Mark Anson - Below Mercury

The lone robot that had pursued Matt joined them at the branch to the silo. With a slow deliberation of purpose, the three robots turned, and advanced towards the pressure doors.

Inside the silo, Clare, Matt and Wilson heard the explosion and sudden roar of air in the passage outside. As the noise faded away, it was replaced by a tremendous pounding, a flailing of hardened steel pincers beating on the sealed pressure doors; the three robots were attacking it together.

Clare grabbed Matt’s arm, and pulled him towards the docking corridor. They thumped across and, as they entered the shuttle’s cabin, she grabbed him close, and kissed him hard on the lips, not caring that Wilson would see.

‘I thought I’d lost you,’ she said, releasing him, and she ran to the commander’s seat. ‘Strap in.’ She restarted the countdown, and prepared to withdraw the docking corridor. ‘Steve, is the door closed?’

There was no response, and she turned round.

Wilson wasn’t in the cabin.

Clare turned back to the windows with a terrible sense of foreboding, and saw Wilson in the control room, rushing to grab an armload of metal bars. She leaned forward in horror.

‘Steve, no! It’s not worth it!’ she screamed, banging on the window in frustration, ‘Steve!’

The pounding of the robots on the pressure doors stopped. Across the silo, Wilson looked up, and straight back into Clare’s eyes. Realisation of his peril dawned on his face, and he dropped the bars.

‘Steve …’ she whispered, her hands on the window, knowing that she had lost him.

There was a tremendous bang outside as the silo doors breached, and Matt was out of his seat, racing for the door close button, just as the air started to rush out of the silo. The door slid shut on a roaring of air, and a thin cry of terror on the wind that he would never forget.

In the control room, Wilson dashed for the door, but his way was blocked by the huge form of a mining robot, its glowing red eyes looking down at him. He backed away, until he could go no further, and he turned round to face Clare, his hands on the glass, his terrified eyes imploring her for help, his mouth saying something that she could never hear.

The robot strode across the room, and grabbed Wilson with its pincers. His mouth opened in a silent scream as the robot pulled him apart, blood splashing over the control room windows in bright red trails as it tore his arms and legs off. Wilson’s body flailed about in the eerie silence as he was dismembered, until the robot finally severed his head, and threw his bloody remains to the floor.

Clare fell back into her seat, her mouth open, unable to move with shock at what she had just seen.

Matt slid into the copilot’s seat next to her, his face aghast.

‘We need to get out of here!’ he said, and then shouted: ‘Clare!’

She turned to look at him, white-faced, her eyes glazed and unseeing, and then she seemed to understand what he was saying. With an effort, she seemed to recover herself. Her eyes flickered uncertainly across the controls, as if she had forgotten what they did, and then she suddenly reached out a hand and punched the corridor disconnect button.

Outside the shuttle, the docking corridor withdrew into the wall of the silo, folding up in sections like a telescope. Air gushed from its open end as the mine continued to empty.

Clare operated the controls to open the silo doors, and the lights in the silo went out. The circle of roof above the shuttle filled slowly with stars as the doors moved aside, spilling dust and rock fragments into the silo as they withdrew.

Alarm lights flashed red in the silo complex, silhouetting the form of another robot, standing in the doorway at the end of the docking corridor. The pressure door strained against the robot’s body, trying to seal off the escaping air. The robot gripped the door, and with a massive heave, tore it bodily from its tracks.

Matt flinched as the robot hurled the heavy door at the side of the shuttle, denting the fragile hull. The vehicle rocked on its landing legs.

‘Pressure’s holding,’ Clare said, her voice unsteady. ‘I’ve started the ignition sequence. Strap in.’

Matt pulled his seat straps over his shoulders as Clare’s hands moved across the controls, her eyes flicking across the displays and switches.

The vehicle creaked loudly beneath them; its fuel tanks were at full pressure. There was a sharp hiss, then a muffled thump as the pressure feeds disconnected and the refuelling boom swung back into its recess in the wall of the silo. A fog of released vapour swirled briefly about the shuttle, and vanished into space.

From the flight controls, an alarm sounded, together with an insistent computer voice.

‘ Danger, landing platform lowered.’

Clare cancelled the alarm with a flick of her hand. Matt looked at the view of the silo walls with concern. The landing platform was always raised to the surface for launches.

‘Ignore it, we can take off from down here,’ Clare said, ‘I’m not hanging around any longer.’ She pressed some more buttons to engage the automatic launch sequence, and pulled her seat straps over her shoulders.

‘ Launching in fifteen seconds,’ the flight computer announced.

Across the crater floor, deep inside the reactor complex, the other mining robots stood on top of the reactor pressure vessel, on the refuelling floor. The wrecked control rods were strewn over the sealed manhole covers, under which the fuel cans glowed red hot as their nuclear reaction ran unchecked, building up heat and pressure in the moderator.

Steam rose in wisps from around the edges of the covers; it could not be far away now. As if knowing that their work was done, the robots assembled in a circle on top of the core, oblivious to the screeching alarms and red warning lights that splashed the roof and walls of the containment.

In the control centre, the unseeing eyes of Peter Abrams had frosted over in the vacuum; they gazed out across the blood-spattered ruin of the room, to where the management system displayed message after message, warning of the reactor overload.

At the edge of the reactor complex, robots had forced open the sealed doors between the reactor containment and the rest of the mine. When the explosion happened, it would rip into the mine and drench it with deadly radiation. Other robots had attacked the containment in strategic points, digging into it with their powerful arms, creating lines of weakness that would help it to shatter.

Starved of coolant flow, and with no means of stopping its energy production, the reactor core was white-hot, and could not be restrained any longer. Steam bubbles formed in the moderator, reducing the cooling and increasing the pressure, and the reaction finally ran away, releasing a hundred times more energy than the reactor’s normal maximum output.

In a fraction of a second, the boiling water in the reactor core flashed into steam, and the pressure vessel breached, near where the robots stood. In a titanic explosion, the pressure vessel exploded, blowing the robots to pieces, bursting the containment, and sending a blast wave of fire and shattered rock rocketing out of the reactor complex into the mine.

Inside the silo, the countdown reached five seconds, and the shuttlecraft stirred as the engine turbines spun up with a rising whine. Moments later, the four engines ignited, and an overlapping sequence of muffled bangs rocked the craft as the engines lit and rose to full thrust.

‘Eat that, you motherfucking machine,’ Clare hissed, as searing hot exhaust swirled round the circular pit of the silo and into the open doorway of the docking corridor, where the robot stood.

The shuttle lurched off the pad, its thrusters firing to keep it level, as it rose up out of the silo.