Keystone

by Talbot, Luke

  Chapter 57

  Captain Danny Marchenko scraped the dirt from his visor excitedly, his hand playing an exaggerated ‘hello’ as he used the rubber blade set into the seam of his glove. He swore under his breath in Russian, but the suit’s sensitive microphone still managed to distinguish between the profanity and his breathing, amplifying it over the control panel speakers of the MLP.

  “Keep it clean, Captain Mar – Danny,” Captain Yves Montreaux corrected himself from his seat in their Martian home. “We don’t want Man’s immortal words from space to have to be censored, do we?”

  He allowed himself a smile as the irony of his last words seeped through. He had told himself, while standing on the precipice of Hellas Basin days earlier, that he had to keep his certainty of their terrible situation to himself. As he had looked down at his excited colleague poring over the engravings – of what he now knew was referred to as the Amarna Stickman, whatever that meant – it had struck him that while he was certain he’d never set foot on Earth again, at least while they were still useful they were safe where they were.

  They. How could he know who was with him, and who was against? He daren’t look in the MLP’s database, for fear of being monitored. What would Earth think if he suddenly started looking at the crew’s personal records? Of course, he had read all of their records several times, but then what he had read then was in blissful ignorance of what had since happened; would he now pick up on some obscure, terrifying detail?

  It was a moot point. What would he do about it even if he found that Dr Richardson and Captain Marchenko were involved in a conspiracy, a conspiracy which had killed Lieutenant Shi Su Ning, a Chinese cosmonaut whose family probably thought she had died as a result of a system failure.

  If they’re in on it, he had thought, then what difference does it really make? He wouldn’t confront them, at least not without absolute certainty, and if he believed his life to be in danger, how could he defend himself? Kill them both? And be left here alone, until I die, he thought morosely. His only option, he concluded, was to act normally. After all, it may just be his own paranoia, brought on by months in space coupled with his own self-inflicted separation from his other crewmembers. What was left of them, he couldn’t help himself from adding.

  Acting normally was difficult on Mars. Normally humans walked on Earth, and occasionally in space and on the Moon. Walking on Mars was anything but normal. Captain Montreaux tackled the issues he was faced with in the most logical order he could, and therefore started with the most straightforward: his separation from Dr Richardson and Captain Marchenko. Fixing that started with an impromptu meeting over dinner the night they had discovered the Jetty.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he had started, “that as there are only three of us on this planet, it makes perfect sense for us to reduce elements of the formality of our methods of communication, and refer to each other using Christian names only.”

  “Not exactly the best choice of words if you’re planning on that, Yves,” Dr Richardson had quipped.

  But nonetheless they had taken to the idea like fish to water. She had taken to it as easily as she had adjusted to walking on Mars he had thought to himself. Captain Marchenko had grinned and extended his hand to be shaken firmly by the American.

  “It’s a deal,” he said in his best Texan accent, which had taken them all by surprise. It was the first time in many days that they had laughed together, the first in nearly a month since Yves could remember laughing so hard, but as the evening had drawn to a close, he still managed to feel secluded. If anything, the laughter, their jokes, had only served to make him feel more different, as ‘Jane’ and ‘Danny’ shared private jokes and candid looks across the MLP’s dinner table.

  And so it turned out that, despite it being his own idea, he had the most difficulty adjusting to it.

  They naturally took to using first names, and for Jane as a scientist this was understandable. But for Danny, with all of his military and academy training, it somehow felt wrong.

  He told himself he was paranoid. You don’t change months of habit and years of indoctrination in the space of a few days. Yet as he sat at the MLP’s control panels, listening to Danny’s cursing and Jane’s whoops of joy, he couldn’t help but plan his next comment, designed to spark a reaction, anything that would betray that they were in cahoots with whoever was in control of their mission. Certainly not me, he thought sarcastically as he looked at the rows of buttons, dials and touch screen displays.

  “Remember people may be watching this live, Danny – we don’t want to offend anyone with profanities, do we?”

  “No problem, Yves, sorry about that everybody back home, but can you see what I can see?” Danny asked, the pitch of his voice reaching prepubescent levels.

  Yves leaned forward and concentrated on the display. “You need to clean your camera a little bit more.”

  ‘Cleaning the camera’ wasn’t technically or physically possible. It was housed within Danny’s helmet, protected from the harsh atmosphere of Mars by half an inch of transparent aluminium. Even if one of them, heaven forbid, fell down to the bottom of the gigantic crater, the camera would emerge intact. Anything that had not been relayed in real-time to the MLP’s processors would be saved to solid-state storage ready for processing at a later date.

  Danny swept his glove across the protective housing, wiping clear the layer of dust that had settled during his excavation of the tunnel. “How about now?” he said.

  On the display, he could make out a smooth wall of darkened stone. A bold, straight line cut the wall in half vertically from off-screen at the top to where the wall met the equally smooth floor at the bottom. The left-hand half of the wall was unmarked, but on the right, in strokes equally as bold as the vertical line and the Amarna Stickman outside was the picture of a creature, it’s long lizard-like form lying prone and its mouth open in a grin, like a komodo dragon celebrating catching its dinner.

  It looked so real it could have turned its head and said hello and Yves wouldn’t have been more surprised. There was no characterisation, no roughness, and even though he had never seen the creature before, or any of its kind, he was certain its depiction was as true to life as was possible in an engraving on stone, with no artistic licence applied. He said as much to Danny and Jane, whose movements he was tracking on the second display.

  “Absolutely!” she said without hesitation. “I’ve looked at the carvings; they’re all over the walls. I don’t like to speculate and I’m by no means the authority on such things, but I can’t see how they’re possible without some kind of laser technology.”

  “Are you saying that something buried hundreds of thousands of years ago was made with technology as advanced as our own?” he said in disbelief.

  “What’s the alternative? That primitive man made a spaceship of wood and sailed across space with his bow and arrow and a bucket on his head?” she responded sarcastically.

  “Well, that’s not exactly…”

  “What Jane is saying, Yves,” Danny interrupted, “is that we already accept that this find is hundreds of thousands of years old, and that Man did not have the means to do this sort of thing back then. This means we must be looking at artefacts from Mars. Artefacts from the Martians.”

  Yves was about to answer when a piercing sound came over the speakers. Before he had a chance to turn the volume down, it stopped. Danny said a single word in Russian that Yves didn’t understand but was almost certainly rude. “Everything OK?”

  Then the sound came back, except this time it was pulsating. With every pulse the video feed from Danny’s suit filled with static.

  “What’s wrong?” Jane said, worried.

  “No idea, his cam is all messed up and the audio…”

  “I can’t hear you Yves! That whining is cutting you off every second word!”

  “What?”

  “I said I can’t hear… ah! That’s better!” The noise had stopped.

  “Shit,” Yve
s said between gritted teeth. “Danny, can you hear us?”

  Danny’s video, audio and medical feeds had all stopped transmitting. Looking at Jane’s screen, he could see the Russian standing in front of the alien engravings. His arms drooped lazily by his sides, his head lolled dangerously. Jane leaped towards him and pulled him back, stopping him from falling head first into the tunnel wall. She lay him down and shone her flashlight through his visor.

  His eyes were open, the pupils fully dilated. They didn’t respond to the bright light as she moved it frantically from eye to eye.

  “Is he breathing?”

  She looked at the breastplate of his suit and tapped it twice quickly. A small OLED display flashed briefly. She hit it again several times, but it didn’t come back. No battery. Moving to his wrist, she checked his suit controls. The suit should have had enough charge for another week’s use, before they would need to be hooked up to the station’s power source for two whole days to fill up.

  The wrist controls were powered by a kinetic wrist band, as a failsafe redundancy; shake your arm and you’ll always be able to check your oxygen. The readout showed twenty-five per cent air. It also confirmed his pulse, faint but still present. He had enough air for a couple of hours breathing, but no power meant that he’d freeze to death before that time was up.

  She said as much to Yves, then paused. When she spoke again her voice was grave. “I can’t carry him up the cliff on my own. I can’t get him out of here without you.”

  And I can’t get to you, he thought to himself. “Have you checked your own suit?” He was going over the readouts himself. “You look fine from here.”

  “Confirmed. Everything looks good to me. It’s just Danny, his suit just suddenly lost all its power. I have to get him warm, somehow!”

  “Jane, go back to the Rover. Remove one of the fuel cells, and take it back to Danny.”

  “Of course!” She was already running.

  It only took her five minutes to reach the vehicle, another two to remove the fuel cell. God Bless mission planners she thought to herself as she marvelled at the simplicity of the power source’s design: completely self-contained like an old fashioned battery. The cable connecting it to the Rover was identical to the cable that emerged from the underside of the suits to charge them up. With a bit of twisting you could even reach it yourself and plug yourself in.

  The way back was slightly longer, as she negotiated a couple of rock slides and steep slopes. The cell wasn’t excessively heavy, but it offset her centre of balance enough for her to risk falling down the crater if she wasn’t careful. She finally entered the tunnel and her flashlight automatically came on.

  She reached the dead end just in time to see the stone wall slide back down to meet the floor. And Danny was gone.

  Chapter 58

  A sudden sense of urgency filled the DEFCOMM control room after the Russian cosmonaut’s disappearance.

  Following that, it took Gail less than an hour to get her tablet back. The hieroglyphic analysis tools would help decipher the engravings on the walls, she had claimed.

  She could only thank her lucky stars that she had the tablet in Mahmoud’s office back in Cairo, and that her abductors had thought to bring it with them.

  Using translation tools was, of course, a decoy. George’s application wasn’t a translator, and in any case she didn’t know of any software on Earth that would help with the alien writing she had seen carved into the tunnel walls on Mars. As much as she would have loved to help solve the mystery of where Captain Marchenko had gone, this was her chance to save herself first.

  Save yourself, the thought, and you stand a chance of saving them. All that she needed to do now was make sure that no one was looking.

  Dr Patterson looked over her shoulder at the screen. “Interesting tool,” he said thoughtfully. “It looks a bit out of date, how old is it?”

  She grunted and tapped a command into the screen. “There’s not a huge demand for this sort of application, in fact I don’t know anyone else who uses it. So it’ll pretty much do the job until it breaks or something much better comes along.” She didn’t tell him that George had developed it for her; it was pointless arousing suspicions when she was so close. “Can you get me some coffee?”

  “Sure. How do you take it?”

  “Julie Andrews,” she replied. Seeing the look on his face, she elaborated. “White, none.”

  He stared at her blankly, then shook his head and made to leave.

  “And something to eat!” she shouted after him. Anything to buy some time!

  Using the interactive pen that slid out of the front edge of the computer, she scanned the first line of symbols from the printout Patterson had given her, and pretended to study the output until she was sure he had gone.

  She tilted her head to one side to check for noise from the corridor. Hearing none, she browsed her saved images and found an appropriately-sized photo of some engravings from the Sixth Pylon at Karnak: the texture of the stone and lighting were similar to that of the Library. She tapped an onscreen menu and accessed the application’s ‘about’ pop-up, before holding down a special combination of keys to open a small text-input screen.

  It took her less than a minute to write the message, a little under one hundred characters. She knew that any more would be pushing it; she would only get one shot at this, and the smaller the message the easier it would be to hide.

  She had known for a while that her tablet would be her best bet of contacting someone on the outside. Her first problem had been getting hold of it; something the events on Mars had precipitated.

  The next problem was working out what to say so that George could find her, when she didn’t even know where she was to start with. For that, however, she’d had a stroke of luck.

  Barely an hour earlier she had glimpsed the logos of NASA and DEFCOMM in the large hanger, before Patterson had slammed the door closed. She knew that they weren’t at NASA, so DEFCOMM were obviously the culprits, working in partnership with the unwitting space agency.

  Later, in the control room, Patterson had let slip another vital clue: that they controlled the satellites and receiver arrays because they built them. It didn’t take a rocket scientist, and from what she’d seen this place had enough of them, to work out that DEFCOMM probably stood for Defence Communications. After what he had told her in the control room, it seemed odd that DEFCOMM should advertise its allegiance to NASA and the USA. But then, what better smokescreen? DEFCOMM was a very American company building American satellites for a government agency, for an American-led first mission to Mars. Who would guess they had their own, hidden, agenda? What scared her more than anything else she had seen was that Seth Mallus had some crazy ideas coupled with huge resources; a dangerous combination. If someone who built rockets, satellites, and who knows what weaponry could be so fanatical about some ancient Egyptian texts, then God help them all.

  And, thanks to poor Mamdouh and the Wizard of Oz man, she knew that she was definitely in Florida.

  With all of this in mind, she barely thought twice about what to write to George.

  Her next task was how to hide the message.

  When George had first developed the application, he had embedded some basic cryptographic algorithms so that he could send secret love letters to her. Every now and then, he would create a message on his laptop and send it to her to decode.

  Now it wasn’t for fun: lives depended on it.

  There were basically two types of cryptography: overt, in which it’s clear you’re looking at a code, but you’re damned if you know what it means, and covert, in which you have no idea you’re looking at a code.

  The drawback of overt cryptographies is that once people knew you’re hiding something, you have to make it pretty much impenetrable. As a result, some overt encryption techniques are so complex, and require so much to be understood by writer and reader, that they aren’t worth the bother for simple love letters.

  George had t
oyed with the one-time cipher, the only truly ‘unbreakable’ overt code. It involved replacing the letters of the alphabet with numerical values, which would give you a long list of numbers representing your message. These would then be dropped into a completely random string of numbers, which would be used only once. The next code would use a different random string. While the principle of the one-time cipher was sound, it was generally considered to be too much hassle; the random string of numbers had to be shared between sender and recipient, as well as the numerical values and their letter counterparts used to encode the original message.

  Because such a cypher was generally deemed unbreakable, the hassle of encrypting was reduced by recycling the random string of numbers between messages, rather than always using new ones. As soon as the one-time cypher became the ‘more than one-time’ cypher, the code was broken.

  So for ease of use, he had chosen to build covert ciphers into her translation program. The overwhelming benefit of covert cryptography being that if people didn’t realise something was hidden, you didn’t need to make such an effort to make it impenetrable.

  Covert cryptography, or steganography, involved hiding a message inside a picture, in this case a scan of hieroglyphic text from Karnak. By using the encryption tool, a text-based message would be added to the colour components of the image file: each binary digit, or bit of the encoded message, was taken and added on to the end of the binary code for each individual picture element, or pixel. Adding a one or a nought to a pixel may change the shade of grey slightly, but overall the picture would remain unchanged.

  The more code-bits you tried to hide in a picture, the more degraded the original image would appear; as soon as the image became too distorted from the original, the message would become less ‘covert’.

  Using a specific decryption tool, which would ask for a shared keyword between sender and recipient, the code-bits would be extracted from the image, and the code decrypted for viewing.