Keystone

by Talbot, Luke

  “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.

  Chapter 19

  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 4th, 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 29th 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 29th 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 prayin
g 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.”

  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.

  Chapter 20

  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.