Текст книги "Keystone"

Автор книги: Luke Talbot

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Chapter 15

Sitting at his desk, Montreaux finished writing and let go of the pen, letting it float gently just above the desk.  He waited for half a minute before tearing the piece of paper from the pad and folding it twice, placing it carefully in his breast pocket and opening a drawer in his desk. He grabbed the pen and put it with the pad in the drawer before closing it carefully.

He knew that the nanostations would have been watching him.

Everything they did, and indeed wrote, on board the ship was being sent back to Earth.  At the current distance of approximately thirty eight million kilometres, it took roughly two minutes and six seconds for the data to reach Earth, network switching at both ends notwithstanding. Between each phrase in a standard conversation would therefore be a delay of over four minutes.

Anything over that could be put down to human deliberation.

It had now been barely four minutes since he had finished writing his message. He expected there to be a few more minutes waiting for a reply, at least. Suddenly and without warning, the screen on his desk lit up. It was a video feed from Mission Control, with no sound. In the middle of the picture, two hands were holding up a neatly written message.

He read the message twice before the screen went blank of its own accord.

Neither video nor audio feeds were accessible by any crew member, including the Captain, without authorisation from Mission Control.  Whereas Earth could see and hear everything, and the information was always stored in the Clarke’s memory, it had been decided that the crew should not be able to systematically see potentially sensitive information.

For the mission planners this had provided a useful method of private communication.

Emailed messages could be read by indiscreet eyes, and conversations could be overheard, so it had been decided that in the event of an emergency, the commanding officer of the Clarke could use the very low-tech Private Message Protocol, or PMP, to speak to Mission Control. It was not something they had expected would be used, but when Captain Montreaux had taken the notepad and pen from the drawer in the Lounge, two nearby nanostations had been alerted, and had followed the officer back to his quarters, where they had watched him write down his enquiry.

The brief reply, held in front of a camera on Earth by steady, anonymous hands for several seconds, had not done much to satisfy him.

Psych request for crewmember Lieutenant Su Ning denied.

No incidents reported.

 

– Mission Control

Montreaux leaned back in his chair and looked at the blank screen where the message had appeared moments earlier. He made an effort to control his facial expression, knowing that they would still be watching, or at the very least recording.

He did the arithmetic in his head. They had written their message in less than thirty seconds and placed it in front of a working camera.  In thirty seconds, they had been able to look into his enquiry, write a message and broadcast it directly back to his quarters. That was quick.

But nonetheless possible, he thought. Maybe they had been proactively monitoring the feeds since Su Ning’s comment during the night, and were expecting him to use the PMP. It was certainly possible.

He unclipped himself from his chair and let himself float away from it towards the door. He thought about the handwriting on the message; neat and deliberate. The steady hands holding the message up to the camera had been calm and practised. Thirty seconds was fast.

He took the written note from his breast pocket and unfolded it before screwing it up into a tight ball with both hands and pushing it into the waste recycling tube recessed into the wall of his quarters. He felt the suction pulling the hairs on the back of his hand as the tube sensed the paper and sucked it through a series of twists and turns quickly leading to the waste processing plant situated in the walls of the Hygiene Bay.

Why didn’t Mission Control want to look into it? He was the commanding officer, their eyes and ears on the ground, in charge of crew wellbeing and safety above all other concerns. He had raised a legitimate concern over the status of the Lieutenant. A psych report would give him a breakdown of her habits on board, analysis of stress and intonation, and even the meaning, of everything she had said, chemical balances, or imbalances, in her blood and even the composition of her waste material. It would, effectively, give him a good idea of how she was, in 0s and 1s. The computer’s answer to the question ‘how are you doing?’

The more he thought about it, the more worried he became. It wasn’t a question of why they had rejected his request, but how? After all, a techie sitting at a desk in Mission Control had, for all intents and purposes, just denied one of his crew a reasonable medical request. Under whose authority?

And then it hit him: Mission Control.

No one signs off as Mission Control! Montreaux tried to keep his face as impassive as possible as the realisation sank in.

Under normal running, the only position in Mission Control to communicate with Clarke was CAPCOM, or Capsule Communicator. It was a legacy of the early space pioneers and a protocol that was affectionately defended. For the Clarke mission, all correspondence, audio, video and written, had so far signed off with two simple words: CAPCOM OUT.

Playing it over and over in his mind, it did not take him long to reach the only logical conclusion: something was wrong. And a little voice in the back of his mind told him that Lieutenant Su Ning knew what it was.

The only question now was that with the nanostations monitoring his every word and movement, how was he going to get close enough to her?

Chapter 16

Christophe Larue paced up and down in front of his desk before coming to a halt in front of the large, tinted window of his office. It had been a very busy day during a particularly stressful period for the European Space Agency’s Head of Policy and Future Programmes.

He was a short man with wispy, almost transparent white hair falling down either side of his plump, flushed face. His expensive tailored suit did not hide the fact that too much good food and good wine combined with too little exercise over the past few years had started to affect his health, and the pressure he had been put under had not helped at all.

Shooting a hand into his pocket he pulled out a small box of pills, which he opened clumsily. After swallowing the medicine, he felt the rhythm of his heart return to normal, and he focused on the buildings outside the window to help him calm down.

It was an exceptional September day in Paris: the sun had been shining brightly since dawn and its warmth was notable through the triple glazing. Directly opposite his office was a small block of flats, each one displaying a proud, perfectly nurtured window box.  Behind the flats he could see the top of the UNESCO buildings, a mass of twentieth century architectural wonders and a popular destination for Parisian workers during their lunch breaks. It had been a boost for France, he thought to himself, for the headquarters of two international bodies to be situated within a few hundred metres of each other in the capital city, but while UNESCO had been going from strength to strength in recent years, the ESA had been riding a torrent of public criticism that had already seen the closure of three major projects and the downsizing of six more.

Funding was being withdrawn, sponsors were getting cold feet, and it was all he could do to keep his head above water from day to day, maintaining the hope that something or someone would throw him and the Agency a lifeline and pull them onto dry land.

Furthermore, he knew it was pretty much his responsibility.

He was shaken from his reverie by a knock on the thick oak door of his office.

“Entrez,” Larue barked.

The tall, attractive man, wearing a white tie-less shirt open at the collar, entered the office and closed the door behind him. He saw Larue looking out of the window and tensed up: it was a bad moment.

“Monsieur Larue?” he said, tactfully.  His French accent was flawless.

Larue turned on his heels and looked the man up and down.  He was young, as he once was, and handsome, like he had never been. Had he been a petty man he would have resented Martín Antunez for this, but the aide had helped him through some difficult times of late, so he was able to see past their physical differences.  “Martin,” he said, pronouncing the Spaniard’s name the French way. “Some very bad news, I’m afraid.”

“Monsieur?” He wondered how his boss’ situation could possibly get any worse.

Larue’s eyes flicked nervously away from his aide’s inquisitive gaze and he focused on a framed picture of the Ariane 5 heavy-lift launcher taking off at night from the European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guyana, nearly half a century earlier. Still the ESA’s most successful venture, he thought.

“Our scientific cooperation with NASA has been suspended, Martin,” he admitted. “We will still receive some direct feeds from the Mars mission, but will no longer hold the same status as Russia, China or even Japan.” His voice was resigned, as if the news had been inevitable.

“Why?” Antunez asked in disbelief.

“We have not invested in the Mars mission. As I understand, it has been decided that we are not to have immediate access to all of the data returned from the Clarke. Our ability to control nanostations remotely, for instance, has been revoked effective from six o’clock tomorrow morning, heure Française. From then on, we will receive a passive live feed, which they control,” Larue said.

Martín Antunez knew this would be one of the last nails in Larue’s coffin, both figuratively and possibly literally. It had all started with his first decision as Head of Policy and Future Programmes, nearly ten years earlier.

“I know what you are thinking, that we should have continued working on the Clarke with the other agencies all those years ago,” Larue said. “But it just wasn’t feasible. All of our scientific research at the time was in the area of robotic probes and landing craft. We were already tied in to dozens of missions we could barely fund. The mission’s demands, both financially and in terms of human resource, were simply too high!”

“I understand, Monsieur.” Aside from hundreds of satellites around Earth, the mainstay of the ESA’s business, their only remaining significant scientific venture was the Beagle 4 rover, roaming alone in the cold winds of Mars for the past three years.

Larue looked at him. “As far as the Clarke is concerned, we barely have one up on the press.  We’ll probably have to watch the landing on CNN.” He sneered as he said the acronym.

“What can I do, Monsieur?” Antunez offered.

“Give me something to be optimistic about!”

Antunez looked at his boss with pity. There was nothing.

Larue returned to the window and held his hands behind his back. The urge to start biting his nails again had grown, but a respectable man restrained himself, he had decided. “Find something,” he said over his shoulder. “Watch everything.” He looked over at the UNESCO building. Education, Science, Culture. It was all there. But above all, he thought, opportunity. “NASA is a business, they only tell us what they want us to know, and then keep the juicy bits to themselves.” His mouth had started to water; he was hungry already.

“Espionage, Monsieur?” Antunez sounded shocked.

Larue shot round and pointed a finger at him. “No! Not espionage, but liberty!” A thought was brewing in his mind and he revelled in his new-found enthusiasm. “Mars is not American, we all have the right to it, and this Clarke mission is from Earth, not the United States. NASA have no right to withhold information —”

“We have no evidence that they have, or will,” Antunez interrupted.

“They will, Martin, I am sure of it,” he looked his aide in the eyes, an unpleasant grin on his face. “And when they do, you will be watching.”

Antunez shifted uneasily on the spot. So this is what happens when you push Larue into a corner, he thought. The boss’ job was almost certainly on the line; the honourable thing to do was to resign. Instead, Larue was grabbing at fanciful conspiracy theories.

“With the feeds we are getting, we are not very well placed…”

“You will find a way, Martin, I trust you,” he said firmly. He sat down at his desk and started flicking through paperwork intently. The small wrist strap he was wearing sent a small impulse to his nerve endings, telling him it was time to curb his enthusiasm and relax. “And one last thing.”

“Monsieur?”

“I trust you have no engagements this evening? I’m sure you understand that, for obvious reasons, we don’t have much time. I want you to get me anything you can, as quickly as possible. I want you to get everything from the Clarke before our control of the nanostations is removed.”

Martín left the office quietly, realising the meeting was over. In the corridor outside, he bumped into a young blond woman carrying a wad of paperwork. His face flushed.

“Excuse-moi, Jacqueline,” he mumbled.

“Martín,” she used the Spanish pronunciation of his name. “You look worried. Can I help?”

He looked at the network programmer for a few seconds before his neurons clicked into place. “Oui,” he said. Yes.

Hours had passed.

Martín watched in silence as the American Captain sailed across the Lounge to meet the Chinese Lieutenant. After a brief exchange of words, too quiet to be picked up by the nearby nanostation, the woman left the Captain by the window. He called after her, this time his voice loud enough to come through Martín’s headphones, but she did not return. He stayed for three minutes, staring into space, before leaving the Lounge.

He had watched the same recording during a routine run through of the Clarke’s activities the day before, but had thought nothing of it. It now stood out as one of the last recordings during which the ESA had been able to control the nanostations. Had he known, and been awake while it had been live and not tucked up in bed with a woman he barely knew and would probably never see again, he would certainly have moved the tiny little nanostation several feet closer.

The Clarke’s equipment of nanostations was superb. Over the past weeks, he had been allowed to control some of the little flying machines, sending them this way and that, bumping into walls, getting in the way of the crew. With the number of nanostations active during the day, there were more than enough to go around. He had even seen a feed from a nanostation controlled by someone at JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, which had accidentally strayed into a doorway adjacent to the Hygiene Bay. The video had been cut by NASA just as Dr Jane Richardson had entered with her towel, and control mechanisms for restricting movement of nanostations within the Hygiene Bay and personal Pods expanded to include the connecting tunnel from the Lounge.

During Nightmode, most of the stations went to the closest charging pad, ready for another busy shift. Unless there was a fault or something needed to be monitored more closely, at these times there were only eight active nanostations – one for each habitable module.  The one that had managed to pick up the meeting between Lieutenant Shi Su Ning and Captain Yves Montreaux the previous day had been on the other side of the room, and although at the time five agencies were able to send basic commands to the lonesome vigil in the Lounge, not one had done so.

He increased the gain on his headphones and flattened the equalizer in the low frequency range; the constant humming of the ship’s air circulation units needed to be cancelled out.  Pressing play, he watched the video again.

“I had no idea you did this,” the Captain’s voice boomed through his headphones.  He was trying to pick up the quiet sections, and this meant that everything else now sounded incredibly loud.

 “You may be the Captain, Sir, but with respect you don’t know everything,” she replied.

A pause while the Captain went across the Lounge to join her. Martín had already seen the look of surprise in the Captain’s face the last time he had watched. But this time he noticed something else; Su Ning had stretched her neck to speak to the Captain. But as soon as she saw his reaction this changed. Martín saw the look in her eyes: she had said too much and knew it. It was a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ detail, hard to pick up from Earth with the angle of the nanostation; but on Clarke, it was obvious that the Captain had not missed a thing.

 “Lieutenant, is everything OK?” he said.

Up to this part, Martín had always been able to hear everything. The section that he had not been able to decipher was about to begin. He leant forward in his chair, as if being closer to the screen would help.  Neither person’s lips could be seen, so even if he had been able to lip-read, it would have been useless. Pressing the headphones hard against his ears, he listened intently.

The sound was terrible, but he still managed to get several syllables.  He stopped the video and played the section back, writing down the bits he could hear on a piece of paper in front of him.  Stopping the video again, he looked down at what he had written:

“I…it…is…an…shoe…Sir….wood…ree…with…thing…less.. was…tain.”

It didn’t make any sense, but he circled the word ‘Sir’, as the only whole word he was sure of; the Chinese Lieutenant was by far the most polite of all the crew members, and always used formal forms of communication.

He was about to play the video again when there was a light tap on his shoulder.

“Still nothing?” Jacqueline asked sympathetically.

He removed the headphones and turned to face her. “Not yet, I’m afraid, but I am getting there, I have half a sentence.”

He passed her the piece of paper with the scribbled, fragmented sentence and she took it with interest, reading through it several times before passing it back to him. “My English is not very good, but I’m pretty sure that means nothing at all,” she smiled at him. “You look tired, Martín, take a break and let me show you something.”

It was raining in the darkness outside, the day’s clear skies long forgotten. He checked his watch and saw that he had been sitting at his desk watching various feeds from the Clarke for over eight hours. It was ten o’clock in the evening, and it had already been a long night.

“OK,” he said standing up reluctantly. “What have you found?”

Chapter 17

Montreaux sat in the Command Module and looked at the closed hatch that led to the pod that would take them to the surface of Mars. Stencilled across the hatch in military font were the letters “M.L.P.”: Mars Lander Pod. A plan was forming in his mind, but he knew it wasn’t a very good one.

Wait until we land on Mars, he thought to himself, and the nanostations will be left behind. The little flying stations only functioned in zero gravity, and would therefore not follow the crew down.  On-board the MLP there were fixed monitoring stations, dotted around the pod and its exterior, that would send streams of data back to the Clarke and Earth, but he could already imagine a situation where he would be alone with the Lieutenant and be able to have a conversation in private; it depended on them both leaving the landing site in protective suits, a normal part of the mission plan, and travelling far enough to be out of range of the MLP’s shortwave antenna.  With the little power they were able to use on the surface, a handful of kilometres would be amply sufficient.  One of the first duties on the surface was to set up signal booster stations at regular intervals, so that they could travel further. He would need to make sure that they were not in the range of one of those, too, or that they had their chat before the boosters were assembled.

As he listed all of the problems facing such a scenario, the thought that the plan was not very good grew, until he was ready to scrap the idea completely.

And what if it’s too late? The look on Su Ning’s face the previous night had been with him ever since. What if whatever is worrying her is too big to be left another six weeks?

His mind was reeling. He had never usually been impressed by conspiracy theories, but the pieces were beginning to fit in an increasingly worrying puzzle. A multinational mission to Mars, the first of its kind, almost at its destination. An ultra-patriotic American scientist intent on planting her flag in new territory.  A Russian MIG-34 pilot as second in command. And the youngest member of the crew: a Chinese army Lieutenant.  Then out of the blue after over two months in space, the Chinese Lieutenant raises his suspicions. Something is wrong, either with the mission, the crew, both, or something entirely different. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound personal. What had she said again? I am not sure it is an issue and would not worry you with anything unless I was certain.

And then, as if that cryptic message wasn’t enough, the inexplicable behaviour of Mission Control. Surely if Su Ning has a problem it is as important to them as it is to us?

He needed space. Space to think, and the Command Module simply wasn’t giving it to him; he knew that at that moment, as many as twenty nanostations could be watching his every move, every blink, every bead of sweat. He looked in the air around him and fancied he could make out the movement of a couple of them, like twenty first century mosquitoes, except that they didn’t bite. Or did they? He laughed to himself, now he felt crazy, and probably looked it too.

He shifted in his seat, running his eyes over the panels of instruments in front of him. Time to act normally, he thought to himself.  If Mission Control want to keep him in the dark, then it would be best if they think that...

In the dark! Nightmode! With the majority of the nanostations inactive, he only had one per module to avoid.

He unclipped himself and carefully made for the exit.  The short tunnel from the Command Module to the Lounge was directly behind the seat he had been using, and he reached it with a single short tug. Emerging into the Lounge, huge by comparison, he could see the back of Dr Richardson’s head; she had assembled her laboratory along one wall and was writing some notes on a clipboard.

On the opposite side of the room, Lieutenant Su Ning was sitting on the sofa, playing cards with Captain Marchenko.  She looked over her cards at him as he entered the room, her eyes showing candour that he had never before seen.

“I see your twenty and raise you fifty!” Marchenko told her.

The brief moment of understanding between the Chinese woman and Montreaux dissipated instantly as she returned to her game with the Russian.

“I see you for fifty, Captain Marchenko,” she said flatly, laying three sixes and two aces on the table.

“Full House? No way!” he complained, before showing his hand. “It’s a good thing I had four of these, isn’t it?” He laughed at the look of dismay on Su Ning’s face as he placed the set of kings on the table carefully. “Do I win?” he asked cheekily.

Su Ning pushed her chips across to him, catching one that had left the table’s surface and was now spinning above her hand. “You win, Marchenko, this time.”

Montreaux pushed across to the sofa and clipped himself in between the Russian and Su Ning.

“Mind if I play?”