Below Mercury by Mark Anson

the rain clouds and soar into the sky.
    The long, streamlined fuselage was set into a swept-back delta wing, over 22 metres across its downturned wingtips. Under the wings, in two large, podded nacelles, the four main engines lay at rest, with just a wisp of white vapour trickling from their enormous exhaust nozzles. Together, the engines provided up to two million newtons of thrust; enough to hurl the spaceplane out of the clutches of Earth, or any of the inner planets.
    Brought back from Mars in January, the spaceplane had spent the last few months in Andersen’s maintenance hangars. As well as a thorough overhaul of its airframe and engines, it had been converted specially for its mission to Mercury. The landing gear, red with iron oxide dust from countless landings on Mars, had been replaced with strengthened units to cope with the higher landing weight. An improved night vision system had also been fitted, to assist them finding the landing site in the darkness of the crater.
    In the crew compartment at the front of the craft, the two unoccupied ejection seats at the rear of the cabin had been removed to save weight and provide more stowage space. Behind the crew compartment, the cargo hold was crammed with equipment for the mission: food, clothing, spacesuits, drilling equipment, tools, sealed canisters of blasting explosives, roof supports, medical supplies, portable radios with folding antennas, and a lightweight, battery-powered trolley for carrying it all.
    Two large bundles held the inflatable habitat modules that the mission team would use as their living quarters while they were on the surface. Pressurised and heated by umbilicals from the spaceplane, these would unfold and inflate into two self-contained living spaces, complete with a surface airlock and flexible room dividers.
    The rest of the fuselage – nearly 24 metres of it – was taken up by the two huge tanks for the liquid oxygen and liquid propane fuel. The spaceplane could not take off with its full fuel load; it was too dangerous in case of a rejected takeoff, and the landing gear was not designed to take the weight. Instead, it took off partly fuelled, and completed the bulk of its fuelling in mid-air over the Pacific Ocean.
    The spaceplane’s structure groaned and creaked as it adjusted to the weight of fuel and liquid oxygen. The insulated cryogenic tanks gave out faint, high-pitched shrieks as the super-cold liquids chilled the metal walls down to their operating temperature.
    Beneath the belly of the spaceplane, the refuelling operator disconnected the liquid oxygen hose from the filling point, and latched the cover hatch closed. White vapour streamed from the end of the hose and swirled around him as he coiled the heavy hose back on to the tanker.
    The ground dispatcher supervising the loading made the final checks of the spaceplane’s hatches and landing gear. He walked round each of the main landing gear bogies, running his hand over the pitted rubber surface of the tyres, and shining his flashlight over the landing gear struts and up into the wheel well bays. Satisfied that there were no fluid leaks or any tyre damage, he walked the length of the lower fuselage, checking every service hatch for security, and finished up at the twin wheels of the nose landing gear, where the ground power truck was plugged into the spaceplane by a heavy cable.
    ‘Shit.’
    Captain Clare Foster enunciated the word clearly.
    She sat in the commander’s seat on the left side of the spaceplane’s cockpit, gazing through the wipers at the downpour outside. The runway, some way off to her left, was invisible behind sheets of driving rain. Each time the wiper passed, there was a moment’s clarity, in which grey sheets of rain were visible, swirling over the concrete taxiways, and then the view dissolved again into a watery blur before the wiper made its next pass.
    She watched the liquid oxygen tanker make a slow, wide turn in front of the spaceplane and move