“Our scientific cooperation with NASA has been suspended, Martin,” he admitted. “We will still receive some direct feeds from the Mars mission, but will no longer hold the same status as Russia, China or even Japan.” His voice was resigned, as if the news had been inevitable.
“Why?” Antunez asked in disbelief.
“We have not invested in the Mars mission. As I understand, it has been decided that we are not to have immediate access to all of the data returned from the Clarke. Our ability to control nanostations remotely, for instance, has been revoked effective from six o’clock tomorrow morning, heure Française. From then on, we will receive a passive live feed, which they control,” Larue said.
Martín Antunez knew this would be one of the last nails in Larue’s coffin, both figuratively and possibly literally. It had all started with his first decision as Head of Policy and Future Programmes, nearly ten years earlier.
“I know what you are thinking, that we should have continued working on the Clarke with the other agencies all those years ago,” Larue said. “But it just wasn’t feasible. All of our scientific research at the time was in the area of robotic probes and landing craft. We were already tied in to dozens of missions we could barely fund. The mission’s demands, both financially and in terms of human resource, were simply too high!”
“I understand, Monsieur.” Aside from hundreds of satellites around Earth, the mainstay of the ESA’s business, their only remaining significant scientific venture was the Beagle 4 rover, roaming alone in the cold winds of Mars for the past three years.
Larue looked at him. “As far as the Clarke is concerned, we barely have one up on the press. We’ll probably have to watch the landing on CNN.” He sneered as he said the acronym.
“What can I do, Monsieur?” Antunez offered.
“Give me something to be optimistic about!”
Antunez looked at his boss with pity. There was nothing.
Larue returned to the window and held his hands behind his back. The urge to start biting his nails again had grown, but a respectable man restrained himself, he had decided. “Find something,” he said over his shoulder. “Watch everything.” He looked over at the UNESCO building. Education, Science, Culture. It was all there. But above all, he thought, opportunity. “NASA is a business, they only tell us what they want us to know, and then keep the juicy bits to themselves.” His mouth had started to water; he was hungry already.
“Espionage, Monsieur?” Antunez sounded shocked.
Larue shot round and pointed a finger at him. “No! Not espionage, but liberty!” A thought was brewing in his mind and he revelled in his new-found enthusiasm. “Mars is not American, we all have the right to it, and this Clarke mission is from Earth, not the United States. NASA have no right to withhold information —”
“We have no evidence that they have, or will,” Antunez interrupted.
“They will, Martin, I am sure of it,” he looked his aide in the eyes, an unpleasant grin on his face. “And when they do, you will be watching.”
Antunez shifted uneasily on the spot. So this is what happens when you push Larue into a corner, he thought. The boss’ job was almost certainly on the line; the honourable thing to do was to resign. Instead, Larue was grabbing at fanciful conspiracy theories.
“With the feeds we are getting, we are not very well placed…”
“You will find a way, Martin, I trust you,” he said firmly. He sat down at his desk and started flicking through paperwork intently. The small wrist strap he was wearing sent a small impulse to his nerve endings, telling him it was time to curb his enthusiasm and relax. “And one last thing.”
“Monsieur?”
“I trust you have no engagements this evening? I’m sure you understand that, for obvious reasons, we don’t have much time. I want you to get me anything you can, as quickly as possible. I want you to get everything from the Clarke before our control of the nanostations is removed.”
Martín left the office quietly, realising the meeting was over. In the corridor outside, he bumped into a young blond woman carrying a wad of paperwork. His face flushed.
“Excuse-moi, Jacqueline,” he mumbled.
“Martín,” she used the Spanish pronunciation of his name. “You look worried. Can I help?”
He looked at the network programmer for a few seconds before his neurons clicked into place. “Oui,” he said. Yes.
Hours had passed.
Martín watched in silence as the American Captain sailed across the Lounge to meet the Chinese Lieutenant. After a brief exchange of words, too quiet to be picked up by the nearby nanostation, the woman left the Captain by the window. He called after her, this time his voice loud enough to come through Martín’s headphones, but she did not return. He stayed for three minutes, staring into space, before leaving the Lounge.
He had watched the same recording during a routine run through of the Clarke’s activities the day before, but had thought nothing of it. It now stood out as one of the last recordings during which the ESA had been able to control the nanostations. Had he known, and been awake while it had been live and not tucked up in bed with a woman he barely knew and would probably never see again, he would certainly have moved the tiny little nanostation several feet closer.
The Clarke’s equipment of nanostations was superb. Over the past weeks, he had been allowed to control some of the little flying machines, sending them this way and that, bumping into walls, getting in the way of the crew. With the number of nanostations active during the day, there were more than enough to go around. He had even seen a feed from a nanostation controlled by someone at JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, which had accidentally strayed into a doorway adjacent to the Hygiene Bay. The video had been cut by NASA just as Dr Jane Richardson had entered with her towel, and control mechanisms for restricting movement of nanostations within the Hygiene Bay and personal Pods expanded to include the connecting tunnel from the Lounge.
During Nightmode, most of the stations went to the closest charging pad, ready for another busy shift. Unless there was a fault or something needed to be monitored more closely, at these times there were only eight active nanostations – one for each habitable module. The one that had managed to pick up the meeting between Lieutenant Shi Su Ning and Captain Yves Montreaux the previous day had been on the other side of the room, and although at the time five agencies were able to send basic commands to the lonesome vigil in the Lounge, not one had done so.
He increased the gain on his headphones and flattened the equalizer in the low frequency range; the constant humming of the ship’s air circulation units needed to be cancelled out. Pressing play, he watched the video again.
“I had no idea you did this,” the Captain’s voice boomed through his headphones. He was trying to pick up the quiet sections, and this meant that everything else now sounded incredibly loud.
“You may be the Captain, Sir, but with respect you don’t know everything,” she replied.
A pause while the Captain went across the Lounge to join her. Martín had already seen the look of surprise in the Captain’s face the last time he had watched. But this time he noticed something else; Su Ning had stretched her neck to speak to the Captain. But as soon as she saw his reaction this changed. Martín saw the look in her eyes: she had said too much and knew it. It was a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ detail, hard to pick up from Earth with the angle of the nanostation; but on Clarke, it was obvious that the Captain had not missed a thing.