“Seventy. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses,” continued Montreaux. “Fifty. As we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not unto temptation, Thirty, but deliver us from evil.” The beeping was now so fast it created a continuous pulsing tone. “For the kingdom, Fifteen, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever, Five –”
The MLP touched the ground and bounced gently like a skipping stone on a pond, its self-inflated underbelly taking the remaining force of their parachuted descent. After the first bounce the bags began to deflate, letting the MLP slide for a few metres along the smooth, sand-covered plain before coming to rest a few centimetres away from a large, round boulder.
Inside, the three astronauts lay in total silence for a whole minute before Captain Danny Marchenko whispered under his breath: “Amen.”
They had landed on Mars.
Martín leant back in his chair and closed his eyes, trying to imagine what was happening on Mars, sixty million miles away.
“They will have landed now,” Jacqueline said, sipping from her coffee slowly.
And we are the only ones outside NASA who know, he thought.
“It’s sickening,” she went on. “To think that the world will be watching in over an hour, thinking that they are watching it Live.”
He could tell by the tone of her voice that she was dying to tell someone what they knew. “You haven’t told anyone, have you?” he checked.
“No! You asked me not to!” She sounded hurt.
He opened his eyes and looked over at her. They were in the coffee room of her floor in the ESA Headquarters, where they had started meeting up during working hours.
“I’m sorry, I know you wouldn’t do a thing like that.” His voice was soft and apologetic.
She smiled and shrugged it off. “I found something this morning that might help,” she said. “The feed we were watching that night, the live feed, I think I know how to get it back.”
He sat up and put his hands round his drink on the table, heating them up on the warm Styrofoam surface. “Go on.”
“Well, you know that we can’t intercept the feed coming from Clarke to Earth, and as the feed from Mars is going through Clarke, we have no hope. They’ve put some kind of encryption on the transmission that I can’t crack, and since our night of hacking,” she whispered the word, though the room was empty aside from themselves, “they’ve clearly upped the security level on everything.”
Martín nodded, they’d been over this a thousand times. What they really needed was to capture a feed that NASA then withheld from the public; that would be their proof that NASA was screening what the other agencies saw. Unfortunately, during their night’s investigations, all of the live data they had recorded had subsequently been aired uncensored. They had been unable to prove a thing.
“OK, so we cannot get a direct feed that way.” She had a smile on her face as she looked at him. “But can you think of one reason why the Mars mission landed where it did?”
He thought for a second before replying. “It’s an interesting geological site?” he said.
“Another reason.”
“It’s got a temperate climate close to the equator?”
She punched him in the ribs. “One more try!”
He thought for a while longer before it dawned on him. “Beagle 4.”
“Exactly. Our lovely little rover proved the existence of liquid and frozen water, in abundance, near the impact crater. It’s essential not only for the crew’s survival, but also for fuel for taking off from Mars in four months.”
“Where is Beagle now?” he asked, suddenly alert.
“Luckily, its current mission plan has it running extended sampling of the Martian soil quite close to the Crater; it’s still only a little over thirteen kilometres from the lander site. I’ve done some calculations; at full speed we can have it within three kilometres of the lander in four days. We will be able to spy on the Mars mission, and send everything back to ESA headquarters directly, via our own encryption.”
He looked over at Jacqueline and grinned. “You’re great!” he exclaimed.
“Calm down,” she said trying to hide her blushes. “We still need to get it there. Larue needs to sign this off, and then it needs building in to the Beagle routes.”
“Put the request forms in for re-routing Beagle, and I’ll make sure they get approval. From there, we just have to hope it gets done sooner rather than later.” He got up quickly, throwing his half-finished coffee into the bin and kissing her on the forehead.
As he pulled away from her she caught his cheek with her hand and pulled him closer again, reaching up with her mouth at the same time. Their lips met and Martín’s resistance ebbed away as she held him more closely. After several seconds he pushed her away and looked her in the eyes. Her bright-red lips were swollen with passion and she had a playful look in her eyes.
He sat down next to her and put his arm round her waist. Drawing her body against his, he kissed her again, more passionately.
Mars could wait, for a little while at least.
Chapter 25
There was more to the Mars Landing Pod than first met the eye. It had been motionless on the surface of Mars for over three hours, and the dust had finally settled in the thin air, when the top half began to move upwards.
Looking like two soup bowls placed one on top of the other, the thirty-foot wide MLP had caught the imagination of the public on Earth as the closest thing yet to a Flying Saucer. They had quickly overlooked the fact that it could not possibly fly; floating down to the ground suspended by parachutes was the best it could do. They had also overlooked the fact that it would only look like a flying saucer for a short time once on Mars.
As the top half of the MLP began to separate from the bottom, which remained firmly on the ground, a thin rubber-like membrane extended in the increasing gap in-between. The top continued to lift until the MLP stood fourteen feet high. The flat rubber walls shook for several minutes, and then stopped as they became taught.
Deployment of the MLP had been completed.
Inside, Captain Montreaux wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I don’t care what the mission planners say; even at a third of Earth gravity it’s still damn heavy!”
“I didn’t think the support on this side would click for a moment,” Jane laughed. She was standing next to the newly extended rubber wall of the MLP. In the gap between the bottom and top halves they had placed a series of titanium supports, about an inch thick, each slotted neatly into two small holes at the top and bottom. “I haven’t had this much fun since I last went camping!”
“I agree, it is a bit like a hugely expensive and advanced camper van, isn’t it?” Montreaux laughed.
“I think you two should see this,” Danny Marchenko said quietly from the other side of the MLP.
Fully deployed, the vastness of the MLP was striking. It was larger than the average one bedroom apartment, at thirty-feet in diameter and with ten feet of internal height. It was difficult to believe that they were on Mars.
They looked over to Danny, who had his head pressed against a transparent segment of the rubber wall. The six windows had been placed at regular twelve feet intervals along the MLP’s circumference, and they each went to the closest one.
Outside lay the cool grey dawn of a Martian sol. A slight orange hue from the soil was the only sign that they were on the Red Planet and not in Arizona, USA. On the horizon, light wispy clouds of dust drifted gently from left to right, the tail end of the storm they had been waiting out.
The fantastic reality of their situation hit them simultaneously, affecting them all differently. For his part, while the Russian and the scientist celebrated behind him, Captain Yves Montreaux could not help himself from shedding a silent tear. Despite his excitement, the fulfilment of a life-long dream of visiting Mars, the only thought in his head was of Su Ning, and the secret she had taken with her.