Dr Patterson looked at Gail intently, waiting for a reaction. When none came, he broke the silence. “You see, Dr Turner? The Xynutians are not imaginary, they did exist and they were wiped out, in all probability by Aniquilus.”
Gail looked at the displays in disbelief. Nothing proved to her that what she was looking at hadn’t been made up in an elaborate computer simulation, but there was one absolute certainty: DEFCOMM, and anyone involved with it, was up to no good.
“And now that I’ve seen all this, all these things that you’re hiding so effectively from the entire world, what are my chances of ever being released?” she said as calmly as she could.
“I hope that what you’ve seen will make you understand how important our cause is, and that you will agree to join us,” he replied hesitantly.
It didn’t, and she certainly wasn’t going to join anyone. “And what about the astronauts on Mars? When they get back, how will you keep them quiet?” She asked the question loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear, but her only response was a heavy silence; Dr Patterson looked at his shoes briefly before looking back at the displays. She scanned the control room and her eyes met the fleeting glance of the controller who had reset the displays for them earlier.
Looking back at the video feeds, she could see Captain Marchenko through the eyes of Dr Richardson. His grin was unmoving as he gesticulated excitedly at the Xynutians. Somehow, she had to contact her husband. She had to get out and tell everyone what was really going on. Because now it wasn’t just her life at stake; although they may be millions of miles away, she now knew that she could be the astronauts’ only real chance of ever getting back to Earth alive.
Chapter 57
Captain Danny Marchenko scraped the dirt from his visor excitedly, his hand playing an exaggerated ‘hello’ as he used the rubber blade set into the seam of his glove. He swore under his breath in Russian, but the suit’s sensitive microphone still managed to distinguish between the profanity and his breathing, amplifying it over the control panel speakers of the MLP.
“Keep it clean, Captain Mar – Danny,” Captain Yves Montreaux corrected himself from his seat in their Martian home. “We don’t want Man’s immortal words from space to have to be censored, do we?”
He allowed himself a smile as the irony of his last words seeped through. He had told himself, while standing on the precipice of Hellas Basin days earlier, that he had to keep his certainty of their terrible situation to himself. As he had looked down at his excited colleague poring over the engravings – of what he now knew was referred to as the Amarna Stickman, whatever that meant – it had struck him that while he was certain he’d never set foot on Earth again, at least while they were still useful they were safe where they were.
They. How could he know who was with him, and who was against? He daren’t look in the MLP’s database, for fear of being monitored. What would Earth think if he suddenly started looking at the crew’s personal records? Of course, he had read all of their records several times, but then what he had read then was in blissful ignorance of what had since happened; would he now pick up on some obscure, terrifying detail?
It was a moot point. What would he do about it even if he found that Dr Richardson and Captain Marchenko were involved in a conspiracy, a conspiracy which had killed Lieutenant Shi Su Ning, a Chinese cosmonaut whose family probably thought she had died as a result of a system failure.
If they’re in on it, he had thought, then what difference does it really make? He wouldn’t confront them, at least not without absolute certainty, and if he believed his life to be in danger, how could he defend himself? Kill them both? And be left here alone, until I die, he thought morosely. His only option, he concluded, was to act normally. After all, it may just be his own paranoia, brought on by months in space coupled with his own self-inflicted separation from his other crew-members. What was left of them, he couldn’t help himself from adding.
Acting normally was difficult on Mars. Normally humans walked on Earth, and occasionally in space and on the Moon. Walking on Mars was anything but normal. Captain Montreaux tackled the issues he was faced with in the most logical order he could, and therefore started with the most straightforward: his separation from Dr Richardson and Captain Marchenko. Fixing that started with an impromptu meeting over dinner the night they had discovered the Jetty.
“I’ve been thinking,” he had started, “that as there are only three of us on this planet, it makes perfect sense for us to reduce elements of the formality of our methods of communication, and refer to each other using Christian names only.”
“Not exactly the best choice of words if you’re planning on that, Yves,” Dr Richardson had quipped.
But nonetheless they had taken to the idea like fish to water. She had taken to it as easily as she had adjusted to walking on Mars he had thought to himself. Captain Marchenko had grinned and extended his hand to be shaken firmly by the American.
“It’s a deal,” he said in his best Texan accent, which had taken them all by surprise. It was the first time in many days that they had laughed together, the first in nearly a month since Yves could remember laughing so hard, but as the evening had drawn to a close, he still managed to feel secluded. If anything, the laughter, their jokes, had only served to make him feel more different, as ‘Jane’ and ‘Danny’ shared private jokes and candid looks across the MLP’s dinner table.
And so it turned out that, despite it being his own idea, he had the most difficulty adjusting to it.
They naturally took to using first names, and for Jane as a scientist this was understandable. But for Danny, with all of his military and academy training, it somehow felt wrong.
He told himself he was paranoid. You don’t change months of habit and years of indoctrination in the space of a few days. Yet as he sat at the MLP’s control panels, listening to Danny’s cursing and Jane’s whoops of joy, he couldn’t help but plan his next comment, designed to spark a reaction, anything that would betray that they were in cahoots with whoever was in control of their mission. Certainly not me, he thought sarcastically as he looked at the rows of buttons, dials and touch screen displays.
“Remember people may be watching this live, Danny – we don’t want to offend anyone with profanities, do we?”
“No problem, Yves, sorry about that everybody back home, but can you see what I can see?” Danny asked, the pitch of his voice reaching prepubescent levels.
Yves leaned forward and concentrated on the display. “You need to clean your camera a little bit more.”
‘Cleaning the camera’ wasn’t technically or physically possible. It was housed within Danny’s helmet, protected from the harsh atmosphere of Mars by half an inch of transparent aluminium. Even if one of them, heaven forbid, fell down to the bottom of the gigantic crater, the camera would emerge intact. Anything that had not been relayed in real-time to the MLP’s processors would be saved to solid-state storage ready for processing at a later date.
Danny swept his glove across the protective housing, wiping clear the layer of dust that had settled during his excavation of the tunnel. “How about now?” he said.
On the display, he could make out a smooth wall of darkened stone. A bold, straight line cut the wall in half vertically from off-screen at the top to where the wall met the equally smooth floor at the bottom. The left-hand half of the wall was unmarked, but on the right, in strokes equally as bold as the vertical line and the Amarna Stickman outside was the picture of a creature, it’s long lizard-like form lying prone and its mouth open in a grin, like a komodo dragon celebrating catching its dinner.