Below Mercury

‘What? I asked you earlier and you just said nothing!’ Wilson’s voice showed his anger.

Clare turned round in her seat to face him.

‘I said, we’re not taking them. And before you start yelling at me, lieutenant, just think how it will look, if we come back loaded up with platinum, but with all the passengers dead. Leave them behind. For your career, if nothing else.’ She turned back to the controls. ‘I’m not going to talk about this again.’

Wilson stood in the doorway, considering. For one moment, just one, he thought of what might happen if Foster had an accident. Then there would be no one to tell him what to do.

As quickly as the thought occurred, it evaporated. She was right. If he came back alone, with a cargo of bullion and some story about how everyone else had been killed, he would be up in front of an investigation board before he left the base. No, she was right, he decided. He felt a tide of disappointment wash over him as he hit the button to close the door, and went to join Clare on the flight deck.

‘Pressurising tanks,’ Clare said, reaching out to the controls.

A hiss and rush of helium gas sounded in the shuttle’s pipework, and it creaked beneath them as the gas flowed into the propellant tanks, building up the pressure.

Clare knew she should do a takeoff briefing, but she couldn’t be bothered. Wilson had done the final checks; let him worry about it. Her gaze wandered across the silo to the control room opposite.

Matt stood there, looking back at her.

For one moment, she thought it was her imagination playing some cruel joke on her, but then Matt thumped on the curved window and shouted something.

‘Hold launch!’ she blurted out, and leaped out of her seat. She ran to the door and banged the button to open it. The rumble of falling rock was very loud now. Wilson halted the takeoff sequencer and followed Clare as she raced along the docking corridor and back to the control room.

She rounded the corner – and cannoned into Matt.

The impact nearly knocked her flying, and for a moment, she backed away in shock. Wilson came to a halt behind her. Matt was wide-eyed and panting, shouting words that didn’t make any sense. He grabbed Clare’s arms, his fingers gripping hard in his desperation.

‘We need to lift off! There’s a robot behind me! It killed Rick, and it’s going to kill us! If you don’t get us out of here in the next few minutes, we’re all dead!’

‘I – I thought you were dead,’ she gasped, her eyes betraying everything. Matt released Clare and yelled at Wilson, trying to get him to understand.

‘I’ve closed and locked the pressure doors, but that won’t hold it for long. We need to get out of here, quickly!’

Outside the silo complex, in the main passage, the tunnelling robots broke through the last pile of rock. With a thunderous roar, the remaining air in the mine blasted out through the hole they had made, bursting the rock fall aside. The two robots stood firm in the maelstrom of escaping air and flying rock, and then strode through the widening gap.

The lone robot that had pursued Matt joined them at the branch to the silo. With a slow deliberation of purpose, the three robots turned, and advanced towards the pressure doors.

Inside the silo, Clare, Matt and Wilson heard the explosion and sudden roar of air in the passage outside. As the noise faded away, it was replaced by a tremendous pounding, a flailing of hardened steel pincers beating on the sealed pressure doors; the three robots were attacking it together.

Clare grabbed Matt’s arm, and pulled him towards the docking corridor. They thumped across and, as they entered the shuttle’s cabin, she grabbed him close, and kissed him hard on the lips, not caring that Wilson would see.

‘I thought I’d lost you,’ she said, releasing him, and she ran to the commander’s seat. ‘Strap in.’ She restarted the countdown, and prepared to withdraw the docking corridor. ‘Steve, is the door closed?’

There was no response, and she turned round.

Wilson wasn’t in the cabin.

Clare turned back to the windows with a terrible sense of foreboding, and saw Wilson in the control room, rushing to grab an armload of metal bars. She leaned forward in horror.

‘Steve, no! It’s not worth it!’ she screamed, banging on the window in frustration, ‘Steve!’

The pounding of the robots on the pressure doors stopped. Across the silo, Wilson looked up, and straight back into Clare’s eyes. Realisation of his peril dawned on his face, and he dropped the bars.

‘Steve …’ she whispered, her hands on the window, knowing that she had lost him.

There was a tremendous bang outside as the silo doors breached, and Matt was out of his seat, racing for the door close button, just as the air started to rush out of the silo. The door slid shut on a roaring of air, and a thin cry of terror on the wind that he would never forget.

In the control room, Wilson dashed for the door, but his way was blocked by the huge form of a mining robot, its glowing red eyes looking down at him. He backed away, until he could go no further, and he turned round to face Clare, his hands on the glass, his terrified eyes imploring her for help, his mouth saying something that she could never hear.

The robot strode across the room, and grabbed Wilson with its pincers. His mouth opened in a silent scream as the robot pulled him apart, blood splashing over the control room windows in bright red trails as it tore his arms and legs off. Wilson’s body flailed about in the eerie silence as he was dismembered, until the robot finally severed his head, and threw his bloody remains to the floor.

Clare fell back into her seat, her mouth open, unable to move with shock at what she had just seen.

Matt slid into the copilot’s seat next to her, his face aghast.

‘We need to get out of here!’ he said, and then shouted: ‘Clare!’

She turned to look at him, white-faced, her eyes glazed and unseeing, and then she seemed to understand what he was saying. With an effort, she seemed to recover herself. Her eyes flickered uncertainly across the controls, as if she had forgotten what they did, and then she suddenly reached out a hand and punched the corridor disconnect button.

Outside the shuttle, the docking corridor withdrew into the wall of the silo, folding up in sections like a telescope. Air gushed from its open end as the mine continued to empty.

Clare operated the controls to open the silo doors, and the lights in the silo went out. The circle of roof above the shuttle filled slowly with stars as the doors moved aside, spilling dust and rock fragments into the silo as they withdrew.

Alarm lights flashed red in the silo complex, silhouetting the form of another robot, standing in the doorway at the end of the docking corridor. The pressure door strained against the robot’s body, trying to seal off the escaping air. The robot gripped the door, and with a massive heave, tore it bodily from its tracks.

Matt flinched as the robot hurled the heavy door at the side of the shuttle, denting the fragile hull. The vehicle rocked on its landing legs.

‘Pressure’s holding,’ Clare said, her voice unsteady. ‘I’ve started the ignition sequence. Strap in.’

Matt pulled his seat straps over his shoulders as Clare’s hands moved across the controls, her eyes flicking across the displays and switches.

The vehicle creaked loudly beneath them; its fuel tanks were at full pressure. There was a sharp hiss, then a muffled thump as the pressure feeds disconnected and the refuelling boom swung back into its recess in the wall of the silo. A fog of released vapour swirled briefly about the shuttle, and vanished into space.

From the flight controls, an alarm sounded, together with an insistent computer voice.

‘Danger, landing platform lowered.’

Clare cancelled the alarm with a flick of her hand. Matt looked at the view of the silo walls with concern. The landing platform was always raised to the surface for launches.

‘Ignore it, we can take off from down here,’ Clare said, ‘I’m not hanging around any longer.’ She pressed some more buttons to engage the automatic launch sequence, and pulled her seat straps over her shoulders.

‘Launching in fifteen seconds,’ the flight computer announced.

Across the crater floor, deep inside the reactor complex, the other mining robots stood on top of the reactor pressure vessel, on the refuelling floor. The wrecked control rods were strewn over the sealed manhole covers,