Mark Anson - Below Mercury

Rawlings turned back to the display behind him, and restarted the animation from where the space tug entered orbit round Mercury.

‘Your orbit takes you directly over the South Pole, every ninety-six minutes,’ he continued. ‘Now, for the landing, you’ve got to make a special manoeuvre.’

The animation showed the spaceplane undocking from the tug, and nosing round to latch onto a large, torpedo-like fuel tank, before starting its descent.

‘This drop tank provides the spaceplane with extra fuel for the mission, as there will be no refuelling facilities on the surface. The drop tank is jettisoned shortly after the de-orbit burn.’

On the display, the empty tank fell away from the spaceplane. The display zoomed in further, following the craft as it fell out of the black sky toward the spreading landscape below.

‘Even with this extra fuel, making a descent to the surface and returning to orbit again is right on the limits for the mission. There is very little margin for error. You will be carrying a heavy load of fuel and equipment, which will limit your hover time over the surface before you have to commit to a landing. We have tried to maximise—’

‘Look, just cut to the bad news. How much hovering time do we have?’ Clare’s voice interrupted.

The mission planner stopped, and he glanced at the back of the room first, before answering Clare’s question.

‘It’s going to be – sub-optimal. We calculate that with your fuel margins, and projected allowances for error, you’re looking at a little over – ah, ninety seconds.’

‘ Sub-optimal?’ Clare threw her pen down. ‘Have you any idea how little time that is when you’re looking for a landing site?’

Rawlings nodded, and opened his mouth to reply, but Clare carried on, her voice rising: ‘Let me spell it out for you. Even if we hit the de-orbit burn spot on, and we descend into the crater without wasting any fuel, we’ve got to locate the landing pad in the dark. There are no landing lights on the pad. Call that thirty seconds, if we’re extremely accurate with our navigation. A quick circuit round the pad to make sure it’s safe to land, and that there’s no obstacles to an abort. Another sixty seconds. And that’s it – we’ve used up our ninety seconds. That is just not enough margin. Minimum rules for manned missions are—’

‘—being revoked for this mission,’ Helligan’s voice cut Clare off. Helligan waved at Rawlings, and the lights came back up in the room.

‘This isn’t a routine flight, boys and girls,’ Helligan continued. He stood up and walked slowly round to the front of the room as Rawlings sat down. ‘This is a cutting-edge exploratory mission to an abandoned, probably wrecked, base with no operational refuelling facilities. You’re going to be close to the limits of fuel the whole way.’

He let his words sink in.

‘Now, the captain here—’ he managed a little smile as he paused, ‘—has reservations about what we’re asking her to do. I’d like to remind you that all of you are volunteers and you’re under no obligation to proceed. If any one of you wishes to leave the mission team, I for one will have no problem in accepting that.

‘But let me make one thing clear. You bail now – right now – or you carry on with the training. If we spend all this time and money in preparing you for this mission, and then you pull out at the last minute, then I will personally ensure that you never go into space again, and that your superiors are left in no doubt about your prospects for future advancement. Do I make myself clear?’

He looked at them all in turn, receiving answering nods and affirmations. He finished up with his eyes on Clare.

She stared back, hating Helligan with a seething anger that wouldn’t go away.

‘Yes, sir,’ she said, leaving the gap between the words as long as she dared.

Helligan’s porcine eyes narrowed.

‘You were saying, captain?’ he asked, his voice and gaze like steel.

‘I was pointing out that ninety seconds of fuel leaves barely any decision time, sir.’ Clare’s voice was quiet, but clearly audible in the hushed room.

What’s wrong, Foster, aren’t you up to it? Are you so worried you’re going to crash, that you’ll abort the landing unless you’ve got five whole fucking minutes to work yourself up to attempting it?

Helligan’s voice blasted back at Clare, but it was just in her head. Helligan hadn’t spoken. He was still looking at her, as if weighing her up.

‘Yeah, it’s not long, Foster,’ he said, ‘but we need someone who can deal with that. You told me you were up for this mission. Is that still the case?’

All around her, the other faces looked at Clare.

What was she to do? They were all waiting to see how she responded. Should she tell them how dangerous this landing could be, how there was a good chance that they could go past the point of no return, run out of fuel, and be stranded? Or that if she tried to land on rough ground and didn’t get it perfectly right, they could roll onto a wingtip, and it would all be over in seconds. Or would that put so many of them off that she would be replaced, with another, less experienced commander who would toe the Company line, and cheerfully fly them into disaster?

She started nodding, to no one in particular.

‘Okay. I accept that we’ve got little choice. Let’s work on finding ways to buy us some more time on the landing.’

Helligan looked back at her without speaking, knowing that if the exchange continued, she would put the wind up everyone.

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.