“Interface confirmed.”
Suddenly a video screen fluttered, ran through a test series of colored bars, then threw up a picture of the cockpit as seen from the camera above the hatch. Vance studied the image of three figures floating in a confined space outfitted with electronic hardware and a giant wing-shaped hood over the central seat. On TV their cockpit looked like the flight deck of some alien vessel in Star Trek IX.
"We're on." Eva waved at the camera. Her image on the screen waved back.
"Okay," Vance said. "Now for the tricky part. Transmission."
Androv smiled as he drifted up again. "That's actually the easiest of all. Remember this vehicle was originally intended—supposedly—as a near-earth research platform. There're plenty of downlinks, in keeping with the need to transmit data, as well as general propaganda functions. We can use any frequency you want, even commercial broadcast channels."
"So why don't we go live worldwide? Just give everybody an inside look at the planet's first radar-evasive space platform."
"Petra has a listing of all commercial satellite channels, just to make sure she doesn't inadvertently violate one of them with a transmission. Let's pull them up and see what they are." He flipped several toggles on the wide console, then told Petra what he wanted. He'd no sooner finished speaking than the large screen that supplemented her voice was scrolling the off-limits frequencies.
"Okay," Eva said. "Let's start with the data channels belonging to world-wide newsprint organizations— Reuters, the Associated Press, all the rest—and send a copy of the protocol. It'll just appear on every green screen in the world. Then we can pick off frequencies used by television news organizations and broadcast a picture postcard from here in the cockpit."
"Sounds good." Androv turned to look at the screen. Quickly he began selecting numbers from the banned list, moving them to a new file that would be used to specify parameters for the broadcasts.
Vance watched, shifting his glance occasionally to the view from the nose camera. Below them clusters of light from central Europe's largest cities beamed up, twinkling lightly through the haze of atmosphere. He reached over and flipped the camera to infrared and sat watching the back-radiation of the North African deserts, now blots of deep red on the southern horizon; then back to visible again, noticing two parallel ribbons of light that signified habitations along the length of the Nile. The world, he was thinking, really is a Global Village. She was right. There's no longer any place you can hide from the truth.