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 barked.

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.