Keystone (11 page)

Sitting at his desk, Montreaux
finished writing and let go of the pen, letting it float gently just above the
desk.
 
He waited for half a minute before
tearing the piece of paper from the pad and folding it twice, placing it
carefully in his breast pocket and opening a drawer in his desk. He grabbed the
pen and put it with the pad in the drawer before closing it carefully.

He knew that
the nanostations would have been watching him.
 

Everything
they did, and indeed wrote, on board the ship was being sent back to
Earth.
 
At the current distance of
approximately thirty eight million kilometres, it took roughly two minutes and
six seconds for the data to reach Earth, network switching at both ends
notwithstanding. Between each phrase in a standard conversation would therefore
be a delay of over four minutes.

Anything over
that could be put down to human deliberation.

It had now
been barely four minutes since he had finished writing his message. He expected
there to be a few more minutes waiting for a reply, at least. Suddenly and
without warning, the screen on his desk lit up. It was a video feed from
Mission Control, with no sound. In the middle of the picture, two hands were
holding up a neatly written message.

He read the
message twice before the screen went blank of its own accord.
 

Neither video
nor audio feeds were accessible by any crew member, including the Captain,
without authorisation from Mission Control.
 
Whereas Earth could see and hear everything, and the information was
always stored in the
Clarke
’s memory,
it had been decided that the crew should not be able to systematically see
potentially sensitive information.

For the
mission planners this had provided a useful method of private
communication.
 

Emailed
messages could be read by indiscreet eyes, and conversations could be
overheard, so it had been decided that in the event of an emergency, the
commanding officer of the
Clarke
could
use the very low-tech Private Message Protocol, or PMP, to speak to Mission
Control. It was not something they had expected would be used, but when Captain
Montreaux had taken the notepad and pen from the drawer in the Lounge, two
nearby nanostations had been alerted, and had followed the officer back to his
quarters, where they had watched him write down his enquiry.

The brief
reply, held in front of a camera on Earth by steady, anonymous hands for
several seconds, had not done much to satisfy him.

Psych request for crewmember Lieutenant Su
Ning denied.

No incidents reported.

- Mission Control

Montreaux
leaned back in his chair and looked at the blank screen where the message had
appeared moments earlier. He made an effort to control his facial expression,
knowing that they would still be watching, or at the very least recording.

He did the
arithmetic in his head. They had written their message in less than thirty
seconds and placed it in front of a working camera.
 
In thirty seconds, they had been able to look
into his enquiry, write a message and broadcast it directly back to his
quarters.
That
was quick.

But
nonetheless possible, he thought. Maybe they had been proactively monitoring
the feeds since Su Ning’s comment during the night, and were expecting him to
use the PMP. It was certainly possible.

He unclipped
himself from his chair and let himself float away from it towards the door. He
thought about the handwriting on the message; neat and deliberate. The steady
hands holding the message up to the camera had been calm and practised.
Thirty seconds was fast
.

He took the
written note from his breast pocket and unfolded it before screwing it up into
a tight ball with both hands and pushing it into the waste recycling tube
recessed into the wall of his quarters. He felt the suction pulling the hairs
on the back of his hand as the tube sensed the paper and sucked it through a
series of twists and turns quickly leading to the waste processing plant
situated in the walls of the Hygiene Bay.

Why didn’t Mission Control want to look into
it?
He was the commanding officer, their eyes and ears on the ground, in
charge of crew wellbeing and safety above all other concerns. He had raised a
legitimate concern over the status of the Lieutenant. A psych report would give
him a breakdown of her habits on board, analysis of stress and intonation, and
even the meaning, of everything she had said, chemical balances, or
imbalances
, in her blood and even the
composition of her waste material. It would, effectively, give him a good idea
of how she was, in 0s and 1s. The computer’s answer to the question ‘how are
you doing?’

The more he
thought about it, the more worried he became. It wasn’t a question of
why
they had rejected his request, but
how
? After all, a techie sitting at a
desk in Mission Control had, for all intents and purposes, just denied one of
his crew a reasonable medical request.
Under
whose authority?

And then it
hit him:
Mission Control.

No one signs off as Mission Control!
Montreaux
tried to keep his face as impassive as possible as the realisation sank in.

Under normal
running, the only position in Mission Control to communicate with
Clarke
was CAPCOM, or Capsule
Communicator. It was a legacy of the early space pioneers and a protocol that
was affectionately defended. For the
Clarke
mission, all correspondence, audio, video and written, had so far signed
off with two simple words:
CAPCOM OUT
.

Playing it
over and over in his mind, it did not take him long to reach the only logical
conclusion: something was
wrong. And
a little voice in the back of his mind told him that Lieutenant Su Ning knew
what it was.

The only
question now was that with the nanostations monitoring his every word and
movement, how was he going to get close enough to her?

Christophe Larue paced up and
down in front of his desk before coming to a halt in front of the large, tinted
window of his office. It had been a very busy day during a particularly
stressful period for the European Space Agency’s Head of Policy and Future
Programmes.

He was a short
man with wispy, almost transparent white hair falling down either side of his
plump, flushed face. His expensive tailored suit did not hide the fact that too
much good food and good wine combined with too little exercise over the past
few years had started to affect his health, and the pressure he had been put
under had not helped at all.

Shooting a
hand into his pocket he pulled out a small box of pills, which he opened
clumsily. After swallowing the medicine, he felt the rhythm of his heart return
to normal, and he focused on the buildings outside the window to help him calm
down.

It was an
exceptional September day in Paris: the sun had been shining brightly since
dawn and its warmth was notable through the triple glazing. Directly opposite
his office was a small block of flats, each one displaying a proud, perfectly
nurtured window box.
 
Behind the flats he
could see the top of the UNESCO buildings, a mass of twentieth century architectural
wonders and a popular destination for Parisian workers during their lunch
breaks. It had been a boost for France, he thought to himself, for the
headquarters of two international bodies to be situated within a few hundred
metres of each other in the capital city, but while UNESCO had been going from
strength to strength in recent years, the ESA had been riding a torrent of
public criticism that had already seen the closure of three major projects and
the downsizing of six more.

Funding was
being withdrawn, sponsors were getting cold feet, and it was all he could do to
keep his head above water from day to day, maintaining the hope that something
or someone would throw him and the Agency a lifeline and pull them onto dry
land.

Furthermore,
he knew it was pretty much his responsibility.

He was shaken
from his reverie by a knock on the thick oak door of his office.

“
Entrez
,” Larue barked.

The tall,
attractive man, wearing a white tie-less shirt open at the collar, entered the
office and closed the door behind him. He saw Larue looking out of the window
and tensed up: it was a bad moment.

“
Monsieur Larue
?” he said,
tactfully.
 
His French accent was
flawless.

Larue turned
on his heels and looked the man up and down.
 
He was young, as he once was, and handsome, like he had never been. Had
he been a petty man he would have resented Martín Antunez for this, but the
aide had helped him through some difficult times of late, so he was able to see
past their physical differences.
 
“Martin,” he said, pronouncing the Spaniard’s name the French way. “Some
very bad news, I’m afraid.”

“
Monsieur
?” He wondered how his boss’
situation could possibly get any worse.

Larue’s eyes
flicked nervously away from his aide’s inquisitive gaze and he focused on a
framed picture of the Ariane 5 heavy-lift launcher taking off at night from the
European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guyana, nearly half a century earlier.
Still the ESA’s most successful venture, he thought.

“Our
scientific cooperation with NASA has been suspended, Martin,” he admitted. “We
will still receive some direct feeds from the Mars mission, but will no longer
hold the same status as Russia, China or even Japan.” His voice was resigned,
as if the news had been inevitable.

“Why?” Antunez
asked in disbelief.

“We have not
invested in the Mars mission. As I understand, it has been decided that we are
not to have immediate access to all of the data returned from the
Clarke
. Our ability to control
nanostations remotely, for instance, has been revoked effective from six
o’clock tomorrow morning,
heure Française
.
From then on, we will receive a passive live feed, which they control,” Larue
said.

Martín Antunez
knew this would be one of the last nails in Larue’s coffin, both figuratively
and possibly literally. It had all started with his first decision as Head of
Policy and Future Programmes, nearly ten years earlier.

“I know what
you are thinking, that we should have continued working on the
Clarke
with the other agencies all those
years ago,” Larue said. “But it just wasn’t feasible. All of our scientific
research at the time was in the area of robotic probes and landing craft. We
were already tied in to dozens of missions we could barely fund. The mission’s
demands, both financially and in terms of human resource, were simply too
high!”

“I understand,
Monsieur.” Aside from hundreds of satellites around Earth, the mainstay of the
ESA’s business, their only remaining significant scientific venture was the
Beagle 4
rover, roaming alone in the
cold winds of Mars for the past three years.

Larue looked
at him. “As far as the
Clarke
is
concerned, we barely have one up on the press.
 
We’ll probably have to watch the landing on CNN.” He sneered as he said
the acronym.

“What can I
do, Monsieur?” Antunez offered.

“Give me something
to be optimistic about!”

Antunez looked
at his boss with pity. There was nothing.

Larue returned
to the window and held his hands behind his back. The urge to start biting his
nails again had grown, but a respectable man restrained himself, he had decided.
“Find something,” he said over his shoulder. “Watch everything.” He looked over
at the UNESCO building. Education, Science, Culture. It was all there.
But above all,
he thought,
opportunity
. “NASA is a business, they
only tell us what they want us to know, and then keep the juicy bits to
themselves.” His mouth had started to water; he was hungry already.

“Espionage,
Monsieur
?” Antunez sounded shocked.

Larue shot
round and pointed a finger at him. “No! Not espionage, but liberty!” A thought
was brewing in his mind and he revelled in his new-found enthusiasm. “Mars is
not
American, we all have the right to
it, and this
Clarke
mission is from
Earth, not the United States. NASA have no right to withhold information —”

“We have no
evidence that they have, or will,” Antunez interrupted.

“They will,
Martin, I am sure of it,” he looked his aide in the eyes, an unpleasant grin on
his face. “And when they do, you will be watching.”

Antunez
shifted uneasily on the spot.
So this is
what happens when you push Larue into a corner
, he thought. The boss’ job
was almost certainly on the line; the honourable thing to do was to resign.
Instead, Larue was grabbing at fanciful conspiracy theories.
 

“With the
feeds we are getting, we are not very well placed…”

“You will find
a way, Martin, I trust you,” he said firmly. He sat down at his desk and
started flicking through paperwork intently. The small wrist strap he was
wearing sent a small impulse to his nerve endings, telling him it was time to
curb his enthusiasm and relax. “And one last thing.”

“
Monsieur
?”

“I trust you
have no engagements this evening? I’m sure you understand that, for obvious
reasons, we don’t have much time. I want you to get me
anything
you can, as
quickly
as possible. I want you to get everything from the
Clarke
before our control of the nanostations is removed.”

Martín left
the office quietly, realising the meeting was over. In the corridor outside, he
bumped into a young blond woman carrying a wad of paperwork. His face flushed.

“
Excuse-moi, Jacqueline
,” he mumbled.

“Martín,” she
used the Spanish pronunciation of his name. “You look worried. Can I help?”

He looked at
the network programmer for a few seconds before his neurons clicked into place.
“
Oui
,” he said. Yes.

Hours had
passed.

Martín watched
in silence as the American Captain sailed across the Lounge to meet the Chinese
Lieutenant. After a brief exchange of words, too quiet to be picked up by the
nearby nanostation, the woman left the Captain by the window. He called after
her, this time his voice loud enough to come through Martín’s headphones, but
she did not return. He stayed for three minutes, staring into space, before
leaving the Lounge.

He had watched
the same recording during a routine run through of the
Clarke
’s activities the day before, but had thought nothing of it.
It now stood out as one of the last recordings during which the ESA had been
able to control the nanostations. Had he known, and been awake while it had
been live and not tucked up in bed with a woman he barely knew and would
probably never see again, he would certainly have moved the tiny little
nanostation several feet closer.

The
Clarke
’s equipment of nanostations was
superb. Over the past weeks, he had been allowed to control some of the little
flying machines, sending them this way and that, bumping into walls, getting in
the way of the crew. With the number of nanostations active during the day,
there were more than enough to go around. He had even seen a feed from a
nanostation controlled by someone at JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration
Agency, which had accidentally strayed into a doorway adjacent to the Hygiene
Bay. The video had been cut by NASA just as Dr Jane Richardson had entered with
her towel, and control mechanisms for restricting movement of nanostations
within the Hygiene Bay and personal Pods expanded to include the connecting
tunnel from the Lounge.

During Nightmode,
most of the stations went to the closest charging pad, ready for another busy
shift. Unless there was a fault or something needed to be monitored more
closely, at these times there were only eight active nanostations – one for
each habitable module.
 
The one that had
managed to pick up the meeting between Lieutenant Shi Su Ning and Captain Yves
Montreaux the previous day had been on the other side of the room, and although
at the time five agencies were able to send basic commands to the lonesome
vigil in the Lounge, not one had done so.

He increased
the gain on his headphones and flattened the equalizer in the low frequency range;
the constant humming of the ship’s air circulation units needed to be cancelled
out.
 
Pressing play, he watched the video
again.

“
I had
no idea you did this
,” the Captain’s voice boomed through his
headphones.
 
He was trying to pick up the
quiet sections, and this meant that everything else now sounded incredibly
loud.

 
“
You
may
be the Captain, Sir, but with respect you don’t know everything
,” she
replied.

A pause while the Captain went across the
Lounge to join her. Martín had already seen the look of surprise in the
Captain’s face the last time he had watched. But this time he noticed something
else; Su Ning had stretched her neck to speak to the Captain. But as soon as
she saw his reaction this changed. Martín saw the look in her eyes: she had
said too much and knew it. It was a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ detail, hard to
pick up from Earth with the angle of the nanostation; but on
Clarke
, it was obvious that the Captain
had not missed a thing.

 
“
Lieutenant, is everything OK?
” he said.

Up to this part, Martín had always been able
to hear everything. The section that he had not been able to decipher was about
to begin. He leant forward in his chair, as if being closer to the screen would
help.
 
Neither person’s lips could be
seen, so even if he had been able to lip-read, it would have been useless.
Pressing the headphones hard against his ears, he listened intently.

The sound was terrible, but he still managed
to get several syllables.
 
He stopped the
video and played the section back, writing down the bits he could hear on a
piece of paper in front of him.
 
Stopping
the video again, he looked down at what he had written:

“
I…it…is…an…shoe…Sir….wood…ree…with…thing…less..
was…tain.
”

It didn’t make any sense, but he circled the
word ‘
Sir
’, as the only whole word he
was sure of; the Chinese Lieutenant was by far the most polite of all the crew
members, and always used formal forms of communication.

He was about to play the video again when
there was a light tap on his shoulder.

“Still nothing?” Jacqueline asked
sympathetically.

He removed the headphones and turned to face
her. “Not yet, I’m afraid, but I am getting there, I have half a sentence.”

He passed her the piece of paper with the
scribbled, fragmented sentence and she took it with interest, reading through
it several times before passing it back to him. “My English is not very good,
but I’m pretty sure that means nothing at all,” she smiled at him. “You look
tired, Martín, take a break and let me show you something.”

It was raining in the darkness outside, the
day’s clear skies long forgotten. He checked his watch and saw that he had been
sitting at his desk watching various feeds from the
Clarke
for over eight hours. It was ten o’clock in the evening, and
it had already been a long night.