Below Mercury

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