THE CAMBRIDGE ANNEX: THE TRILOGY

by Peter Damon

  “It’s one possibility,” Michael offered. “Otherwise the Chinese are going about a legitimate exploration mission using their space-lab, and it has absolutely nothing to do with us.”

  “Which is even more unlikely,” Leanne nodded.

  +++++++++++++

  Pierre Moulier frowned as he watched the evening news from his apartment in the suburbs of Geneva. He felt oddly alienated from his home life as he listened to the French news channel describing the shock waves hitting the metal markets across the world.

  His wife was preparing a mixed green salad in the kitchen and asking him to open a bottle of wine, and it seemed like an empty facade against the tumbling markets reported on the television.

  The phone rang and Pierre rushed to answer it, mumbling a greeting as the news report began listing the large mining corporations who had already lost millions on their shares; whose mines were now worth next to nothing as the markets waited for the asteroid to arrive.

  In contrast, the woman presenter told her audience, the Green Party in Australia and the UK were calling on a ban on all further mining. “We no longer have to rape the earth for our metals!” a placard carrying protester cried to the camera from outside of the UK Houses of Parliament.

  “Hello? Is that Pierre Moulier?” an American voice asked over the phone.

  “It is,” he answered, preoccupied by the continuing report on the television, but not enough to have problems recognising the voice of the American delegate to the UNSA.

  “Pierre, you’ve got to do something. You have to stop those people; they’re killing us!” he was told.

  Pierre put down the phone and picked up his jacket. It was going to be an exceptionally long day.

  October 23rd.

  Mickey finished his tour of the property and nodded. They were just 3 kilometres south-east of Chelmsford, a stone’s throw from the M12 motorway where it curved to the south about the ancient town. Yet, standing in the heart of Blake’s Wood, they could have been 100 kilometres from the nearest town.

  The property was largely untouched woodland, enclosed within a three foot brick wall on top of which five feet of fencing stood, overlapping wooden panels providing a secure enclosure. The cottage that stood on the property was small in comparison, just two bedrooms. Built in the 50s by the recently deceased couple who had owned it, it had never been modernised, and the most recent addition was the chicken coup, built five years previously to replace the old one and already showing signs that it too needed replacing.

  “This will do nicely,” Mickey agreed, and rummaged in his back-pack for his satellite phone.

  Larry nodded and made his own call to ask one of his cousins to bring the equipment they had been slowly accumulating.

  “Leanne? It’s Mickey. Yes love, right here,” he told her, standing by the northern wall of the old cottage so she could record his precise position and begin preparing the orbital satellites.

  “Be here in the hour,” Larry reported, putting his cell-phone away while Mickey leant against the wall, the large satellite-phone held to his ear.

  +++++++++++++

  Pierre had the feeling that Michael Bennett had been waiting for his call. He had the feeling he was being manipulated, and froze, contemplating what that would mean and the repercussions were it true. Bennett waited at the other end of the link, a slight smile suggesting he knew what Pierre was thinking, and taking a delight in frustrating the Frenchman.

  “News of your intentions is causing economic meltdown on earth,” he told the spaceman sharply, disliking the game that Bennett appeared to be playing with them all.

  “You cannot sell the asteroid to anyone, not without UNSA approval, and we do not give it!” he told Bennett sharply.

  “Really?” Michael asked.

  “Really,” Pierre confirmed. “If you wish it sold, UNSA will sell it. The price will be controlled to avoid the type of confusion you appear to have wanted.”

  Michael’s grin grew. “Why should we consent to that?” he asked mildly.

  “You have no choice in the matter. The United Nations voted the treaty into force, and the UNSA administer it. You will provide my offices with the relevant details, and we will disseminate the information to prospective buyers,” Pierre informed him, his voice trailing off as Bennett shook his head.

  “We don’t intend to allow that,” he said.

  “Then there is no sale,” Pierre shrugged while assessing how that would be viewed by both the financial markets, and those in power.

  Michael sighed and leant towards the camera, one conspirator to another. “There will be a sale, because I have something others desperately want,” he told the other.

  “All those who are prospective buyers have signed the treaty. They are not able to make independent bids without UNSA approves them,” Pierre pointed out.

  Now Michael laughed, slapping the table and shaking his head. “You think a little thing like signing their name to a piece of paper will get in the way of massive profits from one single transaction?” he asked. “Really Pierre! I suggest you go back to university and re-take your Economics degree,” he said, and closed the link.

  +++++++++++++

  Joanna Bradworth, until recently the Chief Operating Officer of Google USA, wondered if she had made the right decision; coming to work for the President of the United States as her Chief of Staff. She couldn’t have picked a worse time, she reflected, sitting in the West Wing meeting room with the president’s top aides to review the situation.

  “The communication sector has hit the floor,” she was told, while the screen in front of them showed a plummeting graph line. 20 billion dollars had been lost from US trading companies before trading had been brought to a premature end to allow the markets to settle.

  “Similarly, electronics, who rely on a strong communications sector,” Danny Richards was saying, another graph showing a pronounced fall.

  “Both will probably recover. There was a similar reaction when the ARC first announced it was moving into the communications market, so those companies that remain are fairly robust, although probably feeling very tender at the moment. The real killer is this latest event; the selling of a heavy metal-bearing asteroid to the top-most bidder,” she was told.

  “Ok, I get the picture,” she told them. “Come up with ideas on what we can do to lend them a hand. By early tomorrow morning, please. We need to move quickly, otherwise our eastern friends will steal a march on us,” she explained, perhaps needlessly, perhaps not. She was shocked at the level of complacency within the White House. But perhaps she was unfairly weighing them against the standard of her previous company.

  “What’s next?” she asked, making a note on her tablet.

  “US Universities are extremely angry about the loss of the ARC,” Jim Brad, head of communications, told her from across the table.

  “That was the Cambridge University’s decision, and while we don’t necessarily endorse the decision, we stand by our friends across the water,” she reminded him, to see him nod with impatience.

  “Yes, yes, I understand all of that. But we signed the treaty. We helped put them in this position.”

  “We signed in support of the United Kingdom,” she reminded him, and then looked around the table. “We voted alongside our close allies. We put the development of the whole earth in front of our own considerations, and while that may mean some hardship in the short term, in the long run, we’ll be far better off.”

  “Have you seen the piece in the New York Times?” she was asked.

  Of course she had seen it, and wished the man in NASA dead for his open and frank interview with the newspaper. Glen Schroder should have picked that up and put it to bed. Unfortunately, his resignation left that issue in a void. She would have liked to recruit a replacement quickly, but with the ARC situation outstanding, she couldn’t establish what skills the new man would need. Did she need someone with the skills necessary to help administer the ARC and what it could provid
e, or someone to work with the spacemen, in the event they somehow worked through their current woes?

  “Of course NASA is disappointed that the UN decision does not allow a free-for-all in outer-space,” she told them, paraphrasing NASA’s eloquent words in order to highlight that organisation’s true aims. “But NASA has to understand that we are charged with ensuring there is no repeat of the Wild West at the turn of the 19th century. In this case, the cowboy with the fastest horse or the quickest draw is not going to get the biggest hoard of gold, nor allow a whole host of unscrupulous service industries to sprout up.”

  “But we’re using Professors Don Graves, Chaichenko and Brewer to help us break the HYPORT chemical’s structure,” Eddie Bail broke in.

  Joanna blinked, wondering where the press officer had got his information from.

  “We are not,” she told him. “And I doubt the Russians would lend us Chaichenko, even if we did,” she pointed out. “Where are you getting this from?” she asked.

  “Sources in the press,” he shrugged. “None of the universities are letting me talk to them. They’re either ill, tired, or too engrossed in a project to come to the phone,” he explained.

  “Well, I know nothing of this,” she told him, and made a mental note to follow it up on her own. If her own administration was keeping things from her, then she’d fire the whole lot of them, and enjoy doing it.

  “We need to fight fires,” she told them firmly. “All of you need to get to the media, and I don’t just mean the editors. Get to the owners and their board of directors, push the message out. We’ve done the daring thing, we’ve been visionary. It will mean a hard fight, but our kids will see the benefits,” she stressed.

  They nodded and took notes. She made notes too. She’d need to talk to them individually. Their scowls spoke volumes.

  +++++++++++++

  Allan leant on his elbows as he watched the Chinese manned module approach the space-lab with infinite slowness. Software was doing its best to translate Mandarin to English, sometimes raising a chuckle from Gary, Oliver and Leanne as they also monitored the forthcoming docking from their respective tables in the control-room.

  “10 seconds to docking,” said the computer-generated translation as the monitor showed barely three inches between the two craft, images picked up and de-coded from the Chinese cameras located on the outside of their respective hulls.

  The three in the control-room all silently counted down the seconds while watching the two vehicles move silently together. Although you couldn’t hear the sound of them coming gently together, the watching trio felt it in their bones, sighing with relief as confirmation of the procedure was announced by the Chinese.

  “Looks like Michael may have been wrong on this one,” Oliver said as he sat back and relaxed.

  “So what are the Chinese up to?” Leanne asked.

  “Perhaps they don’t trust their new partners and want their own set of independent eyes and ears to what is going on in space?” Gary suggested.

  Allan nodded. That made sense, only their orbits were completely independent of each other with only a short window in every hour that both craft would be on the same side of the earth. The ARC had the means to monitor the space-lab, but the space-lab had no means to do the same with the ARC.

  “I don’t think that could be it,” he told the room.

  The monitor in the control-room shifted to a view of the inside of the capsule as the ARC managed to de-code the new feed, and Oliver and the others could now see the four Chinese astronauts sitting beside each other, all working at their individual tasks as they finished preparing themselves for transfer into the space-lab.

  They waited for the Chinese to finish their post-docking checks and open the port between the two docked vehicles, listening to the four communicate calmly with their ground-control as they prepared themselves and their craft, donning space suits as a precaution before their commander pushed himself to the door and pressed the button to release the lock.

  “Control. Do you see any problem?” the ARC heard, the computer faithfully translating the spoken Mandarin.

  “We do. Please hold for further instructions,” the commander was told.

  Allan licked his lips and, like the Chinese, waited with a little hint of anxiety.

  “Use the secondary procedure from Appendix B of the docking manual,” he was told after a few minutes.

  “Why don’t they just tell him what to do? It would be much faster,” Oliver complained.

  “Because they know we’re listening,” Gary suggested.

  “Us, and the rest of the planet,” Leanne agreed.

  The ARC watched the commander undo a grub screw to lift a panel and flick a series of switches to fresh positions before once again pressing the main release button.

  Everyone waited, but nothing changed.

  +++++++++++++

  The satellite dish looked just a little bit incongruous, fastened to the north wall of an otherwise 50s style cottage located deep in Essex woodland. Cables now ran from the back, through some recently made holes in the wall, into what had once been a bedroom, and into the back of a remaining built-in wardrobe.

  The clothes were no longer there, and one of the travellers had removed the internal rails and drawers to make a bonfire of them outside while, in the vacated space, Mickey and his mates had installed the communications equipment they needed.

  Outside, on the drive, stood a BT van, and two of Larry’s friends in bright yellow BT vest were busy testing the new underground fibre cables that they had installed, liaising with counterparts at the exchange to ensure the 2 PRI service lines were running, before passing them for Mickey to plug into the back of his communications switch in the bedroom.

  “You’re sure this won’t be noticed?” Mickey asked of them, wandering over to watch them pack away their test equipment.

  “No. We’re using dark fibres,” one of the two explained, and grinned at Mickey’s perplexed look. “Unused fibres assigned for SONET and Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing. No one is ever going to check on them. Don’t worry,” he was told.

  As his friends finished their own particular tasks and meandered into the kitchen to share a brew, Mickey strode outside to use the little test device Sally had given him, making small adjustments to the positioning of the dish before he picked up the satellite phone to call Leanne again.

  “On the button!” she told him after a few moments.

  Mickey grinned, put away his equipment, and went to join his mates for a cup of tea. He had plenty of time before having to dive back to Harwich for the 17:30 ferry back to the European mainland, and his backpack was lighter to the tune of 50 thousand Euros.

  On the ARC, Leanne pressed the display of a button on her communications screen, and their communication through Cambridge University suddenly stopped. With their new link through Blake’s Wood, they had ceased to need Cambridge University.

  +++++++++++++

  Allan watched, preserving his sense of detachment as the Chinese made the decision to separate the module from the space-lab, in order to dock again in the hope that this would fix the problem and allow them to open the hatch between the two vehicles.

  Still wearing their bulky spacesuits, the four astronauts fastened themselves into their seats and the commander invoked the unlocking process.

  Allan, Gary and Oliver watched through their monitor, waiting to see the linked capsules separate, the moments lengthening while nothing appeared to happen on the screens.

  “Control?” the commander asked.

  “Invoke the release again please,” the Chinese controller asked of him.

  The commander pressed the button a second time, his finger pressing the stud more firmly. The two craft remained linked.

  “We will confer and get back to you shortly. We suggest you take this opportunity to have something to eat,” control told them.

  Allan agreed and sighed as he stood. Whether by design or not, the Chinese were obvio
usly having problems. He reached for his communications to alert Michael.

  October 24th.

  Frankie sat in the control-room of Freedom One and sipped his tea, watching as Peter followed instructions from Tony Wood, the mathematician on the ARC, to complete the visuals on the full geological survey they had carried out on the asteroid.

  Moments later, a three dimensional image of the rock appeared on the large monitor on the facing wall, slowly rotating to show them every detail of its surface.

  Peter tapped his screen and the surface became filled with colours, each representing a different mineral. Over a third of the surface area was ice, Frankie saw, much of it five metres deep.

  Peter tapped his screen once more, and the geological fault lines appeared within the revolving asteroid. Frankie surmised that this would help geologists determine how best to mine the asteroid.

  Another tap, and the asteroid was filled with colours. Glancing at the key, Frankie could see where each of the metals was concentrated. He frowned, his attention taken by the new entry he’d not previously seen.

  “Gold?” he enquired.

  Peter nodded. “Within an ironstone lode,” he explained briefly. “From the drilling, we believe there is as much as 1.2 tonnes,” he told Frank, and grinned. “That should raise the price a little,” he chuckled.

  “So, what next?” he asked.

  “More drilling, more geology,” Peter admitted. “The better the geology, the better the guarantees we can give at the auction, and the better the price we’ll get.”

  +++++++++++++

  “What’s the latest?” Allan asked as he returned to the control-room aboard the ARC, nodding to Samuel who rose, stretched, and nodded towards him as he sauntered out. Allan took the warm chair and sipped at the cup of tea he had brought with him.

  “Ground Control had them try a couple of other things, but they’re still stuck against the space-lab,” Oliver told him, not long at his own desk. “Michael’s already aware and on his way here,” he added, idly checking through the headlines, his software having already alerted him to all articles that contained their refined set of keywords.