Below Mercury by Mark Anson Read Free Book Online Page B

up the promotion ladder in the Astronautics Corps. She had been among the best of the best, a captain in an interceptor squadron, commanding huge vessels right at the limits of their performance, until her self-confidence was put into question on a difficult rendezvous with a carbonaceous asteroid out past Mars.
    She had frozen with indecision at a critical point, aborted the manoeuvre too late, and very nearly crashed a spacecraft filled with several thousand tonnes of fuel into the rock. The review panel had investigated her actions and, while not finding her guilty of any wrongdoing, had criticised her for not taking prompter action.
    She still woke up some nights, sweating at how close it had been, the collision alarms sounding, the ship responding too slowly, too slowly. Sometimes, in the worst dreams, she crashed into the asteroid, and the tanks split, and the cold ammonia fuel splashed out over the surface, bubbling and boiling in the vacuum.
    Clare never told anyone about the dreams, not even the people she trusted. If any of that got back to the review panel, she would be out of the Corps, and to Clare, that was like being out of life. She lived and breathed her work as a pilot; it had been her driving ambition ever since she had been a young girl.
    She had gone against the advice of her school and her parents when she entered the Corps, advice that said her talents would be wasted. She had endured the long, hard years of training, first in atmospheric flight and then in low Earth orbit, and spent all her spare time studying for the compulsory master’s degree in astronautics, to get the coveted astronaut’s badge over her name.
    Yet, here she was, flying tankers and training rookie pilots, while others soared into orbit ahead of her. She thought she looked younger than her 34 years, but inside she felt much older. Decades older, coming to the end of her useful working life.
    How she longed for something to do , for something that needed split-second decisions, on the edge of fuel margins, while a huge asteroid turned by above you, and alien mountains and valleys flashed past just above your head, billions of years old, waiting to claw you from the sky. How she longed for that again, the bonds she had forged with the crews, the times they had had, the risks they had run, how she longed for it, how she wanted it, wanted it, wanted it .
    Now they had offered her something: a routine trip to Mercury, ferrying some engineers to some huge tomb of a mine and back again. It was getting back into space, she thought, but not the way she had envisaged. She had an uncomfortable feeling that, once she took this ‘temporary secondment’, it would become permanent, and she would be stuck in Transportation forever, on board space tugs, hauling the huge fuel tankers back and forth across the Solar System until she couldn’t take the boredom any longer.
    She felt like she was being sidelined, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
    Helligan had said not to get excited, and to wait until she received her orders. Knowing Helligan, he probably wanted to make her endure as much waiting as he could contrive, so it could be weeks, or more likely months, before the SAIB would be in touch.
    Before long, she would be desperate even to get the chance in Transportation, and that was probably just what Helligan had in mind. She just had to play the game and try to keep her options open.
    Behind the tanker, the refuelling was complete.
    ‘Orbital Five Two Seven, tanks full, breaking contact. Report when clear of the launch area.’
    ‘Tanker Seven Four, roger,’ Clare’s copilot responded.
    The tanker shuddered slightly as the spaceplane broke free of the refuelling boom, and dropped astern. Clare disengaged the autopilot with a flick of her left thumb, and banked the tanker to the left. Her other hand moved the thrust levers forward, to take the tanker quickly out and away, far away from the dwindling patch of sky where the