‘Jesus Christ.’ Bergman looked ahead and back. They were between two doors. Which one was closer? Forward or back?
‘This way!’ he yelled, sprinting back up the passage,
They ran, and behind them, a faint noise began, just a whisper at first, but rising rapidly to an approaching roar, like a train coming up the passage behind them. The pressure wave was heading towards them, racing up the passage.
Barely ten metres from the pressure door, the roar of escaping air exploded over them, filling the passage with the howling of a hurricane. They fought to run, then walk, then just stop themselves from being blown over by the force of the gale that tried to push them back towards the shaft. Matt fell onto all fours, and crawled forward.
‘Get to the side!’ Bergman yelled. He was already at the left-hand wall, hugging the sides, where the wind was less powerful. The passage filled with dust and debris, making it hard to see. Matt crawled to the side and stood up, hanging onto the wall with his fingers.
They forged ahead, one step at a time, their eyes screwed up tight against the stinging dust that whipped into their faces.
Bergman, the more powerful of the two, reached the doorframe first, and hauled himself through. Behind him, Matt was struggling to move forward against the howling wind, and he could feel his strength going; any moment, and the wind would have him. It buffeted him against the wall, trying to shake him loose.
Was this not his dream, where he was trapped in the mine? Any minute now it would go cold, icy cold, and the ghosts would start flying past.
A hand grabbed his wrist, and pulled him forward, and through the frame of the pressure door. A moment later, the noise of the wind increased to a jet engine scream, as the twin halves of the door came together, constricting the air into a narrowing gap. Then the doors slammed shut, and the gale faded.
Bergman coughed in the thick dust that filled the air around them.
‘Thanks,’ Matt gasped. He collapsed in a heap by the door frame, and both of them looked up at the door controls. The readout showed the rapidly falling pressure on the other side.
‘Oh, no, no, no,’ Bergman muttered, as the pressure fell away, and with it, their hopes of escape.
They watched in despair, as the pressure decayed to zero.
‘That’s it,’ Matt said flatly, after a minute. ‘Nothing on the other side. Oh shit, what about the others …’ He looked up at Bergman, who shook his head.
‘Not unless they got behind a pressure door in time. I don’t think they’ll have—’
Bergman stopped, and looked round.
‘What’s up?’ Matt demanded.
‘Can’t you hear it?’
Matt heard it then, the rising whine of a heavy-duty power pack starting up.
Both men turned round to look at the mining robot slumped in the passage behind them, close to the pressure door. An LED blinked on its rear panel, and as they watched, more lit up.
Matt struggled to his feet, just as the body of the robot stirred in the dust. With a grinding, grating noise, its head moved, and the circles of LEDs round its eyes lit up red as its vision flickered into life.
The head looked up, and swung round to face them. They were so close to the robot that they could see the camera lenses widening behind the clear glass as its gaze locked onto them.
Matt and Bergman backed away slowly, then broke and ran.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Everything has its day.
For Erebus Mine, it was back when it had been the biggest helium-3 extraction facility in the Solar System, when a young Matt Crawford had looked out over the crater floor and watched the lights of the spacecraft out on the landing pads.
Nine years ago, however, those days were over, and the coded instructions that made their way into the mine’s computers didn’t care, just as the minds that took the decision didn’t care.
It was always going to be this way; bringing over 200 people back to Earth was just too expensive. An accident was required, one that would close the mine, and put it forever beyond the reach of prying eyes.
The explosion out at the refinery had been easy; the robots had followed their new instructions and walked into the mouths of the high-pressure turbines. The compressors had exploded in ruin as they ingested the steel bodies of the robots, destroying the processing plant and releasing thousands of tonnes of compressed gas, and the huge main explosion had followed moments later.
The duty controllers at the mine didn’t even had time to understand what was happening. The explosion and fire out at the refinery had distracted them at a critical moment. If they had seen what was happening at their consoles, if they had seen the automated instructions overriding the safety systems and locking them out, perhaps they could have stopped it. As it was, the only warning they had of their doom was the screaming of the pressure alarms as the main hangar doors started to open.
It had been timed to coincide with a shift change, when most of the mine personnel were either in the workings or waiting by the shaft stations, ready to go down.
The maintenance staff in the hangers were the first to die, swept out into the airless crater with the first rush of air. The sound of the alarms and the cries of the workers had been drowned out by the terrible shrieking of the wind, as it carried the air out of the mine.
The duty controllers had reacted quickly when they realised that the mine was losing air, but when they triggered the emergency doors, the system ignored them, and by the time they figured that out, it was too late for the people in the workings and the hangar levels. Everyone who didn’t manage to get behind a working pressure door was unconscious from anoxia in seconds, and dead in minutes.
Those in the accommodation and control levels survived longest; they managed to operate the manual controls and close the pressure doors, sealing themselves in. They managed to contact Earth and relate their plight, before communications were cut.
Before the robots came for them.
The last thing they heard, as they waited for the end, was the relentless pounding of the robots on the sealed pressure doors.
In the abandoned passages and workings of the mine, the mining robots responded to the commands sent out by the central computer, and slowly came back to life. Some did not move, their power packs exhausted after the long years, but the ones that did respond would be more than enough to do the bidding of their masters.
In a parody of resurrection, their mechanical limbs moved in the dust, and the robots started to get up from where they lay. The rings of red LEDs round their video eyes blinked into malevolent life as they stood up, dust streaming down from their armoured bodies.
Their orders were clear, just as they had been nine years ago. Destroy communications. Kill the personnel. Only this time, it would be done properly; there would be no evidence, no survivors hiding out in sealed rooms, and no possibility of any mission coming back to discover what had happened.
The robots started to move, marching down the empty passages towards the reactor complex, out on the crater floor.
The compact nuclear reactor was coming up to power, its control rods withdrawn. It was a safe and reliable design, used throughout the Solar System in remote outposts. Even starved of coolant flow, the reactor would take some time to reach dangerous temperatures, and well before then, the fusible plugs that held back tanks of neutron absorber would have melted, drenching the core in gadolinium nitrate and quenching the nuclear reaction.
The robots that broke down the armoured doors and walked into the reactor containment knew their duty: to sacrifice themselves, just as their comrades had sacrificed themselves all those years ago to cause the explosion in the heart of the refinery.
They moved across to the straining feedwater pumps and closed the manual isolation valves hard shut, preventing the emergency override from sending any cooling water flow to the overheating core. More robots tore