Mark Anson - Below Mercury

They had to get a message back to Earth.

Later, nearly an hour after the great rush of air that had saved them, they were gathered together in a circle in the middle of the hangar, helmets off, sitting in their spacesuits on some freight boxes they had found. They had opened some of the emergency rations from the spacesuit survival packs, and shared the small bars of food round between themselves.

Clare checked her watch. It showed 19:06, so it was still August 9 – the day of their arrival over Mercury. She worked back over the events in her mind. It seemed hardly possible that, less than two hours ago, she had been sitting in the commander’s seat on the spaceplane, coming in to land. Now the ship was just a twisted pile of scrap metal out on the crater floor, and they were marooned, trapped inside an abandoned mine.

Her breath smoked in the frigid air. All around them, a layer of frost lay over every exposed surface. The air had dropped all its moisture when it encountered the deep cold of the hangar, and it had frozen out on the metal structures and rock walls.

The robot stood by the inner hangar door, its eyes glowing in the darkness, waiting for a command.

There was no telling whether they could find any more food, but Clare had insisted that they eat something to get their blood sugar back up before they did anything else. They ate in semi-darkness, by the lights on two of the helmets; they had switched off the others to save the batteries.

Clare picked out the last crumbs from a food bar wrapper, and crumpled it in her hand. It was time to take stock.

She knocked on a freight box for attention, and looked round at them all. Their faces were lit from below, giving them all an eerie appearance.

‘Okay guys, let’s assess our situation. It seems we’ll be staying here awhile.’

She chose her words carefully. She didn’t want to underplay their situation, but she had to keep everyone’s spirits up and talk positively.

‘Our most important needs right now are air, warmth, water and food. If we can secure those, we can start thinking about how to call home.

‘First – air. Seems like we’ve got plenty of that.’ She gestured in the direction of the open inner doors. ‘I guess we’ve all got some questions about how it came to be there, but let’s do this in order.

‘Second priority – warmth. It’s pretty cold in here, but we can manage okay with our suits on. Steve, what’s the temperature doing?’

Wilson glanced at his suit gauges. He had been keeping track of the air temperature and pressure while they were eating.

‘Minus eleven degrees and still rising. Oxygen partial pressure is stable at ninety percent nominal – we’ll be fine as long as we take it easy.’

‘Okay, good. Now – water and food. We’ve got enough emergency rations for another forty-eight hours, and that’s it. We’ll run out of water before that – all we’ve got is what’s in the bottles in the ration packs.’

‘We could scrape some of that frost off before it melts,’ Matt pointed at the exposed girders on the walls of the hangar. ‘It won’t taste too good, but it should be okay to drink.’

‘Good idea. Matt, you figure out how to collect it, and fill up as many of the water bottles as you can.’

She looked round the hangar, then back to the group.

‘I think our next move should be to head for the accommodation levels, to see if we can find some food and more water.’

They all nodded and muttered agreement, then Abrams said: ‘Before we go looking for food, I want to know why there’s air here, when there shouldn’t be any, and how far does it go? Is the whole mine still pressurised?’

Clare nodded.

‘Okay, questions. One – why is there air here when the atmosphere was supposed to have been lost? Another one?’

‘Why were the main doors deliberately opened?’ Matt said, his voice subdued.

‘Okay, that’s two big questions that we can’t answer straightaway. Any more?’ Clare found herself looking at Bergman, and realised that he was going to ask the question that she dreaded.

‘Why did we crash?’ His words hung in the air like an accusation.

She regarded Bergman levelly.

‘Okay. Let’s get that one out of the way first.’ She paused a moment, collecting her thoughts, before continuing. All eyes were on her.

‘As far as I can tell, we lost all pressure in the propellant tanks, just after we went to manual control for landing. Without fuel pressure, the turbopumps stalled, and the engines flamed out. I re-engaged the autopilot and – it just all came back. The engines restarted, but we weren’t high enough to recover, and – we didn’t make it.’

She looked down, and shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t know why the tanks lost pressure. My first thought was that they’d ruptured, but it can’t have been that, or we’d never have got pressure back. It could have been the vent valves, but I’ve been through the landing checklist in my head a dozen times now, and I can’t think of anything that we did that could have caused them to open. Steve, any ideas?’ She looked across at Wilson.

‘It could be some kind of flight software malfunction, but it’s just not – possible.’ He shrugged, and stared back at her.

‘I don’t like to suggest this, but could it have been deliberate?’ Bergman said.

They all looked at him.

Bergman spread his hands, palms outward. ‘I mean, look at what we’ve found so far – doors that were meant to have been blown off standing wide open, and air in the mine when it’s supposed to be in vacuum. There are lots of things that aren’t right here, and – maybe someone didn’t want us finding out.’

‘What exactly are you suggesting, Rick?’ Abrams said, his voice serious.

Bergman paused before replying. There was complete silence in the hangar.

‘I’m saying that we should at least consider deliberate sabotage of the ship’s systems as a – possibility.’

Elliott shook his head, but Bergman carried on.

‘Look – think about it. What we’ve found so far makes all of the evidence given to the investigation board suspect. Just finding the outer doors open and undamaged is enough to warrant a major new investigation, and as for air in the mine—’ He raised his hands, and sat back. ‘PMI resisted any investigative mission to the mine until they were forced into it. I think they knew what we’d find here, and that what happened on landing was no accident.’

Several voices started up; suddenly everyone was talking at once.

‘Okay. Okay, guys, cool it.’ Clare’s voice couldn’t be heard above the confusion of voices, and the noise increased. Elliott stood up, red-faced with anger, and started to yell at Bergman.

‘Will you all shut up!’ Clare shouted.

In the sudden quiet, she motioned for Elliott to sit back down, and she waited for a moment, her head down. Her voice sounded weary as she spoke.

‘Look, we won’t solve anything by fighting over it. The ship’s toast, so we’ve no way of finding out what really happened. All I know is that for something like that to be programmed in deliberately would be nearly impossible to conceal; someone would have noticed that the flight control software had been updated and would have reported it.’

‘Yeah, but who to?’ Wilson said abruptly. ‘Helligan? Suppose he was in on it, and just told Maintenance to ignore it and get on with it? Everyone on the base knows he’s got it in for you, it would have been easy for him to have—’

‘All right!’ Clare snapped, glaring at her copilot. ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere. Whether it was sabotage or not, we crashed, and we’re stuck here for now. So once we’ve secured our position, we need to get a message back to Earth, let them know we’re here.’ Clare looked round at them all.