Below Mercury

by Anson, Mark

  Wilson stood in the doorway, considering. For one moment, just one, he thought of what might happen if Foster had an accident. Then there would be no one to tell him what to do.

  As quickly as the thought occurred, it evaporated. She was right. If he came back alone, with a cargo of bullion and some story about how everyone else had been killed, he would be up in front of an investigation board before he left the base. No, she was right, he decided. He felt a tide of disappointment wash over him as he hit the button to close the door, and went to join Clare on the flight deck.

  ‘Pressurising tanks,’ Clare said, reaching out to the controls.

  A hiss and rush of helium gas sounded in the shuttle’s pipework, and it creaked beneath them as the gas flowed into the propellant tanks, building up the pressure.

  Clare knew she should do a takeoff briefing, but she couldn’t be bothered. Wilson had done the final checks; let him worry about it. Her gaze wandered across the silo to the control room opposite.

  Matt stood there, looking back at her.

  For one moment, she thought it was her imagination playing some cruel joke on her, but then Matt thumped on the curved window and shouted something.

  ‘Hold launch!’ she blurted out, and leaped out of her seat. She ran to the door and banged the button to open it. The rumble of falling rock was very loud now. Wilson halted the takeoff sequencer and followed Clare as she raced along the docking corridor and back to the control room.

  She rounded the corner – and cannoned into Matt.

  The impact nearly knocked her flying, and for a moment, she backed away in shock. Wilson came to a halt behind her. Matt was wide-eyed and panting, shouting words that didn’t make any sense. He grabbed Clare’s arms, his fingers gripping hard in his desperation.

  ‘We need to lift off! There’s a robot behind me! It killed Rick, and it’s going to kill us! If you don’t get us out of here in the next few minutes, we’re all dead!’

  ‘I – I thought you were dead,’ she gasped, her eyes betraying everything. Matt released Clare and yelled at Wilson, trying to get him to understand.

  ‘I’ve closed and locked the pressure doors, but that won’t hold it for long. We need to get out of here, quickly!’

  Outside the silo complex, in the main passage, the tunnelling robots broke through the last pile of rock. With a thunderous roar, the remaining air in the mine blasted out through the hole they had made, bursting the rock fall aside. The two robots stood firm in the maelstrom of escaping air and flying rock, and then strode through the widening gap.

  The lone robot that had pursued Matt joined them at the branch to the silo. With a slow deliberation of purpose, the three robots turned, and advanced towards the pressure doors.

  Inside the silo, Clare, Matt and Wilson heard the explosion and sudden roar of air in the passage outside. As the noise faded away, it was replaced by a tremendous pounding, a flailing of hardened steel pincers beating on the sealed pressure doors; the three robots were attacking it together.

  Clare grabbed Matt’s arm, and pulled him towards the docking corridor. They thumped across and, as they entered the shuttle’s cabin, she grabbed him close, and kissed him hard on the lips, not caring that Wilson would see.

  ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ she said, releasing him, and she ran to the commander’s seat. ‘Strap in.’ She restarted the countdown, and prepared to withdraw the docking corridor. ‘Steve, is the door closed?’

  There was no response, and she turned round.

  Wilson wasn’t in the cabin.

  Clare turned back to the windows with a terrible sense of foreboding, and saw Wilson in the control room, rushing to grab an armload of metal bars. She leaned forward in horror.

  ‘Steve, no! It’s not worth it!’ she screamed, banging on the window in frustration, ‘Steve!’

  The pounding of the robots on the pressure doors stopped. Across the silo, Wilson looked up, and straight back into Clare’s eyes. Realisation of his peril dawned on his face, and he dropped the bars.

  ‘Steve …’ she whispered, her hands on the window, knowing that she had lost him.

  There was a tremendous bang outside as the silo doors breached, and Matt was out of his seat, racing for the door close button, just as the air started to rush out of the silo. The door slid shut on a roaring of air, and a thin cry of terror on the wind that he would never forget.

  In the control room, Wilson dashed for the door, but his way was blocked by the huge form of a mining robot, its glowing red eyes looking down at him. He backed away, until he could go no further, and he turned round to face Clare, his hands on the glass, his terrified eyes imploring her for help, his mouth saying something that she could never hear.

  The robot strode across the room, and grabbed Wilson with its pincers. His mouth opened in a silent scream as the robot pulled him apart, blood splashing over the control room windows in bright red trails as it tore his arms and legs off. Wilson’s body flailed about in the eerie silence as he was dismembered, until the robot finally severed his head, and threw his bloody remains to the floor.

  Clare fell back into her seat, her mouth open, unable to move with shock at what she had just seen.

  Matt slid into the copilot’s seat next to her, his face aghast.

  ‘We need to get out of here!’ he said, and then shouted: ‘Clare!’

  She turned to look at him, white-faced, her eyes glazed and unseeing, and then she seemed to understand what he was saying. With an effort, she seemed to recover herself. Her eyes flickered uncertainly across the controls, as if she had forgotten what they did, and then she suddenly reached out a hand and punched the corridor disconnect button.

  Outside the shuttle, the docking corridor withdrew into the wall of the silo, folding up in sections like a telescope. Air gushed from its open end as the mine continued to empty.

  Clare operated the controls to open the silo doors, and the lights in the silo went out. The circle of roof above the shuttle filled slowly with stars as the doors moved aside, spilling dust and rock fragments into the silo as they withdrew.

  Alarm lights flashed red in the silo complex, silhouetting the form of another robot, standing in the doorway at the end of the docking corridor. The pressure door strained against the robot’s body, trying to seal off the escaping air. The robot gripped the door, and with a massive heave, tore it bodily from its tracks.

  Matt flinched as the robot hurled the heavy door at the side of the shuttle, denting the fragile hull. The vehicle rocked on its landing legs.

  ‘Pressure’s holding,’ Clare said, her voice unsteady. ‘I’ve started the ignition sequence. Strap in.’

  Matt pulled his seat straps over his shoulders as Clare’s hands moved across the controls, her eyes flicking across the displays and switches.

  The vehicle creaked loudly beneath them; its fuel tanks were at full pressure. There was a sharp hiss, then a muffled thump as the pressure feeds disconnected and the refuelling boom swung back into its recess in the wall of the silo. A fog of released vapour swirled briefly about the shuttle, and vanished into space.

  From the flight controls, an alarm sounded, together with an insistent computer voice.

  ‘Danger, landing platform lowered.’

  Clare cancelled the alarm with a flick of her hand. Matt looked at the view of the silo walls with concern. The landing platform was always raised to the surface for launches.

  ‘Ignore it, we can take off from down here,’ Clare said, ‘I’m not hanging around any longer.’ She pressed some more buttons to engage the automatic launch sequence, and pulled her seat straps over her shoulders.

  ‘Launching in fifteen seconds,’ the flight computer announced.

  Across the crater floor, deep inside the reactor complex, the other mining robots stood on top of the reactor pressure vessel, on the refuelling floor. The wrecked control rods were strewn over the sealed manhole covers, under which the fuel cans glowed red hot as their nuclear reaction ran uncheck
ed, building up heat and pressure in the moderator.

  Steam rose in wisps from around the edges of the covers; it could not be far away now. As if knowing that their work was done, the robots assembled in a circle on top of the core, oblivious to the screeching alarms and red warning lights that splashed the roof and walls of the containment.

  In the control centre, the unseeing eyes of Peter Abrams had frosted over in the vacuum; they gazed out across the blood-spattered ruin of the room, to where the management system displayed message after message, warning of the reactor overload.

  At the edge of the reactor complex, robots had forced open the sealed doors between the reactor containment and the rest of the mine. When the explosion happened, it would rip into the mine and drench it with deadly radiation. Other robots had attacked the containment in strategic points, digging into it with their powerful arms, creating lines of weakness that would help it to shatter.

  Starved of coolant flow, and with no means of stopping its energy production, the reactor core was white-hot, and could not be restrained any longer. Steam bubbles formed in the moderator, reducing the cooling and increasing the pressure, and the reaction finally ran away, releasing a hundred times more energy than the reactor’s normal maximum output.

  In a fraction of a second, the boiling water in the reactor core flashed into steam, and the pressure vessel breached, near where the robots stood. In a titanic explosion, the pressure vessel exploded, blowing the robots to pieces, bursting the containment, and sending a blast wave of fire and shattered rock rocketing out of the reactor complex into the mine.

  Inside the silo, the countdown reached five seconds, and the shuttlecraft stirred as the engine turbines spun up with a rising whine. Moments later, the four engines ignited, and an overlapping sequence of muffled bangs rocked the craft as the engines lit and rose to full thrust.

  ‘Eat that, you motherfucking machine,’ Clare hissed, as searing hot exhaust swirled round the circular pit of the silo and into the open doorway of the docking corridor, where the robot stood.

  The shuttle lurched off the pad, its thrusters firing to keep it level, as it rose up out of the silo.

  The cabin windows had just cleared the lip of the silo, when the shuttle rocked violently to one side. An alarm sounded as the autopilot disconnected, along with a warning from the flight computer.

  ‘Attitude, straighten up.’

  ‘What the fuck—’ Clare grabbed the sidestick and pulled the shuttle upright, the thrusters blasting out against the silo’s walls.

  Below them, the silo dissolved in a cloud of shattered rock and dust as the blast wave from the reactor reached it. The control room window exploded into the silo, sending the shuttle across to the other side.

  Clare fought to hold the craft steady in the centre of the silo. It lurched and bucked as the explosion wave burst over it. If they hit the walls, it would all be over.

  Unable to maintain height, the shuttle started to fall back into the silo. Clare slammed the thrust levers forward, sending a sheet of flame up and round the windows, as the shuttle slowly cleared the silo and laboured into the sky, a wide fan of dust flying over the crater floor.

  Below it, the silo collapsed inwards in a cloud of dust and rubble. Secondary explosions threw rocks and more dust into the sky, narrowly missing the climbing shuttle. The entire silo complex was collapsing; great pits were opening up in the crater floor. Matt looked across to the distant reactor complex, aghast; the reactor appeared to have exploded; its cooling radiators and power converters toppling over into a great pit, from which a great cloud of vapour belched, lit from below by the red light of the exposed core.

  The shuttle was behaving strangely; it wasn’t climbing fast enough, as if there was insufficient thrust. The craft seemed to be drifting sideways as it rose, as if something was tugging it off course.

  ‘Climb rate,’ the computer warned.

  ‘Something’s wrong here,’ Clare said, her voice showing concern. The shuttle lurched to one side in an odd way, and Clare’s eyes darted to the engine controls, then to the attitude display.

  The shuttle’s engines were generating plenty of thrust. A dead weight seemed to have attached itself to the craft, and the last lurch was from the weight moving around.

  ‘Check the cameras!’ Clare’s face had gone white. ‘No, over to the right of the landing gear controls.’

  Matt found the camera controls, and punched up various external views: the silo, shrinking below them; a black sky; a view of one of the engines; a landing gear leg; another landing gear leg—

  ‘Oh, shit.’ Matt caught his breath.

  Looking up into the eye of the camera, a robot clung onto the landing leg strut below the main cabin door. It must have grabbed one of the shuttle’s landing legs as it had lifted off past the airlock opening. As Matt watched, it swung its free arm and grabbed hold of the landing strut, higher up. The shuttle lurched.

  ‘It’s climbing up the landing gear!’ Matt yelled.

  ‘Which one!’

  ‘The one – the one below the door.’

  ‘Number four. Okay, that makes sense, I’m having to roll to the right to hold us steady. How heavy is that thing?’

  ‘About two tonnes.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Clare checked the navigation display. The white line of their ascent was peeling away from the magenta line of their flight plan, falling further and further behind.

  ‘We can’t make orbit with that fucking thing hanging on,’ she said, ‘we’ve got to get rid of it.’

  Matt watched the display helplessly, powerless to do anything as the robot hauled itself higher.

  ‘We won’t have to worry much longer, it’s going for the propellant tanks.’ Matt pointed at the camera display.

  Clare risked a quick glance at the display. The robot had advanced up the landing leg by two metres. It was pulling itself hand over hand, up the hydraulic strut. In a few moments, it would be within reach of the fragile pressurised tanks that contained their fuel and oxidiser supplies. One savage swipe with a pincered hand, and it would all be over; even if the tanks didn’t explode, the engines would flame out and the craft would fall back to smash into Mercury.

  The shuttle started to rotate as it climbed; the weight hanging on one corner made it difficult to control, and Clare swore as the craft fought against her control inputs. The mine surface facilities turned in front of the shuttle’s windows, and Matt watched as the mine entrance, the exploding reactor complex, the wrecked refinery, and the landing pad moved past in an endless sequence of ruin.

  Below the fleeing shuttle, the blast wave from the reactor explosion tore its way through the mine. Already weakened by the stresses from explosive decompression, the mine passages started to give way, bursting inwards in showers of rock and tangles of cables.

  An explosive shock wave erupted up the main intake shaft, destroying the shaft station. The hoist motor, supporting the dead weight of the long wire ropes and cage, collapsed in ruin, and slithered partway down the shaft in a mass of broken rock, guide ropes and falling girders. The upper shaft walls fell in behind it, blocking the shaft and sealing it with thousands of tonnes of rock.

  Outside on the crater floor, the explosion tore through the passages connecting the surface facilities. The passages collapsed in pits of sinking rubble as the roofs fell in, opening up long scars in the crater floor.

  The explosion reached the hangar levels, and the main entrance to the mine. The outer doors burst, and a cloud of flame, dust and rubble exploded out from the mine portal. The hangar roof groaned, and then collapsed, sinking to the ground in an avalanche of falling rock that filled the hangars and surged out over the crater floor, burying Erebus Mine forever.

  The shuttle rose high above the spreading ruin of the mine, and Matt shut his eyes against a sudden flood of brilliant sunlight; some crack in the mountain peaks spilled the light of the circling Sun into the dark bowl of the crater. The craft spiralled out of the shadow of the crat
er floor, and the horrors of what they had seen there plunged back into inky darkness once more.

  Sunlight glittered off the reflective foils of the shuttle’s thermal blankets, and it climbed higher, up and out of the crater, until the sunlit peaks of the crater rim came into view.

  A bright point of light burst out from the tallest peak. The huge dish of the deep space antenna on the mountain peak, where Elliott and Abrams had made contact with Earth, was catching the sunlight. It was like a beacon of hope, or of doom; they were not going to escape the clutches of Mercury.

  Clare looked up at the flash from the antenna, and stared hard at it. Her face took on a strange expression. In a sudden decision, she slammed the sidestick hard forward. The shuttle tilted over, slowing its climb, but increasing its ground speed, heading straight for the mountain peak.

  The robot, thrown off balance by the sudden manoeuvre, lost grip with one of its pincers, and hung from the landing leg again, its free arm swinging, trying to grab hold again.

  Looking forward out of the cabin window, Matt saw the mountains rushing towards them, and suddenly they were speeding over the hills, the scenery flashing past below. He saw the repeater station at the top of the service raise, their antennas pointing down into the crater floor, and the line of the winding path that Elliott and Abrams had followed on their climb. He looked up.

  ‘The mountains!’ Matt gasped, ‘We’re too low!’

  ‘Not fucking low enough,’ Clare said with deliberation, and the craft shot across the rising ground, its engines raising a plume of dust beneath it, heading straight for the peak and the communications dish. To its left, the solar power array, high on its pillar, pointed towards the Sun, its panels spread wide to catch the Sun’s rays.

  ‘Oh, no no no,’ Matt said, trying to push his seat backwards in an involuntary response to the power array racing towards them.

  ‘You fucking, bastard, machine, get off my fucking ship,’ Clare hissed, her eyes aflame, and ploughed the landing leg straight into the solar power array.

  The shuttle lurched sideways with an enormous bang, throwing Clare and Matt into their seat straps, as the heavy power array structure ripped the entire landing leg from the body of the craft.