Over seventy years later, it was unlikely that much remained of the ill-fated mission.
“OK, no problem, I’ll keep my eyes open for it,” she replied.
The Russian flipped the lid of a large metal crate and peered inside it. “Besides, we don’t have to walk there.” He pulled a wheel, forty centimetres in diameter, out of the crate and rolled it towards her, its tread leaving a shallow imprint in the ochre soil. “We can go there in style!”
It took two entire days to assemble the Clarke’s manned buggy, affectionately nicknamed ‘Herbie’ by the media; because of the curved enclosure where the two occupants would sit, it bore more than a slight resemblance to an old VW Beetle car. Its power came from two electric engines, each taking charge of a row of three wheels on either side. Fuel came in the form of eight battery cells, which would be charged using the MLP’s generator. In turn, the MLP got its energy from solar sheets, which had been unrolled from the leading edges of the MLP and fastened to the ground. From above, they made the MLP look like some bizarre kind of flower.
In case of emergencies, the MLP had been loaded with three more sheets that could be placed anywhere within a hundred metres. Additionally, Jane was to assemble three wind turbines, especially suited to the thinner atmosphere of Mars, as a secondary source of electricity.
It took another three days to fully charge Herbie, during which time the crew busied themselves collecting the rest of the crates from the surrounding area and setting up four signal boosting beacons around the MLP.
After a short test run, Danny triumphantly declared that Herbie was at last ready to drive.
“He’s a better ride than most of the cars I’ve been in on Earth!” he exclaimed.
“You mean she,” Montreaux corrected him.
Danny looked at him sideways from the driving seat and shook his head. “No, it is definitely a he. Herbie is a boy’s name.”
“All cars are female, Danny, even the ones with boy’s names,” Jane’s voice came over the radio from inside the MLP. “It’s just the way it is.”
He thought about this for a moment and then laughed. “You are right; in Russian mashina is feminine too. I guess it makes sense,” he mused, “because –”
“Don’t even go there,” she warned him.
Montreaux laughed out loud as he loaded four spare compressed air packs onto Herbie’s back. Herbie wasn’t an airtight craft, the thin cabin was designed only to save the occupants from the worst of the Martian weather, and so they would have to use their suits’ air supplies throughout their drives. With just over two hours per pack, they would have a maximum six hours round-trip to where the silvery crates lay on the horizon. They would need to keep a constant eye on the time; it would certainly take more than one trip.
“OK,” he said securing the air packs and turning towards the MLP. “Time for dinner. We’ll set off first thing tomorrow.”
Chapter 28
Larue put the phone down and smiled. It was his first for some time.
Sitting back in his chair, he surveyed the view from his office. His smile grew as he took in the sunshine, Paris’s first for weeks. The windows of the ESA headquarters let the day’s warmth seep in gently, leaving the bitter wind and traffic noise outside. As a young man, he had worked for a short time in the Tour First, Paris’s tallest skyscraper, and had been impressed at how the sounds of the city were silenced when looking down from the top floors. On his arrival at ESA headquarters years later, it had amazed him even more that the triple glazed windows of his third storey street-facing office were just as effective. Occasionally a siren or beeping horn would make its way through the panes and remind him he was working in a sprawling metropolis of over fifteen million inhabitants.
He opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a small wooden box. Opening the lid, he perused the contents for a few moments, inhaling the deep sweet smell of the fine Cuban tobacco before closing it and putting it back in the drawer with a shake of his head. It was a good day, but not yet that good. He brought his gaze back to the blue sky outside, and closed his eyes.
A knock at the door brought him back from his reverie, and he sat up with a start. Looking at his watch, he sighed to himself and tapped the spacebar on his keyboard.
“Come in,” he said.
Martín entered the room. He had a huge smile on his face.
“News travels fast, I see,” Larue said casually.
Martín frowned in response. “Monsieur?”
“I take it from your smile that you have heard the good news?”
“No, I have not heard,” Martín said, confused.
Larue eyed him cautiously. “So why the big smile, Martin?”
Martín felt himself blushing; the past week with Jacqueline had been incredible, giving him plenty to grin about. Not that any of it was Larue’s business. He cleared his face before continuing. “Monsieur, a while ago you asked me to keep my eyes open regarding the Clarke?”
“Yes?” he leaned forward in his chair expectantly. He had almost stopped hoping, after so many weeks without any news. “Have you found something?”
“Not yet. But soon, we probably will. For some time now we have been unable to see any direct feeds from the mission. Whilst on board the Clarke, this was frustrating, but now that they have landed on the planet, it is even more so.” He paused, still unsure of what he was about to say. Telling Larue about the time delay wasn’t easy, but something he felt he could do now that they had a chance to prove it using the feed from Beagle. Nonetheless, he was still slightly nervous that he would be in trouble for hiding this information from his boss for nearly two months.
“I made a discovery shortly after our feeds were stopped, with the help of Jacqueline from Networks.”
“Jacqueline Thomas?” Larue asked, his eyebrow raised.
“Yes, Monsieur. She helped me to analyse the information being sent to us by NASA. There is a lot of information, I needed some help interpreting it, and her programming skills are far higher than my own.”
Larue smiled. “I did not ask you to justify yourself, Martin, I was merely surprised you would go so far to get help, we have very skilled programmers in this department, too.”
Martín shifted his feet uneasily. “She was available at the time, Monsieur.”
Larue looked up at the young man. He was standing in front of his desk like a schoolboy in front of a headmaster. “Sit down, Martin, make yourself more comfortable,” he gestured to a chair opposite him. Martín sat down thankfully and put his hands on his knees. “So, you were saying that you had analysed the feeds from NASA at the time that they stopped relaying direct to ESA. What happened next?”
“We noticed something very strange. So far, we think that we are the first to have noticed it, it certainly hasn’t been raised publicly by either the Chinese, Japanese or Russian agencies. A little over a day before Lieutenant Shi Su Ning, the Chinese astronaut, was found dead in her sleeping quarters, we believe that NASA placed a delay of one hour and fifteen minutes in the feed between themselves and ESA. They also placed the same delay in their feed to the other agencies.”
Larue stared at him in silence for several seconds. “Comment?” he said, eventually.
“NASA have implemented a time delay in the data feed from Mars which allows them to screen everything for over one hour before it is released to any of the other agencies. The other agencies are not aware of this, and as far as we can tell they believe that they are still watching direct feeds.” He paused and looked at Larue. Larue’s smile had disappeared; his hands were laid flat on his desk, fingers splayed. “To help achieve this, they have also added seventy-five minutes to all of the Clarke’s on board clocks and timers. This means that the Clarke’s time in the delayed feed on Earth looks correct.”