The Veil by William Bowden Page A

of the controllers in huddled groups talking over the events of the past twenty-four hours. As well as telemetry data from the Afrika, the big board shows rolling news channels. The world had been told everything and telescopes had peered outward to confirm it.
    Of course, they would have seen at some point, and the discovery would have been shocking, but the lack of facts would have provided the means to control the situation; there is a big difference between speculation and absolute knowledge. But the world had been hit with everything in one go. The result had been instant culture shock on a massive scale, far greater than could be managed. Fear and panic had already led to a breakdown in social order in some parts of the globe, and it was spreading rapidly.
    Special Agent Landelle busies herself with the Afrika’s habitat feed—Lucy woke Robert up an hour ago, but they’ve received no response to Garr’s message, so Landelle is checking up on him. Having already skipped to the end of what has downloaded so far, and seen Robert just starting to watch the message, she’s now casually reviewing what went before. He is in the sleep area washroom.
    “ We have discussed this. If you want to watch then you have to show yourself. That’s the deal. ”
    Landelle wonders whether in fact they should have told him about Lucy’s true nature.
    “ Awkward ,” she sings to herself.
    Chief Justice Garr appears at Landelle’s side, her manner rushed, her face ashen. A similarly disturbed Cardinal Ansoni is with her.
    “Deborah. It was Blake. He broke the story.”
    “ What? How do you know that?”
    “Because he is here.”
    Senator Blake had not been at mission control for months. Neither had Chief Justice Garr for that matter. There had been nothing to see that could not be reported under heavy encryption, and their efforts were best spent in Washington.
    “So are you and Joseph, Alka. Maybe he needs a place to hide as well.”
    “He isn’t alone—”
    Senator Blake swaggers in, a posse of armed marines following behind. Joseph Ansoni wastes no time in turning on him.
    “Have you any idea what you have done, Senator?”
    “Put an end to this insanity,” Blake says. “The world has the right to know.”
    “You’ve plunged the world into an abyss . We could have managed this!”
    “You are delusional, Cardinal. You can’t manage—”
    “I think we have a problem!” mission controller Montroy calls out.
    All turn to the mission display screens. The live feeds have vanished.
    “We’ve lost all telemetry.” Montroy says.
    Joseph breaks away from his confrontation with Blake, utterly mesmerized by the blank screens.
    “It’s starting,” he says quietly.
    * * *
    The Afrika’s systems are still rebooting as Robert makes his way from the carousel to the communication bay, with only emergency lighting to guide him. By the time he gets there the primary lighting is back on and the consoles are up and running. He hauls himself in.
    “Do we know what happened yet?”
    “We temporarily lost all mains power,” Lucy says.
    “Have we been hit?”
    “No. It is a systems failure, but I cannot pinpoint where.”
    Robert buckles himself in before the central communications console.
    “Okay Lucy, what am I looking at?”
    “A frequency spectrum of what the high gain antenna is receiving.”
    A distribution of vertical lines along a horizontal frequency axis shows the breakdown of radio waves the Afrika is picking up.
    “The usual background. Some chatter from the probes on Mars and that spike is Jupiter. So we know it is functioning correctly.”
    “And?”
    “We would also expect to pick up chatter from Earth. Radio in particular. But there is nothing.”
    This has Robert’s attention, a deepening sense of concern creeping up on him.
    “That’s not all,” Lucy says. “Those Mars probes and satellites that I am in contact with also report that they have lost contact with Earth.”
    “Earth is still there,