UMO: A Chilling Tale of First Contact

by K Patrick Donoghue

  “CDR to CC: All X-ray and gamma-ray EQUIP disabled. Early read of UMO attack suggests action triggered by XRS. Full analysis of UMO action and DA to follow. CDR out.”

  The message had obviously been sent before Avery read Morgan’s command to shut off the equipment. Avery’s final message read: “CDR to CC: Received CC directive to disable all X-ray and gamma-ray EQUIP. Per earlier CDR message, EQUIP already disabled. DA and UMO action report still to follow. CDR out.”

  “Where is the son of a bitch?” Ferris asked.

  “I relieved him of duty as soon as I saw his message to Avery. I told him to wait for me in his office,” Pritchard said.

  “What was he thinking?”

  “You know him as well as I do, General. He’s always been one of those guys who acts on instincts,” Pritchard said with a shrug. “But it looks like he was right, again.”

  “I don’t give a crap,” Ferris said, pounding the table. “He broke the chain of command, violated a direct order.”

  “And he’s been relieved because of it,” Pritchard said, “but, in his defense, he was just thinking of the crew. It’s his job, you know.”

  “The crew?” Ferris scowled. “The crew’s job is to see the hill and take it, Pritchard. Now that they’ve seen it, it’s time for them to take it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means it’s time to drop the migration crap. These things are lethal killing machines. We shouldn’t waste another second trying to find old debris. We ought to lure the little bastards out and see if we can kill them with the EMPs.”

  “And how do you propose we do that?” Pritchard asked.

  “Send Andromeda in. Turn its XGEN on and wait for them to attack. Then blast the hell out of them with Perseus. Send in Cetus Prime afterward to see if the EMPs did the job.”

  “With all due respect, General, the EMPs are untested, unproven. They may have no effect on the UMOs,” Pritchard said.

  “Exactly. It’s time to find out if they work,” Ferris said.

  “And what about Cetus Prime? The crew? What happens to them if the EMPs don’t work?” Pritchard asked.

  With a wave of his hand, Ferris scoffed. “Tell them to keep their spectrometers off. The UMOs will go after Perseus, not Cetus Prime.”

  “You don’t know that,” Pritchard said, rising from his chair. “I’m sorry, General. It’s too risky. I’m not advocating a change of mission.”

  “Pritchard, I don’t give a flying fuck what you think,” Ferris said, reclining in his chair. “Besides, I’ve already teed it up with the Joint Chiefs and SECDEF. They’re discussing it with the White House now.”

  “You’ve done what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Now, hold on a minute.”

  “It’s too late, Pritchard. Ball’s in motion.”

  “Not if I can do anything about it,” Pritchard said, heading for the door.

  “Be my guest,” Ferris said.

  Pritchard’s phone call with NASA’s chief administrator, Dr. Karen Wells, was as short as it was frustrating. Wells had already capitulated. The political appointee explained the secretary of defense had convinced the president of the change in mission before she was even consulted.

  When Pritchard pressed her to go back to the White House, she demurred. “It’s a done deal, Dennis. There’s nothing I can do.”

  She explained that SECDEF had presented an ironclad case. If they risked sending the crew into Mars’ orbit without the spectrometers, the chance of them finding and collecting the older probes’ debris was close to zero. If they went in with the spectrometers on, there was a high probability the UMOs would attack again, this time taking out Cetus Prime, likely before they collected any intelligence of value. If the crew was told to turn the ship around and come home, the mission would go down as a colossal waste of time and resources and the UMOs would still pose a grave threat to national security and future space exploration.

  The capper to the secretary’s argument? The EMPs could not be tested in Earth’s orbit. Doing so would violate nuclear treaties with Russia, and depending on which side of the bed their leadership woke up on, might incite a nuclear attack. At a minimum, it would create an international incident that would be hard for the White House to quell.

  To the contrary, Cetus Prime was about to enter Mars’ orbit. Given the earlier attack on the ship, UMOs were obviously in the vicinity. Further, the crew had the means to stimulate a swarm, now that there were two data points demonstrating the UMOs’ sensitivity to X-rays. And Cetus Prime had the best weapon available — the only weapon available — to defeat the UMOs aboard Perseus. If there was ever to be an opportunity to test the EMPs, it was now.

  When Wells finished relaying SECDEF’s sales pitch, Pritchard asked, “But what if it goes wrong?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “What if the EMPs don’t work?”

  “Then the Pentagon will know they need to come up with a different weapon,” she said.

  “I’m not talking about the damn weapon. I’m talking about the crew!” Pritchard said.

  Pritchard found Paul Morgan sitting in his office, staring at his picture-button of the Cetus Prime crew. Pritchard closed the office door, plopped down in a guest chair and uttered a deep sigh. Morgan kept his eyes on the photo and asked, “Am I fired?”

  “What?”

  “Have you come to fire me?”

  Pritchard shook his head. “No. The opposite. I’ve come to apologize. You were right, and you won’t believe what Ferris has done.”

  The mission director ran through his discussions with Ferris and Wells. When he finished, he said, “I have a very, very bad feeling about this, Paul, and I don’t think we can stop it from happening.”

  “Probably not,” Morgan said. “But we can try.”

  “Huh?”

  Morgan rose from his chair and said, “Come with me. I’ve got an idea.”

  The two men walked through the corridors of Goddard Space Flight Center until they reached the office of the TDRS project manager, Hector Jimenez. Behind closed doors, Morgan and Pritchard filled him in on the situation.

  In the middle of the conversation, Pritchard received a page from Mission Control. He stepped out of the room to call the center and returned a few minutes later. “Gotta go. Ferris is trying to pressure the CAPCOM on duty to send the new mission plan. Jesus, I hope your plan works, Paul.”

  “Me, too,” Morgan said.

  After Pritchard left, Morgan turned to Hector and asked, “So, will you do it?”

  “For anyone else, hell, no,” Hector said. “But for you? No one says no to Skywalker.”

  9: BAITING THE BEAST

  Cetus Prime

  Crew Galley

  Date: 04.29.1995

  Time: 0613 UTC

  Avery found Christine in the crew galley picking at the last remnants of a protein bar. He had contemplated waiting until after they’d slept to tell her of Goddard’s new directive, but then Morgan’s secret message had arrived, necessitating an immediate conversation.

  “Hi there,” he said, floating into a seat next to Christine.

  Without looking up, she said, “Hey.”

  He noticed tears on her face and a balled-up tissue tucked into the collar of her shirt. So much for the reemergence of the rhino tamer.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, her lips quivering. A teardrop floated off her cheek. “Flight surgeon had me examine Nick, run an EEG on him. He’s not in a coma, he’s brain dead.”

  Avery bowed his head and sighed. After a moment of silence, he whispered, “Damn.”

  “Surgeon said to take him off oxygen, suit him up and send him out the airlock,” she said, her face turning beet red. She reached for the tissue and swiped it beneath her nose.

  Though the treatment sounded cruel, it was the established protocol for disposing of a dead astronaut on a deep space mission. Avery asked, “Was the surgeon one hund
red percent positive about Nick?”

  She nodded. “Pupils unresponsive to light. No reaction to pain. No blink reflex. Flat EEG. His autonomous functions are still working, but his mind is gone.”

  “Damn,” Avery repeated.

  “I can’t do it,” she said, looking toward the crew quarter’s compartment where Nick lay strapped to a table. “Effing NASA! Effing UMOs.”

  Under the circumstances, Avery was certain Christine would react poorly to the new directive from Goddard, but delaying the discussion now was not an option.

  “I need to talk to you about something,” he said. “And you’re not going to like it.”

  He didn’t sugarcoat his one-sentence description of the change in mission. As expected, Christine was furious. “They want us to do what? Are they effing insane?”

  “They’re scared,” he said.

  “They’re scared? Join the effing party!” she growled. “Jesus, why is the solution to every problem shooting missiles at something?”

  As an Air Force pilot, Avery had done his fair share of missile shooting, and on a few of those occasions, he had wondered the same thing — and in this case, he was fully planted on Christine’s side.

  The suggestion that they lure the UMOs with Andromeda’s XGEN and then shoot one of Perseus’ EMPs at whatever showed up seemed as advisable as walking into a lion’s cage slathered in fresh animal blood and baiting the beast to attack.

  “Before you go nuclear,” Avery said, “Paul Morgan contacted me. Unofficially. Seems he’s been relieved of CAPCOM duty.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Apparently, he caught crap for telling us to shut down the spectrometers. He wasn’t authorized to do it.”

  “I don’t understand. Why?”

  “Braun didn’t change her mind because the MAG-SAT tests failed. One of them succeeded. The UMOs destroyed a satellite broadcasting X-rays. Granted, they had to jack up the intensity of the X-rays to get them to attack,” Avery said.

  “What? Why didn’t Braun say so?” Christine asked.

  “There was a debate about the test results. A decision was made to withhold the info from us until the debate was resolved,” Avery said.

  Christine rubbed her temples as she processed Avery’s explanation. He knew it was only a matter of seconds before she realized Goddard knew about the MAG-SAT test before the UMOs attacked Cetus Prime and that the attack might have been prevented had they shared the news.

  “Look, it sounds harsh, but what’s done is done. We can’t undo what’s happened, but we can change how things roll from here,” Avery said. “Morgan suggested we use the Perseus sep-fault to stall while he tries to talk them out of their plan. But we don’t have much time. Goddard wants us to launch Andromeda by 1300 UTC.”

  Christine glanced at her watch. “You’re kidding me. After everything that’s happened? Why the rush?”

  “They don’t want to risk losing contact with the UMOs that attacked us.”

  “What exactly is Goddard’s plan?” she asked.

  Avery laid it out. They were to send Andromeda into Mars’ orbit and then turn its XGEN on. Presuming the X-rays would attract the UMOs, the crew was to fire one of Perseus’ missiles at the swarm enveloping Andromeda. After the EMP exploded, the crew was to deploy CPO to survey the area for signs of UMOs, utilizing its high-frequency radiation spectrometers to effectively lure them out again. If none appeared, they would know the EMP worked. If CPO was swarmed, then either the EMP had failed or Perseus’ missile had missed its target, and they were instructed to fire a missile at CPO.

  “And then what?” Christine asked.

  “Good question,” Avery said. “We’re supposed to report back our findings and wait for further instructions.”

  “If we’re still alive, you mean,” she said.

  Avery thought of the time he had been playing Frisbee with his father in their backyard. Avery’s errant toss had disappeared into some bushes. His father reached in to retrieve it, only to bolt away from the bush, screaming, “Bees!” Not only did the bees go after his father, they also went after Avery and a neighbor watering her lawn on the other side of the bushes.

  “I hear you,” Avery said. “Morgan’s of the same mindset, too. If the first EMP doesn’t work, he thinks the UMOs will go after any and every electromagnetic signature in proximity to the explosion. There won’t be a chance to deploy CPO and try again.”

  Christine stared off toward the laboratory compartment while Avery continued to speak. “I was thinking we might be able to create a diversion to give us time to escape.”

  There was no response from Christine. She seemed zoned out. Avery waved to get her attention. “Hey, Chris. Over here.”

  “They attacked an XGEN,” she mumbled.

  “Um, yeah.”

  “None of the other probes had XGENs,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. “Look, can we get back to the diversion?”

  She turned to face Avery and grabbed his arm. “Oh, my God. I think I know why. I think I know why they’re attacking.”

  Before Avery could interject, Christine unbuckled and shot toward the lab. At the hatchway, she turned back and encouraged Avery to follow. While she floated to her instrument station, she began talking. “Before the flight surgeon’s message came in, I was watching the video of the UMO attack again. This time in slo-mo. Their behavior was more deliberate than I’d noticed at full speed.”

  She held onto the countertop with one hand to keep from floating away, while tapping on a keyboard with the other. Avery came up beside her as the video screen flickered on. A few keystrokes later, the video of the pallet during the UMO attack began to play in slow motion. “See how they bumped up against the instruments, almost nuzzling against them?”

  “I see what you mean,” Avery said, watching the lights. “They look like moths bouncing off a bug zapper.”

  “A good analogy,” she said, typing away on the keyboard. “Remember how I said I thought the X-ray spectrometer posed a threat to their food source?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think I was wrong, but we’ll know for sure in a few secs. I just need to true up the video and the spectrometer readings.” With the task accomplished, she replayed both feeds in slow motion, darting her eyes from one screen to the other. Avery did the same. On the X-ray spectrometer display screen, the strong spikes dissipated once the UMOs appeared on the pallet. Instead, the wave band narrowed into pulse-type spikes.

  “Gah! I should have noticed that,” she said, slapping the countertop. “I was too focused on the spinning behavior.”

  “Should have noticed what?” Avery asked.

  “The UMO attacks have nothing to do with food! And Dr. Braun was right!” Christine said, glancing down at her watch. “I need to send a message to her. Right now.”

  “Whoa,” Avery said, catching hold of Christine’s leg as she began to propel herself to the communications center below the flight deck. “Slow down. Talk to me. I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  As she floated backward, Avery caught Christine’s shoulder. She turned to reveal a smile on her face. “The XGEN-SAT test. It confirms it. This is about territory, not food. My God, they behave just like honey bees.”

  “Explain,” Avery said. “Still not getting it.”

  “The UMOs around Mars don’t have a queen! Or she’s old, beyond the age where she can replenish the colony. Either way, they’re looking for a new queen. They thought the radiation emanating from the XRS was a queen sending out a signal to them. There must be something in the pulse action of the spectrometer that gives off a pheromone-like radiation,” Christine said. She paused the video and XRS files and looped them back to watch again. “When bees lose a queen, they swarm and go looking for a new one. When they pick up the scent of a new queen, they surround her and together they go looking for a place to create a new hive.”

  “You can tell that from the video?”

  “The video and readings
together. When honey bees are introduced to a new queen, they surround her, rub up against her, sort of dance with her.”

  “Okay, with you now. So, they attacked because the queen didn’t respond? Didn’t dance back?”

  “Exactly! Bees get royally pissed if they discover an impostor. For example, if a foreign queen enters a hive where there’s already a queen in residence, the bees in the hive will attack the new one. Viciously.”

  “So, once the UMOs realized their mistake, they got angry,” Avery said.

  “Yep.”

  “Okay, so how does the XGEN fit in?”

  “All right, remember what happened before the UMOs came toward us. They sent out strong X-ray pulses. Remember the big spikes.”

  “I remember. You said you thought they were using the X-rays as sonar.”

  “Right. That’s exactly it. Only they weren’t trying to locate a threat. They were telling the queen, or what they thought was a queen, ‘we’re here, we’re coming for you.’”

  “Oh, I see,” Avery said. The UMOs orbiting Earth interpreted the blast of X-rays from the XGEN as a scouting party or swarm from a new colony. “The Earth UMOs thought a new colony was invading their territory, looking to take their queen.”

  “Exactly. Bees are very territorial. Very protective of their queen,” Christine said. “I need to share this with Dr. Braun. See if she concurs. If she does, there’s no reason to go through with Goddard’s new plan.”

  She pushed off the wall and glided through the hatch into the communications center. Avery followed her and said, “It’s almost three in the morning on the East Coast. She’s not going to be awake.”

  “Probably not, but Goddard can wake her up. Besides, on the S-band, it’s going to take a while to send the video and spectrometer files.”

  “Look, don’t get your hopes up,” Avery said. “You may be right, but Goddard may not agree. Space Command is pushing the buttons now. They’re probably still going to want to go through with their plan. If for no other reason than to confirm your theory.”

  “Maybe,” she said, typing her message to Dr. Braun. “But I think my theory negates the need for the plan. How often is anyone going to broadcast X-rays from a satellite in Earth orbit? Plus, you said earlier they had to really boost the signal to stimulate the attack. And their XRS tests failed to produce any effect. I think that’s telling us the UMOs around Earth have their queen, and so long as nothing happens to her, they’re not going to attack.”