by Talbot, Luke
Captain Montreaux stopped himself on the metal hand bar which ran the full circumference of the doorway. He pulled himself round slowly to face her, leaving his notepad and pen floating in the tunnel behind him. What amazed him wasn’t that the topic of flags seemed impossible to put to bed; instead it was that of all the crew, with their military backgrounds and patriotism, it was the only civilian among them who seemed to take it all so personally.
“You are absolutely correct, Dr Richardson: my ideal world cannot exist. Not on Earth,” he said carefully, looking straight into her eyes. “But on Mars, maybe. So why spoil this opportunity by setting off on the wrong foot?”
Danny nodded in sombre agreement as Montreaux pulled himself through the door, grabbing his notepad and pen as he went. The parting words weighed down on the Lounge for some time, before Jane finally spoke.
“It’s only a flag,” she muttered bitterly under her breath.
Marchenko unclipped his retaining straps and let himself float towards the centre of the room, giving the sofa a brief nudge with his toes as he went. This caused him to spin slowly as he crossed the Lounge, and as his body turned to face Jane, who was still lodged into the ceiling but was now looking down at him, his face burst into a huge grin, showing his large, perfectly white teeth.
“Exactly, Jane,” he said gleefully as he span, like a child on a fairground ride. “It is only a flag.”
Back in his pod, Montreaux set the notepad down on his desk and let the pen float as he secured himself in his chair. Grabbing the pen, he pressed down on the end to expose the writing tip and placed it against the paper.
After a brief pause, he lifted the tip again and looked over his shoulder at the door behind him. There was no way of closing it, but the faint noise of the crew’s voices still emanating from the Lounge assured him he would not be disturbed.
Touching the paper with his pen once more, he started writing.
The Clarke was a true technological marvel, and was breaking practically every record in the space exploration book.
It was the biggest and most expensive space craft ever conceived, designed to take its crew of four on a seven-month round trip to Mars, punctuated in the middle by a nine-month sojourn orbiting the Red Planet while its occupants had their shore leave. In total the mission would last nearly a year and a half.
The simple logistics of such a task had been a headache for the mission planners, who had spent the last fifteen years meticulously calculating volumes of water, oxygen, food and even hygienic wipes. Every ounce of mass was accounted for, agreed and triply signed-off. In their favour, the laws of physics had given the Clarke’s designers grace when it came to putting the ship together. As far as science was concerned, it wouldn’t have mattered if the Hygiene Bay had been jutting out at right angles to the Command Module and the crew’s quarter’s connected end to end in a train eighty feet long: the vacuum of space simply didn’t care for aerodynamics.
Constructed using a modular design, the Clarke followed the same basic principles as the ISS. When it came to putting it together, it was simply a question of choosing a layout that looked good, and the decision to go for a familiar structure had been widely approved, not least of all because it suited the public relations officers and marketing departments; a spaceship that actually looked like a spaceship, and not an upside down foil-covered colander with tripod landing gear, the likes of which littered the moon, had been most welcome and had led to a marked increase in public attention.
The modular approach had another, more serious benefit. The ship’s computer was programmed to monitor every cubic inch of the Clarke for environmental anomalies, ranging from loss of pressure to temperature irregularities. At the slightest sign of danger, it was able to completely shut down the affected areas and minimise the impact on the rest of the ship until the problem could be addressed. In worse-case scenarios, the faulty module could be jettisoned into space, leaving the rest of the Clarke completely unaffected.
Everyone knew that if they were in a faulty module at the time, they only had thirty seconds from the alert being raised to reach a safe part of the ship. Getting stuck on the wrong side of a sealed doorway could have fatal consequences.
To help the crew interpret these situations accurately, the ship’s lighting had been developed to change colour and pattern: in a danger area, the lights would go red, and the marker strips along doors and passageways would indicate the nearest safe route by flashing.
They had practised all possible evacuation scenarios, from the Lounge imploding to the Hygiene Bay losing pressure. During training exercises simulating everything from fires to meteorite strikes, they had not always ‘survived’.
Additional safety came in the form of the lead-lining in the Command Module. Exposure to radiation from space weather, caused by solar flares and coronal mass ejection on the surface of the Sun, could at best lead to a high probability of developing cancer. At worst, it would result in death. It was a risk that the inhabitants of the Earth’s International Space Station had been coping with for many decades, rushing to specially shielded areas whenever the warning of a major solar event came.
It was a sobering thought that such precautions were relatively recent additions to space exploration. In August 1972, between the manned Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions to the Moon, a solar flare blasted past Earth. Had it occurred four months earlier, or four months later, it would certainly have proven fatal to the unprotected crews.
The modular design had brought flexibility, safety and had also reduced building time and cost. This had combined to create the hundred and eighty foot long Clarke.
But the most technologically advanced feature of the Clarke was not something that could be seen.
The early twenty-first century had been marked by a massive improvement in miniaturisation. Everything from small combustion engines to computer processors was benefiting from advances in the field of nanotechnology: while with the Clarke human spaceships had grown in scale, everything else was getting smaller. Much smaller.
The Clarke was leaving a world obsessed by size. Whereas the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century had been typified by a desire to make things bigger, the brave new world of the 2040s required things that not only fitted in your pocket, but also performed better. Gadgets were by now a necessity: everyone needed the latest telephone, because not only did it weigh less, it could also take your calls for you, set up meetings and call people back, and all while it sat silently in your coat.
As a consequence, in contrast to the ship’s vast dimensions, the Clarke’s on board computers were neatly stowed away in small recesses in the ship. But the computers’ external sensors were everywhere. Every single module of the ship was constantly being monitored, assessed and recorded by hundreds of mobile nanostations. Barely big enough to see with the naked eye, nanostations incorporated a camera, microphone, light sensor, smoke detector, environmental pressure sensor and thermometer. They were each powered by a minute motor with six tiny ‘jets’ on all sides, forcing air through to allow the station to move in any direction in three dimensional space.
They were normally fully automated, but could be guided by the main computer at any time, which in turn would take its directives from Mission Control on Earth.
Each module contained a small, saucer-sized surface, on which the nanostations would occasionally sit to recharge their batteries. They did not need to dock precisely on the surfaces, as the energy would transfer by magnetic induction directly into their power cells.
The nanostations sent all of their information back to the ship’s computers. These were located in not one, but in all of the Clarke’s eight habitable modules. Each pod was fitted with a wafer thin rack, hidden inside a wall, which at all times was receiving input from every nanostation on board, and at any time could assume main control of the Clarke. By default, this control was normally taken by the computer housed in the Command Module, but it would periodically shift for a few hours
every day, so that over a period of seven days every computer on board had taken control for a short time at least. It was an effective way for the computers to auto-test themselves, and something the crew took completely for granted.
They expected that in the event of an emergency, they would not be jumping into a mindless module, leaving the ship’s brains to jettison themselves into the space.
Chapter 15
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?
Chapter 16
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 bar
ked.
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.