Anger suddenly kicked in, and she kicked about in frustration in the sea of useless scraps of paper and bits and pieces, looking for anything that resembled an air cylinder or a suit backpack.
Inside her helmet, an amber LED lit up and started blinking, and the panic rose, constricting her lungs. Another few litres of air and it would start to blink red, and then it was just a countdown to the end.
She fought back tears of frustration and despair. Where the fuck was the air? It was as if someone had been there before them, and had removed anything that could have saved them.
In the distance, she saw Abrams stagger, go down, and lie immobile on the floor. Elliott was on his knees in the dust, close to where Wilson lay.
‘Steve,’ she said, slowly and carefully, ‘can you hear me? Move your arm if you can hear me.’
Wilson’s arm twitched slightly, then he raised a hand. She felt a surge of relief that she was not going to die alone, and then she spotted the air cylinder.
It was lying behind a fallen roof girder, and she only saw it because of the way she was facing; she had missed it on her first pass. She started towards it, trying not to hurry, but it was definitely an air cylinder, with the familiar black-and-white marking on its neck. She hauled the cylinder out of the dust, and turned it round to see the gauge, just as her helmet LED started to blink red.
The gauge read empty, and she saw her death. She tried the valve in case the gauge was faulty, but the valve was wide open; the cylinder was completely empty. She sagged at the knees, and muted her mike as she gave herself up to sobs of despair.
Not like this, she thought, not like this. Not in this empty hangar in a forgotten mine, millions of kilometres from the air and oceans of Earth, with no way of telling anyone what had happened.
There was no air. They were trapped in vacuum on an airless world, and they were going to die.
She felt a sick slide of fear at what would happen to her as the air ran out. It wouldn’t be quick; she would subside into panic, hyperventilation and convulsions, before death finally claimed her. She wondered if she would have the courage to end it all, before it got that far.
Matt was still moving; she could see him in her helmet lights, as she slumped over sideways in the dust. She would watch him, she thought; it would give her something to do while her life ebbed away.
Matt was crawling towards a large object near the outer doors. His helmet LED blinked red. He crawled some more, until he was in front of the huge armoured form of a mining robot. It lay sprawled where it had fallen, face down in the dust that covered the floor.
Matt pulled himself up to the body of the robot, and hauled himself up the armoured carapace until his face was over the maintenance panel on its back. Already, he could feel difficulty breathing. He was running out of oxygen, and his head was aching with the exertion; his temples throbbed with every pulse beat.
He wiped the dust off the status display, but it was dark; the robot’s power pack had shut down years ago.
‘Please, let there be something left,’ he whispered, and turned the main mode switch to the start position. It was hard to turn, and for a moment, he thought it had stuck fast in the cold, but then it slid into position. He found the restart button, popped the safety cover off with shaking fingers, and pressed it.
‘Come on boy, fire up,’ he breathed, as he released the button. He waited for several seconds, his head throbbing with pain. Nothing happened; there wasn’t enough left in the power pack for a restart. Matt closed his eyes, and slumped down besides the robot’s body in despair.
Unseen by Matt, a small LED glowed green, the first light in the darkness of the mine that was not their own, and a group of smaller LEDs blinked on.
Long moments passed as the robot lay motionless. Inside its body, the power pack was starting up; electrical power slowly rose and stabilised. The main status display came on as the primary cortex restarted and sought out its instructions.
A faint whine of motors came through its steel body, and the heavy bulk of the robot stirred in the dust. Matt pushed himself back and away, too weak to stand up, as the robot flexed its huge, ball-jointed arms. It planted them firmly on the ground, and heaved itself slowly onto its knees. It stood up, one leg at a time, dust streaming off its body, its armoured head swivelling round and downwards as it sought out its master. A ring of green LEDs came to life round each of its two video eyes.
‘Identify,’ Matt gasped, knowing that the robot could hear him on the suit radio channel.
‘I AM BOB FIVE,’ the robot’s deep voice replied in Matt’s headset.
‘Bob Five – emergency.’ Matt struggled to get the words out. ‘Help us. We need air.’
The robot gazed down impassively at Matt.
‘Bob Five. Emergency. Help us.’ Matt was gasping now. ‘Get us some air. Hurry.’ The headache was intense now, a drilling pain between his temples, and his vision was contracting.
The robot started moving. It swivelled round, and lumbered off towards one side of the main hangar doors.
‘No – Bob Five. We need help. Don’t – don’t go …’ Matt tried to shout, but it came out barely louder than a whisper. He collapsed in the dust, arms outstretched towards the robot, imploring it to come back.
The robot stopped by the hangar door controls, and extended one of its giant hands to take hold of the manual door winder. Its metal claw squeezed closed on the handle, then its wrist started to rotate, spinning round like an electric drill as it turned the winder.
A deep moan of seized machinery reverberated through the hangar floor and into Matt’s helmet, followed by a slow, grinding vibration, as metal moved against metal in the dark.
The hangar doors were closing.
Clare felt the noise, and turned round to face the doors. She could see them moving, shutting them in, sealing them off from any help, as if anyone could help them here, in this forgotten corner of the Solar System.
The robot continued to wind the vast doors closed, the edges crawling together, centimetre by centimetre. Each half of the door was made from overlapping sections, and as each section latched shut, there was a dull
It must have taken many minutes, but in Clare’s oxygen-starved brain, it seemed as if the doors were racing shut, and she tried to reach out her hand, to try to claw her way out of the hangar, out into the crater and the distant sunlight. But no sunlight fell on the entrance to Erebus Mine, there had never been any sunlight here, not ever, and the doors were nearly closed now.
The sound reverberated through the mountain and into Clare’s clutching fingers, as the last section of the doors thudded home, and the locking actuators moved to seal the entrance.
Dust sprang up, and collapsed back to the floor like water, as the locking pins slid home and locked the doors shut. They were trapped, entombed forever in the mine, and they would never be found.
They would never send anyone to rescue us, Clare thought, they would never send another ship, not after another loss. Helligan had been right; a few more dead bodies wouldn’t make any difference – they should have left this cursed place alone, left it with its dead, left it alone in the deeps of space.
The robot thudded past, near to where Clare lay, and moved away from them, leaving them to die in the darkness. Clare lay down and gave up; she had no strength left. She felt the cold of the hangar floor creeping through her suit, draining the heat from her body, and she wondered how much longer it would take.
The red LED in her helmet filled her contracting vision. Already, she was beginning to lose control of her breathing; it came in short, sharp gasps, and her chest heaved, trying to draw oxygen into her lungs.
This is the end, she thought, and her fingers crept towards her faceplate release; this is how it all ends, entombed in a dead mine on a dead world, and no one would ever come to recover her body, not out here, so close to the Sun, although it was darker than the night.
She closed her eyes.
She felt another vibration coming through the floor, and in her confused mind, she thought the mine was collapsing, burying them in their tomb. She squeezed her eyes shut and cringed, waiting for the roof to fall in on her and crush her, but the pain didn’t come.
She opened her eyes, and the light from her helmet had turned into a cone of light, stabbing upwards. She puzzled over this for an age; there couldn’t be any shafts of light in a vacuum, then she realised that a dense fog was whirling about in great clouds, rolling across her vision. It filled the hangar, reaching into the corners with
