its side, outside an open door to a room stacked full of equipment boxes.
Clare glanced back at her map. ‘We’re looking for the control room for Silo Two.’
They passed more doors, and then the corridor ended in a T-junction. Clare directed them down the right- hand path.
‘I think this may be it,’ Wilson announced. He was looking at a security door, standing half-open in the corridor ahead. It was splattered with dried blood.
They moved forward with a deep sense of foreboding.
The room inside yawned at them, revealing its ghastly secrets as their flashlight beams moved over the red- lit scene. Blood lay in great dried splashes and smear marks over the control consoles, and on the glass window that formed one side of the room. Through the ochre-stained glass, in the darkness of the silo, they could make out the shape of the shuttlecraft that sat inside on its four splayed legs.
‘Shit,’ Wilson muttered. Even after the sobering scenes in the accommodation levels, the scene was shocking. There was even blood on the ceiling, little tracks of droplets in criss-crossing patterns.
‘Does this look like gunfire to you?’ he said.
Clare shook her head. It looked as if someone had used a meat cleaver on the occupants.
‘This wasn’t a battle, it was murder,’ Wilson said, his voice shaking. ‘Bastards must have tricked them into opening the door, and then come in and killed them.’
‘I’d feel a lot safer if we had some weapons,’ Clare said. ‘If they’re still here, we’re in serious danger.’ She glanced at her watch, and pulled the comlink from her jacket and keyed Bergman’s ID.
‘Shit,’ she said after a moment. ‘No coverage here. We’ll have to go back to the airway to see if we can get a signal.’ She glanced around, weighing up the priorities. ‘Okay, I’ll compose a text in a minute. Let’s assess the situation here first. Can we power up the silo?’
They retrieved two seats that lay on their sides, dragged them to the consoles, and sat down. Wilson touched one of the screens in front of him, and the console sprang into life.
‘Promising,’ he commented. ‘Let’s see if it can tell us what state the shuttle’s in.’
Wilson found the lighting controls, and after a few attempts, a blaze of white light lit up the silo and control room. Having spent so long in semi-darkness, both of them screwed up their eyes against the sudden glare.
Outside the curved glass window of the control room, the silo was a large cylinder, twelve metres in diameter, sunk into the crater floor. The roof of the silo was a pair of retractable metal pressure doors that could seal the silo against the vacuum outside, for spacecraft maintenance. The roof was partly closed, which had helped save the silo from being damaged by the refinery explosion.
The squat shape of a shuttlecraft crouched on the lowered landing platform at the bottom of the silo. The vehicle was a compact arrangement of four fuel tanks, surmounted by a crew module in the shape of a flattened drum just over five metres in diameter. The whole arrangement stood eight metres high on four shock absorbing landing legs, set wide apart for maximum stability.
Compared to the spaceplane, the shuttle was ugly and utilitarian; its lower structure was a simple trusswork frame through which the fuel tanks, engines, and associated pipework could be seen. To the two people who looked in at it now, however, it seemed a creature beyond beauty, a lifeboat that could get them home.
As their eyes grew accustomed to the glare, Clare and Wilson saw that the silo was not perfectly white, as it had first appeared; its walls were grey with soot marks and dust blown in from the crater floor from countless landings and takeoffs. The circular landing platform, which was lowered for crew embarkation, was blackened with the exhaust from the engines.
An extendable docking corridor, like the jetbridge at an airport, reached out from the side of the silo, and was locked on to the shuttle’s main cabin door. What was even more promising, however, was a refuelling boom, carrying several large-diameter pipes from a recess in the silo’s wall to the fuelling connectors below the crew module.
‘Looks like they were in the middle of refuelling when the bastards broke in here,’ Wilson said. ‘I wonder how far they got?’ He tapped at the screen for a few seconds.
‘Anything?’
‘Hold on.’ Wilson scanned the display. ‘Oh, yes—’ He looked up in triumph. ‘It was partly fuelled. The silo’s kept the propane from freezing, but it’s still very cold; we won’t get an accurate reading until the heaters have warmed the tanks up.’
‘How much?’ Clare felt as if she could hardly breathe. Please let there be enough in the tanks to make it to orbit, please let there be enough.
‘Just a moment.’ Wilson’s mouth worked in silence as he calculated the weight of the fuel and oxygen. ‘Okay. We’ll need to recheck it when it’s up to temperature, but I think there’s – fourteen tonnes.’
He looked up at Clare, and he saw the hope die in her eyes.
‘It’s not enough, is it?’ he said in a whisper. ‘How much do we need?’
‘Minimum fuel load for Mercury orbit is eighteen tonnes – I remember it from when I trained on one of these things.’ She bowed her head in despair, looking down at the control console.
Wilson stared out at the shuttle. ‘I can’t believe we’re so close,’ he whispered.
Suddenly, Clare’s head snapped up.
‘It’s eighteen tonnes for a
Wilson’s fingers moved over the screen, searching out files.
‘Got it. No, there it is.’ He tapped at a file icon, and it expanded to fill the screen. He scrolled down the table of launch weights and minimum fuel loads. ‘What load will we have with just six of us and no cargo?’
‘Five hundred kilos, no more.’
‘Five hundred, five hundred,’ Wilson searched down the list. ‘Okay, the table says we need fourteen point eight tonnes of fuel, but we can save some more weight by throwing out the spare seats and anything else we don’t need.
‘Or leave us stranded if we don’t,’ Clare muttered. It was terrifyingly close. The Astronautics Corps rules were quite clear: never, ever, take off without sufficient reserve for contingencies. But this wasn’t a normal situation.
‘When can you have a more accurate figure for the fuel?’ she asked.
‘Soon as it’s warmed up. An hour or so, I guess; it’s pretty cold out there.’
‘Okay. Can you get ground power on, and switch on all the heaters. And check out the helium purge as well; we’ll need to clear all the lines.’ She swung her seat round to face the door, and stood up. ‘I’m going to power it up.’
The docking corridor was dark and cold after the glare of the silo. Clare walked along the narrow, rectangular tube, uncomfortably aware that outside its thin metal walls, there was nothing but vacuum in the silo.
Light streamed in from the cockpit windows on her left, and glistened on the thin film of frost that clung to some of the metal surfaces.
The main cabin door of the shuttle was open. She stepped inside, and shivered in the freezing air. Although the silo was protected from the outside by heavy doors, it was close to the surface, and the cold of space had leaked into the silo over the years. Light streamed in through the frost-covered cockpit windows on her left, and glistened on the thin film of frost that covered every surface.
She squeezed her way between the rows of passenger seats, making her way forward and left to the two flight crew seats that faced the curved cockpit windows. The interior was like an airliner; there were pockets in the seatbacks filled with leaflets, held in place by elastic netting, and a part-circle of overhead stowage lockers ran round the ceiling of the cabin.
There were no signs of any struggle here. It looked as if the cabin had been cleaned for the next flight and the shuttle was being refuelled, when disaster struck. She sat down in the commander’s seat, on the left-hand side, and put on a headset that she found lying on the centre console. She selected the intercom for the control room.
‘Hey.’
‘How is it in there?’ Wilson’s voice came over the headset.
‘Fucking cold. Can we get the cabin air packs going?’
