Mark Anson - Below Mercury

Clare snapped her flashlight back on, and the window became a mirror. Matt stared back at his reflection in the glass, his eyes sunken in their sockets, his face darkened by stubble, and he realised how exhausted he looked.

‘You okay?’ Clare said quietly. She was looking at him in the reflection from the window.

‘Yeah – yeah, I’m fine,’ Matt said. He hadn’t realised that she had been watching him.

‘Come on,’ Clare said, ‘we need to search this place.’

Matt tore himself away from the window, and his memories, and picked his way across the galley area, following the others.

Many of the tables and chairs had been pushed to the edges of the room, but several were in the centre, with oxygen cylinders and medical equipment lying about nearby.

‘This looks like it was used as an emergency hospital,’ Clare said. ‘Look at all this blood on the tables.’

‘Still no bodies,’ Elliott said, ‘I thought we would have found some by now.’

Someone’s light flickered behind the serving hatches of the kitchen, and there was a splashing sound.

‘Hey, there’s still water in the faucets,’ Wilson shouted, then a moment later added: ‘Smells a bit, though.’

‘Run it through for a few minutes and see if it clears,’ Clare said. ‘Is there any food in there?’ She stopped by one of the serving hatches and looked in. She could see Wilson, now joined by Matt, opening cupboards and rummaging about in them.

‘Some packaged stuff.’ Wilson pulled a box from a cupboard, and tore open the cardboard lid. ‘Huh. We’ve got dried pasta here.’

There were several large stainless steel cooking pots on the ranges in the kitchen. Above some of them, the contents had splashed on the ceiling when they had flash-boiled in vacuum; it looked like paint had exploded over the kitchen.

‘Freezer,’ Matt’s voice called, ‘I’m going to take a look.’

There was a thunk from deeper inside the kitchens, and a sudden sucking noise as a large door opened.

‘Shit!’ Matt’s voice came from across the kitchen, and the door slammed shut again. A strong smell of decay rolled across the kitchens, and the rest of the group stiffened in alarm.

‘What is it?’ Wilson said, grabbing Matt’s arm as he came stumbling past.

‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ Matt gasped, ‘it’s just the food in the freezer, it’s all gone off.’ He pulled free of Wilson’s hand. ‘I’m okay, let’s keep on looking.’

Outside the kitchen, the other four relaxed, but the smell leaked out and started to fill the room.

They grimaced and continued their search.

Nearly an hour later, they had completed their exploration of the first level without finding anything more unpleasant than the spoiled food in the freezer compartment. There was plenty of evidence of the disaster, however, and more grim reminders of the personnel’s fight for survival when they had retreated here. Blood was spattered on the walls and floor; personal items were strewn about, but there were no bodies.

The water in the kitchen eventually ran clean, and they refilled their bottles, and some larger empty containers they found. They found more food to keep them going; most of the sealed packets of dried ingredients had survived, and the ranges worked, so they would be able to supplement the emergency rations with some hot food.

They gathered together again at the entrance to the level, by the doors that had been torn off, and Clare directed them upstairs, following the fire stairs up to the second level lobby.

The main pressure doors to the second level were wide apart, apparently undamaged.

Matt’s heart sank as he saw them; it seemed as if the careful conclusions of the original investigation board were proving correct at nearly every turn.

‘Looks like it was deliberately opened,’ Bergman said carefully, but quite clearly.

Elliott voice came from behind him.

‘Yes, I agree. The crew almost certainly opened it accidentally, due to their inexperience.’

Something snapped inside Matt. The tiredness, the dark, and the endless repetition of Elliott’s position was too much, and Matt grabbed Elliott by the front of his suit and swung him round until they were face to face.

‘Listen, Elliott, will you do us all a favour and just keep an open mind for once, it’s like listening to some fucking PMI prick who doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up!’

Matt knew he had lost it even as he yelled the last words, but he couldn’t stop himself, and he shoved Elliott away so hard that the smaller man stumbled in the low gravity, and would have gone down had not Abrams caught and held him.

‘Hey!’ Bergman grabbed Matt’s arm and tried to pull him away, but Matt shook him free and advanced on Elliott again.

Clare stepped between the two men.

‘Stop it,’ she said in a firm voice. Something in her demeanour made Elliott and Matt blink, and they halted either side of her, glaring at each other.

‘If anyone endangers this mission,’ she said slowly, looking down at the ground, ‘I will personally handcuff them to the robot, and they can follow us about like that. I don’t give a shit about what anyone thinks about the fucking doors, all I care about is getting off this planet and going home.’ She lifted her gaze to look at them both. ‘All right?’

Matt suddenly felt stupid and ashamed. After a moment, he nodded. He couldn’t even look Clare in the eye.

‘We’re going to explore this level, then the next, until we’re at the control centre level, and then we’ll decide what we’re going to do from there. Is that clear?’

‘Sure,’ Elliott said quietly, white-faced.

‘Right. Abrams, you stay with Dr Elliott. Bergman, keep Mr Crawford out of trouble, will you? Let’s keep moving.’

As they advanced through the open pressure doors, Clare shot Matt a look of anger and disappointment. He cursed himself internally, and looked away.

The second level was a regular array of corridors, and doors opening onto living quarters. Most of the doors on either side of the main corridor were open, and the familiar litter was lying all around, with clothes added to the paper and smaller objects strewn about the place.

Clare stopped outside a room, and went inside. The others continued their search as she picked her way across the small apartment. Her flashlight beam picked out details as she went round the compact apartment, her spacesuit boots silent on the carpet.

Clothes and paper everywhere. A framed photograph of a smiling man on the floor. Magazines spilled on the carpet.

Bedroom. An alarm clock on the floor, its battery long exhausted. The bed, and the quilt lying in the doorway. Clothes on the floor. Wardrobe doors open, where the clothes had been torn out by the shrieking wind.

Bathroom. A toothbrush lay abandoned in the sink, its bristles stiff with dried toothpaste.

Clare shivered. In her mind, she could hear the sudden roar of the wind. She could imagine the confusion and noise as the air rushed out of the mine, and then there was just the terrible silence of vacuum.

She had been in vacuum herself once, for a few brief seconds during training, and she remembered the utter silence that had fallen as the air vanished from the chamber. Her skin had prickled as her sweat percolated through the material of her jumpsuit; her open mouth had tingled as her saliva froze. The instructor had lifted a sheet of paper and let go, and she had watched it fall like a rock to the floor.

But that had been a training exercise; moments later, the life-giving air had rushed back in. Out here, in the depths of the crater, there had been nothing, nothing except the last few gasps as her lungs emptied, and then the fifteen seconds of useless panting on nothing before her brain, starved of oxygen, started to black out—