Keystone (9 page)

On the other
side of the trench, the three engineers stood together, watching him carefully.
At their feet stood the large black case that had been taken with him down the
steps.

The Professor
pulled his eyes away from them and jumped down into the trench, landing next to
the photographer with a thud.

“OK, come and
see what all the fuss is about,” he said in Arabic, ushering the photographer
into the hole. He shot a nervous look over his shoulder at the engineers, whose
steely gaze followed him as he descended once more.

Captain Yves Montreaux had always
dreamed of going to Mars. Born in California to a French-Canadian father and
American mother, his first vivid memory was of an image beamed back from NASA’s
Spirit
mission, in 2004. He had been
barely six years old at the time and his mother, a US Navy pilot, had shown him
the picture on the Internet early one morning before school. Even now,
forty-one years later, he still dreamt of being there, with the
Spirit
rover, as it edged its way
carefully out of its landing craft and onto Martian soil for the first time.

He pulled
himself over to the small circle of Plexiglas, his window onto the eternal
sunshine of interplanetary space.

A month
earlier, the view had been dominated by aluminium cranes, connectors and
cylindrical pods in orbit around Earth; the precision-built chaos that was the
International Space Station.
 
After half
a century of operation, most of the original modules were now lost in a maze of
metal and foil, somewhere towards the centre of the station. It had taken all
of those fifty years to get to its current state, and was still exceeding the expectations
of its original designers, now mostly dead.

Looking out of
the window now, Montreaux had a front row seat to the stars.
 
There was no horizon, no up, no down; a
confusing state of affairs at first, but it was not something that he had
simply been thrown into from one day to the next.
 
For the past eight weeks, as the spaceship
had gradually accelerated beyond the pull of the Moon and into interplanetary
space, he had watched as his home planet had grown smaller, until now he was
able to hold his thumb up and completely block it out.
 
Within another week it would be but a bright
star, and it would be time to look the other way, towards Mars.
 

There was a
knock on the plastic door-frame of his quarters.

“Come in,” he
said without turning.

Despite the
lack of actual doors to separate them, the ingrained protocol was hard to shake.
 

“Sir,” the
female voice said. “We are in the Lounge.”

Montreaux
smiled to himself as he held on to the handle on the wall and slowly pivoted
round to see her. Her jet black hair was pulled into a tight ponytail,
revealing her pretty, pale face. “Su Ning,” he said. “We have known each other
for over a year, trained together for months, and lived in the same metal tube
for over two months, haven’t we?” His voice was kind, soft.

She smiled.
“And I still call you
Sir
,” she
confirmed.

Montreaux’s
Chinese was hopeless. A few basic commands and greetings were all he had
managed to master since meeting Lieutenant Shi Su Ning the previous summer. For
this reason it amazed and humbled him that she could not only speak perfect
English, but do so with barely a hint of an accent. That she had also never
lived outside of Beijing in her entire life only made the feat more incredible
to him.

“I’ll join you
shortly, I have to quickly finish this log entry first,” he explained.

She left, and
the Captain returned to the window and gathered his thoughts.
 
“Captain Daniil Marchenko, Russian cosmonaut,
Second in Command of the
Clarke
, is
twenty-nine years old today.” He paused and repeated the number to himself
under his breath; it seemed impossibly young. “We are having a small
celebration in the Lounge this evening.” He focused on the small brilliant disc
that was Earth, its continents no longer distinguishable, and smiled. “Next log
entry in one sol.
Stop recording
.”
The last two words were said more loudly in a monotonous voice. He was rewarded
with an audible confirmation from his computer.

The
Clarke’s
crew had been working to the
Martian day, twenty-four hours and thirty-nine minutes, for over a year, and
were by now completely adjusted to it.
 
As soon as they had been accepted for the mission training, they had all
been given new wrist-watches, and their computers had been updated with new software
to add the extra minutes into each day.
 
The easy part of the transition had been to start referring to a
day
as a
sol
; the hardest part was to turn up to work nearly three quarters
of an hour later every ‘morning’.
 
Within
two weeks they were working at night instead of during the day, and it was two
months before Montreaux learnt to stop looking towards the Sun for
guidance.
 

While on Earth
this had been a chore, in space it was much easier due to the lack of natural
daytime and night time. Space made it more natural to fall asleep during what
their watches told them was the Martian night. The
Clarke
was designed to simulate the cycle of the Martian sol by
providing ambient light at pre-programmed times, in perfect co-ordination with
the planet itself based on the time zone of their projected landing site.
 

Looking at his
watch now, Montreaux knew that there were barely two hours of
sol-light
left.

As Montreaux entered the Lounge,
he saw Captain Daniil Marchenko sitting next to Su Ning on the sofa. He had a
huge grin on his face as he donned his birthday hat.
 
His head was completely shaven, and the hat
slipped down to rest on his brow, partially blocking his sight.

“Wait, Danny!”
Su Ning laughed as she lifted the paper hat off and crimped the back to make it
smaller. “That’s better!” she placed it back on his head, ensuring it fitted
perfectly.

“Thank you Su
Ning, I will bring you my suit to fix in the morning.” He laughed as he avoided
Su Ning’s playful dig at his ribs before reaching for his drink.
 
Placing the straw in his mouth he pressed
down on the bag’s contents until it was empty.

“Happy
Birthday, Captain Marchenko,” Montreaux said as he glided across the room,
extending his hand to the Russian.
 
They
had, of course, already greeted each other that sol, but it seemed appropriate
to repeat the congratulations given the festive appearance of the crew.

“Thank you,
Captain,” Marchenko replied gracefully.

Montreaux was
glad that the
Clarke
’s official
language was English, as his Russian was worse than his Chinese. While
Marchenko’s accent was not as good as Su Ning’s, his English was similarly
impressive.

“
S
Dnyom Rozdyeniya
, Danny!” came
a voice above Montreaux’s head.

It was bad enough that the crew did not
follow the regulatory naming convention of rank and surname, thought Montreaux,
but if there was one person who would reliably break any possible protocol,
including that of official language, it was Dr Jane Richardson, the mission’s
civilian scientist. She was the only crew member without a military background,
a fact that was usually reflected in both her attire
and
attitude.
 
The Captain
glanced up at her and tutted.

The Lounge was the main social hub of the
Clarke
.
 
A huge spherical room, it was fifty feet wide, with slightly flattened
poles like a beach ball that was being pressed against the ground. Two
cylindrical tubes connected the Lounge to the other parts of the ship, and four
small windows, identical to the one in the Captain’s quarters, were placed at
regular intervals around the equator.
 
Between two of the windows and directly in front of Montreaux, who had
approached from the sleeping area, was the Lounge’s red sofa, sixteen feet long
with four backrests. It was designed for everyone to sit facing the low coffee
table in front. Lieutenant Su Ning and Captain Marchencko had used the sofa’s
straps to stop themselves from floating away from the drinks and meals that
stuck magnetically to the table’s surface.

Behind Montreaux’s head, on the wall above
the entrance, was a large recessed television screen, protected by thick
Plexiglas against out of control floating astronauts.
 
Every night they would be able to sit in
front of the screen and watch a variety of programmes and movies, held in the
Clarke
’s library. It was also where the
crew would get regular video broadcasts from Earth. Private communications
would invariably be played on the smaller screens, inside their own quarters.

The sofa and coffee table formed the logical
‘floor’, while the small recessed cupboards and drawers on the opposing side of
the sphere were the ‘ceiling’.
 
However
the lack of gravity meant that the
Clarke
’s
crew were by no means restricted to such definitions.
 

It would be another month and a half before
they would need to get used to an actual feeling of down and up, but even on
Mars it would be at a third of Earth’s oppressive gravity.

For this reason, he was unsurprised to see Dr
Richardson sitting quite comfortably on the ceiling above him, sipping through
the straw of her drink.

“Hi, Yves!” she waved.

 
“Good
evening Dr Richardson,” he said quite politely. “I would remind you that the
official language of this vessel is English.” He knew he was perhaps being a
little harsh, given the circumstances, but his upbringing had been one of
utmost respect for seniority and rank, none of which was forthcoming from the
doctor. He reached the sofa with a push and strapped himself in. Pulling a
drink from the table, he forced himself not to look up at the scientist. “Will
you be joining us today?”

“Actually, yes, I will,” she replied.

She suddenly appeared on the seat beside him
thanks to a perfectly judged push against the room’s wall. She clipped herself
in and raised her drink for a toast.
 
Some people took a long time to get used to zero gravity, and simply
moving from one place to another was a chore.
 
But not Dr Richardson; Jane was a natural, and it annoyed him no end.

“To Danny!” she said with a grin.

The light-hearted party had lasted three
hours, during which special congratulatory messages from Earth had been played
on the Lounge’s television screen. It had finished when it became evident that
both Captain Marchenko and Dr Richardson had clearly consumed too much alcohol,
a dangerous situation in space. The Russians had a far more relaxed attitude to
alcohol than their western counterparts, and had lobbied hard to allow some
drinks on the mission for special occasions. But Montreaux been had brought up
under the NASA doctrine, where alcohol was a complete no-no.
 

As a consequence, he had called an end to the
night slightly earlier than planned, with Marchenko retiring merrily to his
quarters to watch the more personal greetings that his family had transmitted
during the day.

Back in his own room, Montreaux placed the
headphones carefully over his ears and pressed them down firmly with his hands,
before touching the screen lightly. As the music began to play, he lay back and
let his mind wander.
 

On the wall opposite was a framed picture: a
three dimensional rendering of the
Clarke
,
set against the backdrop of Mars. The Sun shone from the left of the picture,
casting the
Clarke
’s shadow over the
Red Planet.

He closed his eyes and put his hands behind
his head as Barber’s
Adagio for Strings
reached its first climax in his headphones. Sudden silence, then a lone
double-bass mournfully recited the American composer’s melody.

Montreaux’s imagination took him through his
quarters’ small window and he sailed out into space. He felt himself rotating
slowly in the vacuum, before coming to rest in a reclined position, his eyes
wide open.

Before him lay the
Clarke
.