by Talbot, Luke
Ben had seen enough movies and TV shows to know that tapping the side of your nose implied that they were now sharing a secret; in Egypt, however, it usually meant ‘trust me’. The smile also suggested George was probably joking, and that there was no real secret to be shared.
He tapped the screen and a small input dialogue appeared. In it, he entered his usual password, and an error popped up: ‘incorrect keyword!’ He entered all the passwords he’d used in the past, in his secret messages with Gail, each time with the same error. He cast his mind back as far as possible, to their first days together. Memorable places, anniversaries, places, people.
“Jesus, Gail, what’s the keyword?” he growled in exasperation. In response to Ben’s quizzed expression, he explained. “I built a little cryptographic function into this app when I wrote it,” he said. “Just a fun little tool to send each other hidden messages. It’s called steganography. You can hide pretty much whatever you want in an image, as long as the ratios are correct.”
Ben looked at the picture again. “And you think this is one of those?”
“It has to be. Have you ever been sent hieroglyphs by anyone?”
“No,” Ben admitted.
“Then why now? Why would anyone send you hieroglyphs now? It has to be Gail trying to get a message to us, using this Dr Patterson and you as proxies to get hold of me.” He hit the enter key and slammed the keyboard when the same error popped on the screen for the twentieth time.
“Why do you need a password?”
“It’s called a keyword, and I need it to decrypt the message. Without it all I have is a series of zeros and ones in no particular order. I wouldn’t know where to start. The keyword is set when the original message is encrypted. It would be a word that Gail would have chosen.”
“What have you tried?”
“Everything. Birthday’s, our pet names for each other, parents, hometown, university friends, pets, favourite TV shows, films, towns, and I even tried Amarna, just in case.”
“I probably would have chosen Amarna first,” Ben commented. He thought for a moment. “Have you tried ‘Mars’?”
George keyed the four letters in and hit enter. The error popped up. “Yes, I have.”
Ben thought for a few more moments then asked George for the keyboard. When he was in front of the keys, he took a second or two to find the letters on the unfamiliar layout, and then hit enter.
After a longer delay, a popup informed them that the decryption had succeeded.
George looked at Ben in wonder. “What did you type?”
“Nefertiti.”
George slapped his forehead for not thinking of it. It had to be an archaeologist thing, he told himself. Taking control of the computer screen once more, he tapped the popup to open the secret message.
They both read in silence.
Being held by DEFCOMM, Florida. Dr Henry Patterson. Help. No chance of release. Sorry.
ILY.
G
George could feel the emotion rising in him as Ben squeezed his shoulder. He put his hand on the screen, touched the words, caressed the initial of her name, and pressed the ‘ILY’ fondly. She isn’t dead, he thought. She hasn’t been dead. His mind raced back to the body identification he had been taken through back in the morgue, when he had punched Captain Kamal. Had it been Gail? Had he been so close to his wife, still breathing imperceptibly, and not known the truth?
He punched the screen, liquid crystals changing colour grotesquely as they gave way under his fist. “I could have stopped him!” he blurted out. “Bastard!”
The hand on his shoulder loosened, and Ben re-read the email from Dr Patterson. “We still have a chance to get her back,” he said.
“How?” George exclaimed. “She’s in Florida, and I can’t get out of here until tomorrow at the earliest. And even if I did get there, how am I going to get her out of that place?”
“We know she’s with Dr Patterson. And according to his email, he’s going to be here tomorrow afternoon, at Amarna. And he expects me to help him get in.”
George looked up. “Of course.” He brought up the email on the main screen. “He probably doesn’t know about this hidden message, and Gail must have tricked him into sending it to you. It was one hell of a gamble,” he bit his bottom lip. “She couldn’t have known that you would have passed it to me. If we hadn’t been sitting together when you received it, you would probably have never shown the picture to me at all!”
“True,” Ben accepted. “But we were sitting together, and we did get the message. We now know where this Patterson guy is going to be, and when. Even if Gail isn’t with him, we’ll use him to get to her.”
George closed down the terminal session and turned to his friend. “Ben, we’re not exactly Batman and Robin, are we? I’m sure he won’t be coming on his own. We’re going to need some help.”
They looked at each other for only a handful of seconds before looking towards the main entrance to the airport in unison.
“Does that friend of yours owe you any more favours?” George asked.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking, my friend.”
As they burst back through the revolving doors they were hit by the mid-afternoon heat reflecting off the melting tarmac of the road, and they stuck to the shade as they made their way back towards the Tourism Police. Ben’s friend detached from a small group and met them halfway. Her Tourism Police uniform was sharply tucked-in at the waist, accentuating her breasts and hips. A long ponytail of slightly curled, jet-black hair protruded from the back of her cap, which cast a shadow across her strong nose and full lips. She was relatively tall, an inch or so taller than Ben, and George couldn’t help but wonder just how close Ben had been to her during their military service.
He shook the thought from his mind as his eyes fell to the machine gun. Slung over her shoulder, she was holding it close to her left hip with one hand, a finger curled near the trigger. Not on it, but close enough.
“You’re not flying, then?” she said in heavily accented English, an ‘I told you so’ look on her face.
“We decided to stay in Egypt for a while,” Ben said, matter-of-factly. “Zahra, let me introduce an old friend of mine: this is George Turner, from England.”
They shook hands briefly, wondering whether she would have taken her hand off the gun if she’d been holding it on her right-hand side instead. He decided that she probably wouldn’t. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said courteously.
“Me too,” she replied awkwardly. She clearly wasn’t used to being introduced to English people, her conversational English failing her.
The three of them stood looking at each other for several moments, before Zahra broke the silence. “Farid, what are you doing here?” Through politeness, she continued to test her English. George was surprised to hear Ben’s actual name. He had never heard anyone call him that, and it took him more than a couple of seconds to make the association between the name and his friend.
Ben replied in Arabic.
Within less than a minute, George found himself standing back as the two broke into what looked like a full-on argument. He tried to pick up on some key words, and managed to discern ‘Tell el-Amarna’, but that was it; they were simply speaking far too fast for his basic level of Arabic.
Five minutes later, they stopped their discussion long enough for Zahra to break into a perfect white-toothed grin. Turning to George, she shook his hand again.
“Hopefully, I will see you tomorrow morning, George.” And with that, she turned on her heel and returned to the group of policemen, who were pretending to ignore them.
Ben looked sheepishly after her. “She will meet us at Amarna tomorrow at dawn. She’ll bring some friends, too. She has the weekend off, so it’s a case of extreme taking-your-work-home.”
“That seemed easy enough,” George commented. “I thought you were going to bite each other’s heads off for a minute, but then she’s all smiles!”
“It was more difficult than you think, my friend,” he replied. “It turns out she didn’t owe me any favours at all.”
“So why did she agree to help us?”
“Because I decided to take a bullet, as they say in American movies. I promised to take her to one of the most expensive restaurants in Cairo.”
George looked at Ben in surprise, and then looked at Zahra joking with her colleagues less than twenty yards away. She glanced over at them casually and smiled.
He wouldn’t have called it ‘taking a bullet’.
“Is it really that simple?” George said in disbelief. “You’ve organised our own private militia in less than five minutes?”
Ben smiled and got his mobile phone out of his pocket. “Not quite, George. The next step is to call our friend Kamal and ask for a little favour, which he certainly owes us. We need his authority to clear the area surrounding Amarna. If things get ugly, he won’t want Gail Turner showing up anywhere in Egypt, so it’s in his interest to lend a hand.”
Chapter 63
Seth Mallus tapped the screen in front of him and waited for the video feed from the control room to pop up. Of all the scenarios they had gone through over the years of planning, this had not been one of them: one astronaut dead, two disappeared and most likely dead, and the fourth going stir crazy by herself on the surface of Mars.
He spilled a couple of tablets into his palm from a small bottle obtained from the bottom draw of his desk, then reached for a glass of water. Knocking back the pills with several gulps of the cool liquid, he closed his eyes and clenched his teeth; his brain was pulsating against the inside of his skull. With every passing moment his headache worsened, not helped by the flow of bad news that had come his way in the last few days. At least the pills would help his headache, but it would be a few minutes at least until they started to kick in.
In the meantime, he massaged his temples, his eyes still closed, and ran through the facts.
The Mars mission had arrived so close to his dream landing site, he couldn’t have planned it better. The Book of Xynutians had pointed directly to a site on Mars. In the Book of Xynutians’ own words, on the shore of an empty ocean. There were dozens of places that could have fit the description, but within days of comparing the illustrations in the book to satellite photography of the planet, they had found an exact match: Hellas Basin.
It was too accurate to be a fluke. Weeks of cross-referencing had revealed no further matches, not even a close-second. How the ancient Egyptians had managed to produce such a drawing was beyond explanation. Barely sixty years ago it would have been practically impossible. Three and a half thousand years ago, it was unimaginable.
And then there had been his dream. His dreams had always been very vivid, and surreal. But this one? He could still feel, taste and hear the crater-site on Mars, as it was in the time of the Xynutians. It wasn’t just a dream. It felt more like a recollection. The image had stuck with him ever since.
Nevertheless, he had certainly not expected the crew to find the Xynutian remains within days of arriving, by simply throwing a stone at them. Either the crew were incredibly lucky, or there were so many remains on Mars that they simply had to stumble upon one sooner or later. More importantly though, his dream, and the book, had been bang-on.
No one could ever find out about their finds, not even NASA, which was where his headache had come from. Influencing the decision to put the mission on the shore of the Hellas Basin had been fairly straight forward: enough of the scientific community thought it would be a good place to land anyway, which reduced the amount of lobbying needed along NASA’s corridors. Making sure that no one outside his office knew they had been influenced, and even more importantly, why they had been, was infinitely harder.
It had been easy enough to control the nanostations on-board the Clarke, and the interception of the communication relay with Earth had been straightforward. DEFCOMM built and maintained the satellites in orbit, the receiver dishes on Earth, and owned the encryption technology that was used to hide the signal from the rest of the world. With five hundred and twelve bit encryption, even an intercepted signal would take over three years to decode using the fastest supercomputer on the planet, barring the use of quantum computers, which remained inaccessible in a practical sense. For all intents and purposes, he was in total control of the Earth’s view of the spaceship.
Their first mistake, however, had come after introduction of the time-delay. Sooner or later they would need to be able to edit what was happening to the mission so that if they did eventually stumble upon alien remains on Mars, those facts could remain hidden from Earth. The most obvious solution was one that had been used for decades in reality television: a time lag, which meant that what people were watching was actually minutes or even hours old, giving the show’s producers ample time to cut to adverts, bleep out swearwords before the watershed, or change camera to avoid showing certain things that the censors would rather the public didn’t see.
Of course on Earth it would become painfully apparent that something was wrong if anyone tried to have a real-time conversation, which was why they had waited for Clarke to be far enough away to make any kind of to-and-fro impractical. Earth sent messages out, and the crew replied when it was convenient to do so, and the time delay would never be noticed.
But on Clarke, they had not counted on Su Ning, her excellent mental arithmetic and, crucially, her clandestine watch that kept perfect time with Beijing. After she realised the time delay had been introduced, only eliminating her avoided compromising the entire mission.
Shortly after the discovery of the Jetty, and the Xynutian settlement, they had switched to computer generated imagery, to replace almost all external shots on Mars with faked footage generated by their programmers. Shots outside were easy to produce, mainly because everything was either mechanical or alien. Anyone watching would be unable to tell the difference between a fake rock or a real one, and a spacesuit doesn’t exactly have a personality. But everything inside the MLP continued to be real footage, edited and modified as little as possible depending on the topic of the astronaut’s banter.
But then, disaster.
In the space of a few hours, the two leading astronauts on the project had disappeared inside the Xynutian settlement. That had a double effect: firstly, it was now obvious on all video returning from Mars that Dr Jane Richardson was alone. Secondly, she had been in a near-hysterical state for hours now, and when she wasn’t screaming into the cameras, she was sitting down staring into her hands, or shouting into the microphone at the comms panel in a desperate attempt to get hold of her fellow astronauts, whose air had long since run out.
None of the video coming back from Mars could be sent to NASA without him having a lot of explaining to do. He couldn’t allow that to happen.
So for a while now, there had been no feed from Mars. NASA had been told there was a technical problem with one of the satellites in the receiver array. At best, it would buy them a month before a new satellite or repair crew could be launched, at worst NASA would demand that video be transmitted via a different satellite. To stop it coming to that, they had provided a steady stream of synthesised voice clips from Mars. These had been much easier to produce, due to the interference that plagued interplanetary communications.
His headache was starting to subside, and he opened his eyes. Looking at the screen, he watched Dr Richardson fetch herself a glass of water from the kitchen unit of the MLP. She was millions of miles away, alone on a dead planet.
He picked up the phone and dialled a secure line. Almost immediately, there was an answer from the other end.
“How long till they reach their target?” he asked.
“Just under an hour, Sir.”
“Let me know when you have news.” He hung up abruptly and looked at the video from Mars.
Dr Patterson and Dr Turner had come up with a hair-brained scheme, in his opinion. But if the Amarna Library did, miraculously, give them a clue
as to how the Xynutian door mechanism would open, then there may be some hope. If the astronauts trapped inside had somehow survived, if there was some improbable source of oxygen inside the ancient settlement, then there was a chance that they could return to the surface of Mars soon, and they could return to normal video feeds before NASA decided to intervene.
That was a lot of ifs, and the odds on the last two were too long for his liking.
From his perspective, the Mars mission had already fulfilled its primary objective: it had proven without a doubt that the book from Amarna had been telling the truth. The Xynutians had indeed existed, hundreds of thousands, millions of years before modern humans had crawled from the dirt and started their long journey to civilisation. This in turn meant that they must have been wiped out by Aniquilus, which in turn led to the worst possible conclusion: there was no doubt that mankind was about to meet the same fate.
Which was what was making his head hurt. He had come to terms with the Xynutians, and their advanced civilisation, but what troubled him was Aniquilus. This thing that wiped them out just didn’t make sense. It came from nowhere.
Unless Aniquilus was the Xynutians. And if that turned out to be true, then humans would become their own Aniquilus.
There would be one last roll of the dice, one last chance for Mars to reveal more of the Xynutian’s secrets, how the end came about and what could be done to avoid the same fate for the humans. That last chance lay in the mission to Amarna, with Dr Patterson.
And if they don’t succeed? In his mind, the Amarna books were clear on one detail: the Xynutians had been erased because they spread too far, they consumed everything and they failed to fit in with their environment. Mankind had achieved the same dominance on Earth, and there was only one way back.
If there was no good news from Amarna, then there would be no choice but to pass to Plan B, before it was too late. All the pieces fit together perfectly.