The second reason for waiting until the weather subsided was that they wanted to land within accessible distance of a precise point: Crater Landslide on the northern edge of Hellas Basin.
ESA’s Beagle 4 rover had already undertaken extensive reconnaissance of the area over the past three years, and proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that frozen water existed in abundance barely two feet beneath the surface. During a particularly impressive piece of footage, Beagle 4 had arrived on the edge of a cliff barely moments after a mudslide had spilt down into the crater’s basin. The video clearly showed rivulets of dirty, viscous liquid pouring slowly down the slopes for several minutes.
NASA had already been in the process of sending supply drops to Mars to supplement the Clarke mission, and on seeing this had routed everything to the area. The manned mission was destined to land within close proximity of these supply drops.
“Weather report shows that the storm has almost passed,” Marchenko said optimistically from the Lounge’s sofa. The storm covered most of the planet, and had been raging for over a month, well before their arrival in orbit. According to the forecast, based on previous planetary storms on Mars, it was due to end soon.
Montreaux looked round at the television screen behind him and studied the chart. He didn’t need to fully understand it, that was Mission Control’s job, but it was obvious that red was bad and blue was good. Whereas the previous day a three thousand mile long band of red had dominated the screen, it had by now disappeared almost entirely, to be replaced with the soothing tones of light and dark blue.
“Thank God for that. I thought we would be up here forever!” Dr Jane Richardson heaved a sigh of relief. “Everything is ready in the MLP, we’re raring to go, all we need now is the green light from Mission Control.”
It would take five minutes for her voice to reach Earth, but it seemed that Mission Control had been thinking along the same lines, as within thirty seconds a video message appeared onscreen.
“MLP deployment is good to go in T minus three hours. Please confirm message received and understood, and then report status on T minus two hours and T minus one hour,” the nameless American controller read from a printout in front of him. He looked up from the paper, directly into the camera. To the crew of the Clarke, it felt as if he was looking at them all individually, straight in the eyes. “Clarke, good luck from everyone here at Mission Control, and Godspeed. CAPCOM out.”
The television screen went blank.
“OK, you heard the man!” Captain Montreaux shouted after a brief silence. “Last chance for showers and meals in the quiet calm of space before we hit the sands of Mars!”
“At last!” cheered the Russian.
The Clarke reverberated with the sounds of a joyful crew as the storm blew over on the planet beneath them.
Chapter 23
Larue was sitting at his desk, staring out of the window at the heavy grey sky, when Martín Antunez walked into his office.
His light knocking had been ignored, so he had gripped the handle and entered, intent on putting his report on the boss’ desk in his absence. He had been surprised to see him there, and had stopped inside the doorway, waiting for a reaction. None came. It was possible that he hadn’t seen him.
“Monsieur Larue?” he offered quietly.
Still no response, save for a slight movement of the bottom jaw. He was grinding his teeth.
“I have compiled the monthly CSO reports for you, should I leave them on your desk?” Commercial Satellite Orbit reports. Not the most fascinating reads, but essential to the ESA nonetheless.
Larue inclined his head slightly in the opposite direction, as if listening for a noise from the cupboards behind him.
Martín approached the large desk, tidy for the first time since he could remember, and placed the report carefully on its surface, facing Larue. He had turned to leave when the man’s voice stopped him.
“Beagle 3 returned some of the most impressive photos of Mars ever seen,” he began slowly, playing each word over his tongue as if they were from a vintage red wine to be savoured.
Martín turned to face Larue.
“Robotic missions were clearly the way forward. With Beagle 4 we proved the existence of liquid and solid water on the surface of the planet, away from the frozen Poles. But for some reason no one cared. In the ten years that separated Beagle 3 from Beagle 4, people became so enthralled by the prospect of a manned journey to Mars that they completely forgot to get excited about our rover. If it wasn’t about the Clarke¸ it wasn’t worth knowing about,” Larue spat the words out bitterly. “I made a decision long ago not to let the ESA be a part of the Clarke mission. Truth be told, I never thought it would be successful.”
Martín winced as he heard the words.
Larue looked at the young Spaniard and smiled. “Do you think I was wrong?”
Martín bit his tongue. Larue would not be at the ESA for much longer, six months at most, but he could still not afford to upset him. He may have been powerless against the other space agencies, but inside the ESA he could still fire people. “You had good reason to withdraw from the International consortium, Monsieur,” he lied. It was no good making him angry.
Larue returned his gaze to the window. “The Clarke’s landing craft is to be deployed in the next couple of hours, Martin. Tell me what you know about the mission so far.”
He didn’t want to know about the mission, Martín thought to himself. He wanted to know what juicy scandals he could leak, to pass the negative press from one agency to another, across the Atlantic.
“It’s been a busy six weeks, Monsieur. The Chinese Lieutenant is dead, a tragic event caused by faulty programming in the Clarke’s nanostations –”
“Made in Japan by JAXA,” Larue interrupted.
“Yes. The Chinese are not happy with the explanation given by NASA for the accident. Because the nanostations are Japanese, they are barely on speaking terms with JAXA, too. China has lost a national icon, and although they have not admitted so publicly, I think that they blame either the USA or Japan. For their part, JAXA have stated that it is not possible for the nanostations to fail like they did.”
“Their simulations in the ISS did not reproduce the incident, did they?”
“No.”
“Interesting.” Larue was reading as much as he could into the facts, as usual.
Against Jacqueline’s will, Martín had refrained from telling Larue anything about their discovery six weeks earlier. Since the live feed had been shut down and the security loophole Jacqueline had manipulated had been fixed, he felt that they lacked any concrete evidence. Circumstantial evidence, such as Su Ning’s concern with her wristwatch, the strange interaction with Captain Montreaux and the disjointed transmissions between Mission Control and Clarke, while compelling, amounted to nothing in terms of cold, hard facts.
He was certain that Su Ning had been killed because she had uncovered the time delay, and he had no intention of meeting the same fate.
With Larue’s increasingly desperate behaviour, if he had told him everything he knew, he was sure that Larue would have been on the phone to Le Monde within minutes. Unless they could prove the time delay existed, which they couldn’t, it would just make everything much worse for the ESA.
Larue gestured with his hand for Martín to keep talking.
“NASA continue to supply us with most feeds from the Clarke, although the raw data has not been coming our way for over a month now. We get what NASA want us to see.” And over an hour later, he thought. “Since the incident with Lieutenant Su Ning, there are a maximum of twenty active nanostations at any one time, and none of them can be controlled remotely. We have learnt from sources within the other agencies that Russia, China and Japan have been lobbying NASA for improved access to the nanostations.”