Keystone (31 page)

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.

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.

A sudden sense of urgency filled
the DEFCOMM control room after the Russian cosmonaut’s disappearance.

Following
that, it took Gail less than an hour to get her tablet back. The hieroglyphic
analysis tools would help decipher the engravings on the walls, she had claimed.

She could only
thank her lucky stars that she had the tablet in Mahmoud’s office back in
Cairo, and that her abductors had thought to bring it with them.

Using
translation tools was, of course, a decoy. George’s application wasn’t a
translator, and in any case she didn’t know of any software on Earth that would
help with the alien writing she had seen carved into the tunnel walls on Mars.
As much as she would have loved to help solve the mystery of where Captain
Marchenko had gone, this was her chance to save herself first.

Save yourself
, the thought,
and you stand a chance of saving them
.
All that she needed to do now was make sure that no one was looking.

Dr Patterson
looked over her shoulder at the screen. “Interesting tool,” he said
thoughtfully. “It looks a bit out of date, how old is it?”

She grunted
and tapped a command into the screen. “There’s not a huge demand for this sort
of application, in fact I don’t know anyone else who uses it. So it’ll pretty
much do the job until it breaks or something much better comes along.” She
didn’t tell him that George had developed it for her; it was pointless arousing
suspicions when she was so close. “Can you get me some coffee?”

“Sure. How do
you take it?”

“Julie Andrews,”
she replied. Seeing the look on his face, she elaborated. “White, none.”

He stared at
her blankly, then shook his head and made to leave.

“And something
to eat!” she shouted after him.
Anything
to buy some time!

Using the
interactive pen that slid out of the front edge of the computer, she scanned
the first line of symbols from the printout Patterson had given her, and
pretended to study the output until she was sure he had gone.

She tilted her
head to one side to check for noise from the corridor. Hearing none, she
browsed her saved images and found an appropriately-sized photo of some
engravings from the Sixth Pylon at Karnak: the texture of the stone and
lighting were similar to that of the Library. She tapped an on-screen menu and
accessed the application’s ‘about’ pop-up, before holding down a special
combination of keys to open a small text-input screen.

It took her
less than a minute to write the message, a little under one hundred characters.
She knew that any more would be pushing it; she would only get one shot at
this, and the smaller the message the easier it would be to hide.

She had known
for a while that her tablet would be her best bet of contacting someone on the
outside
. Her first problem had been
getting hold of it; something the events on Mars had precipitated.

The next problem
was working out what to say so that George could find her, when she didn’t even
know where she was to start with. For that, however, she’d had a stroke of
luck.

Barely an hour
earlier she had glimpsed the logos of NASA and DEFCOMM in the large hanger,
before Patterson had slammed the door closed. She knew that they weren’t at
NASA, so DEFCOMM were obviously the culprits, working in partnership with the
unwitting space agency.

Later, in the
control room, Patterson had let slip another vital clue: that they controlled
the satellites and receiver arrays because they
built
them. It didn’t take a rocket scientist, and from what she’d
seen this place had enough of them, to work out that DEFCOMM probably stood for
Defence Communications
. After what he
had told her in the control room, it seemed odd that DEFCOMM should advertise
its allegiance to NASA and the USA. But then, what better smokescreen? DEFCOMM
was a very American company building American satellites for a government
agency, for an American-led first mission to Mars. Who would guess they had
their own, hidden, agenda? What scared her more than anything else she had seen
was that Seth Mallus had some crazy ideas coupled with huge resources; a
dangerous combination. If someone who built rockets, satellites, and who knows
what weaponry could be so fanatical about some ancient Egyptian texts, then God
help them all.

And, thanks to
poor Mamdouh and the
Wizard of Oz
man, she knew that she was definitely in Florida.

With all of
this in mind, she barely thought twice about what to write to George.

Her next task
was how to hide the message.

When George
had first developed the application, he had embedded some basic cryptographic
algorithms so that he could send secret love letters to her. Every now and then,
he would create a message on his laptop and send it to her to decode.

Now it wasn’t
for fun: lives depended on it.

There were
basically two types of cryptography: overt, in which it’s clear you’re looking
at a code, but you’re damned if you know what it means, and covert, in which
you have no idea you’re looking at a code.

The drawback
of overt cryptographies is that once people knew you’re hiding something, you
have to make it pretty much impenetrable. As a result, some overt encryption
techniques are so complex, and require so much to be understood by writer and
reader, that they aren’t worth the bother for simple love letters.

George had
toyed with the one-time cipher, the only truly ‘unbreakable’ overt code. It
involved replacing the letters of the alphabet with numerical values, which
would give you a long list of numbers representing your message. These would
then be dropped into a completely random string of numbers, which would be used
only once. The next code would use a different random string. While the
principle of the one-time cipher was sound, it was generally considered to be
too much hassle; the random string of numbers had to be shared between sender
and recipient, as well as the numerical values and their letter counterparts
used to encode the original message.

Because such a
cypher
was
generally deemed
unbreakable, the hassle of encrypting was reduced by recycling the random
string of numbers between messages, rather than always using new ones. As soon
as the one-time cypher became the ‘more than one-time’ cypher, the code was
broken.

So for ease of
use, he had chosen to build covert ciphers into her translation program. The
overwhelming benefit of covert cryptography being that if people didn’t realise
something was hidden, you didn’t need to make such an effort to make it
impenetrable.

Covert
cryptography, or steganography, involved hiding a message inside a picture, in
this case a scan of hieroglyphic text from Karnak. By using the encryption tool,
a text-based message would be added to the colour components of the image file:
each binary digit, or bit of the encoded message, was taken and added on to the
end of the binary code for each individual picture element, or pixel. Adding a
one or a nought to a pixel may change the shade of grey slightly, but overall
the picture would remain unchanged.

The more
code-bits you tried to hide in a picture, the more degraded the original image
would appear; as soon as the image became too distorted from the original, the
message would become less ‘covert’.

Using a
specific decryption tool, which would ask for a shared keyword between sender
and recipient, the code-bits would be extracted from the image, and the code
decrypted for viewing.

Gail made sure
the message was as short as possible by deleting a couple of unnecessary words.
Satisfied with what she had written, she entered her keyword, and tapped to
submit.

Seconds later,
the image was ready, her secret message hidden deep inside each individual
pixel, undetectable to the human eye and, she hoped, invisible to firewalls. If
anyone suspected that there was a hidden message, it wouldn’t take them long to
break her code; George had used an algorithm readily available on the Internet,
and advanced code-breaking programs could unlock keywords within hours. But
that was the beauty of George’s program: no one need ever know they were
exchanging messages, because all you ever saw were pictures.

Now all she
needed to worry about was how to send it to him. She leant back in her chair
and stared into the screen. The network icon advised her that there were access
points in range, but they were all encrypted. The irony didn’t escape her.

All the terminals
she’d seen in the facility had thumbprint access restriction. No doubt, if they
were as security conscious as she believed they should be, the thumbprint
scanners would also take a minute sample of tissue to perform a quick DNA
analysis. There would probably even be retinal scan software, using the cameras
that were embedded into most screens. To back all that up, they might even ask
users for a typed password before unlocking the displays, too.
 

So she wasn’t
going to get a connection, and she wasn’t going to be able to log onto someone
else’s machine. Despite all the technology she had used to get to this point,
it was all going to let her down on the last leg. She had been so caught up in
writing the message and hiding it that getting the message to him hadn’t even
crossed her mind.

She hit the
table in frustration.
All I want to do is
send a bloody email!
As the word entered her mind, she froze.
Mail!
Tapping the screen quickly, she
moved the image file to her memory card and closed the application. She then popped
a small flap open and pulled out the thumbnail-sized piece of plastic.

Rummaging through
the papers on the desk, she found a few scans inside a brown paper envelope.
Removing them, she slipped the tiny drive in and shut the envelope before
sliding it into her pocket just as Patterson returned. He was carrying a tray
full of cakes, with two mugs of steaming hot coffee. To her relief, he pushed
the door open with his rear as he backed into the room, and therefore didn’t
see the guilty look on her face as she quickly returned both her hands to the
laptop.

“Get
anywhere?” he asked, casually.

“No,” she
cleared her throat. “Still a couple of stumbling blocks. Coffee will help
though, thanks.”

“No problem. I
asked the guy in the canteen for coffee ‘Julie Andrews’ and he knew exactly
what I was talking about. Seems you’re not so crazy after all!”

“Ha! I think
any of you guys calling me crazy when I’ve seen what you’re up to here is a bit
out of order.”

He looked at
her and took his mug from the tray, sipping it cautiously after a short cooling
blow. “I’m sorry you’re caught up in this,” he said sympathetically.

“You should
be!” she retorted.

“No, I mean
it,” he said, obviously hurt.

It suddenly
occurred to her that there was something more than just sympathy in his eyes.
She still had a big problem to solve: there weren’t exactly that many mailboxes
around the corridors of the facility, and sending a letter to England was not
going to be straightforward. She’d need help. And while she wasn’t the kind of
person to use someone, Patterson’s inability to be an authority on the Book of
Xynutians was the main reason for her being kidnapped.

Here was a
weak man, who had clearly taken a shine to her. Why, she had no idea; although
only forty-one, she felt old and slightly podgy after too many quiet nights in
and too little exercise. And she had been anything but nice to Patterson since
she’d first laid eyes on him.

I have to get this message to George
,
she though as she pushed back the feelings of hate towards herself for what she
was about to do and painted what she hoped looked like a completely natural,
slightly flirty smile on her face.

“I’m sorry,”
she said, ignoring her morals screaming from deep down inside. “I didn’t mean
to snap at you. You have been kind to me since I got here.” She reached out and
brushed her hand against his forearm briefly, before taking her coffee. She
hadn’t been on the dating scene for over fifteen years now, but she knew that
just with that gesture, she was already halfway there.