THE CAMBRIDGE ANNEX: THE TRILOGY

by Peter Damon

  “Professor Lovell,” Stanley snapped.

  “Well, at this time in the morning, he’s usually getting ready to go to his office,” Sir Richard began, glancing at his watch while he collected his wits about him.

  “He’s not. His housekeeper says he’s not slept in his bed last night.”

  “Well, I don’t know then,” Sir Richard said. “Why the urgency, Stanley? What’s happened?”

  Stanley looked at the older man and tried to determine from his expression alone what he knew and what he didn’t. When he gave up he shook his head and turned towards the door. “Dr Cannon is helping us with our enquiries and may be gone a few days. If you happen to see Professor Lovell, tell him we need to talk, urgently,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

  Sir Richard sighed. The old days were back he feared, and he was once again pushed into a position of watching and waiting, hoping Michael and his crew knew what they were up to.

  More pressing was the disappearance of Professor Lovell and the custody of Dr Cannon. Sir Richard tried contacting both on their private numbers, without success.

  October 22nd.

  “Oh yes, now they want me,” Oliver said, nodding to himself as another email arrived, another editor asking for details concerning the ARC’s intention to withdraw their communication satellites.

  He distributed another stock answer, one he and Michael had prepared earlier that put the blame firmly on all those countries that had signed the new Outer-Space Treaty. He had other articles too, including a good one that Robert had put together, citing all the instances in the last fifty years where huge steps forward had been made, with intellectual property rights maintained. There had been literally hundreds of patents awarded in the field of electronics alone, some of which would revolutionise the high street once they filtered down into mainstream manufacturing.

  The articles all ended in the same vein. Working for five large nations in the form of the UNSA, giving up intellectual property rights as a result of it, and operating under their jurisdiction and immediate authority, did not fit with the aims of those who owned the ARC.

  +++++++++++++

  “Mr Bennett,” Pierre Moulier began as soon as he recognised the man over the video link from his offices in Geneva. “I really must insist that you comply with the United Nations Space Authority and begin supplying our offices with documentation regarding the maintenance and running of the ARC.”

  “And I would suggest you cease making requests to which you know there will be no answer,” Michael told him in reply. “It would save you a lot of energy,” he explained with a friendly smile.

  Moulier looked like a landed fish, allowing Michael to take advantage of his silence.

  “We both know the ship is not legally accountable to the United Nation, or indeed to Britain. The only trading laws governing outer-space were written specifically for parties involved in the International Space Station, and therefore not binding upon us,” he shrugged.

  Moulier had recovered and took on a shrewd and calculating look. “Who will trade with you, Mr Bennett? Sudan? Morocco? Cuba? They can hardly feed themselves, let alone provide good quality material for your ship,” he grinned.

  “Which is why we will abandon it,” Michael agreed, nodding.

  Pierre laughed and shook his head. “You really would have me believe you would destroy a 180,000 tonnes space station? No, Mr Bennett, let us discuss realities. Depart in that smaller craft, if you will, but that large vessel is ours, and we will manage it, ultimately,” he promised.

  “What; you think those three professors we recently returned to their respective places of research are going to help you develop the ARC’s processes?” Michael asked. “Oh, yes,” he added with a knowing smile and a nod. “We know you’ve secreted the three of them away to continue to work on gravity,” he said.

  Michael smiled and cut the communication, knowing full well he was cutting off a lot more than just the communication link.

  +++++++++++++

  Viktor Usov stepped from the limousine and looked across the Manege square and the Alexander Gardens road towards the main Kremlin building. Over 200 metres long, the building was a fortress, a trapezoid shaped building that encased a large quadrangle, turrets or spires on the building’s corners emphasising its military background. He lit a cigarette, his last chance to smoke before he entered his office, and began walking south. It turned him away from the Kremlin and the history it represented, the number of times it had been pulled down to then be rebuilt depressing him. Although the mechanism of state no longer inhabited the building, it still represented the state, and as such, gave even more reason for Viktor to frown with frustration and disappointment.

  He stepped into the Moscow Manege and loosened his heavy overcoat as the warm air of the large and open lobby warmed him. He was persona non grata at that moment, a senior man in a department that didn’t exist. Too senior and with too many influential friends to dismiss, but not so senior he couldn’t be ignored, just left on the side-lines to while away his days until early retirement.

  He nodded at the security men and walked on past to enter the nearest lift, his hand delving into his pocket for the security pass he always carried. The mirrored walls gave back his reflection a multitude of times, diminishing into an infinity of its own making. It revealed him to be a man who wished to be taller, who cut his hair uniformly short rather than admit to balding from the front, a round face with dark brown eyes set too far apart to be considered handsome, a full lip beneath a prominent chin that suggested indulgence.

  Even as his right hand reached out to press the button marked B, his left thumb was feeling the bite of the card as it took a sample of his blood, analysed it, and instructed the security of the building to allow him entry. The lift descended, passing the basement car-park to continue downwards, until it reached the lowest and most protected of the basements hidden beneath Moscow’s most prominent exhibition and trade centre.

  Viktor stepped out into a passage of bare concrete, service pipes and ducts running along the underside of the ceiling just above the hanging lights. All services were visible and clearly marked with no opportunity left for additional and unauthorised objects. He followed the pipe-work towards his office, turning off the main thoroughfare towards his smaller, less desirable office space. The people he passed avoided his eye, ignoring him as best they could, lest his taint rub off on them. Reaching his twin-room offices, he nodded at his uniformed secretary before stepping into his room and taking off his overcoat. The secretary was a new man, barely a full month in the job and unlikely to remain much longer. None of his predecessors had asked for his favour in getting a better job, a more senior role, and it wasn’t because they knew he was just as likely to laugh in their faces. Everyone in the building knew he was out of favour with the current administration.

  “Demyan, what’s this?” he called, seeing a large envelope on his desk.

  “It arrived early this morning, special delivery,” his secretary answered, bringing in his cup of coffee to place it quickly on the desk, before his shaking communicated itself to the cup and saucer.

  Viktor nodded and waited until Demyan had stepped out, closing the office door behind him, before he tore the envelope open to drop the thick document on his desk. Sitting down, his face bland, he began to read.

  By page three a small smile had crept to the corners of his full-lipped mouth. It appeared that Russians had finally woken up to what he’d been telling them for weeks now; the ARC would not comply with the UN resolution. The outer-Space treaty was not worth the paper it was written on.

  “Demyan,” he called on the intercom. “Get me Lyasin at ROSCOSMO. You may tell him who I represent, but no more,” he advised. “And when I’m finished with Lyasin, I want to discuss trade with South Korea, with whoever in the government is in charge of that,” he warned.

  +++++++++++++

  Michael waited patiently while Cheryl and Gary got themselves a drink
from the dispenser and joined him at the table, their expressions questioning his fitness. He smiled lazily for their benefit and asked how the communication providers had taken the news of the ARC’s loss, listening with only half an ear, really not that interested in how they had taken it. The legal entity that had provided the facilities and services were rooted within the Cambridge University and had to die along with the college.

  “What do we do now?” Gary asked, and Michael could see the worry on their faces.

  “I want you to auction the asteroid,” Michael told them, and grinned at their astonishment. He flicked an electronic document to them, details Oliver and Robert had obtained about those who had already expressed an interest in it.

  “That’s your starting point, but I’m sure you can develop that further,” Michael told them.

  They looked at it and nodded. “Glen can probably help us with some big US names,” they agreed, glancing towards one another.

  “No, don’t use Glen Schroder,” Michael told them. “You won’t be able to find him anyway,” he confided, a new blandness to his features making it harder for the others to judge what views were behind that statement.

  “But you want this done now?” Gary queried. “I mean, with this new break with Cambridge, anyone sitting in the Shack, the Cambridge University Wireless Society’s hub, is going to be able to monitor our communication with ease.”

  “That’s perfect,” Michael told them, and with another small smile, left them.

  Michael took the lift to the 6th floor and walked along the main service corridor that ran from the docking bay at the rear of the large ship, all the way to the farm in the bows, nodding pleasantly to those he passed before, arriving at the gym hall, he walked into the changing room to get ready for his stint on the machines.

  Heather was already in the gym when he got there, jogging gently, earplugs in her ears while she listened to some music.

  Michael sighed. Of all the things he hated the most, the treadmill had to rank the highest. However, regular exercise was one of the things he’d agreed to do in return for his release from the jail of the clinic, and if he tried hard enough, he found he could turn off the day-to-day and just commune with himself for a while.

  It took practice to begin with, to get a rhythm to his movements that allowed his mind to segregate that activity, and begin turning inward. Michael attacked it as he would a puzzle, systematically testing it to find a point of entry, and then expanding on it, capitalising on what he had achieved in order to build up a whole.

  +++++++++++++

  Freedom One stood motionless above the asteroid as it hurled towards earth, playing catch up with the planet as it continued along its orbit of the sun. Five small satellites stood above and around the large rock, their fixed positions about it making them all appear to be one whole unit.

  The core samples continued to be taken, analysed and documented. For the others, there was little to do but check their screens, and study.

  “Frankie, what do you think of this?” Ricky asked as he fed the image from his tablet up onto one of the screens of the control-room.

  Frankie turned his attention to the diagram and leant forward as interest caught at him.

  At first glance, the vehicle looked like an old metal bedstead which had the blade of a snow-plough added to one end, the metal oddly shaped, in this case to siphon back whatever had been caught by the blade, onto the flat bed behind it.

  With closer inspection Frankie could see how the collected material would be compacted and rolled into a ball by its passage backwards, and then flung away as if from a sling.

  “Where does it go?” he asked. “Into orbit?” he wondered, to be recovered whenever it was wanted, he assumed.

  Ricky shook his head a replaced the image with another.

  “How?” Frankie wondered, staring at the rectangle of latticed beams of light metal that created an open frame, with no floor or lid.

  “The frame is armed with HYPORT, creating a swell of gravity within the space enclosed by it. Fling anything at it and it will be held within the frame, ‘caught’ there by the gravitational field. You make the frame as broad and deep as you want it.” Ricky explained.

  “And to recover each item?” Frankie asked, thinking he knew the answer.

  “You fix a sheet of HYPORT onto any part of the ball, and float it away to wherever you want,” Ricky explained.

  “The ice won’t just boil away?” Frankie asked.

  “Matt says not. I mean, some of it will, but not a lot. Not enough to rely on it just boiling away,” Ricky elaborated.

  Frankie nodded and asked for an image of the bedstead again. It would be big when compared with any road-going vehicle, the blade anywhere between 30 and 80 metres, the vehicle powered by HYPORT to drive it forward, scraping a full metre down on every pass. The blade would need to be tough and specially made somewhere on earth, but if that hurdle could be overcome, then they had a good means of taking ice off of any asteroid, and for storing it.

  +++++++++++++

  Mickey watched Halfpenny Pier pass by on the port side of the ferry before picking up his bag to move towards the disembarking point. There was still ten minutes to go before the ferry finished docking at Harwich, but it guaranteed that he’d be one of the first off the boat, and that meant no long queues at the British Customs desk, always under-staffed, no matter the time of year.

  As it was, they hardly glanced at his photo ID, issued by the Netherlands in the name of Otto Franks. He walked on, onto English soil properly, and saw that his two cousins were already there, waiting to greet him. He had to stand right in front of them before they recognised him.

  He suffered their taunts on the loss of weight and heavier arms while walking to the car-park, and settled into the car with a sigh of relief as the doors closed.

  “There’s a small party down at the Pig and Trough,” lanky Larry told him, turning in the front passage seat to smile at him.

  “Thanks Larry. Can we see the site first though, eh?” he asked.

  “Sure. Get your head down. We’ll drive there straight away,” Gordon told him from behind the wheel, turning the car towards Chelmsford.

  +++++++++++++

  While the auditorium showed Freedom One and the asteroid as they continued to drill and analyse bore holes, the main screen in the meeting room beside the control-room showed a very different image.

  One of Sally Locke’s analytical satellites was providing sharp images of the Chinese launch site as they made their final preparations to launch a rocket into orbit.

  “You think it’s military?” Michael asked the room at large.

  “They’re not advertising it, let’s put it that way,” Leanne pointed out. “There’s nothing on their TV or radio concerning this.”

  “And it’s manned?” he asked.

  Gary nodded. “Four astronauts, one a woman,” he told them. “You can tell by their voices,” he explained as Robert Fuller raised a questioning eyebrow, wondering how he’d obtained that information.

  “But they can’t reach us?” Michael looked for confirmation.

  “We don’t believe so,” Allan agreed. “And if they try, we just move away,” he shrugged. “They have a finite volume of fuel. We don’t.

  “I really don’t see what they aim to achieve; they already know our satellites are self-propelled and can very easily remain out of reach.” The Russians had learnt the futility of trying to catch one of their satellites, and had been forced to return to earth empty-handed. The ARC had made sure their failure had been advertised, a warning to any of the other space-faring nations should they want to try for themselves. Russia, however, was claiming their mission was UNSA sponsored and had been charged with the task of determining the safety of the satellites the ARC had put into orbit. Their inability to verify the condition of the satellites only served to prove that the ARC was not operating under UN guidelines.

  “I think I know what they plan,” Michael murmu
red, licking his lips and taking a deep and steadying breath. Samuel was watching him, patiently waiting, just as the others around the table were doing.

  “Can we have a satellite placed close to their space-lab, close enough to monitor them, but not be captured by them?” he asked of Sally.

  She nodded and began typing on her tablet.

  “You see, they don’t really know us. They probably don’t even understand us,” Michael explained. “Every attempt they’ve made to approach us has met with disaster. But there is one thing they do know of us; that if another space-going vehicle has a problem, we’ll come running.”

  “You think they’re going to purposefully cause a fault on their space-lab?” Oliver asked, filling the shocked silence of everyone else in the meeting.

  Further discussion was halted by the plume of smoke that rose off to the side of the launch gantry as the main engines of the Chinese rocket were ignited. Support arms pivoted smoothly away, and the long rocket began to rise, accelerating swiftly to begin the long lift from earth’s gravity towards outer-space.

  In the meeting room, they collectively held their breaths, watching the rocket as the cameras on their satellite faithfully tracked its gentle arc upwards.

  The solid booster rockets decorating the sides of the main rocket died and, moments later, fell away to earth and a new rocket ignited in the main column, pushing it still further upwards.

  “Well, that’s further than their last two attempts,” Gary remarked softly.

  The rocket continued a steady burn for over two minutes, pushing it further and further from the earth, before it petered out and died.

  “They’ve done it,” Allan said, watching his tablet as it calculated velocity and trajectory, allowing them all to breathe again. “They have enough momentum to get them to the right orbit. It will take them about 18 hours to come up to the space-lab, and probably about four more hours to complete the docking. The Chinese process is fully automated, so we just have to watch and wait.”

  “But you think it’s programmed to fail,” Oliver pressed of Michael, only to see him shrug.