Mark Anson - Below Mercury

‘You okay?’

Clare jumped at the sound of Bergman’s voice.

‘Yeah. Yeah, sure.’ Clare moved a strand of hair from her face. ‘You find anything?’

‘No. It’s the same as this. No bodies, just lots of clothes and stuff. We’re going to skip the next level and go straight up to the control deck.’

Clare nodded, and followed Bergman and the others back to the open pressure doors and the elevator lobby.

They climbed the fire stairs to the next level, and found a similar situation there; the pressure doors were wide open again. They continued up the stairs without stopping to explore, and the stairs finally came to an end at a final elevator lobby, on the control centre level.

The pressure doors stood open, like the ones on the levels below, but here there were signs of a violent struggle. One wall had been damaged by what looked like an explosive charge; the lining cement had been blown off the rock walls, and there was the black smudge of fire up the wall. Several upturned chairs lay scattered round the lobby.

‘What the fuck happened here?’ Bergman asked, looking at the damage. ‘Is this gunfire?’ he added, pointing out with his flashlight places where small, round chunks had been taken out of the white cement lining of the lobby.

‘Yeah. Looks like small arms fire,’ Wilson said slowly. ‘Were there any weapons in the mine?’

‘Yes.’ Matt spoke up. ‘It wasn’t well known, but there was a gun locker up here, just in case there was a – problem that needed dealing with.’

‘Could there have been a revolt by the personnel?’ Elliott said, ‘Perhaps they vented the mine to try to gain control?’

Matt stared at the wall, his face set.

‘I think that’s pretty unlikely,’ Abrams said, ‘none of the transmissions from the mine mentioned anything about a mutiny.’ His face didn’t show the same conviction as his words, though, and he looked troubled.

‘Let’s see what’s happened up here,’ Clare said, and stepped forward over the chairs, and into the control level.

‘Straight ahead,’ Matt prompted, as Clare hesitated in the branching corridors.

They walked past a door that opened onto a room full of silent air-conditioning equipment, and past other doors to rooms filled from floor to ceiling with rack-mounted electronics. In one of them, it looked like someone had gone berserk with a hammer; all the equipment in several large racks had been smashed, and broken circuit boards lay strewn across the floor. They went inside to take a closer look.

‘Comms equipment,’ Matt commented, frowning. ‘Why would they destroy that?’ The feeling was growing in Matt’s mind that the possibility of some kind of revolt wasn’t so unlikely after all. He looked at Bergman, who shrugged, but looked equally concerned.

‘Whoever did this knew what they were doing,’ Wilson commented, crouching down to pick up a smashed circuit board. ‘There’s no way any of this can be got working again. Are there any other comms rooms?’ he asked, but Matt shook his head.

Wilson tossed the circuit board aside and stood up.They left the comms room and continued down the main corridor, past other equipment rooms, and meeting rooms with overturned tables and chairs.

A broken door, hanging off its hinges, opened onto the Mine Manager’s office. Clare pushed the door aside and they filed in.

The far wall, behind the Manager’s desk, was a full-height window, opening onto the view of the crater. It had once been the office for the most important person in the mine, but the place had been ransacked; every desk and filing cabinet drawer had been pulled out, and its contents scattered over the floor. Mineral samples had been swept off their shelves, and some had been thrown against the walls, where they had shattered into pieces. All the pictures on the wall had been thrown down and smashed. A large globe of Mercury, that had occupied one corner of the room, lay like a crushed eggshell on the floor.

‘Looks like they were looking for something,’ Clare said, her flashlight beam probing the corners of the room. It came to rest on a large bloodstain on the surface of the desk. ‘What was kept in here, besides all this stuff?’ she asked Matt.

‘I don’t know. I just came in here for meetings. I’d imagined it was just files. Maybe some sensitive commercial stuff, ore grade reports, geological maps, that sort of thing.’

‘Anything vital to the functioning of the mine?’

‘Possibly some of the higher-level access codes for the critical systems; they might have been kept here. But they wouldn’t be in drawers; they’d be, in a …’ his voice trailed off, and he looked around.

‘In a safe?’

They looked around, but Clare was right; there was no safe in the room. Clearly, whoever had been here before them, had also expected to find one there, and had searched the place without success.

The uneasy feeling that they could be dealing with a mutiny was growing on Matt as they left the mine manager’s office and came to the end of the main corridor, to where another set of pressure doors stood half-open. They were covered with dents, as if someone had hammered at the doors to get them open.

Bergman ran his fingers over the wavy and discoloured edges of the two door panels.

‘Welded shut,’ he commented. ‘They seem to have sealed themselves in here, but the doors were forced open.’

They fell silent as they clambered through the gap, and the barricade of chairs, steel beams and equipment cabinets that lay beyond. Increasingly, it appeared that there had been some kind of battle between the mine personnel, and the evidence of a disastrous mutiny was mounting.

Beyond the barricade, the deck split into two levels; a lower area that ran round in front of the main windows, for observing and managing the spacecraft traffic in and around the crater, and an upper deck accessed up a short stair, an elevated command area with monitor screens for controlling the operations of the mine. The place looked like a war zone, and the command deck had been the focus of furious fighting; there was more evidence of explosions and small arms fire, and monitors and consoles had been smashed and overturned. Dried blood was spattered heavily over the area.

Matt picked his way through the wreckage and up the stairs to the command deck. Part of the ceiling had come down, and wiring and ventilation trunking lay across his path. He stepped over them, and clambered up to the semi-circular area.

Some of the consoles appeared undamaged, while others were smashed beyond repair; someone had wanted to prevent the mutineers from gaining access to certain systems. Matt wished he knew more about the layout of the consoles; it might have told them something.

Something caught his eye, and underneath one of the consoles, he saw a large circuit breaker panel. The metal cover was hanging off its hinges, and the master switch had been turned off.

‘Hey.’ Matt beckoned to Bergman, who had followed him onto the control level. ‘You reckon it’s safe to try switching this back on?’

Bergman considered the panel, and the smashed equipment nearby.

‘Do it one circuit at a time. If you get any sparks, pull the breaker. Hey, everyone, we’re going to try to restore some power here. Stand clear of any exposed cabling.’

‘Okay, here goes,’ Matt muttered. He clicked all the breakers off, and turned the handle of the master switch to the on position.

Nothing happened, which was what Matt had expected. He pressed the first breaker in gingerly, and it popped back out again at once. Short circuit. It meant there was power to the board, though, which was encouraging. He ran along the line of breakers, most of which either did nothing or just popped out again.