Skywave

by K Patrick Donoghue

  He pointed in the direction of the media invited to the event scurrying toward Dante and then cupped his hand around Dante’s ear. “Just don’t give away any secrets!”

  Amato stepped away and watched the reporters circle Dante. Pritchard came alongside and tapped Amato on the shoulder. “Gravity-assist? I can’t believe you kept this from me.”

  “Relax, my friend. You’ll have first crack when NASA’s ready for manned missions again,” Amato said. “Until then, it’s reserved for Rorschach.”

  “Uh-huh,” Pritchard said, casting a wary eye at Amato as the two walked inside the museum.

  Within seconds of entering the lobby, a throng of donors descended upon Amato. As Pritchard stepped aside to avoid getting trampled, he was cornered by a job-seeking Gateway fellow who was anxious to make a direct pitch to NASA’s top man. Fortune favors the bold, Pritchard thought.

  After ten minutes of polite conversation with the PhD student, Pritchard offered his business card. “Send me your CV and I’ll make sure it gets to the right people at JPL. Then it’s up to you to sell them like you did me.”

  By then, Amato had disappeared into the heart of the museum. Looking around, Pritchard spied a placard directing gala guests to the new GEFF display and figured that’s where Amato had headed. As Pritchard made for the exhibit, he felt the vibration of his cell phone against his chest and retrieved it from the inside pocket of his tuxedo jacket. The screen identified the caller as Dr. Helen Brock, NASA’s chief science officer. Pritchard looked around for a quiet corner. Late night calls from NASA executives were rarely good news.

  “Hello, Helen. Burning the midnight oil?” Pritchard asked with a light lilt.

  “Sorry to disturb you, Dennis. I know it’s not a good time,” Brock said.

  “That’s all right. What’s up?” Pritchard asked, ducking behind a display case housing Moon rocks.

  “I just got off the phone with Houston. We just had an incident on ISS. The situation is under control, no one was hurt, but the live cameras caught the front end of the incident before they could shut off the feed,” Brock said.

  At mention of the camera feed, Pritchard understood the source of the incident, alien beings known to the brass at NASA as unidentified magnetic objects, or UMOs. “I take it our little friends showed up again.”

  “Yes. This time there were only a few of them, but one of them pierced through Destiny,” Brock said.

  Pritchard cupped his free hand over his ear to dampen the ambient chatter around him. “I’m sorry, say again?”

  Brock repeated an expanded version of her summary. One of the electromagnetic beings had caused two micropunctures of the Destiny module, NASA’s primary laboratory aboard ISS. “It flew through one side and went out the other. Scared the hell out of Mission Specialist Connors. He was storing samples when the flash of light came through the cabin.”

  “My God.” Pritchard said, “They’ve never done that before. What was Connors working on?”

  “Nothing that should have attracted attention. That’s what concerns me, Dennis. There were no active experiments involving X-rays or gamma rays,” Brock said. “The punctures were easily sealed, but the crew up there is pretty spooked right now.”

  I imagine they are, Pritchard thought. “Does Shilling know?”

  Dr. Robert Shilling was NASA’s project manager for the space agency’s clandestine UMO research program. He had developed a deep knowledge base about the creatures over the past decade, and he had successfully trained several colonies to relocate away from critical NASA and military satellites. Brock told Pritchard that Shilling had been alerted and was currently reviewing video and data from ISS. “He’s puzzled, Dennis. With the ion pods we’ve got in orbit to feed them, he can’t understand why they keep showing up around ISS.”

  “Well, he better figure it out pretty damn fast,” Pritchard said. As he spoke, Amato passed by with a now-larger contingent of donors in tow. From what Pritchard could tell, the proud museum owner was leading the group on a private tour of his favorite exhibits. Fearing they would soon circle back to the Moon rock display Pritchard was camped behind, he headed for the exit and comparative quiet of the Living Universe courtyard. “Look, Helen. I’m not in a great spot to have this conversation. I’ll call you back when I get to my car. Shouldn’t be more than five minutes.”

  “Okay, Dennis. Before you go, just a heads up, the media’s picked up on the video. There was quite a flash when the UMO burned its way into Destiny. We’re working on a cover story now,” Brock said. “And Space Command’s chomping for an explanation.”

  Pritchard sighed. “All right. I get it. We’ve got another UMO fire drill on our hands.”

  Back inside the museum, Dante stood beside the GEFF display and smiled for one last picture with a group of gala donors. After the event photographer snapped the photo, Dante thanked the donors for supporting the scholarship fund and then went in search of Kiera. She had stopped by the display as the line for photographs was winding down to tell Dante she was going outside for some fresh air, but she hadn’t been specific as to where to meet her.

  Outside the museum, there were a few gala guests strolling through the still-lit gardens, but otherwise the only people visible were the waiters gathering empty glasses and plates from the tray tables stationed throughout the maze of walkways, and bartenders packing up leftover libations.

  Dante walked down the museum steps and made his way past the Rorschach Pool just as a fresh plume of water ejected from the fountains. Checking his watch, he noted it was eleven o’clock. On time as usual, he thought.

  When he reached the Sun tree at the center of the garden, he walked around its base, looking toward the other planet trees, hoping to spot her blond hair and silver-sequin gown. She was nowhere in sight, so he began the tedious process of walking around each of the elliptical paths. Kiera was short enough that if she were sitting on a bench somewhere in the garden, her head would not be visible above the boxwoods lining each walkway.

  As he was already at the Sun, Dante began his search with Mercury’s path. By the time he’d reached Earth’s path, he was fed up with the search. Standing on a bench, he called out her name. From behind, she answered. Dante turned and saw her waving from beneath the Jupiter tree, thirty yards away.

  “Hey there,” she shouted. “Didn’t you get my text?”

  Dante patted his blazer pockets to discover his phone was missing. He did the same to his slacks as Kiera walked toward him. “You left it inside, didn’t you?”

  “Uh, looks that way,” he said.

  “Come on, we better hustle back before they close up,” Kiera said, as she brushed past him. With her heels in one hand, she race-walked toward the museum, her tight dress swishing with each step.

  Dante followed close behind, admonishing himself for misplacing his phone…again. At least it wasn’t his eyeglasses or keys this time. They were always much harder to track down.

  “Do you remember where you left it?” Kiera asked.

  “Uh…sort of,” he said. “Somewhere around the GEFF display.”

  “You should have let me hold it, like I suggested,” she said.

  He knew that was coming, sooner or later. Kiera was not one to shy away from “told you so” moments, and Dante found himself on the receiving end of those moments all too frequently. It was annoying when she did it at the office, given the fact she worked for him, not the other way around. But talking to her about it did no good. She’d just say, “Well, if you don’t like it, quit giving me reason to say it.”

  It was an eminently logical perspective, Dante thought, and a hard one to argue against. But it was the kind of statement that led to trouble for Kiera — at work, with friends and family, and in her dating relationships. Dante had seen the carnage wrought by her pop-up gruff demeanor in all three settings. Some people called her a bull in a china shop, but that wasn’t an apt description in his mind. The analogy connoted someone trampling everything in his or her p
ath. That wasn’t Kiera. She liked to stop now and then in the china shop and tell you why the piece she’s just smashed wasn’t worth all that much to begin with.

  Yet, once you got beyond that layer of her personality, if you could get beyond it, she was as sweet and devoted a friend as one could find. She always had Dante’s back. He smiled as he watched her display it once more.

  Kiera banged on the locked museum door, louder and louder, until a security guard appeared in the lobby. He mouthed that the museum was closed for the night. She dropped her heels and reached in the purse dangling from her shoulder. Producing her phone for the guard to see, she turned and pointed to Dante. “He left his phone inside. We need to get it.”

  Dante heard the guard shout back to come back in the morning. Kiera used her phone as a prop to mimic an airplane. “We’re flying out tonight! We can’t come back in the morning.”

  The guard, irked by her persistence, approached the door and unlocked it. Poking his head out, he said, “I’m sorry, miss. I can’t let you in.”

  “I don’t need you to let us in. He left his phone at the new display. Can you please go look?” Kiera said. She turned to Dante. “Did you leave the ringer on?”

  “Uh…I think so,” he said.

  Turning back to the guard, Kiera said, “I can call his number. That’ll help you find it.”

  “Look, miss, just come back in the morning.”

  Kiera reached in her purse again to retrieve her A3rospace Industries security badge. “I told you, we’re flying out tonight. To Mayaguana. With Mr. Amato. Capiche?”

  While it was true they were flying out to Amato’s Mayaguana-based Mission Control Center, they weren’t leaving until noon the following day, and Amato was not traveling with them. But the twisted truth worked. A few minutes later, the disgruntled guard returned to the entrance with Dante’s cell phone. As they walked away, Dante slid the phone in the pocket of his slacks and said, “You didn’t have to do that. I could have come back in the morning.”

  “Did I get you the phone or not?” she asked.

  “You did.”

  “Then just say thank you, and let’s get going. My feet are killing me.”

  After walking through the gardens, they cut through the lobby of the campus headquarters building to reach the employee parking lot. At the late hour, there were only a dozen cars scattered about the lot’s five-hundred-plus spaces.

  As Kiera veered off toward her car, Dante asked, “You sure you still want to do this tonight? It’s been a long day.”

  “No, I’m fine,” she said. “Besides, it’s the only chance we’ll get for the next three weeks and I want you to hear one of the storms live.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “Can we grab something to eat on the way? Didn’t get much of a chance to sample the hors d'oeuvres with all the glad-handing.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said. “You got your keys, I hope?”

  He patted his blazer pocket. “Yep. And my glasses. And my phone.”

  “Good. You remember the way to my place?” she asked.

  “Uh…I just take 528 to A1A and hang a right. The building with the big wave mural,” he said.

  “That’s it,” she said, opening her car door. “We can walk to Bahama Bettie’s from there and get something to go, but we’ll have to make it quick. Storm is supposed to be the strongest around two.”

  With their carryout containers set on the dinette table, Kiera disappeared into her bedroom to trade her dress for a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. While she changed, Dante slid off his suit jacket, loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves. When Kiera emerged, they filled their plates before heading for the living room sofa. As they snacked on coconut shrimp, Cajun-spiced crab balls and Jamaican jerk chicken wings, the conversation turned to the subject of Ajay Joshi and his clicks from Callisto.

  “You really think he’s on to something?” Dante asked.

  “It pains me to say yes, but, yes,” Kiera said. “I don’t think the clicks are some sort of alien greeting, but the more I’ve listened to them, the less I think they’re coming from some sort of interference. They’re too predictable, too consistent.”

  “And you’re sure the clicks originate from Callisto?”

  “No, I’m not sure,” she said, “but Callisto’s involved somehow. I think Ajay’s right about that.”

  “Okay, so let’s say I listen to the storm and hear the clicks. What then?”

  “Well, I thought you might review my data, see if you agree with me about Callisto,” she said.

  “Tonight?” Dante asked before tearing into a chicken wing.

  “No. When we get to Mayaguana. Sometime in the next day or two.”

  “Why the urgency?” he asked.

  Kiera dipped a crab ball in a citrus-mustard sauce. “Well, I know you and Mr. Amato are still discussing a mission objective for the SatFleet space trials. I thought Callisto might make for a challenging test — more challenging than snapping moon buggy pics.”

  “Ahhhh,” Dante said, shrimp in hand, pointing at Kiera. “Now I understand. This is about your VLF prototype, isn’t it? You don’t care about the clicks, you want to up the wow factor for the new engine.”

  The present candidate for testing Kiera’s experimental propulsion system was a trip to the Moon to video and photograph the landing sites of previous Apollo missions. Her engine would be mounted on a dozen CubeSat probes that would travel to the Moon in a convoy, providing Amato with a chance to demonstrate his SatFleet concept at the same time. The mission was favored by Amato for another reason: the videos and photographs would be used for a new exhibit in his museum.

  “Wrong,” she said. “I do care about the clicks.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Seriously, I do.”

  “Amato won’t go for it. It’s too big a leap,” Dante said, swirling the shrimp in cocktail sauce.

  “Are you kidding me? He’s all about big leaps,” she said. “He bought into GEFF, didn’t he?”

  As he bit into the shrimp, he said, “That’s different.”

  “How?” Kiera said. “You have sauce on your chin, by the way.”

  Dante used the back of his hand to wipe away the sauce. “We did several trials.”

  “Yeah, with mice.”

  The first phase of testing for Dante’s gravity-assist invention had involved sending a series of probes into low orbit with mice aboard.

  “You know that’s not all we did. The vomit comet, remember?”

  After proving the GEFF system worked with mice, the next challenge had been to scale the magnetized forcefield and accompanying flight suits for human use. It was impractical to launch a manned vessel into space for the test, so Dante devised a chamber that could ride inside Amato’s version of NASA’s famed “vomit comet,” an airplane used to simulate a reduced-gravity environment.

  “Well, there’s a helluva lot more scientific value investigating an unknown phenomenon than there is taking pictures of Moon junk.”

  “There’s a huge difference. You’re talking close to four hundred million miles of space travel. Through the asteroid belt! We don’t know whether the radiation-protection system works. We haven’t tested in-flight battery swap-outs. Or the comms relay network. We’re not ready for a deep space mission,” Dante said.

  “Okay, okay, you’re right,” Kiera said, laying her plate on the table. “But if the Moon mission goes well, maybe we can propose Callisto for the next round of trials.”

  “We’ll see,” Dante said with a yawn. He glanced down at his watch. “Look, it’s nearly two, can we please get this over with? I need to get home and sleep.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said. “It’ll only take a minute to set everything up. Be back in a jiff.”

  Kiera headed for her bedroom to retrieve her laptop and headphones. Returning to the sofa, she balanced the laptop on her knees while Dante cleared their plates from the table. Several keyboard commands later, she arrived at the website of a woman named Marle
ne Stannis.

  Marlene was a middle-school science teacher in Ocala and a contributor to Radio JOVE’s cooperative database of storm recordings. Kiera had struck up a correspondence with Marlene during her initial research into Ajay’s clicks and had arranged to tap into a live-stream of the night’s Io-B storm.

  While Kiera would have preferred to listen to the storm directly, Cocoa Beach was not the place to set up a Radio JOVE antenna given the high density of power lines and buildings. Marlene’s antenna, by contrast, was set up on an open field of a horse farm — a far more suitable setting to pick up Jupiter’s magnetic storms.

  They could have waited until they returned to Mayaguana to use the Radio JOVE equipment Kiera had set up on the grounds of Amato’s Bahamian complex, but it would have meant waiting another seventeen days to catch the next time Callisto transited Jupiter. And that would have been too late for Kiera to influence the selection of the VLF engine space trial objective.

  At 2:01 a.m., Kiera plugged in her headphones and pressed the live-stream icon on her laptop’s touch screen. She listened to the storm’s ocean-wave sound pattern, waiting for the first set of clicks. When they occurred, she set the laptop on the table and handed the headphones to Dante.

  “Okay, here you go. Clicks just happened. Listen for the next set at 2:06,” she said, pointing at the time on the laptop’s menu bar.

  After Dante slid the headphones on, Kiera leaned back against the sofa cushion and closed her eyes, whispering, “Come on, Callisto, do your thing.”

  3: ONE CLICK LEADS TO ANOTHER

  Mission Control Briefing Room

  A3rospace Industries Command and Control Center

  Mayaguana Island, The Bahamas

  June 17, 2018

  The conference room was packed. At the head of the table sat Amato, his pen hovering over the third item on the agenda. Around the table were the senior members of his research team, including Dante and Kiera. The seats ringing the walls behind the table were filled by junior engineers, astrophysicists and other support staff. They were gathered to discuss development and testing updates related to Amato’s SatFleet.