Mark Anson - Below Mercury

‘Okay, can you all hear me now?’ Clare’s voice came over his headset, and suddenly Matt had something to hang on to – a voice, someone who knew what to do. It steadied him. He took a deep breath, and gave Clare a thumbs-up sign.

‘Peter? Dr Elliott? You with us?’

‘We’re a little shaken up back here, but we’re okay,’ Abrams responded.

‘Right, everyone listen carefully. We need to evacuate the ship. You’ve all done this before in training. Disconnect your air hoses first, then release your seat straps and get ready to move. Steve, get the door open, the slide down, and get everyone well away from the ship while I safe all the systems. I’ll follow behind. Quick as you can.’

Wilson was already out of his seat and moving towards the rear of the cabin. Elliott and Abrams released their straps and got up as soon as Wilson was past, followed by Bergman and Matt, in the evacuation sequence they had practised so many times, but never thought they would be using. Their suits switched over to a self-contained air cylinder the moment they unplugged their air hoses. The cockpit looked strange and alien in the blood-red light; all the colour and familiar shapes had drained away, adding to the sense of unreality.

‘Hold on to something, there might be some residual air,’ Wilson cautioned, and pulled the release handle downwards. The door unsealed, and he swung it out and away to one side. The faint mist in the cabin vanished; a scrap of paper blew out of the open doorway, and dropped away outside. The last of their air was gone, and they were in hard vacuum.

The escape slide tumbled out automatically, unfolding and inflating in the silence of space. Wilson looked out of the empty doorway into the blackness outside.

‘Okay, the slide’s inflated. Dr Elliott, you go first. Don’t wait at the bottom of the slide; just get away from the ship. Come on, let’s move it.’

They slid in turn down the silver fabric of the escape slide, first Elliott, then Abrams, Bergman, Matt, and finally Wilson. As each of them landed, they got up and stepped away from the bottom of the slide, moving carefully in the low gravity after so long in space.

Matt followed the others away from the ship for maybe twenty metres before he stopped to look back.

The spaceplane lay half-buried in the dust, tilted onto its left-hand wing. A large section of the centre fuselage had been torn open, and liquid propellants were pouring out into the dust and boiling in the vacuum. A cloud of vapour hung over the scene, spreading outwards as he watched.

‘Matt, keep moving!’ Wilson shouted on the radio, ‘Get away from the ship!’

Matt turned away, and followed Wilson and the others as they walked out into the darkness of the crater floor. One of the ship’s landing lights was still on, and the men’s colossal, stick-like shadows stalked over the ground in front of them. As they walked, the light behind them went out, and was replaced by the bobbing pools of light from their helmet lights. Wilson kept them going for about another hundred metres before he signalled that they could stop and look back.

The spaceplane lay at the end of a huge furrow that stretched away across the crater floor. A trail of wreckage lay scattered behind the ship; they could just make out the mangled remains of the landing gear, and one of the engine intakes lying nearby.

‘Shit,’ someone’s voice whispered over the radio.

Matt said nothing, but his heart sank as he took in the damage. Clare had managed to absorb some of the energy of the crash by keeping the spaceplane’s nose up as it hit, but it looked as if the cargo hold had been partially crushed. There was no way of telling how much of their supplies had survived until they could go back and investigate.

As Matt’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realised that the crater floor was not completely dark, as it first appeared; a faint, ghostly light illuminated the scene.

The five men stood on a gently undulating slope at the base of a colossal mountain range, a line of peaks that climbed up out of the crater floor in a succession of huge terraces, receding into the sky. Marching in an unbroken line from one horizon to another, they blocked out the stars as they rose, until their peaks caught the light of the unseen Sun, four kilometres above the crater floor. The reflected light, paler than any moon, filled the interior of the crater with its faint radiance.

As Matt looked around, he could make out the line of the main access roadway, snaking past them on its way from the landing pad to the mine entrance. The roadway disappeared into the black shadows at the base of the mountains; the feeble light from above could not reach into the Stygian darkness of their hidden valleys. Matt shivered at the thought, and turned back to the crash site in front of him.

The cloud of vapour from the ruptured propellant tanks was spreading out and falling, glistening in the ghostly light as it froze into billions of tiny crystals. Behind the ship, the crater floor disappeared into the distance, towards the huge, unseen ice field.

The sound of Matt’s breathing sounded harsh in his ears, and he realised he was hyperventilating. Maybe from the exertion, more than likely from delayed shock. He made a conscious effort to control his breathing, to make it deeper and slower, to conserve his air.

The others stood close by, staring at the wrecked spacecraft. The depth of their situation was only just sinking in.

‘What the hell happened?’ Bergman said at last, breaking the silence.

‘I don’t know. Something happened when we went to manual control for landing.’ Wilson continued to survey the scene. ‘We’re lucky to be alive after that. If the captain hadn’t got the engines restarted, we’d have made a new crater.’

‘Lucky to be alive,’ Elliott muttered under his breath, but they all heard him.

‘What’s the captain doing - shouldn’t she get out?’ Abrams asked, ‘The ship’s still leaking fuel.’

‘She’s coming now,’ Bergman said. A small figure had appeared at the top of the escape slide, and as they watched, she slid down to the surface, and began walking towards them.

Behind her, under the wing of the spaceplane, a bright blue light flickered.

Wilson’s voice yelled in their headsets.

‘Captain! There’s a fire! Get away from the ship!’

Without looking back, Clare broke into a loping run, taking long strides in the low gravity.

‘Get down!’ she shouted at them, ‘Get behind some cover!’

As she ran towards the distant group, over a hundred metres away, she knew she only had seconds. The liquid propane and oxygen leaking from the tanks would not ignite on contact, but something had started the fire, some piece of hot metal or electrical short-circuit, and now the fuel was burning, spreading towards the ruptured tanks. She was moments away from becoming history. She spotted a low hummock in the crater floor just ahead of her.

‘I’m going to stop here,’ she gasped, ‘I think there’s a—’

There was a bright flash from behind her, and she dived forwards. The ground underneath Clare jarred with the sudden shock of an explosion, as the ship’s propellants detonated in a silent fireball of blue light.

Wilson and the others fell to the ground, sprawling in the dust. The light from the explosion burst over them, and smaller thuds echoed through the ground as some of the demolition charges went off.

The light flickered and faded. Several seconds passed. Bergman looked up.

‘Keep your heads down! The debris is coming!’ Wilson yelled.

As he said the words, something heavy fell in front of Abrams, shaking the ground. A piece of titanium wing spar whirled over Matt’s head, barely a metre away, and cartwheeled to a halt close by in a shower of dust.