where it entered the enclosure. Eventually, he spoke.
‘Okay, I think I know what to do here. Can you give me the baseband feed patch cable, the one with the right-angled connector on?’
Abrams bent down and unravelled one of the cables that they had made that morning, and handed it to Elliott, who was busy disconnecting cables inside the cabinet.
‘Thanks.’ Elliott hooked up the cable from the radio, and rerouted more connections inside the cabinet.
Abrams passed him more cables and connectors as he worked. It was hot in the sunlight, and Elliott moved himself round a little to spread the heat load on his suit. He took his time, double-checking the connections, until he was satisfied he had completed the patch correctly.
‘Okay – I’m ready to give it a try now. Can you get that note we made of the coordinates, and turn the antenna mount to face Earth? The control box is over there, where the power cables enter.’
‘Sure.’ Abrams retrieved a small plastic slate from one of his suit pockets and went over to the mount controls. The antenna was normally pointed remotely, by a computer in the control centre, but had evidently been stuck in one position since the accident. He opened the cover to the control panel. A small keypad and control panel lay inside, and a tiny monitor screen that showed a telescopic view from the antenna mount.
Abrams switched the antenna mount to manual control, and punched in the altitude and azimuth figures written on the slate. He pressed the ALIGN button.
For several moments nothing happened; the antenna mount remained stuck in place. Then, with a jerk, the mount freed, and began moving round slowly to its new setting. The shadows around the antenna changed shape as the huge bowl panned across the landscape, turning to point at the bright star of the Earth. Elliott looked up as the shadow of the dish fell over him.
‘That’s great. Right, we’re all hooked up here. I’m going to scan across the Deep Space Control channels, and see if we can hear any transmissions.’
‘Hey, it’s not pointing directly at the Earth,’ Abrams said, looking at the telescopic view. The tiny disc of the Earth was off to one side of the crosshairs.
‘Oh, okay, my numbers are probably a bit out. Can you manually move the antenna to point at the target, and move it around very slightly, until we get a signal?’
‘Yeah, I think so,’ Abrams responded. ‘Okay, I’m moving it now.’
Elliott switched the radio on, and set it up to scan across the frequency range.
‘Right. Let’s hope this works. I’ve set the gain as high as it goes, and patched it into our suit radio channel. Okay, keep as quiet as you can, and move the antenna round, very slowly. If you hear a signal, stop. Okay?’
‘Okay. I’m centred on the target. Moving it around now.’
Elliott closed his eyes and listened to the swish and hiss of the radio. The sound changed in quality as the antenna moved imperceptibly against the sky, becoming thin and faint, and then close and loud again. A high- pitched trilling sound broke out, and Abrams halted the antenna. Elliott listened to the sound, and tried switching the radio coding scheme. The sound changed, but nothing useful could be heard.
‘Keep moving it around, very slowly,’ Elliott said.
The sound broke up and faded as the antenna moved again. Elliott felt that they were close now, and he concentrated, trying to catch any change in the background noise coming from the radio. He thought he heard something, and he strained to hear.
‘—OFF AND ON AGAIN TWICE, OR MAKE CONTACT—’
Both men recoiled in unison from the voice that blasted out in their headsets. Elliott turned the gain down hurriedly. Too far – the voice faded. He got it back, and the recorded voice carried on: ‘—Deep Space Control calling. We have lost contact with you. We have seen an x-band beacon signal on the Erebus Mine frequency. Please respond by switching the beacon signal off and on again twice, or make contact on any deep space channel. Repeat. Mercury Two Zero Seven, this is Deep Space Control calling—’
‘They know we’re here!’ Abrams yelled, his voice jubilant. ‘They’re trying to reach us!’ He came across to Elliott, and thumped him on the shoulder. ‘Fantastic work, Martin!’
Behind his darkened visor, Elliott was grinning.
‘I’m going to try to get the message out. Let me set the frequency, and we’ll see if they can hear us. Have you got the text?’
‘Sure.’ Abrams pulled out another plastic slate from one of his suit pockets, and passed it to Elliott.
‘Okay, here goes.’ Elliott studied the message written on the slate, and looked up. ‘Just like it says?’
‘Just like it says. We don’t want to tell them
Elliott held the slate up in front of his visor, turned the transmit switch on, and read out: ‘Deep Space Control, this is Mercury Two Zero Seven. We have crashed in Chao Meng-fu crater following a landing accident. Zero casualties. Spacecraft is destroyed repeat destroyed. We have entered the mine and it still has breathable atmosphere. No survivors located. We have located sufficient supplies for several weeks, and have limited solar power only. Request assistance. Please respond.’
Elliott repeated the message three more times, leaving a pause between them, and ended the transmission.
‘There. Let’s see if they can hear us. It’ll take eighteen minutes for the round trip signal, even if they acknowledge immediately.’ He looked round. ‘Shall we have a go at moving the power array?’
The reply came a little over twenty minutes later. They were directing Bob Five to turn the jammed power array to face the Sun, when the voice of Earth sounded unexpectedly in their headsets. It was faint, and distorted by distance and by the makeshift radio setup, but they could make the words out clearly.
‘Mercury Two Zero Seven, Deep Space Control. Are we glad to hear from you guys.’ A noise of cheering could be heard in the background. ‘We’ve got some people here who would really, really like to talk to you, but we need to know if you can hear us. Please respond when you receive this, and stand by for a relay message from Andersen Base.’ There was a short pause, and then an unmistakeable drawl came on the line.
‘Two Zero Seven, this is Colonel Helligan. We’re sure glad to hear that you’re all okay. We’ve been really worried about you back here, and there’s a whole team of people working here to figure out how to help you. We need to know that you’re getting this, so I’ll keep this brief, but if you have access to the mine computer, we can tell you how to restart the mine reactor and get some more power.
‘This is a privileged command sequence, and you need to follow these instructions carefully. First, you need to login using the following user name and password …’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Matt Crawford and Rick Bergman stepped out from the cage into the sub-main shaft station, on the 400 level. After their grim discovery deep in the mine, it was good to escape the dank confines of the long shaft, and Matt breathed deeply of the fresher air, as Bergman tried the comlink.
‘Shit, there’s still no coverage. We’ll have to walk back to the main shaft and see if we can get a signal there. Why can’t these fucking things work?’
They hurried back along the haulage way, towards the bottom of the main shaft.
The continuing delay in being able to warn the others of the danger from the robots wore at Matt’s nerves. His anxiety for his crewmates was tempered by the fact that Bob Five seemed to have no memory of the accident or of what happened afterwards. On the other hand, how had the robot known that there was air on the other side of the inner hangar doors? Yet if the robot intended to kill them, why hadn’t it done it before now?
He couldn’t work it out. They had argued the points back and forth on the journey back up the sub-main shaft, and had come to no conclusion except that they had to warn the others of what they had found, and power Bob Five down immediately.
Matt wondered if the others had tried to get any more robots started up, and that thought made him pick up the pace.
They had been walking for a few minutes, when Bergman stopped and tried the comlink again. To their surprise, it worked; there seemed to be plenty of signal strength, and almost straightaway, the comlink beeped,
