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.
She would need to tell Montreaux what she knew efficiently. The last thing they needed was a long protracted debate in the middle of the night, which would be a fool-proof way of attracting the unwanted attention of the lone nanostation patrolling the Lounge.
Nanostations. She hated nanostations. They had at first intrigued her, but after a while had brought back memories of her mother’s stories of old China, where freedom of speech did not exist and even the birth rate had been rigorously controlled. Even out here, nearly forty million miles away from Earth, they had no privacy. Especially out here, she almost said out loud.
Nightmode had become her only way to be alone. She knew there was always one nanostation active in the Lounge, but it was also the biggest room, and she could easily switch windows if she felt like it. Her hearing had become finely tuned to the brief hisses of the nanostation motors, imperceptible during the day, but just audible at night within a foot or two. As soon as she heard it, she would switch window, and after a couple of weeks either the operators had grown bored of the game of cat and mouse, or they had learnt to stay at least a few feet away from her.
She had since spent her evenings undisturbed, giving her time to think about Earth, Beijing, and what waited for her on her return. Sometimes she found herself imagining Mars, and what it would be like to set foot on the Red Planet, but mostly she dreamt of home as she stared out into the twinkling infinity of space.
It had been during one of her Nightmode sessions that she had noticed the change.
She had grown accustomed to checking her watch every now and then, to ensure that she got enough sleep. It was fine staring out to space all night, but she would rather keep it a secret. If she was always yawning at the breakfast table, the others would have quickly started asking questions.
Seeing the Martian time, she had tried to calculate what time it was in Beijing. It was a game she played every now and then, helping not only fight off monotony but also keep her mind sharp.
They had been on Sols rather than days for over a year. Since midday on July 4th, 2044, she remembered. It had been the last time they had counted in days.
She knew that every sol was thirty-nine minutes longer than a day. She also knew that the previous day had been the 29th of September, after a video message from her mother. This meant that they had been on Sols for four hundred and fifty two Earth days.
Gaining thirty-nine minutes every day meant that at midday on the 29th September the Clarke would have been twelve days, five hours and fifty-nine seconds ahead of Earth. This meant that it would have been 5:59pm on the Clarke. She had smiled as she completed the equation in her head, then scratched her chin and looked out of the window, trying to focus the numbers in her mind.
Checking her watch, it was almost exactly 1am, Clarke time. So seven hours more or less since midday Earth time, she surmised. Every Martian hour was approximately one minute and thirty-seven seconds longer than every Earth hour. This meant that the seven hours on Clarke equated to six hours, forty-eight minutes and thirty seven seconds. More or less.
She grinned. She now knew it was just past 6:48pm, Houston time. With fourteen hours between Houston and Beijing, that meant it was just before 9am back home. Her mother would already be up, and would probably be reading the papers with her second cup of tea of the day.
Su Ning had gone back to her room and fished into her kit bag, pulling out a small, jewel-encrusted time-piece she had been given, “so you will always know when I am praying for you,” her mother had said.
Since moving to Martian time there had been a strict mission rule of no Earth-time devices, so she had smuggled the gift onto the Clarke, and it only came out at night when the nanostations were kept outside their sleeping quarters. Turning it over in her hands, she had looked at the time and been taken aback.
It wasn’t nearly nine in the morning in Beijing: it was barely seven-thirty.
She tapped the watch’s display and stared at the hands faultlessly ticking away. In the day or two since she had last checked it, could it possibly have come so unstuck? She shook her head, but nonetheless watched it for several minutes to be sure.
Her calculations must be the problem. You only needed to add a few seconds to each day and you could easily be out by an hour after a year or so. But then she had dismissed the thought: she was always accurate. It was a game she often played, and she hadn’t been wrong yet, let alone by an hour and a quarter!
Despite this she still double-checked, and after going through the maths several more times, was left with only thought: someone had changed the time on board the Clarke.
Why would they do that? Why would they want the time on the ship to be faster than the time being recorded on Earth? This would mean that when people in China thought that it was nine o’clock on the Clarke, it was actually past ten o’clock, which meant that what they would be watching would already be over an hour old.
The conclusion had hit her in the face so hard she struggled to breath for a few seconds. So that what people saw could be controlled.
As she realised this, more thoughts started to come to her; small throwaway comments that she had read and listened to in her personal messages on her computer screen. Her mother had written to her once, and the letter had seemed disjointed, as if the sentences she was reading were not meant to be read together, and were missing something. One phrase in that particular letter had seemed completely random.
She had quickly found the letter, placing the watch carefully in the bottom of her kit bag. Towards the end, sandwiched between ‘It’s not raining as much this year’ and ‘Good luck’ was a chilling sentence. ‘Just like when I was a girl’.
It had to be deliberate. Her mother had been trying to tell her something, like a code.
She had gone back to the dark space of the Lounge to clear her head and think hard about the phrase. ‘Just like when I was a girl’, and then ‘Good luck’. Her mother had been a girl in the twentieth century, before China had given its citizens freedom of speech.
It did not take Su Ning long to work out what her mother had tried to tell her: not only was the feed from the Clarke to Earth being censored, so too were messages from Earth to the Clarke.
She had been mulling over this when Captain Montreaux had floated through the door.
Su Ning had not been able to tell him then. For a start it had just been a theory. But her mind had been racing and despite herself, she had failed to hide her emotions. It was unlike her. Unlike the controlled, precise Su Ning that the Captain had become accustomed to.
The following day, when their eyes had met in the Lounge, his facial expression had proven to her that, in some way, he was suspicious of something being wrong; he wanted to know more.