Текст книги "Keystone"

Автор книги: Luke Talbot

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Chapter 56

Gail turned the pages slowly, looking at the symbols one by one and making notes with a pencil in the margin. She’d been given a copy of the Book of Xynutians, with a promise to see the original should her initial investigations be encouraging.

She was now on her tenth page, and was becoming desensitised by the overload of information. She had seen Xynutians in cars, Xynutians in what appeared to be mass-transportation systems, and even Xynutians going up and down in lifts attached to the sides of towering skyscrapers. And then she had seen Xynutians running, Xynutians on fire, skyscrapers broken and twisted and cars and mass transportation systems crumpled and destroyed. The drawings were like no other ancient Egyptian illustrations she had ever seen, though the accompanying text left no doubt that they were contemporary to the Book of Aniquilus.

She scanned through the translations that Patterson, or someone from his team, had made.

Aniquilus cast his gaze over the Xynutians, He eats their pride and ambitions with his swift punishment.

She shook her head. Eats made no sense at all in the context of the sentence. Obviously, it hadn’t to the Patterson either, who had circled the offending hieroglyphs.

Her tablet would probably tell her what they meant – she knew a lot of Egyptian verbs off the cuff, but she had become maybe a little too reliant on George’s application remembering some of the more complex contextual translations for her.

She flicked through a few more pages before stopping at a picture of a group of Xynutians, gathered around what she assumed were houses, looking up at the stars in the sky. Some calculations had been scribbled in pencil below the original hieroglyphs, along with a post-it note: Nefertiti’s return is 3344 years after the writing of the Book of Xynutians. This was in 2007!

She crossed the date out and scribbled some notes down on her own pad. Amateurs, she thought. The ancient Egyptians had followed a three hundred and sixty-five day calendar. Eventually, Roman rulers in the first century BC had imposed an earlier Ptolemaic ruling that every fourth year had to have an extra day, to account for the discrepancy between the solar year and the traditional Egyptian year.

The Book of Xynutians had been written thirteen centuries before this ruling, and at least a thousand years before the Ptolemaic kings had first suggested the change.

Therefore, the calculations in the translation she was looking at were, to the best of her mental arithmetic, about three years out. The ‘second coming’ of Nefertiti was scheduled to have occurred in 2004, not 2007.

“The year I was born,” she said with a wry smile.

She sat back and looked at the next picture carefully. Aniquilus left a trail of destruction behind him, and yet there were a handful of Xynutians, standing outside their homes looking to the stars, according to the translation waiting for the next coming of Aniquilus. She scratched her head, and then suddenly gave a satisfied laugh as she snatched the text up from the desk. On her desk was a telephone. It allowed her to dial one number: Patterson’s.

He came in with a smile a moment later. “Less than an hour into it and you’ve already made a discovery?”

She nodded at the paper on her desk. “A few things, I think,” she began. “Some odd translations here, I need my tablet to verify them, but the text makes no real sense.”

He agreed. “But I probably can’t get you access to your equipment. I’ll work on that one. What else?”

“The dates. You’re about three years out, because of the leap years,” she said with more than a hint of triumph.

He looked surprised and nodded. “Well spotted. I had no idea that the ancient Egyptians had no leap years.”

“You’re obviously not an Egyptologist then, are you? Finally,” she pointed to the picture of the surviving Xynutians, “there’s this.”

He looked at her, puzzled. “What does this prove?”

“Think about it: if Aniquilus somehow punished these mythical Xynutians, but left some alive to pass the message on, then where are they now? Surely such an advanced civilisation would pick itself back up and thrive again. Even in low numbers their technology would be enough to help them survive until their numbers were restored?”

Patterson contemplated the thought for a moment. “But what if there was nothing left? What if all the scientists were dead? Would you know how to make an internal combustion engine, or indeed have the ability to, if no-one was able to assist?”

“Surely not everything would have been destroyed?”

“Maybe not, but who would maintain it all? Once the electricity stops being piped in, or the chip in your computer dies, or the satellite connecting your phone falls out of the sky, how useful is the technology then? How long would it be before a dark age came about, and rival tribes fought among themselves?”

Gail smiled. “Assuming they even existed, they had to live through that once to get to where they were. Surely they could do it again? And the human race has been through its fair share of ‘dark-ages’, and we always bounce back stronger.”

Patterson rubbed his chin pensively. “You do have a point. There is a hole in the story, something the book does not say.”

“The book doesn’t have a preface indicating it’s a work of fiction, but I’m sure that if we look hard enough it’ll have a ‘Made in Hollywood’ stamp somewhere on it.”

He ignored the comment. “You need to start looking at this with an aim to helping us, not trying to prove us wrong. I think that you need to see something else, Dr Turner.”

Leaving the room, they walked briskly down the corridor, to a part of the facility that Gail had not yet been in. On their left were a series of double doors recessed into the wall. The third set had been left ajar, enough for Gail to glimpse the inside of a huge hanger. Patterson was several yards beyond the door already, and she stopped to peer inside.

Before Patterson backtracked and slammed the door shut in her face she saw an open space that would have been large enough to comfortably house several average-sized passenger jets, of the type that would normally take her to Egypt. Large scaffolds filled three quarters of the space, with rockets or missiles in various stages of completion in each one. The closest scaffold to the door held a complete rocket, the tip of which was roughly twenty yards away and ten above her. From the distance to the floor of the hanger, she fancied she must have been on the third or fourth floor of the building.

Just as the door was shut, she saw a gigantic Stars and Stripes on the opposite wall, flanked by two logos. On its left was the smaller of the two, the familiar logo of NASA. On its right, several times larger, was a name she had not heard of before: DEFCOMM. Written in bold white text across a black background, the O was the planet Earth, with the USA dead-centre.

“We’re not going in there,” Patterson said sternly. He continued down the corridor, keeping her slightly behind him and to his left so he could still see her in his peripheral vision.

A few moments later, they reached a lift. He entered a long sequence of numbers on the keypad and pressed a button marked B3. She could tell because of the momentary weight loss that the lift was descending rapidly. She guessed that the B stood for Basement, so they may have descended six or seven floors, but she was surprised at how quickly. The doors slid open after less than ten seconds.

All thoughts of lifts and their mechanisms left her when she saw what the lift doors had revealed.

“This is the Agency’s control centre.” Patterson said flatly.

“Are you working for NASA,” she asked in awe. Before her were spread out dozens of computer terminals in semi-circles facing a huge screen, like seats of congress facing the leader of the house. On the big screen was a video-feed of two people in space suits leaning over a pile of dirt and rocks.

“No, this is better than NASA, they’re a little behind the times. What we’re seeing here is the direct feed from the crew of the Clarke on the surface of Mars. NASA sees the same picture in seventy-five minutes, which then gets sent to the other space agencies around the world.”

“Why do you get to see it earlier?”

He said nothing in reply, so she made the assumption that whatever the reason was, it wasn’t legal.

“How can you intercept such data? Surely someone would find out?”

“Someone nearly did, but it’s exactly because it’s so unthinkable that it became so easy. All of the messages sent to and from Clarke are sent via a network of secure satellites stationed around Earth. Breaking through their security model is impossible. Unless you built the satellites in the first place; then you have an advantage – you can get to all the data without anyone ever finding out about it. That way they can then censor out what they don’t want people to see, and make up what they do.”

“Why would you want to do such a thing?” she asked.

“They do it to gain control of information.”

Gail noted the correction. Dr Patterson was a mystery to her – he was obviously implicated in Mallus’ dealings, but was also distancing himself from him. And then there was the message he had written to her when she had been strapped into her bed.

“Look, Patterson, I get the fact that there are some dodgy things going on here, I get the fact that you didn’t want me to be here in the first place, that’s obvious. But answer me this: why does the Agency need me here? What can I do or offer that is any different to what is already being done?”

He smiled gently. “Under these circumstances, I didn’t want you here; but while I have a broader understanding of the Book of Xynutians, you have studied the Book of Aniquilus in infinite detail for ten years. The Agency believes, I believe,” he corrected himself, “that the book of Aniquilus is a set of rules, without which you get the Book of Xynutians.”

“Like the Ten Commandments and Revelations?”

“Not exactly; the Ten Commandments are Old Testament, and Revelations is New, which in that respect is like the two books, yes. But Revelations is something that it was suggested would happen regardless at the end of times. I believe that the Xynutians are an actual example of what will happen in our worst case scenario. I had difficulty believing the whole concept, to be honest, until I started looking at the Book of Xynutian pictures in detail. And now, I don’t doubt a word of it. Because it looks like we’ve found Xynutian remains on Mars.”

He walked up to a young man seated in front of a computer terminal and spoke to him quietly for a few moments. The operator nodded and started tapping commands into the terminal.

“Watch this,” he said.

Gail watched as the main screen of the control room split in half. On the right hand side she could see two astronauts in what looked like a dune buggy, driving through an arid desert. The pale blue-grey sky looked cold and lifeless. The camera filming the scene panned steadily as it followed the vehicle and its occupants from left to right.

The left half of the display was totally different: the camera was jolting from left to right as it made its way through a narrow corridor and under a low archway. The route ahead of it was lit by a torch beam, which brought Gail to the conclusion that the camera must be mounted somewhere near an astronauts visor. She was seeing what he or she was seeing. In front of the camera another astronaut emerged from the darkness holding a shovel. The torch beam bounced off the astronaut’s visor, but as it changed direction she glimpsed the excited features of a middle-aged man, his grin taking up half of his face.

“On the right is what the world sees. A computer generated mission to Mars, perfect in every conceivable way: Captain Marchenko and Dr Richardson on a routine outing to drill ice cores from the bed of an ancient frozen river. On the left is what is actually happening on Mars: Dr Richardson has just entered what they have called The Gallery for the first time, and Captain Marchenko is coming to greet her.”

She looked at the two feeds for a moment. “How do I know it’s not the other way round? What if the reality is the dune buggy, and the faked images are the Xynutian remains?”

“Why would we do that?” he asked.

Gail had to admit that she couldn’t think of a reason.

“But the world knows that they found the Stickman on Mars. That’s why I went to Egypt in the first place. Why would the world accept that they would simply return to drilling ice cores?”

“Because since you have been with us, the images captured by Beagle 4 and broadcast so readily to the media have been debunked. Dismissed as fakes by the scientific community. They were an attempt by the European Space Agency to cause a sensation, and I believe that attempt is failing.”

“No help from you, of course.”

He looked at her sideways and raised an eyebrow. “Please pay attention to the video. This was recorded this morning, and should give you all the convincing you need.”

As Gail watched, Captain Marchenko led Dr Richardson’s helmet camera down the dark corridor until it stopped abruptly at a dead end. Marchenko pointed eagerly towards where the dirt-covered floor met the perfectly smooth walls. As Dr Richardson’s camera refocused, Gail began to pick out familiar shapes, and her heart sank. Embossed in the wall, at waist-height, was a small procession of humans. From their clothing it was clear they were Xynutians, but with a difference: these were not Egyptian caricatures as in the Book of Xynutians, but detailed, lifelike renditions. They were being marched towards the dead-end of the corridor, and towering over them, almost squashing them into the dirt-floor, was the Stickman, Aniquilus.

Dr Patterson looked at Gail intently, waiting for a reaction. When none came, he broke the silence. “You see, Dr Turner? The Xynutians are not imaginary, they did exist and they were wiped out, in all probability by Aniquilus.”

Gail looked at the displays in disbelief. Nothing proved to her that what she was looking at hadn’t been made up in an elaborate computer simulation, but there was one absolute certainty: DEFCOMM, and anyone involved with it, was up to no good.

“And now that I’ve seen all this, all these things that you’re hiding so effectively from the entire world, what are my chances of ever being released?” she said as calmly as she could.

“I hope that what you’ve seen will make you understand how important our cause is, and that you will agree to join us,” he replied hesitantly.

It didn’t, and she certainly wasn’t going to join anyone. “And what about the astronauts on Mars? When they get back, how will you keep them quiet?” She asked the question loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear, but her only response was a heavy silence; Dr Patterson looked at his shoes briefly before looking back at the displays. She scanned the control room and her eyes met the fleeting glance of the controller who had reset the displays for them earlier.

Looking back at the video feeds, she could see Captain Marchenko through the eyes of Dr Richardson. His grin was unmoving as he gesticulated excitedly at the Xynutians. Somehow, she had to contact her husband. She had to get out and tell everyone what was really going on. Because now it wasn’t just her life at stake; although they may be millions of miles away, she now knew that she could be the astronauts’ only real chance of ever getting back to Earth alive.

Chapter 57

Captain Danny Marchenko scraped the dirt from his visor excitedly, his hand playing an exaggerated ‘hello’ as he used the rubber blade set into the seam of his glove. He swore under his breath in Russian, but the suit’s sensitive microphone still managed to distinguish between the profanity and his breathing, amplifying it over the control panel speakers of the MLP.

“Keep it clean, Captain Mar – Danny,” Captain Yves Montreaux corrected himself from his seat in their Martian home. “We don’t want Man’s immortal words from space to have to be censored, do we?”

He allowed himself a smile as the irony of his last words seeped through. He had told himself, while standing on the precipice of Hellas Basin days earlier, that he had to keep his certainty of their terrible situation to himself. As he had looked down at his excited colleague poring over the engravings – of what he now knew was referred to as the Amarna Stickman, whatever that meant – it had struck him that while he was certain he’d never set foot on Earth again, at least while they were still useful they were safe where they were.

They. How could he know who was with him, and who was against? He daren’t look in the MLP’s database, for fear of being monitored. What would Earth think if he suddenly started looking at the crew’s personal records? Of course, he had read all of their records several times, but then what he had read then was in blissful ignorance of what had since happened; would he now pick up on some obscure, terrifying detail?

It was a moot point. What would he do about it even if he found that Dr Richardson and Captain Marchenko were involved in a conspiracy, a conspiracy which had killed Lieutenant Shi Su Ning, a Chinese cosmonaut whose family probably thought she had died as a result of a system failure.

If they’re in on it, he had thought, then what difference does it really make? He wouldn’t confront them, at least not without absolute certainty, and if he believed his life to be in danger, how could he defend himself? Kill them both? And be left here alone, until I die, he thought morosely.  His only option, he concluded, was to act normally. After all, it may just be his own paranoia, brought on by months in space coupled with his own self-inflicted separation from his other crew-members. What was left of them, he couldn’t help himself from adding.

Acting normally was difficult on Mars. Normally humans walked on Earth, and occasionally in space and on the Moon. Walking on Mars was anything but normal. Captain Montreaux tackled the issues he was faced with in the most logical order he could, and therefore started with the most straightforward: his separation from Dr Richardson and Captain Marchenko. Fixing that started with an impromptu meeting over dinner the night they had discovered the Jetty.

“I’ve been thinking,” he had started, “that as there are only three of us on this planet, it makes perfect sense for us to reduce elements of the formality of our methods of communication, and refer to each other using Christian names only.”

“Not exactly the best choice of words if you’re planning on that, Yves,” Dr Richardson had quipped.

But nonetheless they had taken to the idea like fish to water. She had taken to it as easily as she had adjusted to walking on Mars he had thought to himself. Captain Marchenko had grinned and extended his hand to be shaken firmly by the American.

“It’s a deal,” he said in his best Texan accent, which had taken them all by surprise. It was the first time in many days that they had laughed together, the first in nearly a month since Yves could remember laughing so hard, but as the evening had drawn to a close, he still managed to feel secluded. If anything, the laughter, their jokes, had only served to make him feel more different, as ‘Jane’ and ‘Danny’ shared private jokes and candid looks across the MLP’s dinner table.

And so it turned out that, despite it being his own idea, he had the most difficulty adjusting to it.

They naturally took to using first names, and for Jane as a scientist this was understandable. But for Danny, with all of his military and academy training, it somehow felt wrong.

He told himself he was paranoid. You don’t change months of habit and years of indoctrination in the space of a few days. Yet as he sat at the MLP’s control panels, listening to Danny’s cursing and Jane’s whoops of joy, he couldn’t help but plan his next comment, designed to spark a reaction, anything that would betray that they were in cahoots with whoever was in control of their mission. Certainly not me, he thought sarcastically as he looked at the rows of buttons, dials and touch screen displays.

“Remember people may be watching this live, Danny – we don’t want to offend anyone with profanities, do we?”

“No problem, Yves, sorry about that everybody back home, but can you see what I can see?” Danny asked, the pitch of his voice reaching prepubescent levels.

Yves leaned forward and concentrated on the display. “You need to clean your camera a little bit more.”

‘Cleaning the camera’ wasn’t technically or physically possible. It was housed within Danny’s helmet, protected from the harsh atmosphere of Mars by half an inch of transparent aluminium. Even if one of them, heaven forbid, fell down to the bottom of the gigantic crater, the camera would emerge intact. Anything that had not been relayed in real-time to the MLP’s processors would be saved to solid-state storage ready for processing at a later date.

Danny swept his glove across the protective housing, wiping clear the layer of dust that had settled during his excavation of the tunnel. “How about now?” he said.

On the display, he could make out a smooth wall of darkened stone. A bold, straight line cut the wall in half vertically from off-screen at the top to where the wall met the equally smooth floor at the bottom. The left-hand half of the wall was unmarked, but on the right, in strokes equally as bold as the vertical line and the Amarna Stickman outside was the picture of a creature, it’s long lizard-like form lying prone and its mouth open in a grin, like a komodo dragon celebrating catching its dinner.

It looked so real it could have turned its head and said hello and Yves wouldn’t have been more surprised. There was no characterisation, no roughness, and even though he had never seen the creature before, or any of its kind, he was certain its depiction was as true to life as was possible in an engraving on stone, with no artistic licence applied. He said as much to Danny and Jane, whose movements he was tracking on the second display.

“Absolutely!” she said without hesitation. “I’ve looked at the carvings; they’re all over the walls. I don’t like to speculate and I’m by no means the authority on such things, but I can’t see how they’re possible without some kind of laser technology.”

“Are you saying that something buried hundreds of thousands of years ago was made with technology as advanced as our own?” he said in disbelief.

“What’s the alternative? That primitive man made a spaceship of wood and sailed across space with his bow and arrow and a bucket on his head?” she responded sarcastically.

“Well, that’s not exactly…”

“What Jane is saying, Yves,” Danny interrupted, “is that we already accept that this find is hundreds of thousands of years old, and that Man did not have the means to do this sort of thing back then. This means we must be looking at artefacts from Mars. Artefacts from the Martians.”

Yves was about to answer when a piercing sound came over the speakers. Before he had a chance to turn the volume down, it stopped. Danny said a single word in Russian that Yves didn’t understand but was almost certainly rude. “Everything OK?”

Then the sound came back, except this time it was pulsating. With every pulse the video feed from Danny’s suit filled with static.

“What’s wrong?” Jane said, worried.

“No idea, his cam is all messed up and the audio…”

“I can’t hear you Yves! That whining is cutting you off every second word!”

“What?”

“I said I can’t hear… ah! That’s better!” The noise had stopped.

“Shit,” Yves said between gritted teeth. “Danny, can you hear us?”

Danny’s video, audio and medical feeds had all stopped transmitting. Looking at Jane’s screen, he could see the Russian standing in front of the alien engravings. His arms drooped lazily by his sides, his head lolled dangerously. Jane leaped towards him and pulled him back, stopping him from falling head first into the tunnel wall. She lay him down and shone her flashlight through his visor.

His eyes were open, the pupils fully dilated. They didn’t respond to the bright light as she moved it frantically from eye to eye.

“Is he breathing?”

She looked at the breastplate of his suit and tapped it twice quickly. A small OLED display flashed briefly. She hit it again several times, but it didn’t come back. No battery. Moving to his wrist, she checked his suit controls. The suit should have had enough charge for another week’s use, before they would need to be hooked up to the station’s power source for two whole days to fill up.

The wrist controls were powered by a kinetic wrist band, as a failsafe redundancy; shake your arm and you’ll always be able to check your oxygen. The readout showed twenty-five per cent air. It also confirmed his pulse, faint but still present. He had enough air for a couple of hours breathing, but no power meant that he’d freeze to death before that time was up.

She said as much to Yves, then paused. When she spoke again her voice was grave. “I can’t carry him up the cliff on my own. I can’t get him out of here without you.”

And I can’t get to you, he thought to himself. “Have you checked your own suit?” He was going over the readouts himself. “You look fine from here.”

“Confirmed. Everything looks good to me. It’s just Danny, his suit just suddenly lost all its power. I have to get him warm, somehow!”

“Jane, go back to the Rover. Remove one of the fuel cells, and take it back to Danny.”

“Of course!” She was already running.

It only took her five minutes to reach the vehicle, another two to remove the fuel cell. God Bless mission planners she thought to herself as she marvelled at the simplicity of the power source’s design: completely self-contained like an old fashioned battery. The cable connecting it to the Rover was identical to the cable that emerged from the underside of the suits to charge them up. With a bit of twisting you could even reach it yourself and plug yourself in.

The way back was slightly longer, as she negotiated a couple of rock slides and steep slopes. The cell wasn’t excessively heavy, but it offset her centre of balance enough for her to risk falling down the crater if she wasn’t careful. She finally entered the tunnel and her flashlight automatically came on.

She reached the dead end just in time to see the stone wall slide back down to meet the floor. And Danny was gone.