by Anson, Mark
Matt felt anger rush through him at the suggestion that Clare could have done anything wrong. The strength of the emotion surprised him. He knew his feelings for Clare were getting the better of him, and he had to put them aside. None of them were infallible: not him, not Bergman, not Clare, nobody. If he could make a mistake, so could Clare.
They walked on, and eventually Matt said: ‘You’re right. We’ve got to consider every possibility.’ His voice was reluctant. ‘But that one doesn’t feel right to me.’
Bergman said nothing, and let the subject drop, but he stole a quick glance at his companion a few minutes later, and saw that Matt was still deep in thought.
They had been walking for some time, and had travelled nearly a kilometre along the passage, passing two more pressure doors along the way. Just after the last door, they came upon a lifeless mining robot, slumped against the wall of the passage, staring at the ground with its dead eyes. They debated if they should try to restart it or not, but couldn’t think of a use for it, and left it where it lay.
Three hundred metres further on, they came to a fork in the haulage way; one way continued ahead, through another set of pressure doors, while the other curved to the left. Matt took the left-hand turn, and after a few metres, the passage opened up into another shaft station.
‘Sub-main shaft,’ Matt announced, ‘let’s hope it’s working.’
There was no cage at the station, but the safety gate had been forced aside, and stood wide open. The noise of falling water came from the shaft.
They clung on to the sides of the opening, and looked down, their flashlights piercing the gloom of the shaft.
Immediately below the station, the guide rails for the cage extended down for several metres, then flared outwards. The wire rope that hauled the cage plunged down into the exact centre of the dark shaft. Just below the guide rails, a steady torrent of water flowed out from the wide opening of the wind slit, and cascaded down the shaft, bouncing off the pipework and fittings fastened to the sides. Sprays of escaping droplets disappeared down the shaft in an endless fall into the abyss. A warm, moist air welled up from the shaft, carrying a faint smell of stagnant water.
‘Oh, fucking hell,’ Matt groaned, ‘how long has this been running?’
Bergman stared down the shaft, and then moved his body back into the safety of the shaft station again.
‘Where’s it coming from?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. Meltwater from the ice mining levels, I guess. It must have overflowed somewhere and found its way into the ventilation airways. Without anyone to seal it off, this could have been running for years.’ Matt sniffed the breeze that rose into his face. ‘I don’t like the smell of that, either. There’s foul air down there.’
The cage was near the bottom of the shaft, but the hoist was still working. While the cage came back up, they sat down and had a brief rest. Bergman tried contacting the others, but there was no response, so he sent a brief message with their position.
‘What’s on this level?’ Bergman asked. He had studied the mine layout as part of the mission preparation, but he had not expected to be going into the workings, and had not memorised their details.
‘Main ice mining levels,’ Matt answered, taking off his helmet. ‘If you’d carried on back at that fork, you’d have gone past the crosscuts that connect to the return airway, then this haulage way runs all the way out into the deep ice, and the room and pillar workings.’
‘Have you ever been out there, into the ice workings?’
Matt nodded.
‘Several times. It’s mainly automated, and the robots do all the dangerous work, but new developments need surveying, and all the mining needs to be checked. The workings are like huge halls of black marble, with massive pillars to hold the roof up, and all the time there’s this constant noise from the cutting machines, and the haulage vehicles coming and going.’
‘Must have been quite a sight.’
‘Yeah. I loved it.’ Matt gazed into the distance and was silent for a few moments. ‘When I left here, I was hoping for a promotion. Now, I’d be happy just to work in mining at all.’
‘Haven’t you been able to get work on one of the Martian mines? They must be able to use someone with your experience.’
Matt shook his head.
‘Not with this hanging over me. Once I became an expert witness for the class action, PMI didn’t want to know me, and there’s a list as long as your arm of engineers wanting to work on Mars.’
‘What will you do?’
‘What, if we get back home? I don’t know. Keep trying to make some money doing consultancy work, I guess.’
‘I could have a word with the Mines Inspectorate. They might be able to get you some leads.’
‘Thanks. I’d appreciate that.’
‘Don’t mention it.’ Bergman put his head on one side, listening to the note of the hoist motor. ‘Come on, sounds like the cage is nearly here.’
They boarded the sub-main cage, and for the second time, watched as the doors slid shut, and felt the cage drop away down the shaft. As they passed the wind slit in the side of the shaft, the river of falling water thundered onto the roof of the cage and sprayed around the shaft sides. It ran and dripped onto their helmets as the cage left the guide rails behind and started to pick up speed.
The sub-main shaft was an unbroken two kilometres deep, with no workings at intermediate levels. Refuges cut into the walls at 100-metre intervals punctuated the long fall; there were no large shaft stations here. They were below the level of the deepest ice, under the rock floor of the crater.
The only sounds were the hissing of the guide ropes through the greased sleeves, and the rush of air through the bottom of the cage, as they fell into the depths.
The sides of the shaft were wet with water streaming down from above; their flashlight beams reflected back off a glistening, hollow waterfall that ran down around the cage.
Long minutes passed as the cage plummeted down the shaft. The air gradually became warmer, and the smell of foul water grew stronger. The only clues to the huge depths to which they were descending came from the passing signs on the refuges announcing how deep they were. One thousand metres passed by, then two thousand, and still the shaft went on.
Finally, at the 2,200 level, they passed a shaft station. It slid past the cage in darkness; not even the emergency lighting worked down here. A new sound grew as they neared the bottom of the shaft, a liquid slithering that neither of them had heard before. Matt knelt down, and pointed his flashlight through the framework of the cage floor, down the shaft.
For a moment, he couldn’t see anything. Then, in the distance, he saw a glittering white light. It seemed to be coming closer. He puzzled over it for a moment, then he realised with a shock that he was looking at the growing reflection of his own flashlight in a deep pool of water. The slithering sound came from the balance rope underneath the cage, as it ran down into the water and back up the other side of the shaft.
He stood up quickly, and turned the control handle to Slow. Moments later, the cage jerked as the distant hoist applied the brakes, and the cage’s motion slowed. Matt let it come down to walking pace, watching the approaching water.
The surface drew closer, and Matt slowed the cage to a crawl. Five metres away, then four, three, two – Matt brought the cage to a halt, just as the top edge of the shaft station came into view. The cage bounced gently at the end of the wire rope, barely dipping into the water’s surface.
The waterfall high above had been emptying into the shaft for years. The sump had flooded long ago, and had overflowed into the shaft station. From there, the water had crept its slow way along the passages until it found the workings, and had trickled into the stopes and the orepasses, the crosscuts and the drifts, little by little filling the empty spaces with its cold tendrils, until the whole workings were drowned under water.
The cage had stopped with barely half a metre of the opening showing above the c
age floor. Matt and Bergman pushed the cage door up, and squirmed onto the floor of the cage to see out into the shaft station.
The light from their flashlights reflected off the rippling surface of an underground pool; the passage leading off from the shaft station was completely underwater. The air was heavy and close, and smelled of foul water far off in the workings. Around them, the water streaming down the shaft sides flowed almost silently into the pool, and ran in rivulets from the roof opening.
‘Shit.’ Bergman spat into the water, and turned sideways to look at Matt. ‘That’s why the air’s so bad; the water’s blocked off the ventilation.’
‘Yeah.’ Matt lowered his head, looking down into the flooded sump below the cage.
‘Well, we’ll never know what happened to the personnel now,’ Bergman said, standing up again. ‘There’s nobody alive down here.’
Matt didn’t reply. He was looking down at the water that filled the sump. The surface was broken with fading ripples, scattering and reflecting his flashlight beam, but the water seemed clear. He leaned out, and pushed his flashlight lens below the surface, and he found he could see clearly, all the way to the bottom of the sump.
He stayed like that for several moments.
‘Rick,’ he said quietly.
‘Yeah?’
‘I think you need to take a look at this.’
Something in Matt’s voice sent a chill down Bergman’s spine. He knelt down by Matt and looked into the water. His movements had disturbed the surface again, and for a few moments he couldn’t see anything. The ripples faded slowly away until he could see what was at the bottom of the shaft.
‘Oh, fucking, fucking, hell,’ he breathed.
In the unsteady beam from Matt’s flashlight, the sump of the shaft lay revealed below them. The balance rope ran from the bottom of the cage, round in a loop beneath them, before returning up the other side of the shaft.
Below the bottom of the loop, the sump was completely filled with sprawling human skeletons. Their empty eye sockets stared back at Matt and Bergman. Bony fingers rose out of the pile, as if reaching up to them.
Many were still clad in the clothes they had died in, and all were in advanced stages of decomposition; immersion in water had reduced their flesh to a foul ooze covering the floor of the sump. It rose in faint eddies where the water had been disturbed.
The two men stared at the scene for long moments. Their eyes, flickering over the scene, picked out more details. Many of the bodies had been dismembered; their bony arms and legs ended in shattered bone, and here and there whole torsos had been cut in half. Ribcages ended in severed spines. Skulls, looking up at the cage with empty eye sockets, had gaping fissures, as if a huge axe had cut through them.
Not all the remains were human; here and there, the large forms of mining robots were piled with the dead. The robots’ steel bodies were riddled with small dents and holes, and the unmistakeable black peppering of shotgun rounds fired at close range.
‘Oh, no,’ Matt whispered.
In a sliding rush of dread that was colder than the deep water that lay below him, he realised what had killed the people in the mine. He remained rooted to the spot, staring into the water, unable to tear his eyes off the scene, as the reality of what had happened washed over him.
When the depressurisation failed to kill everyone in the mine, when the survivors had taken refuge behind secure pressure doors, another terror had been unleashed in the mine. An enemy that could tear its way through steel doors, that could rip and crush, that would walk unblinking into the hail of small arms fire that were the mine personnel’s only defence.
How they had done it, Matt couldn’t begin to guess; it was supposed to be impossible, the protocols were burned in at the hardware level and couldn’t be subverted by software. But PMI had done it somehow; the evidence was staring back at him, the cloven, empty skulls and accusing fingers.
They had been reprogrammed to attack and kill, to break open the sealed doors, and turn on their masters.
It had been the robots.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The cage carrying Dr Elliott and Peter Abrams came to a stop at the top of the raise, and the brakes locked on. Below them, the service raise bored straight down into the mountain, and into the darkness of the mine.
The cage door slid up and the safety gate moved aside, and they stepped out into the upper shaft station. The robot lumbered out after them, carrying its load of air cylinders, and they stood there, uncertain what to do next.
Abrams looked around them. The shaft station looked identical to the one they had left behind, but there were no passages opening onto it. A single pressure door stood in the centre of the opposite wall.
‘Crawford said there was an airlock,’ Elliott said, looking at the door.
‘Yes, and maybe there’s air still in it, but let’s not take any chances. I say we get our helmets on here before we open that door, yes?’
Elliott nodded, and they lifted four air cylinders off the robot’s arms and took turns to load each other’s suit backpack. Both of them had received a thorough course in using a surface spacesuit as part of their training for the mission, and they cross-checked each other’s equipment, taking their time, making sure that their helmets were sealed, the air flow was correct and that the temperature regulation and radios were working.
The rucksacks containing the radio equipment went on top of the two remaining air cylinders that Bob Five carried. Finally, Abrams was satisfied that they were ready to move out.
‘Okay, let’s open the inner door.’ His voice sounded strange inside his helmet. ‘Bob Five, can you hear me?’
‘YES, MASTER,’ the robot’s deep voice sounded in Abrams’s headset.
‘Okay, follow us.’
Abrams punched the door open button with his gloved hand. The heavy door moved aside a few centimetres before jerking to a halt. For a moment, they thought it had become stuck, but then it slid open, its mechanism making a grating noise.
‘Doesn’t sound too healthy,’ Abrams commented, but stepped through, and Elliott and the robot followed, carrying the air cylinders and radio equipment in its arms. It bent over to pass under the door frame. Its sliding, overlapping joints made it surprisingly flexible for such a large and heavy machine.
Elliott closed the door once the robot was through, and the door moved shut with the same uncertain, scraping motion, and sealed.
The airlock chamber was a white-painted space, about four metres square, cut into the rock, with air ducts and cables in the walls and roof. The outer door was red, with a prominent sign in large white letters:
DANGER
OPEN TO VACUUM
‘Air okay? Right, here we go.’ Abrams pressed and held the two buttons to start the airlock depressurisation sequence. As the air in the chamber vented out into space, the suits stiffened slightly round their bodies, and the airlock status display changed colour, going from a solid green, to blinking green, to blinking red, and finally the solid red of vacuum.
Abrams pressed the button to open the outer door, and it slid aside silently. A faint swirl of dust stirred outside.
They paused at the airlock door, taking in the scene outside.
The opening led out onto the base of a narrow ramp set in a deep cutting. On either side of the exit, the rock walls of the cutting stood three metres above their heads, and the ramp sloped up between the high walls until it emerged into the intense, arc-like glare of sunlight at the end of the cutting.
‘Make sure your visor is on automatic,’ Abrams warned, ‘and don’t look at the Sun when we get out there.’
‘Okay,’ Elliott said, his breath sounding rasping and hollow in his helmet. He checked the wrist console on his suit, and followed Abrams up the ramp, the robot following behind. Its lumbering gait was strangely silent in the vacuum.
The rock walls on either side fell away as they came to the top of the ramp, and suddenly their heads and upper bodies emerged out
of shadow and into the brilliant glare of the Sun.
‘Whoah.’ Abrams let out an involuntary cry of surprise as the sunlight smote him in the face. Even at Mercury’s South Pole, the Sun’s radiant energy was intense; it was like walking from an air-conditioned lobby into the full heat of a tropical day. His helmet visor darkened instantly at the first touch of sunlight, and the suit’s cooling unit increased power to compensate for the sudden inrush of heat.
Elliott came up and stood beside him, and surveyed the scene. The robot halted behind them.
‘Jesus.’
They had emerged from the cutting to stand on a levelled area high on Chao Meng-fu’s ramparts, on the spur that thrust out into the crater. A lightweight post-and-wire guard fence ran around the perimeter of the area. Ahead to their left, the Sun glared over the southern peaks of Chao Meng-fu’s crater wall, a mass of terraces, boulder slopes and hills that climbed up into the black sky.
On their right, northwest, a sheer fall plunged into blackness, and an array of repeater antennas pointed down into the crater, providing infill coverage for the radio shadow behind the crater walls. Feeder bundles from the antenna array snaked across the rock into large junction boxes, and from one of these boxes, a set of heavy cables led off alongside a sloping pathway to the left. It wound its way up into the higher peaks, hugging the shadows.
Abrams and Elliott walked over to the right-hand edge and looked out across the crater. From this high vantage point, they could see almost the entire ring of the crater wall. In the sharp relief of the low sunlight, the encircling peaks looked like a ring of small, broken teeth.
Standing there above the sheer drop, they had the impression that they were staring out over a gigantic, bottomless pit, a gateway to a hidden underworld. Only the central peaks broke the illusion; they rose into the sky in the distance, rising up out of nothingness, their steep-sided peaks blazing in the sunlight above the blackness of the crater floor. No trace of the crater floor could be made out; the sunlight reduced the landscape to a world of stark whites and absolute blacks.
