“Sir, we have the images from the orbiter,” Sasaki said, drawing back Nichols’s attention.
In spite of innumerable coffees, Jan was struggling to stay awake. With the different time zone and the isolation of the control room, he had completely lost sense of time. He didn’t even know how long had passed since the last time he had eaten. For sure, he wasn’t hungry now. His stomach was closed by his tension, and the sudden agitation of the staff caused him a painful cramp. He pushed away the cup with the hot beverage and sipped some water from a bottle.
The screen turned black. The mission director looked daggers at the deputy flight engineer, who didn’t get perturbed.
“I’m sorry, Sir, unfortunately the sun has already set in that area. You can’t see a thing.” He didn’t really look sorry; actually he didn’t betray any particular emotion. He didn’t even look tired.
Nichols let a growl escape.
“And what do we do now?” Jan asked, worried.
“We can’t do anything.” The mission director was shaking his head, showing his disappointment. “The good thing is that, including both rover and suit, Anna still has many hours of air left. We can only wait for the dawn and hope to see something. Or that she gets in touch.”
Jan’s stomach contracted again. Continuing to wait was a nerve-wracking prospect. He would’ve liked to shout, given that he still had the strength.
“Wait a moment …” Sasaki tilted his head to one side, staring at the screen. “Do you see it too?” Moving a hand in the air, he delineated a square on the picture and centred it. A tiny bright spot within it shifted as well.
“What the …?” Nichols murmured, but then stopped.
Sasaki joined two fingers and as he separated them the square enlarged, occupying the entire height of the screen. And the tiny bright spot expanded in a diffused glow, with lighter and darker zones.
“Show me the matching topography,” the mission director ordered, but couldn’t complete the sentence when a map appeared superimposed. The bright area was precisely in the middle of the canyon. “Well, I’ll be damned … that’s artificial illumination.”
“Holy shit.” Gray’s voice emerged from the general chatter, shutting up everybody again. “It’ll turn out that those from the Hera are still alive.”
“It’s impossible!” Nichols thundered.
“But it’s the only explanation occurring to me,” Sasaki commented. A drop of sweat trickled down his temple. So, in the end, even he had emotions. Jan couldn’t hold back a half laugh.
“We have plenty of images from that area,” the mission director insisted. “How can that have escaped us?”
“Because they are diurnal footage, Sir.” The Japanese wasn’t frightened by that authoritarian tone. “Being able to distinguish something so small in the bottom of a canyon under the sunlight is like distinguishing a single drop in the sea. All the more so as we weren’t looking for it at all.” He stopped briefly and shot a reproaching glance toward Gray’s workspace, where he was now busy in an intense and noisy discussion with another colleague. “But in the dark, it’s a quite different matter. Usually we don’t do night filming of Mars.” He took another pause before clarifying the concept. “Because there is nothing to see.”
“That’s a good one,” Jan exclaimed, giggling. “You wanted to colonise Mars and, instead, it turns out that you’ve already done that for thirty years!”
Nichols didn’t appear to appreciate his witty remark. He was about to say something.
“Sir.” Gray stopped him, drawing his superior’s attention onto him. Now, he looked just a little more nervous than usual. He had even abandoned his sandwich halfway through, which wasn’t like him, given that he had spent the day fully relaxed, drinking and eating while working. “I’ve just being informed about a problem at Station Alpha.”
“What the hell is up now?”
The man beside Gray intervened. “Qabbani skipped the report at twenty zero zero.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Sir. It’s the first time something like this has happened, and therefore we got worried.” He took the control of the screen, and a room with various equipment and a few seats appeared on it, an empty one. “These images are coming in, in real time, so they are about sixteen minutes old. If you rewind the recording, the room remains empty until the previous transmission, the one at eight a.m. Then we lose track of Qabbani, after he exits the room.”
“Access the real-time footage from the other environments of the station and play the recordings,” Nichols ordered.
“That’s exactly the problem,” Gray said. “We can’t access the main server. We can only see the communications room and the greenhouse, which are also connected to the emergency system, also controlling the life support. As for the rest, we are blind and deaf. I can only tell you that Qabbani and Green haven’t been in one of those places or in the rover in the latest twelve hours.”
“Aren’t we able to find out what they are doing in any way?”
The other technician took the floor. “Since we could rely only on the life support sensors, we tried to locate them based on carbon dioxide’s peaks in each room.” He reached out to access Gray’s workspace again; his colleague moved out of the way to let him. A floor map of the building appeared on the screen. Some areas were blue-coloured, with different shades. “Here’s where we have detected the peaks in the hour after Qabbani’s last communication. It’s difficult to define their movements exactly, because the anomalies in the chemical composition of air depend on the kind of activity performed, for instance, if you speak or walk or do some work, you’ll use more oxygen than that of someone who is still, seated. Do you follow?”
Nichols nodded.
“Moreover, the peaks persist even thirty seconds before the life support cancels them, therefore I cannot say who was in these environments and for how long. I can just suppose that at a certain point both were here.” The bright spot with the darker blue shade occupied a small area in the room with the label ‘Laboratory’. “Because this is where we’ve detected the highest peaks.”
“And where do you detect them now?”
“We don’t detect any, Sir.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Any anomaly disappeared over eleven hours ago.”
“There must be a problem with the sensors. They can’t be evaporated.”
“That’s what I’ve thought as well, Sir. So I’ve tried to alter on purpose the gas concentrations in an area where we have never detected anomalies, to see whether the sensors would report these changes. And they did it punctually after sixteen minutes, so the sensors are working to perfection.”
“I guess Bradley’s analysis is correct,” Gray confirmed, laconic; a moment earlier, he had been very busy messing about with his touch-screen.
“Where the hell have they gone? They haven’t taken the rover!”
“I don’t know, Sir,” Bradley replied. “I’m just telling you what I see, or better I don’t see.”
“Are you telling me they exited Station Alpha over eleven hours ago? They wouldn’t have enough air in their suits!”
“No, Sir, I’m telling you that, if they are still in there, they haven’t been breathing for at least eleven hours.”
###
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