Keystone (12 page)

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

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?”

Martín gripped the Styrofoam
coffee cup in his hand and looked down into the dark swirl of liquid that the
machine had given him. It smelt like coffee, but he knew from experience that
it carried a bitter metallic aftertaste.

Sitting down
in front of him, Jacqueline had been typing and clicking at her computer for
five minutes now, in silence. He barely understood half of the functions she
was using, and the other half may as well have been in Hebrew for all he knew.
Her work was punctuated by short sighs and clicks of the tongue when what she
was trying to achieve didn’t work. She would then try another method, still
without saying a word.

Eventually,
she pushed her chair away from the desk and looked up at Martín, who was
standing behind her.

“There. What
do you think?” she said triumphantly.

He looked up
from the depths of his drink and squinted at the screen. He took a step towards
her desk. The display was split into two sections, left and right. Running from
top to bottom on the left hand side, in green text on black background, were
dozens of lines of programming code. Every second or so, a different section
would flash bold for a moment, as if to inform the user which part was being
used.
 
The right hand side displayed two
video feeds, in black and white. Both feeds showed the
Clarke
’s Lounge, but were somehow different. As he watched he saw
the top view of the Lounge pan round, until he could see Captain Montreaux,
Captain Marchenko and Lieutenant Su Ning sitting at the table playing what
looked like poker.
 
Montreaux was
collecting the chips from the table, while Marchenko was already dealing
another hand.

“Five Card
Stud, I think,” Jacqueline informed him.

The video feed
directly below it showed the same Lounge, but at a different time. As he looked
at it, he saw Captain Montreaux enter the room from the Command Module.
Martín’s mouth dropped open as he watched him cross the room, clip himself down
on the sofa, and join the game of poker that he was already playing in the feed
above.
 
He moved closer to the screen and
studied the code on the left.

“Seventy-five
minutes precisely,” she told him.

“
Precisely
what?” Martín
 
looked at her.

She looked at
him and then tapped the display with the nail of her index finger, first the
top feed then the bottom one. “Seventy-five minutes precisely between the feed
coming back from the
Clarke
and the
feed being sent to us by NASA.”

Martín didn’t
know what was more impressive: that Jacqueline had managed to hack into the
original data stream herself within four hours, or that security and encryption
at Mission Control eight-thousand kilometres away was so lax as to let such a
hack occur.

“So they’ve
added a delay to the feed they’re sending us?” he asked.

“Yes, although
I don’t know when it was introduced, obviously I only know it’s effective now.”
She looked back at the screen and the programming code she had spent hours
putting together.

“It doesn’t
entirely surprise me,” he said, despondently. “Our partner status has been
downscaled, so they’ve probably downgraded our feed, too. How long will we have
the direct feed?”

“I don’t know,
I’m amazed it’s still there, to be honest.”

“And you’re
recording all of this?” he asked, watching the screen intently. In the delayed
feeds, Captain Marchenko had just lost most of his chips, while at the same
time in the live one he had already won most of them back again.

She pointed to
a little red flashing icon in the bottom left hand corner of her screen and
nodded. “Yes,” she said. “But it’s only useful to you and I as we stand here
watching.
 
In an hour and a quarter
practically anyone will be able to see this feed, so we don’t exactly gain
anything.”

As she said
this, the top feed started to move across the Lounge. He looked at Jacqueline
in earnest.

“We can’t
control anything, sorry. And even if we could, we wouldn’t want to. If they
haven’t realised that we’re watching yet, sending commands to a nanostation is
a sure-fire way of putting them on the right track.”

He nodded in
agreement. He hadn’t thought of that at all.
 
The nanostation was clearly going to recharge anyway, as it headed for
the corner of the Lounge and slowly dropped onto the available induction plate.
Just as the screen went blank, Jacqueline sat upright and typed quickly on the
keyboard for several seconds.

“What is it?”
he urged.

She left him
waiting for almost five minutes before replying. When she did, the screen had
changed, this time completely full of programming code.

“You say that
the delay is because they downgraded our partner status, but I didn’t tell you
the best bit,” she said. She was enjoying her brief spell as a technological
spy.

“Yes?”

“Well, while I
was searching data streams to tap into, I naturally started by looking for the
feeds going from NASA to JAXA, CNSA and the RSA,” she said eagerly. “I expected
that they would be seeing the same data as NASA, and not the delayed feed NASA
is sending us.”

The Japanese
Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, the China National Space Administration,
CNSA, and the Russian Space Agency, RSA he thought to himself. The string of
acronyms were unlikely bedfellows among which the ESA should have fitted
nicely, had it not been for Larue.

“At first I
thought I was going crazy,” she continued. “But I ran comparisons several times
and I’m absolutely right.”

“And?”

She looked him
directly in the eyes and said the words slowly and deliberately. “The other
agencies are being sent the same feed as us!”

Jacqueline’s
discovery was still ringing in his ears as he entered his office. The ESA
building had been empty for some time now and he checked his watch. Two in the
morning. He’d missed the last Metro, and had too much to think about to go
home, anyway. He picked up his telephone and dialled Larue’s office. It went
straight to voicemail, as he had expected.
 

He had to
think carefully about his next move. After the first NASA feed had gone blank,
Jacqueline had managed to hack into another nanostation, but her handiwork had
been picked up on after about twenty minutes. During this time the feed from
NASA to ESA still hadn’t caught up with the
actual
live feed they had been watching.
 
Whatever chink in security she had exploited had been resolved, as from
that point on she was unable to access anything but the standard, delayed feed.
He could picture the situation in America where some programmer had probably
been typing frantically for ten minutes before hitting
Enter
and punching the air triumphantly, just like in the movies.

Jacqueline had
persevered for almost three hours, trying desperately to hack into another
nanostation on board the
Clarke
, but
had failed at every attempt. It had been no good. Whatever they had seen was
impossible to prove anyway.

She had left
shortly afterwards, and he had almost reluctantly declined her offer of a ride
home. On any other day, he would have jumped at the opportunity; Jacqueline was
beautiful by any standards, single, and he was certainly very attracted to her.
But somehow after their discovery, it didn’t feel quite right to simply leave.

For Martín,
the evening’s work had at least served one lasting purpose: having not taken
Larue’s words regarding NASA seriously that afternoon, he had returned to his
desk dreading the task he had been given. Now, however, not only did he believe
that Larue’s suspicious nature was justified, he was positive beyond a shadow
of a doubt that someone at NASA was up to something. And whatever it was, they
were prepared to go to great lengths to cover it up.
 

Lieutenant Su Ning lay on her
side and looked across the room at the photo next to the window: a young
Chinese man, strong and well groomed with a perfect smile that showed in his
eyes as well as his straight, white teeth.
 
His dark green uniform was starched to perfection, and his collar nudged
up precisely against the bottom of his chin. His officer’s hat was wedged
carefully under his upper arm, while his hands shot down in perfect straight
lines towards the floor.

They had both
grown up in the same small village outside Beijing, and had joined the Academy
together. Their relationship had not been spoilt by the fact that only she had
been put through for the Mars
mission.
He had been immensely proud of her and had supported her all of the way.
Although he had always dreamed of going into space, he had failed his entrance
medical due to a retinal disorder he hadn’t even been aware of at the time.
Since then, his sight had deteriorated to the extent of being service-affecting,
and he was now desk-based.

In the corner
of the photo, a neatly written message:
See
Mars for me.

She pulled her
eyes away from the picture and looked at her computer screen.
That’s where it had all started
, she
thought. She pushed gently on the covers of the bed and let herself float
several inches above it, enjoying the feeling of zero gravity.

As she lay
above her bed, she cleared her mind and thought about what she would tell the
Captain. She knew he would be going to the Lounge during the night, she had
seen the look on his face and understood immediately what he was thinking: that
something was wrong, but that he did not know what. From the behaviour of the
others, she was sure she was the only one to have noticed it. Jane had been
acting strangely that afternoon, but then again, she so often did.

She would need
to tell Montreaux what she knew efficiently. The last thing they needed was a
long protracted debate in the middle of the night, which would be a fool-proof
way of attracting the unwanted attention of the lone nanostation patrolling the
Lounge.

Nanostations.
She hated nanostations. They had at first intrigued her, but after a while had
brought back memories of her mother’s stories of old China, where freedom of
speech did not exist and even the birth rate had been rigorously
controlled.
 
Even out here, nearly forty
million miles away from Earth, they had no privacy.
Especially out here
, she almost said out loud.
 

Nightmode had
become her only way to be alone. She knew there was always one nanostation
active in the Lounge, but it was also the biggest room, and she could easily
switch windows if she felt like it.
 
Her
hearing had become finely tuned to the brief hisses of the nanostation motors, imperceptible
during the day, but just audible at night within a foot or two.
 
As soon as she heard it, she would switch
window, and after a couple of weeks either the operators had grown bored of the
game of cat and mouse, or they had learnt to stay at least a few feet away from
her.

She had since
spent her evenings undisturbed, giving her time to think about Earth, Beijing,
and what waited for her on her return. Sometimes she found herself imagining
Mars, and what it would be like to set foot on the Red Planet, but mostly she
dreamt of home as she stared out into the twinkling infinity of space.

It had been
during one of her Nightmode sessions that she had noticed the change.

She had grown
accustomed to checking her watch every now and then, to ensure that she got
enough sleep. It was fine staring out to space all night, but she would rather keep
it a secret. If she was always yawning at the breakfast table, the others would
have quickly started asking questions.

Seeing the
Martian time, she had tried to calculate what time it was in Beijing. It was a
game she played every now and then, helping not only fight off monotony but
also keep her mind sharp.

They had been
on Sols rather than days for over a year.
Since
midday on July 4
^th
, 2044
, she remembered. It had been the last
time they had counted in days.

She knew that
every sol was thirty-nine minutes longer than a day. She also knew that the
previous day had been the 29
^th
of September, after a video message
from her mother. This meant that they had been on Sols for four hundred and
fifty two Earth days.

Gaining
thirty-nine minutes every day meant that at midday on the 29
^th
September the
Clarke
would have been
twelve days, five hours and fifty-nine seconds ahead of Earth. This meant that it
would have been 5:59pm on the
Clarke
.
She had smiled as she completed the equation in her head, then scratched her
chin and looked out of the window, trying to focus the numbers in her mind.

Checking her
watch, it was almost exactly 1am,
Clarke
time. So seven hours more or less since midday Earth time, she surmised. Every
Martian hour was approximately one minute and thirty-seven seconds longer than
every Earth hour. This meant that the seven hours on
Clarke
equated to six hours, forty-eight minutes and thirty seven
seconds. More or less.

She grinned.
She now knew it was just past 6:48pm, Houston time. With fourteen hours between
Houston and Beijing, that meant it was just before 9am back home. Her mother
would already be up, and would probably be reading the papers with her second
cup of tea of the day.

Su Ning had
gone back to her room and fished into her kit bag, pulling out a small,
jewel-encrusted time-piece she had been given, “
so you will always know when I am praying for you,
” her mother had
said.

Since moving
to Martian time there had been a strict mission rule of no Earth-time devices,
so she had smuggled the gift onto the
Clarke,
and it only came out at night when the nanostations were kept outside their
sleeping quarters.
Turning it over in
her hands, she had looked at the time and been taken aback.

It wasn’t
nearly nine in the morning in Beijing: it was barely
seven-thirty
.

She tapped the
watch’s display and stared at the hands faultlessly ticking away. In the day or
two since she had last checked it, could it possibly have come so unstuck? She shook
her head, but nonetheless watched it for several minutes to be sure.

Her
calculations must be the problem. You only needed to add a few seconds to each
day and you could easily be out by an hour after a year or so. But then she had
dismissed the thought: she was always accurate. It was a game she often played,
and she hadn’t been wrong yet, let alone by an hour and a quarter!

Despite this
she still double-checked, and after going through the maths several more times,
was left with only thought: someone had changed the time on board the
Clarke
.
 

Why would they
do that? Why would they want the time on the ship
to be faster than the time being recorded on Earth?
 
This would mean that when people in China
thought that it was nine o’clock on the
Clarke
,
it was actually past ten o’clock, which meant that what they would be watching
would already be over an hour old.

The conclusion
had hit her in the face so hard she struggled to breath for a few seconds.
So that what people saw could be controlled
.

As she realised
this, more thoughts started to come to her; small throwaway comments that she
had read and listened to in her personal messages on her computer screen. Her
mother had written to her once, and the letter had seemed disjointed, as if the
sentences she was reading were not meant to be read together, and were missing
something.
 
One phrase in that particular
letter had seemed completely random.

She had
quickly found the letter, placing the watch carefully in the bottom of her kit
bag. Towards the end, sandwiched between ‘
It’s
not raining as much this year
’ and ‘
Good
luck
’ was a chilling sentence. ‘
Just
like when I was a girl
’.

It had to be
deliberate. Her mother had been trying to tell her something, like a code.

She had gone
back to the dark space of the Lounge to clear her head and think hard about the
phrase. ‘
Just like when I was a girl
’,
and then ‘
Good luck
’. Her mother had
been a girl in the twentieth century, before China had given its citizens
freedom of speech.

It did not
take Su Ning long to work out what her mother had tried to tell her: not only
was the feed from the
Clarke
to Earth
being censored, so too were messages from Earth to the
Clarke
.

She had been
mulling over this when Captain Montreaux had floated through the door.

Su Ning had
not been able to tell him then. For a start it had just been a theory. But her
mind had been racing and despite herself, she had failed to hide her emotions.
It was unlike her. Unlike the controlled, precise Su Ning that the Captain had
become accustomed to.

The following
day, when their eyes had met in the Lounge, his facial expression had proven to
her that, in some way, he was suspicious of something being wrong; he wanted to
know more.

She knew she
was playing a dangerous game. If her suspicions were correct, then someone had
already assumed full control of the
Clarke
.
She did not know exactly what their motives were, but the inflamed rhetoric
that poured so easily from the American on board, Dr Richardson, gave her a
pretty good idea.
 
In her experience, Westerners
were usually extremely emotional and headstrong.

However, since
the beginning of the Mars mission training Su Ning had grown to like one:
Captain Montreaux. With his calm, reflected manner he had always been able to
manage difficult situations, and she had been glad that it had been he who had
appeared the previous night in the Lounge.

She was
certain that he was the right person to confide in.

Captain Yves
Montreaux sat in the Lounge and looked at his watch for the fifth time. Still
another hour to Nightmode, he noted impatiently.

The poker game
had been over for more than two hours, Marchenko finally winning all the chips
with a pair of twos. They had then eaten together at the table, before watching
the daily news feed on the Lounge’s television. As usual, NASA hadn’t selected
anything particularly interesting for them to see that evening; they were all
fully aware that the television broadcasts were carefully screened and selected
by a team of psychologists back at Mission Control.
 
This meant that most of what they saw
revolved around financials, funny stories and weather. It had been alright for
the first few weeks, but by now they all craved something more tangible. It was
a sad fact that the news just wasn’t exciting if it didn’t show you the
suffering and plight of others. The psychologists would probably pick up on
that fact, so any day now they could expect to see some additional flavour
added to the broadcasts.

After dinner,
Marchenko and Su Ning had both retired to their quarters, and Dr Richardson had
busied herself with disassembling her experiments and returning the laboratory
to its compartments inside the walls of the Lounge. He had decided to stay on
the sofa to read
.

“Waiting for
someone?” Dr Richardson said from behind him.

He looked over
his shoulder at the scientist, who was looking at him with a grin. “No, Dr
Richardson,” he said casually. “I was just checking the time.”

“What are you
reading?” She closed the final compartment and pushed towards the sofa. “Is it
good?”

He showed her
the cover of the book. “
The Martian
Chronicles
, and I don’t know yet, because I’ve only just started it.”

“Essential
reading for a mission to Mars, I think,” she looked at him keenly and cocked
her head to one side. “But surely you, Captain Yves Montreaux, obsessed with
Mars, would have read everything there is to know about the planet. How could
you get this far without reading Bradbury’s classic?”

“I was never
as much into Science Fiction as I was into Science,” he replied, closing the book
and placing it on his lap. “From what I have read so far, Bradbury was the
other way around.”

Dr Richardson
looked at him and smiled. “I am sure that he knew Mars was not as he described
it. But the purpose of Science Fiction is not to relate life as it is, but life
as it could be. I heard somewhere that Science Fiction is able to tell us about
all the possible mistakes we can make in the future, so that with effort, we
can avoid them. When you get to the end of that book, you will understand what
I mean.”

He looked at
her with interest. Dr Richardson had always come across to him as hot-headed
and impetuous, particularly with her heated debates about flags and national
identity. But hearing her talk about Bradbury’s book forced a rethink. “I
hadn’t put you down as a sentimental person,” he said lightly.

“As the
commanding officer of the
Clarke
you
must have read my psych report, so I can only imagine that either you didn’t
believe it, or that the analyst shared your opinion.”

Her reply was
good natured, but as always he sensed an edge to her voice, sign enough that to
go any further on the subject may take him somewhere he was not keen on
going.
 
Just one more question, he told
himself, just not about flags. “I prefer to judge people from what I see, not
from what somebody with a computer thinks.”