A/N: Hey guys, sorry this took so long, school has been mental. It's gonna be a while before the next chapter. In the meantime, enjoy XD
The blip drew ever closer. John again brought up the flight path of the ship. The ship had launched from southern China, a remote area surrounded by mountains, and only a few hours ago. John brought up the co-ordinates of the launch site. They looked familiar. John brought up another window on the monitor and called up the co-ordinates of the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre. They matched almost perfectly with the launch site of the blip. John was puzzled. He followed all government space programs closely, like the American Demeter program. John didn't remember the Chinese having any launches scheduled. The Chinese were notoriously secretive about their space program, but John had ears everywhere.
John pulled a document up onto the monitor; the launch schedule that he had put together, listening to various radios. He scrolled through, looking for today's date. As he got closer, he saw the Demeter unmanned probe pre-cursor program, then the first exploratory launches, not so different from the Apollo program, all those years ago. The heavy lifters appeared, bringing the equipment and facilities to the moon. The current generation of the Demeter spacecraft appeared. These were huge, heavy beasts, designed as they were to take all the crew and necessary supplies to staff a mining operation on the moon.
John flicked to the next page, and the date of Demeter III's launch appeared on the screen, two days from now. John swiped back down, and found that the last launch was a European Space Agency resupply mission to the second International Space Station, over a week ago. John remembered following that launch, it was flawless. John had teased Alan about the launch. Alan had done a tour aboard the ISS2; he had piloted the crew capsule on the way up, and made a minor error in reaching orbit. He was a few fractions of a degree off the perfect orbit, and the crew of that mission had had to take the two day path to the station, rather than the few hour path.
The alarm once again started to blare, with an increased intensity. John felt the edges of panic creeping in. This alarm had a different sound. This was no longer the proximity alarm, this was the collision alarm. John closed the launch schedule document and flicked back to the three dimensional map of nearby space. Thunderbird 5's computer had updated the flight path of the blip. It was going to pass within 200 meters of Thunderbird 5. Given the tolerance of space flight, that was way too close for comfort.
John took a couple of steps and stood in front of the radio transmitter. He muted all the channels that were currently switched on, and tuned into the frequency that the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre usually used. Nothing. John frowned, disappointed. He had hoped to communicate with the Chinese space centre, to ask them to redirect their spacecraft away from Thunderbird 5.
John realised that if the Chinese hadn't told anyone about their launch, they would hardly want anyone listening to any radio communication between such a spacecraft and the space centre. John set the radio to scan through all the frequencies. Radio signals could be disguised, encoded even, but not hidden. When the scanner detected transmission on a frequency, it stopped, playing the frequency and waited for action from John. It was a slow process, but there was really nothing else John could do. He knew that if the blip was a manned spacecraft, the Chinese would be communicating with it. If it was unmanned, then there was nothing John could do about it.
The radio found a frequency with chatter on it. The chatter was in a European language, so John indicated to the computer to keep searching. John was struck with a worrying thought. International Rescue chose this particular altitude, longitude and latitude above earth for Thunderbird 5's orbit. The reason for this choice had been that it was as far as was reasonably possible from all other orbiting stations and satellites while being within effective communication range. It was entirely possible that the Chinese had realised this as well, and wanted to place a secret military satellite in the same orbit as Thunderbird 5. The Chinese would not know that Thunderbird 5 was right where they planned to orbit. The radio found another channel that was broadcasting. What played through the speaker was just garbled static. Angrily, John swiped the screen, and the radio kept scanning.
There were contingencies for situations such as this. Thunderbird 5 could reorient or even adjust its orbit slightly, but this was a highly problematic process. Usually, Jeff, John and Brains would communicate to make sure that the maneuverer was as precise as possible. John squeezed his eyelids shut and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. The computer started playing the next radio signal, an African language this time. John took a deep breath, placed his hands on the edge of the console. John swiped, and the computer kept searching. As John swiped, there was a brief surge of static.
Static.
The panic receded, and John's mind was crystal clear.
The static signal. Of course!
John cursed himself for not realising sooner. The radio signal used by the Chinese would be encoded. Such encoding would be designed to make any accidental discoverer of the signal ignore it. What better way than to disguise the signal as static. John tuned to the static frequency and turned the volume up high. The static pulsed and swelled, with pauses of inactivity. The pulses occurred with an almost random frequency and regularity. John listened closer, and realised that the pulses were occurring with the cadence of speech.
John flipped to the three dimensional radar. The computer had updated the Chinese spacecraft's path and, indeed, the craft was predicted to hang in orbit almost exactly where Thunderbird 5 was. The nearest intercept between the two craft was down to under 100 meters, and getting less as the Chinese craft adjusted its path to stabilise its orbit. As John watched, the Chinese craft's nearest intercept dropped to 0; a collision course with Thunderbird 5. A timer popped up onto the screen. Three minutes. John felt a bead of sweat roll down his temple, despite the cold.
John brought up another program on his monitor – software for decoding radio signals – and started to work.