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
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
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
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
