Mark Anson - Below Mercury

The cabin windows had just cleared the lip of the silo, when the shuttle rocked violently to one side. An alarm sounded as the autopilot disconnected, along with a warning from the flight computer.

‘ Attitude, straighten up.’

‘What the fuck—’ Clare grabbed the sidestick and pulled the shuttle upright, the thrusters blasting out against the silo’s walls.

Below them, the silo dissolved in a cloud of shattered rock and dust as the blast wave from the reactor reached it. The control room window exploded into the silo, sending the shuttle across to the other side.

Clare fought to hold the craft steady in the centre of the silo. It lurched and bucked as the explosion wave burst over it. If they hit the walls, it would all be over.

Unable to maintain height, the shuttle started to fall back into the silo. Clare slammed the thrust levers forward, sending a sheet of flame up and round the windows, as the shuttle slowly cleared the silo and laboured into the sky, a wide fan of dust flying over the crater floor.

Below it, the silo collapsed inwards in a cloud of dust and rubble. Secondary explosions threw rocks and more dust into the sky, narrowly missing the climbing shuttle. The entire silo complex was collapsing; great pits were opening up in the crater floor. Matt looked across to the distant reactor complex, aghast; the reactor appeared to have exploded; its cooling radiators and power converters toppling over into a great pit, from which a great cloud of vapour belched, lit from below by the red light of the exposed core.

The shuttle was behaving strangely; it wasn’t climbing fast enough, as if there was insufficient thrust. The craft seemed to be drifting sideways as it rose, as if something was tugging it off course.

‘ Climb rate,’ the computer warned.

‘Something’s wrong here,’ Clare said, her voice showing concern. The shuttle lurched to one side in an odd way, and Clare’s eyes darted to the engine controls, then to the attitude display.

The shuttle’s engines were generating plenty of thrust. A dead weight seemed to have attached itself to the craft, and the last lurch was from the weight moving around.

‘Check the cameras!’ Clare’s face had gone white. ‘No, over to the right of the landing gear controls.’

Matt found the camera controls, and punched up various external views: the silo, shrinking below them; a black sky; a view of one of the engines; a landing gear leg; another landing gear leg—

‘Oh, shit.’ Matt caught his breath.

Looking up into the eye of the camera, a robot clung onto the landing leg strut below the main cabin door. It must have grabbed one of the shuttle’s landing legs as it had lifted off past the airlock opening. As Matt watched, it swung its free arm and grabbed hold of the landing strut, higher up. The shuttle lurched.

‘It’s climbing up the landing gear!’ Matt yelled.

‘Which one!’

‘The one – the one below the door.’

‘Number four. Okay, that makes sense, I’m having to roll to the right to hold us steady. How heavy is that thing?’

‘About two tonnes.’

‘Jesus.’ Clare checked the navigation display. The white line of their ascent was peeling away from the magenta line of their flight plan, falling further and further behind.

‘We can’t make orbit with that fucking thing hanging on,’ she said, ‘we’ve got to get rid of it.’

Matt watched the display helplessly, powerless to do anything as the robot hauled itself higher.

‘We won’t have to worry much longer, it’s going for the propellant tanks.’ Matt pointed at the camera display.

Clare risked a quick glance at the display. The robot had advanced up the landing leg by two metres. It was pulling itself hand over hand, up the hydraulic strut. In a few moments, it would be within reach of the fragile pressurised tanks that contained their fuel and oxidiser supplies. One savage swipe with a pincered hand, and it would all be over; even if the tanks didn’t explode, the engines would flame out and the craft would fall back to smash into Mercury.

The shuttle started to rotate as it climbed; the weight hanging on one corner made it difficult to control, and Clare swore as the craft fought against her control inputs. The mine surface facilities turned in front of the shuttle’s windows, and Matt watched as the mine entrance, the exploding reactor complex, the wrecked refinery, and the landing pad moved past in an endless sequence of ruin.

Below the fleeing shuttle, the blast wave from the reactor explosion tore its way through the mine. Already weakened by the stresses from explosive decompression, the mine passages started to give way, bursting inwards in showers of rock and tangles of cables.

An explosive shock wave erupted up the main intake shaft, destroying the shaft station. The hoist motor, supporting the dead weight of the long wire ropes and cage, collapsed in ruin, and slithered partway down the shaft in a mass of broken rock, guide ropes and falling girders. The upper shaft walls fell in behind it, blocking the shaft and sealing it with thousands of tonnes of rock.

Outside on the crater floor, the explosion tore through the passages connecting the surface facilities. The passages collapsed in pits of sinking rubble as the roofs fell in, opening up long scars in the crater floor.

The explosion reached the hangar levels, and the main entrance to the mine. The outer doors burst, and a cloud of flame, dust and rubble exploded out from the mine portal. The hangar roof groaned, and then collapsed, sinking to the ground in an avalanche of falling rock that filled the hangars and surged out over the crater floor, burying Erebus Mine forever.

The shuttle rose high above the spreading ruin of the mine, and Matt shut his eyes against a sudden flood of brilliant sunlight; some crack in the mountain peaks spilled the light of the circling Sun into the dark bowl of the crater. The craft spiralled out of the shadow of the crater floor, and the horrors of what they had seen there plunged back into inky darkness once more.

Sunlight glittered off the reflective foils of the shuttle’s thermal blankets, and it climbed higher, up and out of the crater, until the sunlit peaks of the crater rim came into view.

A bright point of light burst out from the tallest peak. The huge dish of the deep space antenna on the mountain peak, where Elliott and Abrams had made contact with Earth, was catching the sunlight. It was like a beacon of hope, or of doom; they were not going to escape the clutches of Mercury.

Clare looked up at the flash from the antenna, and stared hard at it. Her face took on a strange expression. In a sudden decision, she slammed the sidestick hard forward. The shuttle tilted over, slowing its climb, but increasing its ground speed, heading straight for the mountain peak.

The robot, thrown off balance by the sudden manoeuvre, lost grip with one of its pincers, and hung from the landing leg again, its free arm swinging, trying to grab hold again.

Looking forward out of the cabin window, Matt saw the mountains rushing towards them, and suddenly they were speeding over the hills, the scenery flashing past below. He saw the repeater station at the top of the service raise, their antennas pointing down into the crater floor, and the line of the winding path that Elliott and Abrams had followed on their climb. He looked up.

‘The mountains!’ Matt gasped, ‘We’re too low!’

‘Not fucking low enough ,’ Clare said with deliberation, and the craft shot across the rising ground, its engines raising a plume of dust beneath it, heading straight for the peak and the communications dish. To its left, the solar power array, high on its pillar, pointed towards the Sun, its panels spread wide to catch the Sun’s rays.