ghostly fingers. Dust and scraps of paper whirled about in the mist, and she heard a faint noise, like a seashell held to her ear when she was a child.
Something nudged her, and again, and she realised she was being buffeted by something. Something was blowing around her, blowing
She was unable to take it in at first; her mind refused to believe what she saw.
Twenty metres away, the robot was operating another manual winder. Another set of doors, huge in the darkness, opened slowly, and
Air. There was
Clare’s chest heaved, and she convulsed; there was nothing to breathe any more, there was nothing in her lungs. She was surrounded by air – if she could only get her helmet open. She tried to unlock her faceplate, but her fingers would not move. Try, she told herself, and her fingers responded, but it was too slow, too late—
Someone grabbed her shoulder and turned her onto her back, then there was a fumbling, a click, and a sudden suck of air as pressures equalised. A hand lifted her faceplate, and blessed fresh air rushed into her lungs.
She took a deep breath – too deep, and the ice-cold air burned in her chest, but she didn’t care, all she wanted to do was breathe, breathe. She inhaled dust, and coughed, but it didn’t matter, she just sucked more air down.
A face loomed over her as she lay there, and she saw that it was Matt. He knelt down beside her, his eyes searching her face. He looked away for a moment, speaking to someone else, and then turned back to her.
She gazed up at him, unable to speak. The emotion at still being alive, of coming so close to death and surviving, rose up and overwhelmed her. Her face broke up and she turned away, sitting up on one arm, not wanting him to see her like this. Matt put a hand on her shoulder. Her body shook with sobs.
‘It’s okay,’ he said, ‘you’re going to be all right.’
‘I thought – I thought I was going to die,’ she whispered through her tears.
‘Didn’t we all,’ Matt said, and laughed, wiping his eyes. He moved round so that she could lie against him, and put an arm round her. They remained that way for a while, neither of them moving.
Eventually, Clare pulled herself up onto one shoulder, and sniffed as she composed herself. Her chest hurt, and her throat was dry from breathing in the cold air.
‘How are the others?’ Her voice was hoarse and unsteady.
‘They’re all okay. Steve’s in the worst way, but he’s going to be all right. Rick’s with him now.’
Clare looked around her, and her eyes widened.
‘Air – how come there’s air in here?’
‘I know. I don’t understand it.’ Matt looked to the far end of the hangar, to where the robot stood by the open inner doors, then back to Clare. ‘You should take it easy for a while; you’re suffering from hypoxia.’
Clare complied reluctantly, and lay back down. She closed her eyes and focused on her breathing, letting the oxygen flow back into her lungs.
As her body recovered, the memory of the crash and the frantic race for survival came flooding back. Her mind flicked over ever detail of the last hour; remembering it, analysing it. The crash, the explosion, the open outer doors, and now air in the mine. She didn’t know what all of it meant, but one thing was certain.
They had to get a message back to Earth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Later, nearly an hour after the great rush of air that had saved them, they were gathered together in a circle in the middle of the hangar, helmets off, sitting in their spacesuits on some freight boxes they had found. They had opened some of the emergency rations from the spacesuit survival packs, and shared the small bars of food round between themselves.
Clare checked her watch. It showed 19:06, so it was still August 9 – the day of their arrival over Mercury. She worked back over the events in her mind. It seemed hardly possible that, less than two hours ago, she had been sitting in the commander’s seat on the spaceplane, coming in to land. Now the ship was just a twisted pile of scrap metal out on the crater floor, and they were marooned, trapped inside an abandoned mine.
Her breath smoked in the frigid air. All around them, a layer of frost lay over every exposed surface. The air had dropped all its moisture when it encountered the deep cold of the hangar, and it had frozen out on the metal structures and rock walls.
The robot stood by the inner hangar door, its eyes glowing in the darkness, waiting for a command.
There was no telling whether they could find any more food, but Clare had insisted that they eat something to get their blood sugar back up before they did anything else. They ate in semi-darkness, by the lights on two of the helmets; they had switched off the others to save the batteries.
Clare picked out the last crumbs from a food bar wrapper, and crumpled it in her hand. It was time to take stock.
She knocked on a freight box for attention, and looked round at them all. Their faces were lit from below, giving them all an eerie appearance.
‘Okay guys, let’s assess our situation. It seems we’ll be staying here awhile.’
She chose her words carefully. She didn’t want to underplay their situation, but she had to keep everyone’s spirits up and talk positively.
‘Our most important needs right now are air, warmth, water and food. If we can secure those, we can start thinking about how to call home.
‘First – air. Seems like we’ve got plenty of that.’ She gestured in the direction of the open inner doors. ‘I guess we’ve all got some questions about how it came to be there, but let’s do this in order.
‘Second priority – warmth. It’s pretty cold in here, but we can manage okay with our suits on. Steve, what’s the temperature doing?’
Wilson glanced at his suit gauges. He had been keeping track of the air temperature and pressure while they were eating.
‘Minus eleven degrees and still rising. Oxygen partial pressure is stable at ninety percent nominal – we’ll be fine as long as we take it easy.’
‘Okay, good. Now – water and food. We’ve got enough emergency rations for another forty-eight hours, and that’s it. We’ll run out of water before that – all we’ve got is what’s in the bottles in the ration packs.’
‘We could scrape some of that frost off before it melts,’ Matt pointed at the exposed girders on the walls of the hangar. ‘It won’t taste too good, but it should be okay to drink.’
‘Good idea. Matt, you figure out how to collect it, and fill up as many of the water bottles as you can.’
She looked round the hangar, then back to the group.
‘I think our next move should be to head for the accommodation levels, to see if we can find some food and more water.’
They all nodded and muttered agreement, then Abrams said: ‘Before we go looking for food, I want to know why there’s air here, when there shouldn’t be any, and how far does it go? Is the whole mine still pressurised?’
Clare nodded.
‘Okay, questions. One – why is there air here when the atmosphere was supposed to have been lost? Another one?’
‘Why were the main doors deliberately opened?’ Matt said, his voice subdued.
‘Okay, that’s two big questions that we can’t answer straightaway. Any more?’ Clare found herself looking at Bergman, and realised that he was going to ask the question that she dreaded.
‘Why did we crash?’ His words hung in the air like an accusation.
She regarded Bergman levelly.
