Read Online Below Mercury by Mark Anson - Free Book Online Page B

question, and his mouth fell open slightly.
    ‘I – represent the relatives class action group, and—’
    ‘I know what you’re there to do,’ she interrupted, ‘but the relatives would never have proposed you as their representative if you hadn’t wanted to go back.’
    Matt wondered if he wanted to tell her. The directness of this serious young woman was disconcerting.
    What the hell. They had to spent months cooped up together anyway.
    ‘Well, the accident left me feeling – like I’d escaped, and they hadn’t. I wasn’t any better than any of them, it could have been me in the mine. Going back makes me feel like I’m somehow making – amends for things.’
    Matt paused. It had been a long time since anyone had asked him how he felt about anything. His throat had gone dry, and the last words had been difficult to get out. He took another drink of his coffee.
    Clare stared back at him for several seconds before replying, but her gaze had softened.
    ‘So. You feel guilty for surviving. It’s not unusual. But there must be other ways of coping than by going back. Haven’t you been offered any counselling?’
    Matt looked down, and he hesitated, wondering if he should tell her.
    ‘Yes – I had several sessions in the early days after the accident,’ he said at last, ‘but it didn’t really help, and I stropped going after a while. I felt such a fake – I was one of the survivors, after all.’
    ‘It doesn’t mean you don’t deserve a bit of help.’
    ‘Maybe. But none of the counselling seemed to work. I guess that’s why I got involved with the relatives, and the class action – I felt like I was helping people who really needed it.’
    Clare waited, listening.
    ‘I just need to know what happened. I keep seeing it – the accident – imagining what it was like for them. It’s worse than not knowing. I’ve got to go back and see it with my own eyes. I’ve got to know how they died.’



CHAPTER TEN
    Helligan stood at the front of the room as they finished their break, flanked by a thin, sandy-haired man in civilian clothes. Matt recognised him from earlier briefings as Rawlings, the mission planner.
    Rawlings was one of the civilian specialists retained by the Corps for their expertise in crucial areas. He had a hurried manner that gave the impression of him never having enough time, and the pale complexion of someone who spent too much of his time away from the Sun, in darkened control rooms in the bowels of FSAA facilities. He seemed nervous and ill at ease as Helligan introduced him to the team, and as Helligan went to sit at the back of the room, Rawlings dimmed the lights at once, as if he felt safer in the familiar darkness.
    A view of the Inner Solar System appeared on the viewscreen wall behind Rawlings, silhouetting his head and shoulders.
    At the centre of the display, a tiny Sun burned, and the planets circled round it like glittering marbles in space, following the coloured ellipses of their orbits as they moved round in accelerated time.
    The display zoomed in on the three innermost planets. The blue globe of the Earth moved slowly at the edge of the screen, Venus a little faster, following the yellow circle of its closer orbit, and finally Mercury, pursuing its highly eccentric orbit close to the Sun.
    ‘This is the situation of the planets right now,’ the silhouette of Rawlings said, freezing the display. ‘The launch window we’re recommending is here—’ he fast forwarded the display a few months ‘—in the early hours of May fourth. Transfer orbit insertion at zero six thirty UTC will put you onto a minimum-energy trajectory to Mercury, with a journey time of just over ninety-seven days.’
    The display moved forward again, and a thin green line sprouted from Earth and curved inward, converging on Mercury. The mission planner stopped the display as the green line touched the innermost planet.
    ‘Your rendezvous with Mercury is on August ninth, six days before