Below Mercury Read online

  Below Mercury

  Mark Anson

  In the permanent darkness of an ice-filled crater on the South Pole of Mercury lies Erebus Mine, abandoned after a devastating accident that claimed the lives of 257 people. After an eight-year legal battle, an investigation team is finally on its way to Mercury to find out what really happened. But powerful forces want to make sure that what lies beneath Chao Meng-fu crater is never uncovered…

  Featuring line drawings and maps, realistic technical detail, and magnificently-imagined visions of the Sun’s innermost planet, BELOW MERCURY sets new standards for the hard SF novel.

  Mark Anson

  BELOW MERCURY

  PREFACE TO THE E-BOOK EDITION

  This book includes several illustrations by the author. In the print book, these are located in the text in the appropriate place. In the e-book edition, to avoid inconvenient breaks in the text when the viewing font is changed, the illustrations are placed at the start of the relevant chapter rather than in the body of the chapter text.

  The layout of the Glossary and Bibliography have also been altered for the e-book edition, so that these sections display consistently across all platforms.

  PART I

  Space Grave

  CHAPTER ONE

  The night before the investigation board hearing, Matt Crawford had the dream again.

  It had taken him some time to get to sleep that night. He had spent the evening reading various reports and technical documents related to the accident, and they had reminded him of things he wanted to forget. Even the beers he had consumed had done little to make him feel sleepy. He had lain awake for several hours, jumbled thoughts turning endlessly in his mind, before falling into an exhausted sleep.

  At first, he slept in a blackness that held no memory. Then, in the early hours of the morning, as the city awoke around him, Matt’s mind surfaced from the depths of sleep. He drifted for a while in a grey world of formless thoughts, his mind free-wheeling through nothingness.

  Matt’s eyes moved behind closed eyelids, and he began to dream.

  He wasn’t aware of any beginning to the dream, he was just there, hanging motionless in the blackness of space. All was dark about him, except for the pinpricks of distant stars, watching him with their cold and terrible gaze. He looked down, and felt a surge of fear as he saw stars underneath him. He was alone in space.

  No – not quite alone. Something was moving against the distant stars; they winked out and back again with its unseen passage. It grew steadily larger, until he saw that it was a planet. With a sinking of his heart, Matt realised that it was the dark and menacing globe of Mercury.

  As if it had seen him, the planet changed direction, and headed straight for him, moving with breathtaking speed. It expanded until it filled his vision, rushing to smite him like a gigantic, pock-marked cannonball in space.

  Matt moved suddenly in his sleep in a reflex action of fear, cringing against the blow that never came.

  The viewpoint changed, and now he was much closer to the planet’s surface. He seemed to be flying, falling lower and lower, moving over the shadowed, crater-strewn landscape that he knew so well. Shadows lengthened as the Sun slid down the sky, and he saw the dark ramparts of a giant crater looming ahead. The crawling sensation of dread rose in him as he realised where he was: Chao Meng-fu crater, on the very South Pole of Mercury.

  He hadn’t recognised the signs of the familiar dream. It had been a long time since he had last been here, but something had released the trapped memories again, and they were coming back to haunt him, rising like slow, dark bubbles out of deep water.

  He passed over the jagged and mountainous rim, and the huge black pit of the crater opened before him, a gulf of darkness from which nothing ever returned. Matt shivered as he fell lower, spiralling down, down, into the darkness of the crater. The light of the Sun faded as he fell, until at last it winked out altogether, and impenetrable darkness closed around him.

  In a sudden shift, he was floating again, moving towards a smooth wall cut into the base of a black cliff, in the inner walls of the vast crater. He could only just make it out; the scene was lit with a faint, ghostly light coming from above, but he knew it was not sunlight.

  As he came closer, a set of massive, sliding pressure doors were revealed, many times his own height, set into the rock wall. The doors separated, and moved aside slowly as he approached, allowing him through into a vast stone chamber filled with the sound of faint whispers. Beyond, a dark passage led ahead and down.

  Matt knew it was the entrance to the mine, and the beating of his heart quickened as the fear climbed in him. He tried to stop himself from moving forward, flailing his arms and legs, trying to get a purchase on something, but it was useless; he was being pulled down the passage, towards the deep places, far below the surface of the planet. Ahead of him, the whispering grew louder. He knew he should turn round, try to get back, but the mine continued to draw him inwards. More doors slid aside as he rushed down the passage, down, always down, into the heart of the mountain.

  He shivered. It grew cold, and he knew that the distant whispering was directed at him; they knew he was here. The whispering grew louder and more insistent, and then suddenly the scene shifted; he was in the control room, and the whispering turned into voices, and he was standing behind the shift supervisors as they pored over the display consoles, turning to one another in puzzlement.

  Matt had never been this far before in the dream; it had always ended in the tunnels. His terror rose until he felt he couldn’t breathe, but the dream wouldn’t release him. The control room was exactly how he remembered it, down to the smallest detail; even the ominous warnings that spilled across the displays.

  You’ve got an emergency, he tried to cry out, shut the pressure doors! His jaw muscles moved, but his mouth was muted by the silent barriers of dream, and they couldn’t hear him.

  The scene shook, and the men in the control room grabbed hold of the support rails as the distant explosion shook the refinery.

  Shut the doors!

  But the events were unfolding in front of him, just like he had imagined them so many times: the shock, the terror and the confusion. He had thrust the thoughts away over the years, forced himself not to think about what it must have been like. Now, all the suppressed fears played out inexorably in front of him, unwinding like a malevolent recording.

  Matt saw what was happening on the displays in front of him, saw the outer doors beginning to open, but he couldn’t make himself heard. The pressure alarms sounded, but it was already too late. In the distance, he could hear a rising roar – it was the sound of the wind approaching, the sound of the air rushing out of the mine.

  Matt tried to move, to get to safety, but his legs wouldn’t work, and then the roaring noise of escaping air was on them; a baleful, freezing blast that howled round the control room, scouring the air from his lungs.

  It grew colder, icy cold. Matt held his arms round himself to try to ward off the cold that ate into his bones, but his breath smoked like white fog in the freezing air, and his lungs burned with pain with each breath he took. The screaming of the pressure alarms faded into the eerie silence of vacuum, and it grew colder still, an unimaginable cold, a cold so deep that he knew it was the cold of space, sucking the heat from his body.

  Matt’s eyes started to sting as his tears froze. He felt a terrible panic, the fear of knowing that he was in vacuum and that he was going to die, and that this time, there would be no escape – he was trapped here in the control room with them, trapped here in the mine that was now a tomb. In a sudden shock, he saw that the control room floor was filled with skeletons, crawling towards him, their jaws moving soundlessly as they tried to speak.

  He retreated
in horror, but then he banged up against one of the equipment supports, and he realised he was cornered; he couldn’t escape. He hung onto the support and cried out in fear, but no sound came, only the silent moan of dream.

  The skeletons reached him and began clawing their way over his body. Their ice-cold finger bones froze onto his flesh, and he felt the chill of death spread through his body at their touch.

  Matt fought to hang on, to resist them dragging him away, but the cold was creeping up his body. His fingers were already numb; in a few moments, they would lose their strength, and then they would have him; after all these years they would claim him, and Matt would join them in the cold and the dark below Mercury, far beyond any help.

  The cold rose to his head, and a high-pitched whistling sound started in his ears. It rose in pain and intensity, drilling into his skull, until he couldn’t bear it anymore, and his nerveless fingers slipped off the support. Bony fingers dug into him, dragging him away, down into the icy tomb of the mine.

  Matt thrashed out, and sat up with a gasp of fear.

  A piercing electronic beeping filled the darkness. For a moment, he didn’t know where he was, then he realised with a rush of relief that it was just the alarm, and that he was alive.

  He put a hand out and fumbled across the bedside table. A beer can skittered across the surface and hit the carpet with an empty, metallic clank. He groped further, found the alarm button, and fell back in the bed, his heart hammering in his chest. The howling of the nightmare wind still rang in his ears, but it faded, until it became the quiet rush of air conditioning in the room. He put a hand to his face, and kicked the covers off his body. He was soaked in sweat.

  A grey light crept through the curtains as he lay there on the bed, getting his breathing and heart rate back under control. It had been the worst one yet; he had never been this far in the dream, never actually been in the control room when the mine vented its air into space. He had tried not to imagine what it had been like, but the dream had crawled out to ambush him, today of all days.

  The day of the investigation board hearing into the disaster.

  Matt tilted the alarm display towards him, and let it fall back. He lay there a few moments more, trying to put it off, but just like the dream, there was no getting away. He rolled out of bed and walked unsteadily towards the bathroom, and flicked the light on.

  His dark green eyes, underlined by the shadows of a broken night’s sleep, looked back at him from the mirror. At 39 years of age, Matt looked older; his brown hair was greying at the temples, and there were lines of care and worry etched into his face.

  He ran the faucet and slopped water over his face while he waited for it to run hot. He caught sight of his hands, and realised that they were shaking.

  He took several deep breaths, and tried to focus, but the memory of the nightmare still echoed, and he had to go over it in his mind, to reassure himself that he was still alive, that he hadn’t been in the mine on that terrible day in November 2142, eight years ago.

  Matt and twenty others were ten days out from Mercury, on board the deep space tug Cleveland. They were bound for Earth after their tour of duty at Erebus Mine, an ice extraction and refining facility on the South Pole of Mercury. It had been an uneventful, routine journey, and Matt was looking forward to getting back to Earth and enjoying the regulation six-month break before his next tour.

  Then, in the middle of an afternoon watch, he heard a clamour of voices coming from the command deck.

  He found the flight crew monitoring a series of distress calls from the mine; there had been some kind of explosion in the fuel refinery, out on the crater floor.

  The Cleveland’s crew responded to the call, but in the middle of a transmission from the mine, the voices on the speaker were drowned out by the high-pitched shrieking of the pressure alarms, and an enormous roaring of air. The faint cries from the mine faded away into an empty, hissing silence that was terrifying in its finality.

  As he shaved, Matt remembered the anxious faces on the command deck that day, the other passengers gathering round as they began to grasp the scale of the disaster that had struck the mine. Telemetry data streamed in for a time, telling their enigmatic story. It was agonising, knowing that they could not help; the Cleveland was beyond the point where it could alter its trajectory to return to Mercury. Instead, they could only listen to the faint transmissions from the survivors, and their fading hopes of rescue.

  It had been heart wrenching, listening to their last messages to loved ones, until finally the transmissions stopped altogether. He remembered the feeling of relief when he didn’t have to listen to them any more, and the guilt at that thought had never gone away.

  Matt rinsed the razor in hot water, and started on the other side of his face.

  The accident at Erebus Mine had gone down as the worst space accident in history; 257 people had lost their lives, and the mine had been declared a Space Grave; permanently off limits to all landings. Erebus had been the last operating base on Mercury, and shortly afterwards the planet itself had been closed to further commercial development, and no ships had visited it since.

  Matt splashed warm water over his face and washed off the stray lines of foam, and dried his face with a towel.

  The original investigation into the accident, completed two years after the accident, had been rejected by the relatives as a whitewash. The report of the investigation board had been based on analysis of the systems telemetry data from the doomed mine, and placed the blame squarely on the mine personnel for failure to follow procedures.

  The board had refused to sanction an investigative mission, citing the Federal Space Navigation Act of 2103, which made it clear that there had to be clear evidence of negligence or wrongdoing, before an operator or Government agency was obliged to recover physical evidence from a space accident.

  In the years since the accident, however, the relatives’ various law firms had managed to persuade a Federal Court of Appeal to order the Federal Spaceflight and Aviation Administration to reopen their investigation. Their case centred on new evidence – 32 seconds of restored telemetry data that had previously been unreadable because of severe data corruption.

  There had been other changes, too – the FSAA had been criticised severely over an investigation of another space accident, in which its objectivity had been in question. As a result, a separate and independent Space Accident Investigation Board had been created to investigate all future accidents, and reopen the investigation into the accident at Erebus Mine.

  As he dressed in his shirt and grey business suit, Matt wondered if the new investigation would deliver the result that the relatives hoped for. He was doubtful himself; the new evidence was open to interpretation, and he suspected that the new investigation board might well come to the same conclusion as the original one.

  But he had helped the relatives so far, and he was interested in the outcome, however it turned out. It could even help bring him nearer to personal closure, to have the events re-examined once again.

  He checked his appearance in the wardrobe mirror, straightening his tie, and sighed as he saw how tired he looked. His eyes looked back at him with a strange mixture of sadness and understanding.

  Nobody can release you but yourself.

  You must forgive yourself for surviving.

  He pulled on his coat, checked round that he had not left anything, and let himself out of the room, the door swinging closed behind him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Matt glanced at the agenda sheet, lying open on the table in front of him, as the board chairman came towards the end of his opening address.

  It was the first week in December, 2150, and Matt was seated in the audience in Committee Room A of the Federal Spaceflight and Aviation Administration, on Independence Avenue, in Washington, D.C. The grand old building, the larger of the two FSAA buildings on either side of Seventh Street, had been completely rebuilt nearly a hundred years ago in a more classical style. The
high ceilings and skylights of the main committee room gave it the feeling of a courtroom, which was a suitable atmosphere for the business of the Erebus Mine Accident Investigation Board.

  Dust motes swam in the rays of the low winter Sun that illuminated the rectangular chamber. The room was filled with over 300 people, sitting at tables facing the elevated stand at the front of the room.

  Here, surrounded by microphones, display screens and recording equipment, Chairman Trent and the rest of the board sat looking out at the audience. Robert Trent was 62, overweight, but with a piercing gaze in his pale blue eyes, and an incisive mind that had led a dozen major investigations before this one. He took a long sip from the glass of water on the desk, before continuing his address.

  ‘Planetary Mining Inc., whom I will refer to from now on as “PMI”, are not in favour of any attempt to revisit the mine, as it is a designated space grave, and because of the distress this may cause to those relatives who are not disputing the findings of the original investigation. In this respect, PMI are supported by the FSAA, and by this investigation board. The Space Graves Commission, however, have indicated that they would allow the mine to be entered for investigative purposes, if there is sufficient weight of evidence that an entry is necessary.’

  Matt cast his gaze around the room. He was seated at one of the tables in the third row, close to the lawyers for the class action. Most of the people in the room were lawyers, in fact; a disaster of this scale produced many grieving families. Matt wondered what each of them was seeking. For some, it would be closure; the need to know what had happened to their loved ones, so that they could try to move on after all these years. For others, it might be revenge, the desire to strike back at whoever had been responsible. For some, it would be the prospect of increased compensation for their loss, but there was no prospect of that unless there was a reversal of the previous finding that PMI were not negligent. And there was no chance of that unless the FSAA sanctioned an investigative mission.