“Five Card Stud, I think,” Jacqueline informed him.

The video feed directly below it showed the same Lounge, but at a different time. As he looked at it, he saw Captain Montreaux enter the room from the Command Module. Martín’s mouth dropped open as he watched him cross the room, clip himself down on the sofa, and join the game of poker that he was already playing in the feed above.  He moved closer to the screen and studied the code on the left.

“Seventy-five minutes precisely,” she told him.

“Precisely what?” Martín  looked at her.

She looked at him and then tapped the display with the nail of her index finger, first the top feed then the bottom one. “Seventy-five minutes precisely between the feed coming back from the Clarke and the feed being sent to us by NASA.”

Martín didn’t know what was more impressive: that Jacqueline had managed to hack into the original data stream herself within four hours, or that security and encryption at Mission Control eight-thousand kilometres away was so lax as to let such a hack occur.

“So they’ve added a delay to the feed they’re sending us?” he asked.

“Yes, although I don’t know when it was introduced, obviously I only know it’s effective now.” She looked back at the screen and the programming code she had spent hours putting together.

“It doesn’t entirely surprise me,” he said, despondently. “Our partner status has been downscaled, so they’ve probably downgraded our feed, too. How long will we have the direct feed?”

“I don’t know, I’m amazed it’s still there, to be honest.”

“And you’re recording all of this?” he asked, watching the screen intently. In the delayed feeds, Captain Marchenko had just lost most of his chips, while at the same time in the live one he had already won most of them back again.

She pointed to a little red flashing icon in the bottom left hand corner of her screen and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “But it’s only useful to you and I as we stand here watching.  In an hour and a quarter practically anyone will be able to see this feed, so we don’t exactly gain anything.”

As she said this, the top feed started to move across the Lounge. He looked at Jacqueline in earnest.

“We can’t control anything, sorry. And even if we could, we wouldn’t want to. If they haven’t realised that we’re watching yet, sending commands to a nanostation is a sure-fire way of putting them on the right track.”

He nodded in agreement. He hadn’t thought of that at all.  The nanostation was clearly going to recharge anyway, as it headed for the corner of the Lounge and slowly dropped onto the available induction plate. Just as the screen went blank, Jacqueline sat upright and typed quickly on the keyboard for several seconds.

“What is it?” he urged.

She left him waiting for almost five minutes before replying. When she did, the screen had changed, this time completely full of programming code.

“You say that the delay is because they downgraded our partner status, but I didn’t tell you the best bit,” she said. She was enjoying her brief spell as a technological spy.

“Yes?”

“Well, while I was searching data streams to tap into, I naturally started by looking for the feeds going from NASA to JAXA, CNSA and the RSA,” she said eagerly. “I expected that they would be seeing the same data as NASA, and not the delayed feed NASA is sending us.”

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, the China National Space Administration, CNSA, and the Russian Space Agency, RSA he thought to himself. The string of acronyms were unlikely bedfellows among which the ESA should have fitted nicely, had it not been for Larue.

“At first I thought I was going crazy,” she continued. “But I ran comparisons several times and I’m absolutely right.”

“And?”

She looked him directly in the eyes and said the words slowly and deliberately. “The other agencies are being sent the same feed as us!”

Jacqueline’s discovery was still ringing in his ears as he entered his office. The ESA building had been empty for some time now and he checked his watch. Two in the morning. He’d missed the last Metro, and had too much to think about to go home, anyway. He picked up his telephone and dialled Larue’s office. It went straight to voicemail, as he had expected.

He had to think carefully about his next move. After the first NASA feed had gone blank, Jacqueline had managed to hack into another nanostation, but her handiwork had been picked up on after about twenty minutes. During this time the feed from NASA to ESA still hadn’t caught up with the actual live feed they had been watching.  Whatever chink in security she had exploited had been resolved, as from that point on she was unable to access anything but the standard, delayed feed. He could picture the situation in America where some programmer had probably been typing frantically for ten minutes before hitting Enter and punching the air triumphantly, just like in the movies.

Jacqueline had persevered for almost three hours, trying desperately to hack into another nanostation on board the Clarke, but had failed at every attempt. It had been no good. Whatever they had seen was impossible to prove anyway.

She had left shortly afterwards, and he had almost reluctantly declined her offer of a ride home. On any other day, he would have jumped at the opportunity; Jacqueline was beautiful by any standards, single, and he was certainly very attracted to her. But somehow after their discovery, it didn’t feel quite right to simply leave.

For Martín, the evening’s work had at least served one lasting purpose: having not taken Larue’s words regarding NASA seriously that afternoon, he had returned to his desk dreading the task he had been given. Now, however, not only did he believe that Larue’s suspicious nature was justified, he was positive beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone at NASA was up to something. And whatever it was, they were prepared to go to great lengths to cover it up.

Chapter 19

Lieutenant Su Ning lay on her side and looked across the room at the photo next to the window: a young Chinese man, strong and well groomed with a perfect smile that showed in his eyes as well as his straight, white teeth.  His dark green uniform was starched to perfection, and his collar nudged up precisely against the bottom of his chin. His officer’s hat was wedged carefully under his upper arm, while his hands shot down in perfect straight lines towards the floor.

They had both grown up in the same small village outside Beijing, and had joined the Academy together. Their relationship had not been spoilt by the fact that only she had been put through for the Mars mission. He had been immensely proud of her and had supported her all of the way. Although he had always dreamed of going into space, he had failed his entrance medical due to a retinal disorder he hadn’t even been aware of at the time. Since then, his sight had deteriorated to the extent of being service-affecting, and he was now desk-based.

In the corner of the photo, a neatly written message: See Mars for me.

She pulled her eyes away from the picture and looked at her computer screen. That’s where it had all started, she thought. She pushed gently on the covers of the bed and let herself float several inches above it, enjoying the feeling of zero gravity.

As she lay above her bed, she cleared her mind and thought about what she would tell the Captain. She knew he would be going to the Lounge during the night, she had seen the look on his face and understood immediately what he was thinking: that something was wrong, but that he did not know what. From the behaviour of the others, she was sure she was the only one to have noticed it. Jane had been acting strangely that afternoon, but then again, she so often did.