Keystone (13 page)

She laughed.
“I’m screwed then, aren’t I?”

The scientist
had a cavalier attitude to the conversation, he thought, as if her non-military
background excluded her from the formalities of protocol. He chose his words
carefully in the front of his mind and then asked her his question. “Dr
Richardson, has anything been bothering you recently?” As the commanding
officer, he had to ask the difficult questions, but he hated putting people on
the spot. Especially Dr Richardson.

“Why do you
say that?” She sounded hurt.

The officer in
him suddenly took over, changing the tone of the conversation completely. “I
have my reasons. Now is there anything you would like to tell me?”

She looked at
him in surprise. “Like what?”

“
Anything
.”

“Not really,
to be honest.”

He sensed that
she was holding back on something. “I would rather know, Dr Richardson. Your
behaviour lately has been erratic.”

She had not
yet clipped herself in to the sofa, and had been floating several inches above its
cushions. Suddenly, she propelled herself towards the door of the Lounge with a
kick. As she reached it, she spun round quickly and stopped herself just inside
the mouth of the tunnel.

“If you must
know, Captain Montreaux, I’m menstruating, and in zero gravity it’s not
particularly pleasant.” Her voice was bitter and defiant. “Read that book,
Captain. I recommend it.”

And with that,
she was gone, leaving him sitting dumbstruck on the sofa, still holding the
book to his lap.

Martín could sense day
approaching in Paris.
 
He had left his
desk to refill his Styrofoam cup and had been surprised by the crispness of the
air. It was still dark outside and he was filled with a sensation that took him
back to his days at university; he would typically have been late handing in
his assignments, and would regularly have worked all night long in order to
hand them in the following morning.

But it had
been a long time since his last
nuit
blanche
.

Larue had
asked for haste, though maybe even he wouldn’t have expected such commitment on
the first night. But after having witnessed Jacqueline’s discovery he didn’t
need orders. He wanted to find out what NASA were trying to cover up, and find
out now.
 

After more
endless hours of watching old feeds from the
Clarke
, the night had started to catch up with him, and as he
returned with his hot drink, he felt like he was wading through treacle.
 

Sitting down
at his desk once more, he clicked lazily on his computer screen with his mouse.
The feed he was now looking at was also from the previous night, but slightly
earlier than the muffled conversation between Su Ning and Montreaux. One part
of the video had been bugging him.

Su Ning had
been alternating her gaze between her wristwatch and space for about five minutes.
At the same time her lips had been moving silently, as if reciting some
personal prayer, pausing occasionally to remember a word caught on the tip of
the tongue. Eventually, she stopped and looked at her watch one final time, before
giving a satisfied nod. Smiling, she turned and disappeared through the door to
her quarters.

When she
returned she was different, the smile gone, her shoulders dropped. He could not
see her face properly in the faint glow of Nightmode, but it was obvious to
Martín from nearly forty million miles away that something was deeply wrong.

Something to
do with her watch, and the
time
. Maybe
the time delay was on
Clarke
as well,
maybe they had been
accelerated
by an
hour and a quarter, so the time output by the mission was in sync with the
delayed transmission from NASA.

But why?

He was too
tired to get excited now. The night had begun to overwhelm him. His mouth was
pasty and bitter from the coffee, and his head felt like it was being wrapped
in foam; the effects of his self-inflicted sleep deprivation. He rocked back
and forwards in his chair and put his feet up on his desk, closing his eyes and
pulling his collar up to warm his neck.

Su Ning was
the key, he thought to himself as his body shut down. Watch Su Ning.

On
Clarke
it was Nightmode once more, and Su Ning was ready.

Two whole Sols
had passed since her discovery in the Lounge. Nobody else had noticed the
change in time, as far as she could tell, and so she had to tell Captain
Montreaux what she knew. Swinging her legs into the void beside her bed, she
hung in the air for several moments, listening carefully to make sure the coast
was clear.

If someone is up to something, I have to act
as normally as possible
, she said to herself as she waited.

She was about
to push towards the door when something caught her attention: a microscopic
movement just at the limits of her senses. And then the sound, to her left and
right: the gentle hiss of air passing through dozens of tiny motors. She jerked
her head to and fro frantically, trying to sense one of the nanostations in the
faint light.

Weeks spent
avoiding the lone nanostation in the Lounge had taught Su Ning a great deal
about detecting them; the sound they made, the small flurry of air as they
moved through the modules, the occasional glint as the light would catch one at
just the right angle.

It was Nightmode
in Su Ning’s quarters, and she was terrified.

Instead of the
lone nanostation that would patrol the air at night, making sure everything was
safe, she knew she was surrounded by tens of them, shooting past her head as
fast as they could go. They had appeared suddenly, as if they had been waiting
for her to move.

She turned her
eyes to the door connecting her quarters to the Hygiene Bay and tensed.
 
Between her and the door, there was a small
flash of light, like a spark shooting from a fire.

Pushing on her
arms with all her might, she shot for the opening, ten feet away.

The
nanostations were executing their carefully programmed drill, a simple systems
test, for safety reasons.

The monitor
station sat in the centre of the room, motionless, waiting.

The other
stations calculated their vectors with infinite precision, converging with
great speed on a point next to the monitor. They came together within a
millisecond of each other.

The monitor
station, millimetres away, detected the small explosion in its vicinity: a
sphere of heat exceeding two hundred degrees Celsius. A fire. No time to
evacuate in the oxygen-rich atmosphere.

The door to
the Hygiene Bay was sealed in the instant before Su Ning reached it.

Captain Yves
Montreaux shot upright in his bed and looked for the lights. A deafening alarm
was ringing through the
Clarke
, but
its tone told him that his quarters were not in the danger zone.
 
He lunged toward the door.

Poking his
head through the short tunnel and into the Hygiene Bay, he saw the faces of Dr
Richardson and Captain Marchenko coming out of the modules to his left and
right, both with similarly confused expressions.
 
Around all three of their doors were the
safe, blue lights indicating the problem was elsewhere.

“Su Ning!” he
cried as he pulled out of the tunnel, groping for handholds on the shiny
metallic walls of the Hygiene Bay as he struggled to reach her quarters.

The light
around her sealed door was flashing red.

A small square
control box recessed into the side of the door was also flashing red:
Module Evac
.

Montreaux knew
what it meant. They didn’t have much time.

“Richardson,
get over here!” he barked as he ripped the cover off the control panel. “Open
this door!”

The scientist
reached his side and saw the warning message. Her jaw dropped. “I can’t,” she
managed to say. “It’s flushing the module, all of the air is being sucked into
space! Even if I could, opening the door could kill us all!” She looked and
sounded helpless.

“Do it!” he
screamed. He started banging on the sealed door with his fist and shouting
through the metal. Hearing no response he redoubled his efforts with a double
fisted blow that sent him cart-wheeling backwards.
 
His arms and legs flailed around as he tried
to stop himself from spinning, and he finally managed to bring himself back to
the door. He had raised his fist for another blow when a firm hand caught his wrist
and stopped him.

“Captain, it
is too late.” Marchenko said, his accent coming through stronger than usual in
his voice. “If she was in there, she is gone.”

Montreaux
turned round in a daze and pushed towards the Lounge. “She may be in here!” he
said. “She used to come in here at night!” He looked through into the large
spherical room and scanned round it several times before giving up, his body
going limp in the connecting tunnel.
 

He felt a
gentle tug at his legs as he was pulled back into the Hygiene Bay. He came to a
halt facing Dr Richardson. In the background, the noise of the alarm had
stopped.

“Yves,” she
started.

Behind her, he
saw that Marchenko was sliding into Su Ning’s quarters: the door was now lit in
blue and had opened. Montreaux pushed past Richardson and reached the module,
his eyes full of hope.

His face fell
when he saw the Russian, cradling Su Ning’s limp body.

Mars filled the window of the
Lounge as the
Clarke
completed
another orbit. Captain Montreaux looked out over the reddish brown swirl of the
Martian atmosphere and sighed.

He could still
remember his last private exchange of words with Su Ning, at that very window,
overlooking the stars. It was hard to believe that six weeks had passed since
the accident.

The official
word from Mission Control had been that a group of malfunctioning nanostations
had collided inside the Chinese officer’s quarters, causing a small fireball
that had initiated the isolation procedure.
 
On its own, this would not have been fatal, but a secondary fault in the
Clarke
’s safety protocols had caused
it to issue a command to flush the module and put out the fire, despite the
fact that no fire could be detected. All the computer had to do to avoid the
situation was check the nanostation for a second reading, thereby gaining a measure
by which to assess the risk to the spaceship; had it done so, it would have
established that the fire had already stopped, and the area was safe.

The faulty
programming caused all of the air to be evacuated from the module. The sudden,
unexpected drop in atmospheric pressure and temperature killed Su Ning in less
than two minutes.

Her body had
been stored inside the
Clarke
in an
empty refrigeration unit that had once contained food supplies for the outbound
journey. The remaining crew members had pasted a photo of the astronaut on the
door of the unit, along with a few personal messages.
 
The mourning process had been especially
difficult in the depths of space; the melancholic isolation of the had
prolonged their silent suffering for well over a week.

In the end,
Mission Control had started to play music through the internal communication
system on board the
Clarke
.
 
Within two days, the crew had begun
socialising and even laughing again. It was amazing the effect music could have
on people.

But Montreaux
knew that for his part it was all a charade. While Dr Richardson and Captain
Marchenko had eventually been satisfied by the explanation of the incident, the
commanding officer had seen no accident in Su Ning’s death.

Instead, he
saw a very clear warning.
 

They had been
orbiting the planet for a week now, waiting for a storm on the surface to let
up.
 
It was important that the
Clarke
’s
landing module, the MLP, entered the atmosphere in quiet weather
if possible, for two reasons.

Firstly, the
safety of the crew was of major concern. The MLP was the largest landing craft
ever to enter an alien atmosphere, and also the heaviest.
 
Designers had initially toyed with the idea
of a winged craft, similar to the old fashioned NASA Space Shuttle. But the
lack of sufficiently flat surfaces to land on added to the thin atmosphere made
it a far too risky option.
 
A traditional
parachute driven approach was therefore quickly adopted.
 
Six chutes would deploy to bring the craft
down safely, aided by inflatable cushions on the underside of the MLP.
 
It was therefore vitally important that they
did not land in the middle of a storm, as the high winds could easily disrupt
the flow of air through the parachutes, and cause the craft to list
uncontrollably during its descent. A landing under such conditions could be
fatal, and an unfortunate premature ending to the already blighted Mars
mission.
  

The second
reason for waiting until the weather subsided was that they wanted to land
within accessible distance of a precise point:
Crater Landslide
on the northern edge of Hellas Basin.

ESA’s
Beagle 4
rover had already undertaken
extensive reconnaissance of the area over the past three years, and proven
beyond a shadow of a doubt that frozen water existed in abundance barely two
feet beneath the surface.
 
During a
particularly impressive piece of footage,
Beagle
4
had arrived on the edge of a cliff barely moments after a mudslide had
spilt down into the crater’s basin.
 
The
video clearly showed rivulets of dirty, viscous liquid pouring slowly down the
slopes for several minutes.

NASA had
already been in the process of sending supply drops to Mars to supplement the
Clarke
mission, and on seeing this had
routed everything to the area.
 
The
manned mission was destined to land within close proximity of these supply
drops.
 

“Weather
report shows that the storm has almost passed,” Marchenko said optimistically
from the Lounge’s sofa. The storm covered most of the planet, and had been
raging for over a month, well before their arrival in orbit. According to the
forecast, based on previous planetary storms on Mars, it was due to end soon.

Montreaux
looked round at the television screen behind him and studied the chart. He
didn’t need to fully understand it, that was Mission Control’s job, but it was
obvious that red was bad and blue was good.
 
Whereas the previous day a three thousand mile long band of red had
dominated the screen, it had by now disappeared almost entirely, to be replaced
with the soothing tones of light and dark blue.

“Thank God for
that. I thought we would be up here forever!” Dr Jane Richardson heaved a sigh
of relief. “Everything is ready in the MLP, we’re raring to go, all we need now
is the green light from Mission Control.”

It would take
five minutes for her voice to reach Earth, but it seemed that Mission Control
had been thinking along the same lines, as within thirty seconds a video
message appeared onscreen.

“MLP
deployment is good to go in T minus three hours. Please confirm message
received and understood, and then report status on T minus two hours and T
minus one hour,” the nameless American controller read from a printout in front
of him.
 
He looked up from the paper,
directly into the camera. To the crew of the
Clarke
, it felt as if he was looking at them all individually,
straight in the eyes. “
Clarke,
good
luck from everyone here at Mission Control, and Godspeed. CAPCOM out.”

The television
screen went blank.

“OK, you heard
the man!” Captain Montreaux shouted after a brief silence. “Last chance for showers
and meals in the quiet calm of space before we hit the sands of Mars!”

“At last!” cheered
the Russian.

The
Clarke
reverberated with the sounds of a
joyful crew as the storm blew over on the planet beneath them.