Keystone (16 page)

“My God!” She held the binoculars
up to her visor and focused on the metallic object shining on the horizon; one
of the supply drops that had arrived on Mars in the last year, it contained
some of the vital life-support components for their return launcher, which
would take them and the central core of the MLP back into Mars orbit. “We have
to go all the way over there?”

“Be thankful
we are not salvaging my beloved country’s lander, instead. At least we can see
this one.” Danny said. “But if you do notice any metal objects with red flags
on them, please let me know.”

The 1972
Mars 2
lander had been sent by the
Soviet Union as part of its ambitious early exploration of the planet.
 
It consisted not only of an orbiter and
landing craft, but also a small rover on skis, which would explore the immediate
surroundings of the landing site. Like most missions to Mars it had failed, and
although the thin Martian air would have slowed it down from the six kilometres
per second with which it had hit the atmosphere, its parachutes did not deploy
as it hurtled towards the ground.
 
To the
best knowledge of the scientific community, it had impacted within a hundred
mile radius of where the
Clarke
’s MLP
now stood.

Over seventy
years later, it was unlikely that much remained of the ill-fated mission.

“OK, no problem,
I’ll keep my eyes open for it,” she replied.

The Russian
flipped the lid of a large metal crate and peered inside it.
 
“Besides, we don’t have to walk there.” He
pulled a wheel, forty centimetres in diameter, out of the crate and rolled it
towards her, its tread leaving a shallow imprint in the ochre soil. “We can go
there in style!”

It took two
entire days to assemble the
Clarke
’s
manned buggy, affectionately nicknamed ‘Herbie’ by the media; because of the
curved enclosure where the two occupants would sit, it bore more than a slight
resemblance to an old VW Beetle car. Its power came from two electric engines,
each taking charge of a row of three wheels on either side. Fuel came in the
form of eight battery cells, which would be charged using the MLP’s generator.
In turn, the MLP got its energy from solar sheets, which had been unrolled from
the leading edges of the MLP and fastened to the ground. From above, they made
the MLP look like some bizarre kind of flower.

In case of
emergencies, the MLP had been loaded with three more sheets that could be
placed anywhere within a hundred metres. Additionally, Jane was to assemble
three wind turbines, especially suited to the thinner atmosphere of Mars, as a
secondary source of electricity.

It took another
three days to fully charge Herbie, during which time the crew busied themselves
collecting the rest of the crates from the surrounding area and setting up four
signal boosting beacons around the MLP.

After a short
test run, Danny triumphantly declared that Herbie was at last ready to drive.

“He’s a better
ride than most of the cars I’ve been in on Earth!” he exclaimed.

“You mean
she
,” Montreaux corrected him.
 

Danny looked
at him sideways from the driving seat and shook his head. “No, it is definitely
a
he
.
Herbie
is a boy’s name.”

“All cars are
female, Danny, even the ones with boy’s names,” Jane’s voice came over the
radio from inside the MLP. “It’s just the way it is.”

He thought
about this for a moment and then laughed. “You are right; in Russian
mashina
is feminine too. I guess it
makes sense,” he mused, “because –”

“Don’t even go
there,” she warned him.

Montreaux
laughed out loud as he loaded four spare compressed air packs onto Herbie’s
back. Herbie wasn’t an airtight craft, the thin cabin was designed only to save
the occupants from the worst of the Martian weather, and so they would have to
use their suits’ air supplies throughout their drives.
 
With just over two hours per pack, they would
have a maximum six hours round-trip to where the silvery crates lay on the
horizon.
 
They would need to keep a
constant eye on the time; it would certainly take more than one trip.

“OK,” he said
securing the air packs and turning towards the MLP. “Time for dinner. We’ll set
off first thing tomorrow.”

Larue put the phone down and
smiled. It was his first for some time.

Sitting back
in his chair, he surveyed the view from his office. His smile grew as he took
in the sunshine, Paris’s first for weeks. The windows of the ESA headquarters
let the day’s warmth seep in gently, leaving the bitter wind and traffic noise
outside. As a young man, he had worked for a short time in the
Tour First
, Paris’s tallest skyscraper,
and had been impressed at how the sounds of the city were silenced when looking
down from the top floors. On his arrival at ESA headquarters years later, it
had amazed him even more that the triple glazed windows of his third storey
street-facing office were just as effective. Occasionally a siren or beeping
horn would make its way through the panes and remind him he was working in a
sprawling metropolis of over fifteen million inhabitants.

He opened the
top drawer of his desk and pulled out a small wooden box. Opening the lid, he
perused the contents for a few moments, inhaling the deep sweet smell of the
fine Cuban tobacco before closing it and putting it back in the drawer with a
shake of his head. It was a good day, but not yet that good. He brought his
gaze back to the blue sky outside, and closed his eyes.

A knock at the
door brought him back from his reverie, and he sat up with a start. Looking at
his watch, he sighed to himself and tapped the spacebar on his keyboard.

“Come in,” he
said.

Martín entered
the room. He had a huge smile on his face.

“News travels
fast, I see,” Larue said casually.

Martín frowned
in response. “
Monsieur
?”

“I take it
from your smile that you have heard the good news?”

“No, I have
not heard,” Martín said, confused.

Larue eyed him
cautiously. “So why the big smile, Martin?”

Martín felt
himself blushing; the past week with Jacqueline had been incredible, giving him
plenty to grin about. Not that any of it was Larue’s business. He cleared his
face before continuing. “
Monsieur
, a
while ago you asked me to keep my eyes open regarding the
Clarke?
”

“Yes?” he leaned
forward in his chair expectantly. He had almost stopped hoping, after so many
weeks without any news. “Have you found something?”

“Not yet. But
soon, we probably will. For some time now we have been unable to see any direct
feeds from the mission
.
Whilst on
board the
Clarke
, this was
frustrating, but now that they have landed on the planet, it is even more so.”
He paused, still unsure of what he was about to say. Telling Larue about the
time delay wasn’t easy, but something he felt he could do now that they had a
chance to
prove
it using the feed
from Beagle. Nonetheless, he was still slightly nervous that he would be in
trouble for hiding this information from his boss for nearly two months.

“I made a
discovery shortly after our feeds were stopped, with the help of Jacqueline
from Networks.”

“Jacqueline
Thomas?” Larue asked, his eyebrow raised.

“Yes,
Monsieur
. She helped me to analyse the
information being sent to us by NASA. There is a lot of information, I needed
some help interpreting it, and her programming skills are far higher than my
own.”

Larue smiled.
“I did not ask you to justify yourself, Martin, I was merely surprised you
would go so far to get help, we have very skilled programmers in this
department, too.”

Martín shifted
his feet uneasily. “She was available at the time,
Monsieur
.”

Larue looked
up at the young man.
 
He was standing in
front of his desk like a schoolboy in front of a headmaster. “Sit down, Martin,
make yourself more comfortable,” he gestured to a chair opposite him. Martín sat
down thankfully and put his hands on his knees. “So, you were saying that you
had analysed the feeds from NASA at the time that they stopped relaying direct
to ESA.
 
What happened next?”

“We noticed
something very strange. So far, we think that we are the first to have noticed
it, it certainly hasn’t been raised publicly by either the Chinese, Japanese or
Russian agencies. A little over a day before Lieutenant Shi Su Ning, the
Chinese astronaut, was found dead in her sleeping quarters, we believe that NASA
placed a delay of one hour and fifteen minutes in the feed between themselves
and ESA. They also placed the same delay in their feed to the other agencies.”

Larue stared
at him in silence for several seconds. “
Comment
?”
he said, eventually.

“NASA have implemented
a time delay in the data feed from Mars which allows them to screen everything
for over one hour before it is released to any of the other agencies. The other
agencies are not aware of this, and as far as we can tell they believe that
they are still watching direct feeds.” He paused and looked at Larue. Larue’s
smile had disappeared; his hands were laid flat on his desk, fingers splayed. “To
help achieve this, they have also added seventy-five minutes to all of the
Clarke
’s on board clocks and timers.
This means that the
Clarke
’s time in
the delayed feed on Earth looks correct.”

“But,” Larue
was visibly shocked, “surely it would be easy for everyone to find this out
simply by trying to talk to the crew?
 
There would be a huge delay!”

“The change coincided
with NASA cutting off our direct feed, which would have sorted us out. As for
the others, a serious malfunction of the nanostations caused NASA to stop using
them, which forced a policy change on communications.
 
On top of that, the
Clarke
was already so far away by then that we weren’t having
direct conversations with the crew anymore, it just wasn’t practical.”

“So how did
you
find out?”

“Jacqueline
hacked into the direct feed for a short period, and before she was cut off by
NASA, we managed to view the real footage alongside what the other agencies
were being sent. The time delay is real, but they’ve upped their security
since, and we haven’t been able to get back in.”

Larue was
taken aback. He looked out of the window and thought carefully about the
situation; none of his counterparts at the other agencies had communicated
anything to him directly. On top of that, NASA had certainly not lodged a
complaint with ESA for the low level hacking of the data feeds.
 
He would leave that issue for another day.
For the time being he would concentrate on the facts. “Can we prove this?”

“Unfortunately,
we cannot,” Martín admitted. “I recorded the nanostation feeds that show the
time difference, but since then the
live
footage has also been transmitted normally, so it proves nothing.”

“And you
haven’t been able to access the live feeds since then?”
 

“No. Whatever
encryption they’re using, it’s impossible to crack.” He looked at Larue, who
was now staring at the backs of his hands on the desk. “We’ve tried several
times,” he added helpfully.

Larue looked
up from his desk and met Martín’s eyes, which contrary to his smile had lost
none of the joy that they had shown when he had first entered the room several
minutes before. “And you said that no one else knows this?”

“As far as we
can tell, we are the only ones to have seen this.”

Larue looked
out of the window again. “How about the Chinese? Their relationship with NASA
is very strenuous at the moment, is it possible that they know too?”

“It’s very
possible,
Monsieur
.”

Larue looked
across and raised his eyebrow quizzically. “There’s something you haven’t told
me, isn’t there?”

Martín hadn’t
intended to tell Larue any of this, at least not until
Beagle 4
was in place. He had agreed with Jacqueline that it was best
to present him with good news rather than speculation.
 
His good mood had certainly helped to break
his silence, but he was now finding it a relief to tell his manager everything.
“We know of one other person who found out about the time change.”

“Yes?”

“We believe
that shortly before her death, Su Ning became aware of the difference. Somehow,
she must have calculated the time on Earth. This alone wouldn’t have helped
her, and we’ve been trawling video footage to find any clues, but the best
guess we have is that she must have had access to a watch that showed Earth
time with which to verify her calculations,” Martín said. He had started the
sentence slowly, carefully, but as he had gone on he had found the words
pouring out of their own accord. He stopped himself from saying more, and tried
to gauge Larue’s response.

Larue sat
silently for over a minute, before standing up and walking to the window. He
looked down at the traffic below, congested behind a bin lorry collecting
recyclables from the side of the road.
 
A
motorbike weaved its way through the lines of cars, narrowly avoiding a
pedestrian reading a newspaper. He looked over at the UNESCO building.
 
The familiar tops of the trees beckoned to
him; he would definitely go for a walk today.

Turning round,
he looked at Martín and frowned. “You should have told me all of this much
sooner, Martin,” he said. He walked over to his desk and opened the top drawer
again. Beside the small wooden box was a large plastic tub. He pulled it out
and popped the lid, carefully pouring one pill into the palm of his hand.
 
He clenched his fist around the pill and
replaced the tub in the drawer before picking up a glass of water on his desk.
He looked at Martín out of the corner of his eyes and titled his head back, taking
the pill and water in one gulp.

He sat down at
his desk once more, leaning back slowly and closing his eyes, his arms placed
carefully on the armrests.

Martín waited
for at least two minutes before speaking. “
Monsieur
,”
he began, “I am sorry that I didn’t tell you this sooner; we wanted to be
certain that –”

“I am not
concerned with that, Martin,” Larue snapped. He did not move from his chair,
his eyes remained closed. Of course, he was enraged that his employee had left
him in the dark, but now he had to concentrate on what was happening on Mars.
If it played out in his favour, this whole situation could be his saving grace.
“You did well to find out what you did.”

“Then what is
wrong?” To Martín, it was simple. The Americans were hiding information from
their closest technological allies, and had probably caused Su Ning’s death to
keep the fact secret. It was more of a conspiracy than even his boss could have
hoped for.

Larue half
opened his eyes and looked over at Martín. “If I understand you correctly, and
you are right in what you say, which I have no doubt you are, then this is more
than a simple rivalry between competing space agencies.” He paused, shifting
his body up in the chair. “NASA would not simply carry out deception on such a
scale for the fun of it. Placing this time difference between
Clarke
and Earth suggests that this is
bigger than that.”

Martín leant
forward. “So who could be responsible?”

“I do not
know, Martin. But there’s one thing that is even more certain than the fact
that NASA couldn’t be responsible for this.”

“Yes?”

“NASA would
never intentionally kill an astronaut.”

Martín leant
back and crossed his arms. “To hide the truth, they might,” he said.

Larue sat
upright and laughed. “This isn’t
Capricorn
One
, Martin! This is NASA! This is 2045, and the
Clarke
is a multinational mission to Mars! Why would anyone want to
jeopardise our first manned mission?”

Martín had no
idea. He looked at his shoes, as if the answer somehow lay in the criss-cross
pattern of his laces.

“Which leads
me to the most important question. The question that lies at the heart of this
whole situation:
what is there to hide?
”

“We have no
idea,
Monsieur
. The feeds we have do
not show anything revealing.”

“And they’re
never likely to either!” Larue said in frustration. “They slipped up at the
beginning, which is how you and Jacqueline were able to see this, and also why
poor Su Ning lost her life. They are not likely to slip up again.” He looked
out of the window again and his frown grew as he noticed dark clouds gathering
on the horizon, ready to blot out the sun. “And until we know what they are
hiding, or at least have some evidence, there is no way we can say anything to
anyone. With what we have, we cannot tell anyone, Martin. Do you understand?”

Martín nodded
slowly. “There is one more thing,
Monsieur
,”
he said, “that may help us, and give us this proof.”

“What is
that?” Larue had a wry smile on his face, as if he already knew what he was
about to say.

Martín sat up
straight and looked directly into Larue’s eyes. “We still have
Beagle 4
. While whoever it is controls
the feed from
Clarke
, we have no hope
of them slipping up again. But ESA controls the rover, which is equipped with
high resolution cameras and microphones.”

 
“Our maximum resolution being?”

“Beagle
can read a book from one kilometre,”
Martín found himself grinning, “and can travel at roughly two hundred metres
per hour. We can follow them pretty closely, and they should always be within
sight as long as the atmosphere is clear. All we need is to hope that Beagle is
still up to the task.”

Larue gave a
short laugh. That the people behind the cover up were able to control time and
data feeds on the
Clarke
was one
thing, but control over Beagle was something else entirely. “I trust you quite
a bit, Martin, and based on your recommendation alone I signed off the Beagle
mission route changes Jacqueline Thomas put through several days ago.”