Keystone

by Talbot, Luke

  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.

  Chapter 21

  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.

  Chapter 22

  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 cr
ew 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.

  Chapter 23

  Larue was sitting at his desk, staring out of the window at the heavy grey sky, when Martín Antunez walked into his office.

  His light knocking had been ignored, so he had gripped the handle and entered, intent on putting his report on the boss’ desk in his absence. He had been surprised to see him there, and had stopped inside the doorway, waiting for a reaction. None came. It was possible that he hadn’t seen him.

  “Monsieur Larue?” he offered quietly.

  Still no response, save for a slight movement of the bottom jaw. He was grinding his teeth.

  “I have compiled the monthly CSO reports for you, should I leave them on your desk?” Commercial Satellite Orbit reports. Not the most fascinating reads, but essential to the ESA nonetheless.

  Larue inclined his head slightly in the opposite direction, as if listening for a noise from the cupboards behind him.

  Martín approached the large desk, tidy for the first time since he could remember, and placed the report carefully on its surface, facing Larue. He had turned to leave when the man’s voice stopped him.

  “Beagle 3 returned some of the most impressive photos of Mars ever seen,” he began slowly, playing each word over his tongue as if they were from a vintage red wine to be savoured.

  Martín turned to face Larue.

  “Robotic missions were clearly the way forward. With Beagle 4 we proved the existence of liquid and solid water on the surface of the planet, away from the frozen Poles. But for some reason no one cared. In the ten years that separated Beagle 3 from Beagle 4, people became so enthralled by the prospect of a manned journey to Mars that they completely forgot to get excited about our rover. If it wasn’t about the Clarke¸ it wasn’t worth knowing about,” Larue spat the words out bitterly. “I made a decision long ago not to let the ESA be a part of the Clarke mission. Truth be told, I never thought it would be successful.”

  Martín winced as he heard the words.

  Larue looked at the young Spaniard and smiled. “Do you think I was wrong?”

  Martín bit his tongue. Larue would not be at the ESA for much longer, six months at most, but he could still not afford to upset him. He may have been powerless against the other space agencies, but inside the ESA he could still fire people. “You had good reason to withdraw from the International consortium, Monsieur,” he lied. It was no good making him angry.

  Larue returned his gaze to the window. “The Clarke’s landing craft is to be deployed in the next couple of hours, Martin. Tell me what you know about the mission so far.”

  He didn’t want to know about the mission, Martín thought to himself. He wanted to know what juicy scandals he could leak, to pass the negative press from one agency to another, across the Atlantic.

  “It’s been a busy six weeks, Monsieur. The Chinese Lieutenant is dead, a tragic event caused by faulty programming in the Clarke’s nanostations –”

  “Made in Japan by JAXA,” Larue interrupted.

  “Yes. The Chinese are not happy with the explanation given by NASA for the accident. Because the nanostations are Japanese, they are barely on speaking terms with JAXA, too. China has lost a national icon, and although they have not admitted so publicly, I think that they blame either the USA or Japan. For their part, JAXA have stated that it is not possible for the nanostations to fail like they did.”

  “Their simulations in the ISS did not reproduce the incident, did they?”

  “No.”

  “Interesting.” Larue was reading as much as he could into the facts, as usual.

  Against Jacqueline’s will, Martín had refrained from telling Larue anything about their discovery six weeks earlier. Since the live feed had been shut down and the security loophole Jacqueline had manipulated had been fix
ed, he felt that they lacked any concrete evidence. Circumstantial evidence, such as Su Ning’s concern with her wristwatch, the strange interaction with Captain Montreaux and the disjointed transmissions between Mission Control and Clarke, while compelling, amounted to nothing in terms of cold, hard facts.

  He was certain that Su Ning had been killed because she had uncovered the time delay, and he had no intention of meeting the same fate.

  With Larue’s increasingly desperate behaviour, if he had told him everything he knew, he was sure that Larue would have been on the phone to Le Monde within minutes. Unless they could prove the time delay existed, which they couldn’t, it would just make everything much worse for the ESA.

  Larue gestured with his hand for Martín to keep talking.

  “NASA continue to supply us with most feeds from the Clarke, although the raw data has not been coming our way for over a month now. We get what NASA want us to see.” And over an hour later, he thought. “Since the incident with Lieutenant Su Ning, there are a maximum of twenty active nanostations at any one time, and none of them can be controlled remotely. We have learnt from sources within the other agencies that Russia, China and Japan have been lobbying NASA for improved access to the nanostations.”

  Larue moved his hands through his hair slowly. “What do you think of all this?”

  “I think that we need to be careful, Monsieur. We have no proof that NASA is trying to hide anything, and moreover, we have no reason to believe that they would have a motive for hiding anything in the first place. NASA is a scientific agency, and they do not have a political or ideological agenda.” He chewed his bottom lip nervously.

  “Everyone has an agenda, Martin, even NASA. Especially NASA.”

  “I am still looking, Monsieur. There is no smoke without fire, certainly. But this is like looking for a fire without smoke.” He sighed. “I will keep looking, though.”

  Larue stopped looking out of the window and turned his head to his aide. “Martin,” he checked his watch. “In one hour and twenty minutes, the MLP will be detaching from Clarke and entering the atmosphere of Mars. If they are going to slip up, it will be down there, away from the controlled environment of the spaceship.”