Mark Anson - Below Mercury

‘There’s no signal. The bastard robot’s cut the links.’

‘But they’re alive!’ Matt said, clicking his flashlight on. ‘Clare and Steve are still alive in the silo. If we can reach them, we can still escape.’

Bergman looked back at Matt, his face a mixture of hope and fear.

‘How are we going to get back to the silo? We can’t go back to the shaft, the robot’s behind us.’

‘We can get there by going up the return shaft.’ Matt spoke urgently. ‘There’s an air bypass duct that goes between the top of the shaft and the main return airway. It’s there to balance the air flow. It’ll take us directly to the silo.’ He stared at Bergman, willing him to believe in the chance.

‘Are you sure? I can’t remember the layout of the workings well enough.’

‘Trust me, it’s there. Come on, we’ve got to reach them before they lift off. They don’t know we’re still alive!’

Bergman switched his flashlight on, and set off after Matt. They ran on into the passage, their flashlight beams skittering over the walls.

It was utterly dark in the haulage way; not even the emergency lights were working. Behind them, a loud boom echoed down the passage, followed by another; the robot was beating down the pressure door.

The air grew chill; they were heading towards the ice workings. After a few hundred metres, Matt turned aside, down another wide passage.

‘Cross cut,’ Matt said. ‘Connects with the return airway.’ He halted by another open pressure door, about twenty metres in.

‘These should never be open. Any air flowing down here short circuits the entire mine ventilation.’

They stepped through, and Matt closed the door behind them, and locked it with the isolation switch. In the distance, the rhythmic pounding had stopped, which could only mean that the robot had broken through the doors, and was moving after them once more.

‘Second set up ahead.’ Matt pointed up the crosscut. Twenty metres further on, another set of open pressure doors formed an airlock, to allow men and materials to move between the intake and return airways without disrupting the mine ventilation.

They closed and locked the doors behind them. There were now two sets of locked pressure doors between them and the robot, and they felt slightly safer.

‘Come on, we’re nearly there.’ Matt led off down the crosscut, and a light grew ahead; they were approaching the return airway.

They clicked off their flashlights as they came to the end of the dark crosscut, and peered out cautiously into the brightly-lit passage. The return airway was quite different from the passages on the other side of the mine; this was the route through which the output of the ice mine came, on its way to the skip loaders that would hoist it up the return shaft to the refinery.

The passage was dominated by the support framework of the belt conveyor, which occupied over half the width of the passage. When the mine was working, the conveyor would have run constantly, transporting ice from the underground workings to the waiting skip loaders. The mud from the melting ice had dried to strange, circular patterns in the floor, and the walls were grey with dried mud and spray.

They looked carefully both ways before leaving the crosscut, and turned right, heading for the return shaft.

Inside the silo, Clare sat in the shuttlecraft, staring ahead. Her tears had dried on her face, and she knew she had failed. Her mission had been simple; to convey her passengers to Mercury, and return them home safely.

Now, every one of the passengers was dead, and she had to return to the shame and the investigation boards. It would have been better if she had died along with them.

Wilson sat next to her in the copilot’s seat, checking the flight plan as they waited for the launch window to open. They could not delay any longer; outside the silo complex, the security cameras showed two robots attacking the pile of rubble that blocked the airway. Every few minutes, a distant rumble reverberated through the silo as another large boulder was moved aside. Soon they would be through, and then it would be the end.

Clare almost wished they would break through, and that the air would rush out, so that she could die in her misery. It would be so much easier than going back.

She looked at her comlink for the hundredth time, to see if there were any messages. There were none, and she cast it aside. They were all dead, they were all dead an hour ago.

She cast a listless eye over the flight deck. The shuttle was fully prepped for launch. She had been so proud of being able to get it flightworthy, to provide a way to get everyone home. The fuel gauges and stripped-out cabin mocked her now; with only two people, there was more than enough fuel to reach orbit.

Wilson had been keen to salvage something from the mission, and she hadn’t stopped him from piling up some metal bars in the control room, ready to bring them aboard.

‘How long?’ She didn’t even turn her head to speak to him.

‘Launch window opens in twenty-six minutes. I’m going back to the control room to finish up.’

Clare nodded, and Wilson pushed back his seat and got up. She wondered if the robots would break through before they could leave, and decided she didn’t even care.

‘Did you hear that?’

Matt stopped and listened, and grimaced as another distant boom reverberated through the passage behind them.

‘Looks like they’re at the last pressure door,’ Bergman said. ‘We’d better decide what we’re going to do.’

Matt and Bergman stood at the edge of a small maintenance refuge at the base of the return shaft. Above them, their flashlights illuminated the walls of the huge shaft as it disappeared upwards above their heads. It was wider than the intake shafts; as well as being the main air reservoir for the mine, it was also the route by which the mined ice and ore was raised up to the refinery and smelters on the surface.

Below and to one side of the refuge, a skip loader hung by its wire ropes, waiting at the shaft station for the load that would never come. Its companion was at the shaft station high above them, and they operated as a pair; while this one was loading, the one up top would be emptying, and then the two skips would exchange positions. The two skips ran side by side in the larger shaft, and the shaft was filled with their guide ropes, suspension ropes, counterbalance guides, and balance ropes.

There were no manriding cages in the shaft; the skips were only used for carrying loads of ice and ore, and the hoists were automated, and operated by the mine computer. There had no way of commanding the hoists to run, and in any case Matt and Bergman were wary of using any system that was under computer control.

From somewhere high above, occasional droplets of water fell down the centre of the shaft, echoing as they plunged into the sump. The water surface far below them rippled with each drop.

To one side of the refuge, a metal ladder led straight upwards, bolted to the vertical wall of the shaft. It disappeared into the darkness above their heads.

‘We don’t have a choice. We have to climb,’ Matt said. He fastened his flashlight to his belt, leaned round, grabbed a rung, and swung himself sideways onto the ladder. ‘At least robots can’t follow us up these.’

‘How far?’ Bergman asked from below, as Matt started to climb.

‘Five hundred metres,’ Matt’s voice floated back down.

‘Shit,’ Bergman muttered, as he swung onto the ladder and followed Matt upward.

In the dark, by the swinging beams of their flashlights, it was difficult to appreciate the true size of the shaft; they could not see up its huge height, but the echoes of their footsteps on the ladder rungs rang around the chamber. Behind them, over their backs as they climbed, glistening specks of water raced downwards.