Skywave

by K Patrick Donoghue

  “Roger that, Flight,” Kiera said.

  “INCO, turn Cam-2 aft,” Dante said.

  “Affirmative,” came the reply from INCO.

  “Guidance, keep your eyes on direction and speed. First hint of any changes, call it out,” Dante said.

  “Roger, Flight.”

  “Elroy?” Dante queried.

  “Uh, yeah?” responded Ajay through his headset.

  “Let’s put your ears to use. Jack into the radio receiver. See if our little alien bees buzz,” Dante said.

  A smattering of titters echoed in the otherwise quiet room. Ajay replied, “Roger wilco.”

  “Flight, VLF MES in ten, nine, eight…”

  When Kiera reached zero, Dante said, “FAO, you are go for VLF MES.”

  “VLF MES confirmed,” Kiera said.

  Dante’s eyes drifted up to the monitors showing the views from CUBE-1’s cameras. Cam-1 again focused on the orbiting Earth below. At present, the probe was flying over the Pacific Ocean. Cam-2 was pointed to the rear of CUBE-1, aimed down the centerline of the probe’s fuselage. To the left, Dante could see the sheared base of the lost solar panel. To the right, behind an intact solar panel, he could see the comms dish and several antennas.

  Glancing back down at his data screen, he watched the engine output meters begin to climb. “Nice and easy, FAO.”

  “Roger that, Flight,” Kiera said.

  Prior to powering up, CUBE-1 was traveling at twenty-eight thousand kilometers per hour, average speed for spacecraft in stable orbit around Earth. At ten percent of full power, CUBE-1’s speed rose to thirty-five thousand kilometers per hour. Dante looked at Cam-2’s feed. Thus far, no UMOs.

  “INCO, pan Cam-1 forward,” Dante said.

  “Copy, Flight.”

  When the view finished reorienting to the darkness in front of CUBE-1, Dante asked, “FAO, report on VLF. All good?”

  Without hesitation, Kiera said, “Flight, we are green across the board.”

  For twenty minutes, nothing extraordinary occurred. CUBE-1 flew along its prescribed path at its set speed. Periodically, Dante checked in with each station. All reported normal readings, and Cam-1 and Cam-2 showed no unusual activity. Not a single UMO had appeared.

  “Okay, FAO, let’s take VLF up to fifteen percent,” Dante said.

  Again, all seemed steady. After another twenty minutes, Dante directed Kiera to raise the engine power to twenty percent of capacity. As he watched the probe’s speed climb on his console display, the guidance and navigation officer said, “Flight. Bogeys at seven o’clock.”

  Dante looked up to see a handful of bright lights drifting up from the curvature of the Earth. Then three more appeared from above. Shifting his eyes to Cam-2, he saw three more, spinning around each other behind CUBE-1. “FAO, reduce VLF to ten percent of max.”

  “Roger, Flight.”

  “INCO, verify RCS on manual,” Dante said.

  “Confirmed, Flight.”

  “Guidance, how are we looking?”

  “Green screen, Flight.”

  “Copy that.”

  Dante looked at Cam-2 again. There were now over two dozen of the UMOs behind CUBE-1 flitting about in a disorganized fashion, their illumination rising and falling. They truly looked like fireflies on a summer’s eve.

  “FAO, port thruster, ten degrees. Give it a couple of pops,” Dante said.

  Kiera initiated the maneuver, shifting the trajectory of CUBE-1. The Mission Control team watched Cam-2 with fascination. The UMOs did not follow CUBE-1’s new heading for several seconds. Several flew away.

  “FAO, raise power to twenty percent again,” Dante said.

  The disorganized collection of UMOs converged on CUBE-1. From the inside out, lights began to spin.

  “Give me twenty-five, FAO,” Dante said. As CUBE-1 accelerated, the UMOs spun faster.

  “Here come more, Flight,” announced FIDO. “All directions.”

  “Flight, Guidance. Speed jumping, heading changing.”

  Dante watched the ball of spinning UMOs morph in size and speed. Soon, all the lights pulsed in unison. “Roger that, Guidance. Let it ride. FAO, right thruster, ten degrees. One pop.”

  “Copy that. Right thruster, ten degrees. One pop confirmed,” Kiera said.

  On the two camera monitors, the images jiggled.

  “No effect from thruster, Flight. Still veering off course,” reported Guidance.

  “Roger, Guidance,” Dante said. “FAO, report on VLF.”

  “Still green, Flight.”

  “Copy,” Dante said. “Elroy, you hearing anything?”

  “Yes, Flight, heavy static…like lightning, but coming in waves,” Ajay said.

  “FAO, increase engine to thirty-five percent,” Dante instructed Kiera.

  Within seconds, the pulsing ball of spinning lights behind CUBE-1 flashed brighter, turning into a solid orb. The probe began to rattle again, creating blurs on both cameras.

  “Flight, Guidance. Speed up to one hundred thousand km/h! CUBE-1 now through high Earth orbit. At present course and speed, will reach the Moon in…three hours, thirteen minutes!”

  “My God,” Dante said.

  “Flight,” Ajay said. “Something’s happening. Sound’s changing. Pitch rising…fast!”

  “Speed one-thirty-eight-K km/h,” Guidance said.

  “Just lost another panel, Flight,” reported INCO.

  Temptation to cut the power to CUBE-1’s engine swelled inside Dante but he resisted. In his mind, CUBE-1 was a goner anyway. This was now about learning as much as they could before it disintegrated.

  “FAO, right thruster, ten degrees, three pops,” Dante said.

  “Copy,” Kiera said.

  “Flight, course altering to the right! Thruster worked,” Guidance reported. “Speed holding at one-thirty-eight-K km/h.”

  “Roger that, Guidance,” Dante said. The report confirmed a hunch on Dante’s part. The UMOs’ ability to control the direction of the ship diminished the farther they moved away from Earth and its ionosphere. To further confirm his suspicion, he issued a new command. “Guidance, plot course for lunar orbit.”

  “Uh…repeat, Flight?” Guidance said.

  “You heard me. Plot course for a trip around the Moon,” Dante said. “Tell me as soon as you have it available.

  “Roger, Flight.”

  “FAO, as soon as Guidance confirms new heading, prepare to activate RCS autopilot,” Dante said.

  “Say again, Flight,” Kiera said.

  Before Dante could reply, Ajay said, “Flight, pitch really high now, sounds like they’re about to explo—”

  The screens providing the camera feeds flashed bright white, filling both screens. The light was so intense, all in Mission Control shielded their eyes. Dante was convinced CUBE-1 had been destroyed, but as the flash faded, he saw the black of space surrounding a shrinking Earth behind CUBE-1 on Cam-2, and a similar vista of a growing Moon on Cam-1. Not a single UMO was in sight on either screen.

  “FAO, cut VLF engine,” Dante said. “Stations report.”

  Over the next several minutes, the team provided CUBE-1 status updates. The probe was intact, speeding toward the Moon. Two solar panels were intact, as was the comms dish. The engine and thrusters appeared undamaged from the explosion. Sensors aboard the probe were functioning properly, feeding data back to the various stations, and CUBE-1 was receiving instructions sent by the Mission Control team.

  When Guidance finished prepping headings to insert into orbit around the Moon, Dante ordered Kiera to activate the probe’s automated thruster control programming to maneuver CUBE-1 to the new course entered by Guidance. Although UMOs were nowhere to be seen, and the VLF engine was idle, CUBE-1 was still flying at over one hundred fifty thousand kilometers per hour. Once the probe was on the reprogrammed headings, Dante instructed Kiera to override the RCS briefly to fire its forward thrusters and slow the spacecraft down to one hundred twenty thousand kilometers per hour. He then tasked
Kiera to program the VLF engine to kick on any time the speed dropped below that mark.

  Dante requested all data, video and audio files of CUBE-1’s flight sent to his folder on the network server and then turned over Flight duties to FIDO and instructed the Boost engineer to take over FAO’s station.

  “If the UMOs show up again, page me in my office,” Dante said to FIDO. “Kiera, Ajay, follow me. We’ve got work to do.”

  It pained Amato to stay away from Mission Control, but his mind was awash with thoughts that demanded his attention more than the fate of CUBE-1.

  At the core of these thoughts was the comment Pritchard made in the aftermath of CUBE-1’s first contact with the UMOs. After Brock probed him about Kiera’s VLF engine, Pritchard had said information on the engine could help solve a decades-old mystery.

  In the context of their “honeybee” conversation, Amato assumed Pritchard was referring to Cetus Prime, or possibly the lost Martian probes that preceded the doomed manned mission. But, so far as he knew, none of the spacecraft had employed VLF transmitters or receivers.

  During the retest of CUBE-1’s engine, Amato researched the instrumentation aboard the probes, but he had no means of accessing the sealed, classified records of the Cetus Prime mission. After confirming no VLF equipment was aboard Phobos-1, Phobos-2 or Mars Observer, Amato was left at a dead end that could only be resolved by one of two conversations: he could call Pritchard and ask him to explain his VLF comment, or he could reach out to retired Colonel Paul Morgan. As Amato had little faith Pritchard would speak openly about Cetus Prime, a conversation with Morgan seemed the only viable option.

  Morgan had served as CAPCOM for the Cetus Prime mission, the primary liaison between Mission Control position and the ship’s crew. As such, any and all communication between the spacecraft and Mission Control had gone through Morgan. The man had also been a legendary astronaut, a heroic figure who had once saved a fellow astronaut who’d broken free from her tether during a Space Shuttle mission.

  As a subcontractor to the Cetus Prime mission, Amato had been privy to pieces of the mission’s story, but not all of it. In the aftermath of the spacecraft’s loss, he’d gleaned other pieces from loose-lipped NASA staff, but some of the stories they told conflicted. Yet, all stories agreed on one point: Morgan had again been heroic, even though his gallant efforts to save the crew had failed.

  Amato also knew that Morgan had taken a long leave of absence after the loss of the ship, and when he returned to active duty at NASA, he was never the same man. Amato had met him on a few occasions before and after Cetus Prime and he could attest to his altered personality. This knowledge left Amato to wonder whether Morgan would talk with him.

  Despite what Amato had said to Pritchard about not knowing Morgan’s whereabouts in their earlier phone conversation, Amato knew exactly where to find him. More precisely put, Amato’s assistant Mark knew where to find him. And while urgency argued in favor of calling him, Mark discovered the former astronaut had no phone in his home! Nor did it appear he owned a cell phone. So, Amato was left with no choice but to make an unannounced trip to visit Morgan.

  After finalizing the travel arrangements with Mark, Amato turned his thoughts to the next concern stuck in his craw: the UMOs. More specifically, Pritchard’s use of honeybees as a proxy for the ion-chomping beings, and Brock’s contention that the UMOs’ interaction with CUBE-1 was not a demonstration of swarming behavior.

  Together, these comments caused Amato to remember the debate that had raged between NASA and the Pentagon all throughout the Cetus Prime mission — a debate that began with the photographs from Phobos-2 showing the UMOs appearing to swarm the Soviet probe.

  Amato recalled an animal behavior specialist had been hired by NASA to evaluate the photographs, Dr. Heidi Braun. She was the one who made the initial comparison between the UMOs and honeybees, noting the similarity between the UMO formation and a swarm of bees.

  While Amato’s memory of Braun’s theory was sketchy, he did recall some of it. She believed the UMOs were migratory life-forms. In her mind, their swarming behavior, in and of itself, was not an aggressive act. She put forth the theory the UMOs had come across the probes in their search for a new place to establish a colony. They found the probes were rich in electromagnetic radiation, the UMOs’ primary food source, and they stopped to feed on the radiation before continuing their journey.

  The Pentagon, however, had held an entirely different view, one that Amato remembered clearly. They believed the swarming behavior was predatory in nature. They argued the UMOs were dangerous creatures who viewed the Martian probes as threats. The tension between these two theories ultimately played a pivotal role in the catastrophe that claimed the lives of the Cetus Prime crew. As far as Amato knew, the controversy had never been resolved.

  Over the two decades since the spaceship was lost, Amato was sure NASA had continued to research the UMOs. Brock’s assertion that she’d never seen UMOs behave as they did around CUBE-1 seemed to confirm Amato’s speculation.

  Given that it was now clear any foray into deep space using Kiera’s engine, whether as part of his CubeSat fleet or incorporated into The Rorschach Explorer, meant dealing with the UMOs, Amato deemed it necessary to bolster his team’s knowledge of animal swarming. As he would not be able to tap NASA’s UMO knowledge base, he would have to acquire the knowledge elsewhere.

  His first thought had been to reach out to Dr. Braun, but Mark discovered she had died several years ago. Fortunately, Amato had a good idea of whom to contact as an alternative. And it wouldn’t require a personal visit — a phone call would do.

  “Antonio!” Amato said.

  On the other end of the phone line, Dr. Antonio Wallace replied, “Augie, good to hear from you! How’ve you been, my man?”

  “Busy as usual,” Amato said. “And you? How is your team? Ready for the playoffs, I trust?”

  Antonio was not only a fellow billionaire and technology magnate, he also owned the Bay Area’s professional basketball team.

  “Think so. We’re nicked up a bit, but we’ve got a deep bench,” Antonio said.

  “Good, I imagine you’ll have to build a bigger trophy case soon!” Amato said.

  Antonio’s booming laugh caused Amato to move the phone away from his ear. “Oh, now don’t go there. One game at a time, and all that!”

  “Of course, of course, not trying to jinx you,” Amato said. “By the way, thank you for your donation to the Gateway Foundation. I appreciate your generosity.”

  “Absolutely, you’re welcome,” Antonio said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to make the gala. Did it go well?”

  “One of our best, I’m pleased to say. Maybe you can join us next year,” Amato said.

  “Count on it,” Antonio said. “Always enjoy seeing your latest tech, and I’m always on the lookout for new talent!”

  Antonio’s engineering firm, Whave Technologies, had hired several Gateway graduates over the years as Antonio expanded the defense contracting arm of his business to cater to the Pentagon’s burgeoning interest in space-based defense systems.

  Amato had developed an instant fondness for Antonio when he and his research team first burst onto the tech scene with their alternative propulsion system for automobiles known as the Whave engine. Antonio and his three-man team were out-of-the-box thinkers, contrarians and risk takers. In short, Amato’s kind of men. Though the team broke up not long after selling the patent for their creation, Antonio had parlayed his share of the patent proceeds into an ever-expanding footprint in the engineering technology field.

  Antonio was also quite the celebrity. As one of the most successful black entrepreneurs in the country, he garnered a lot of media attention on Wall Street as well as in the tabloids. The forty-five-year-old bachelor was a regular fixture on the front pages, escorting the latest starlet-of-the-moment to one function or another.

  After conversing about their latest respective inventions, Amato said, “I wonder if I might
ask a favor of you?”

  “Sure, name it,” Antonio said.

  “I’m working on a research project that’s outside of my area of expertise, and you know someone who can help me. I was hoping you might make an introduction for me,” Amato said.

  “Okay. What kind of expertise are we talking about?”

  “Animal behavior.”

  “I’m sorry, say again?”

  “Animal behavior. Migratory animals, to be specific,” Amato said.

  There was a long pause, and then Antonio said, “Ahhhh, I know who you’re talking about. You’re interested in Anlon Cully.”

  Dr. Anlon Cully had been one of Antonio’s Whave engine team members, and as Amato recalled it, the one who came up with the concept upon which the engine was designed — a concept the biologist had formulated based on the energy consumption and conservation tactics of long-haul, migratory animals. The “Whave” name had indeed been inspired by one such animal Cully had long studied, the humpback whale.

  “Are you still in touch with him?” Amato asked.

  “Sure am,” Antonio said. “He’s retired, though.”

  “Yes, I read as much before calling you,” Amato said. “I’m not looking for anything intense from him. Just wanted to pick his brain. If he can’t help me, I thought he might be able to point me to someone who can.”

  “I got you,” Antonio said. “I’m sure he’ll talk with you. Anlon’s a good dude. Plus, he owes me a stack of favors! How soon are you looking to connect with him? I’m pretty sure he’s out of the country at the moment.”

  “It is somewhat urgent,” Amato said. “I’m more than willing to travel to him.”

  “Okay, I’ll see if I can track him down for you.”

  “I’d be much obliged, Antonio.”

  “No problem. Can you give me some background on your project? Anlon tends to ask a lot of questions.”

  The request was reasonable and expected, but Amato hesitated before answering. The delay had less to do with his trust in Antonio and more to do with his reluctance to lie to him. “Of course. We’re funding a research project for one of our Gateway interns involving honeybees. We plan on sending a probe with a hive of the bees into orbit to see how the change in magnetic field affects their colony and migration behaviors, both while they’re in space and after they return.”