Free Below Mercury by Mark Anson Page B

seconds. Or would that put so many of them off that she would be replaced, with another, less experienced commander who would toe the Company line, and cheerfully fly them into disaster?
    She started nodding, to no one in particular.
    ‘Okay. I accept that we’ve got little choice. Let’s work on finding ways to buy us some more time on the landing.’
    Helligan looked back at her without speaking, knowing that if the exchange continued, she would put the wind up everyone.
    He turned away.
    ‘Mr Rawlings,’ he drawled as he moved to the back of the room again, ‘please continue your briefing.’
    The mission planner stood up again, and consulted his notes, turning pages over.
    ‘Okay, so you, ah, make the landing. The landing pad at Erebus Mine is less than two kilometres from the main mine portal, so it’s within walking range – you’ll need a motorised trolley for all your equipment, though. I’ll leave the details of the mine entry and exploration to my colleagues this afternoon, but – ah, yes?’
    Matt had raised his hand to ask a question.
    ‘I know the mission has been planned on the assumption that we can’t refuel on the surface. But there were a lot of fuel stores at Erebus – it was a main refuelling base. Is there any possibility that some of them have survived?’
    Rawlings shook his head emphatically.
    ‘Ah, no, Mr Crawford, even if the surface tanks have survived, they’ve had no power for their heaters. The temperature in the crater is so low that any liquid propane would have frozen solid.’
    Matt nodded.
    ‘Uh, what happens if we exceed our hover time?’ Bergman asked, ‘do we run out of fuel and crash?’
    ‘No sir. If you exceed the margin, you’ll still be able to land, in fact you’d have plenty of fuel to make a landing. But you’d be left with too little fuel to take off and make orbit again. You’d climb up towards orbit, run out of fuel, and come back down to impact the surface of the planet before you had completed one revolution.’
    ‘Right,’ Bergman said, in a quieter voice.
    The silence persisted, so Rawlings went on.
    ‘The return journey is the same in each case; you take off from the mine, rendezvous with the tug in orbit, and fire the engine to put you onto an Earth return trajectory. The timing of the return journey is flexible; we have prepared scenarios for three possible dates, depending on when your investigations are complete. The journey times range from ninety-four to a hundred and fifteen days, but we recommend the first window, which will get you back here by early December using a one-tangent trajectory.
    ‘The rest of the mission in standard stuff, margin calculations and so on; I can run over this later on an individual basis with anyone who’s interested.’
    Rawlings stopped, and looked round.
    More silence. They were still turning over the implications of what he had said earlier.
    ‘Any questions?’
    ‘Can we lighten the ship, or reduce the scope of the mission, so that we have some more margin for the landing?’ The voice belonged to Abrams.
    ‘I’m afraid not. We’ve already stripped all the mass we can out of the mission, just to get it to work at all.’
    ‘What about reducing the crew size, say from six to five, would that help?’ Abrams continued.
    Rawlings shook his head.
    ‘We’ve already examined that. It helps, but nowhere near enough.’
    There were several more questions, and Rawlings spent some time answering them.
    Clare kept quiet for the most part. She answered one question that Rawlings passed to her, but for the rest of the time she feigned polite attention and asked no questions of her own. She was aware from the prickling on the back of her neck that Helligan was watching her. She glanced to her side at one point, and out of the corner of her eye she saw him stifling a yawn.
    There came a time when there were no more questions. Helligan eased himself out of his seat and looked around.
    ‘Okay, boys and girls, if