He squinted at his own watch. “It’s two a.m.!”
“Only in Beijing. Come on… you need to be sitting next to me when I call the kids, or they’ll just spend the whole hour asking me what you’re doing.”
When they’d eaten and made themselves presentable, they sat down in front of the computer and powered it up. It booted without any problem, but when Aisha opened Skype, it told her that she had no connection to the internet.
“Maybe we’re out of view of the dish,” Gianni suggested.
“I thought they had us covered around the clock.” There were ground stations in Mongolia, Nigeria, and Honduras, and no one in the training camp or on the base had mentioned a particular time window for contacting Earth.
Gianni frowned. “Did you hear that?” The gentle thump had sounded like the air lock’s inner doors closing.
They walked out into the common room. Martin had just returned from outside; he was still suited, and holding his helmet.
“We’re having communications problems,” he said.
“Oh.” Aisha hesitated. “Is it going to be easy to fix?” Forget about her disappointed students; Martin and his colleagues were stuck here for another four months, and if they didn’t have the right replacement parts on hand, the link could remain broken until the new crew arrived.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “There’s nothing wrong at our end.”
“Okay.” Aisha wasn’t sure why his tone suggested that this was bad news. “So when we switch over to a different dish…?”
Martin said, “We should have been through one handover already.”
“So the problem’s at mission control?” Gianni suggested.
“No.” Martin sounded harried. “We should be getting carrier from the dishes themselves, whatever’s happening at Dongfeng.”
Aisha was bewildered now. “How can there be two separate problems at two different dishes, halfway around the world?”
Martin shook his head. “I have no idea.”
The other members of the crew joined them one by one, either woken by the conversation or alerted by their own devices to the broken link. Yong talked over the technical issues with Martin, then went out to perform some supplementary tests. Aisha gathered that Martin had successfully established contact with a portable, self-contained transceiver that mimicked the protocols they would normally be following with a ground station. Medii’s own antenna required no active measures to keep it aligned; the Earth was essentially a fixed target, with all the careful tracking delegated to the other end. But Yong had a theory about some obscure defect that might still blind them to a distant transmitter without stopping them connecting to the proxy.
Gianni tried to make light of it all. “At home we just flick our modems on and off, but here you need to check in case we’ve jumped into another dimension where the dinosaurs stayed in charge down on Earth.”
Only Zhilin laughed, but then, he’d once flown commercial airliners. He had to be accustomed to setting his passengers’ minds at ease—no matter what was going on inside his own head.
Yong returned. “It’s not us,” he declared. “The problem’s back home.”
Jingyi and Martin gazed down at the dining room table, but Gianni couldn’t tolerate silence. “So maybe the Americans hacked all the Chinese ground stations? In some kind of… preemptive cyberattack?” He stopped short of spelling out the reason, but the recent tensions had revolved around rumors of weapons in orbit.
Aisha said, “I didn’t think things had got that serious.”
Yong turned to the couple. “You had some sightseeing scheduled, and I’m already suited up. The next dish won’t be in view for five hours, and there’s nothing we can do just by sitting here worrying.”
Aisha and Gianni got into their suits and the three of them cycled through the air lock together. Aisha did her best to surrender to the spectacle and concentrate on perfecting her regolith gait. Never mind that the ground around them looked like it had been melted in a nuclear blast, and the claustrophobic confines of her suit made her think of fallout protection gear.
Yong was in the middle of explaining a theory that the farside had fewer maria than the nearside because a collision with a second, much smaller satellite had thickened the Moon’s crust there, when Aisha noticed a high-pitched, metronomic beep.
“Does anyone else hear that?” she asked. She was afraid it was some kind of alarm, though she’d been told that even a malfunctioning suit would always manage to give a polite, informative message in the occupant’s preferred language.
“Sorry, that’s the beacon from the skyhook.” Yong did something and the sound went away. “I listen in to it sometimes, just to reassure myself that it’s still up there.”
“How could it not be?” Gianni wondered.
“A micrometeor could cut it in two.”
“So what would a micrometeor do to us?”
“Don’t worry, we’re much smaller targets.”
By the time they were back inside, the wait was almost over. Martin sat hunched over the console in the common room, gazing at the screen. Aisha tried to prepare herself not to take another dose of dead air too hard; there might be an entirely innocuous reason for it that hadn’t occurred to any of them.
“Nothing,” Martin announced. “They’re all down.”
Gianni said, “Can you try tuning in to one of the NASA dishes?”
“They won’t be pointed at us.”
“What about TV broadcasts?”
Martin grimaced impatiently. “The only antenna sensitive enough to pick up that shit is on the farside, precisely so it doesn’t have to listen to it.”
Gianni nodded, chastened. “Okay. So what’s the upshot? We should just relax and hope they get things working again soon?”
“Sure,” Zhilin replied. “No internet for a couple of days. That never hurt anyone, did it?”
As the silence stretched on, Aisha found herself equally committed to two ways of viewing the situation. On the one hand, for her and Gianni the inability to communicate with Earth was just a mild inconvenience—and in the short term, at least, that was probably also true for the base’s longer-term residents. And assuming that the problem with China’s network of ground stations wasn’t being treated as a state secret, no one’s relatives would have reason to be worried about the lack of contact. Her father would still be anxious, but at least he’d know why he hadn’t been able to talk with her.
On the other hand: short of hostilities, cyber or otherwise, what could have happened at three separate sites that was taking so long to repair? And if Beijing and Washington were merely sulking with each other, that shouldn’t have stopped the ground stations in Spain or Australia showing enough goodwill to step in and make contact with Medii, just to let them know what was going on.
But even with Gianni, Aisha stuck to version one, and shut down any pessimistic speculations. “We won’t need clearance from Earth to take off and head home,” she reminded him. “It’s not like it’s so crowded out here that we need a flight plan approved by air traffic control.” Zhilin would probably prefer to get a weather report before he took them all the way to Dongfeng, but in principle, they could still make the journey even if Earth’s whole population had ascended in the Rapture, and the last soul to depart had turned off the lights.
Aisha woke to the sound of Gianni repeating her name. “Something’s happening!” he whispered. “They’ve been sitting in the common room, arguing, and now some of them have gone outside.”
“Arguing about what?” Aisha wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but Gianni seemed too agitated to be told to stop worrying and go back to sleep.
“I don’t know, they were speaking Chinese.”