gingerly, and it popped back out again at once. Short circuit. It meant there was power to the board, though, which was encouraging. He ran along the line of breakers, most of which either did nothing or just popped out again.

  One circuit breaker caused red emergency lights to come on, bathing the control centre in an angry red glare. Matt hesitated, and then continued to the end of the panel.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said, ‘no more breakers.’

  For several moments, there was no sound in the control centre.

  ‘Looks like it’s dead,’ Bergman said.

  Matt help up his hand for silence.

  In the red-lit scene, a fan whirred. Then, lights started to wink on control panels, and more fans spun up as the control centre systems restarted after their long shutdown.

  There was a sharp crack from one of the wrecked cabinets, and they all jumped.

  ‘Easy,’ Matt said, ‘we might get some more of that. Keep an eye out for anything that looks like it’s burning.’

  As he said these words, some of the display panels started to come back to life. Most showed either a blank screen, or a jagged riot of dancing colour, but one or two seemed to be coming up with a status display.

  Clare and the others clim
bed up to take a look, and they gathered round one display, which was generating a list of items.

  ‘Main mine status display.’ Bergman said. ‘Seems the management systems computer is still working.’

  ‘Yeah, but look at what’s not working,’ Matt said, as the display reported item after item as NON-OPERATIONAL or OFFLINE.

  ‘Main reactor offline, solar power only thirty-five percent, refinery offline, navigation aids non-operational, primary ventilation offline – hey, how come we’ve got fresh air in here if there’s no ventilation?’ Clare asked, as the list scrolled up the screen.

  ‘Natural ventilation,’ Matt answered. ‘There’s enough difference in temperature between the deep workings and the surface to drive a slow convection current round the mine. It’s not much, but it’ll keep us alive.’

  ‘What’s on this second console?’ Clare bent over the other screen.

  ‘Uh, internal communications system,’ Matt said, moving to examine the display. ‘Might be useful. It controls the comlink network in the mine. If we can find some handsets, we might be able to use them to stay in touch.’

  Clare nodded.

  Matt bent closer to the screen. ‘The network’s out in several places – looks like coverage will be pretty patchy. Hey, what’s this?’ A location map of the mine had sprung up, and on one of the levels, there was a cluster of red dots.

  ‘Are they handsets?’ Clare asked.

  ‘Yeah. And they’re close together. Twenty-five hundred level. Right at the bottom of the mine.’

  ‘Are they working?’

  ‘No, it’s just showing the last location of the handsets, before the batteries expired.’ Matt looked up at Clare.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Matt’s mind raced. The comlink handsets were carried by everyone working in the mine, and doubled as communications handset and location monitor. He couldn’t think of any reason why the mine personnel would retreat to the deepest parts of the mine, but it would certainly explain why the upper levels were deserted.

  ‘Well, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. But it’s worth some of use going down to take a look.’