Mark Anson - Below Mercury

‘The rest of the mission in standard stuff, margin calculations and so on; I can run over this later on an individual basis with anyone who’s interested.’

Rawlings stopped, and looked round.

More silence. They were still turning over the implications of what he had said earlier.

‘Any questions?’

‘Can we lighten the ship, or reduce the scope of the mission, so that we have some more margin for the landing?’ The voice belonged to Abrams.

‘I’m afraid not. We’ve already stripped all the mass we can out of the mission, just to get it to work at all.’

‘What about reducing the crew size, say from six to five, would that help?’ Abrams continued.

Rawlings shook his head.

‘We’ve already examined that. It helps, but nowhere near enough.’

There were several more questions, and Rawlings spent some time answering them.

Clare kept quiet for the most part. She answered one question that Rawlings passed to her, but for the rest of the time she feigned polite attention and asked no questions of her own. She was aware from the prickling on the back of her neck that Helligan was watching her. She glanced to her side at one point, and out of the corner of her eye she saw him stifling a yawn.

There came a time when there were no more questions. Helligan eased himself out of his seat and looked around.

‘Okay, boys and girls, if that’s it for questions, we’ll call it a day. We’ll be having a further session with Mr Rawlings later this week, if you think of any further questions. There are some more detailed handouts on the mission plan on the desk here. These are numbered and you are required to sign for your copy and keep them in your sight at all times, or in your personal safes.

‘Okay, that’s it; I’ll see you all tomorrow morning at oh eight thirty hours.’

Later that evening, the mission team was seated together at a large outside table, in a restaurant high up on Orote Point. From their elevated position, they could see down to Apra Harbour, and the ships moving in the evening light.

They had pushed back their dinner plates; scrunched napkins lay on the table, and they were enjoying the view as they finished their cokes and beers. A large liquefied gas tanker, its superstructure twinkling with lights, was nosing its way carefully through the narrow harbour entrance. They watched as tugs moved alongside, helping to manoeuvre the larger ship through the gap.

Clare had suggested that they go out for dinner together, to unwind after the first day, and had brought them here. It was one of Clare’s favourite places; lively but not too crowded, and sufficiently far away from the base to be free of Helligan’s cronies. Even so, she lowered her voice when talking about some of the more sensitive subjects; there was considerable media interest in the mission, and she didn’t want to read the mission plan in tomorrow’s news.

‘So, captain, I need to ask you something,’ Abrams said, looking up at Clare from under his brows. ‘I guess some of us are a bit concerned after that business this afternoon about the landing. Just how dangerous is it?’

Clare looked at Abrams in surprise; she had thought he would have understood the implications as well as anybody. Then she realised that he was asking the question to get it out in the open, and she nodded in understanding.

‘If there is any danger,’ she said, turning her beer round on the table, ‘it’s in having to make the decision quickly. Normally there’d be plenty of time to choose a suitable landing site, do a turn round it, check for any debris, whatever, before descending.

‘With so little hover time, we’ll have to commit to a landing site very quickly, and once we’re committed, we simply have to land – there’s no time to search about for another one if we find we can’t use it.’

‘Are you worried about it?’ Bergman asked.

Clare looked steadily at him for a moment.

‘Yes, I am. I think any – competent commander would be. My job is to try to maximise the time we’ve got, and one way of doing that is by accurate navigation. We don’t want to waste time looking for the landing pad.’

‘I’m not sure I understand why we have so little hover time,’ Abrams asked. ‘I mean, the base is wrecked and all that, but at some point people came in and set things up there, when there was nothing in the crater. Surely those guys had more than ninety seconds to decide where to land?’

‘Steve, why don’t you answer that one.’ Clare sat back in her chair, and took a long drink of her beer, as Wilson leaned forward to explain.

‘Well, the original survey teams had already landed fuel and other stores by unmanned landers, and they used those landers’ cameras to scope out suitable landing sites. When the manned landers put down, they had a cache of fuel waiting there for the return journey, so they could land relatively light, and still have plenty of margin. We’ve got to carry all our fuel for the return journey with us, which means we’re very heavy when we land, which means we burn more fuel, and our margins get used up really quickly.’

They digested this for a few moments.

‘Why can’t we do the same thing, then?’ Elliott asked.

‘Money. We’d need a bigger tug, one that could carry two landing vehicles, and one of the landers would have to be abandoned. Plus there’s the complexity of managing a manned and unmanned landing in the same mission.’

Abrams asked Wilson another question, and gradually steered the conversation away. Clare watched the faces round the table as they talked. Their reactions were typical; they didn’t want to know, but they needed to know. Like moths drawn to a candle flame, they had to hear what would happen to them if it all went wrong, in the black skies over Mercury.

For her part, Clare wasn’t put off by the risks; she had accepted these the day she joined the Corps, but these guys had wives, families. Futures.

Did she have a future? Less than two days ago, she had been staring at the end of her career. Tonight, despite her best efforts to stay disconnected, she felt the first stirrings of enthusiasm for the mission. These guys wanted the mission to be a success, they wanted to get back home again, and she was part of that. She rolled the thought around her head, and it felt good.

The mission planners had thought the mission through all right; they had explored all the alternatives. If she was honest with herself, the landing on Mercury was no more challenging than some asteroid landings she had pulled off.

There was the publicity, too, which had come as a surprise to her; she hadn’t expected so much interest in the mission. A superior officer who had blanked her for months had stopped her in a corridor this afternoon, asked her how it was going. What she had thought would be a dull ferry job looked set to be a high-profile mission that could help relaunch her career. All she had to do was complete the mission, and bring them all back safely.

Her glance flickered over them as they sat there, leaning forward, listening to Wilson. Abrams was solid and experienced. Bergman seemed competent, if a little too sure of himself. Elliott was clearly a PMI stooge. As for Matt – she flicked a look at him, and was surprised to find him looking straight back at her.

Caught off guard, her eyes met his for a moment before she could look away.

Matt had faced a ruined career too, of course; he was despised by the organisation he once worked for. But he had taken his decision after careful thought, not in some split-second judgement call over an asteroid’s tumbled surface. Did that give her a greater right to feel sorry for herself? Probably not. Matt had every right to feel aggrieved at his treatment, but he had continued to direct his energies into helping the relatives. Perhaps she should think more about other people, about being part of this mission, and less about herself.