Skywave

by K Patrick Donoghue

  Therefore, on the surface, the blackout was more of an inconvenience than it was a crisis. CUBE-11 and the remaining probes in the fleet were locked in geosynchronous orbit over Callisto. They weren’t going anywhere until commanded to do so…

  “Oh, my God,” Morgan said. “It’s too late.”

  “Excuse me?” Rashid said.

  “If Space Command hacked our transmissions, they probably have all the information they need to reprogram the CUBEs. It’s too late to stop them,” Morgan said. He cupped his hand over the phone and spoke to Davenport and Chu. “Who do we know with a radio telescope powerful enough to help us ping Cetus Prime? Like tonight.”

  Davenport and Chu rattled off several names. Morgan said, “Okay, can you guys get on your phones and see if you can get us on tonight with any of them?”

  In his ear, Morgan heard Rashid say, “Colonel Morgan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You can’t just call observatories directly.”

  “Dr. Rashid?”

  “Yes?”

  “You don’t know me very well.”

  Thirty minutes after Morgan ended the call with Rashid, Davenport and Chu were still working their phones. So far, they’d placed a dozen calls to contacts at various observatories with no success.

  For most of that time, Morgan had been on the phone with A3I’s COO to discuss the situation at Mayaguana. Morgan peppered him with questions. Had they been in touch with the Pentagon? The White House? NASA? What did they know about Amato? Was anybody in contact with Dante? To Morgan’s surprise, the COO pushed back just as hard with questions of his own. What did Morgan know about the raid? What had Amato been up to at Mayaguana? Was it something illegal? What was Morgan’s role?

  It quickly became clear that Amato had kept the search for Cetus Prime from his executive team. Why he had done it, Morgan didn’t know. But he judged the situation grave enough to disclose the search, the reason for it and a description of what they’d found on Callisto. When he finished, the COO thanked him and told Morgan he and the other members of Amato’s team would start lighting fires now that he knew what was going on.

  Shortly after he hung up, Morgan heard Davenport say, “No way! You have her number? Uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay, got it. Thanks much, my brother!”

  After Davenport hung up, he smiled at Morgan and Chu.

  “You got something?” Morgan asked.

  “I do, and you won’t believe it,” Davenport said. “Guess who’s one of the trustees of the Green Bank Observatory?”

  “Bobby, this isn’t the time for guessing games. Who?”

  “Talk about karma…only the craziest Skywalker fan on the planet,” Davenport said.

  “Who, goddamn it!” Morgan said.

  “Julia Carillo.”

  “No way.”

  “See, that’s what I said,” Davenport laughed as he handed Morgan the slip of paper with Carillo’s number.

  Julia Carillo was a former astronaut. She had been one of Morgan’s crew aboard the Space Shuttle Horizon in the late 1980s — the mission where Morgan earned the Skywalker nickname. Indeed, Carillo was the astronaut Morgan had risked his life to save after she floated off into space, unconscious and without a tether.

  Abandoned Runway

  A3rospace Industries Command and Control Center

  Mayaguana Island, The Bahamas

  Dante and Ajay lay flat on the runway. They could hear the sounds of Marines moving about beyond the fence in the distance. From their position, they were unsure what the sounds signified. Were the soldiers pulling back or getting ready to charge?

  Thirty minutes had passed since Dante had fired off messages to Ascension and HQ. Though he had received back acknowledgments from both recipients within fifteen minutes, he’d received no substantive updates since then. At several intervals, Kiera had urged Dante to return to the building, but he refused, vowing to stay in position until they knew all was in order. Ajay said the same.

  With the sound of ocean waves in the background, and the rustling of tropical plants surrounding the runway, they never heard the approach of the SEALs across the sand, nor the sound the M-84 stun grenade as it sailed toward them.

  Situation Room, The White House

  Washington, D.C.

  Shaw hung up the phone and turned to Jennings, Hawkins and General Warner. “Well, that does it. It’s going to be tough to keep things under wraps for much longer.”

  “Why? What’s happened now?” Jennings asked.

  “Amato’s people created a diversion to sneak out two guys with a laptop hooked to a satellite dish. They used the setup to send out a message, maybe multiple messages. The SEALs captured them, but not until after the deed was done,” Shaw said.

  “Do we know who they contacted?” Hawkins asked.

  “No, the two gentlemen have declined to answer any questions,” Shaw said. “And Major Kitt says they haven’t been able to hack into the laptop yet. But I think it’s safe to assume they tried to contact someone they think can help them. Amato’s headquarters, perhaps?”

  “Or Ascension,” Warner said.

  Shaw sat down at the table. “Right…or the media…or all three.”

  “Good God, this just keeps getting worse,” Jennings said, stalking the room.

  “Agreed. Let’s just hope they didn’t send out the photos,” Shaw said.

  “What if they did?” Hawkins asked.

  “If they get to the media, we’re done. Game over,” Shaw said.

  “Not necessarily,” Warner said. “Mr. President, I have a suggestion. It’s drastic, but if the goal is to preserve national secrets, national security, I think it’s worth a discussion.”

  “By all means, General. Let’s hear it,” Jennings said.

  “As you know, we have control of Amato’s fleet now,” Warner said.

  “Yes. And?”

  “Well, sir, without any other corroborating evidence, we can claim the photos are a hoax.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following you, Warner,” the president said.

  “We could give the CUBEs a new assignment, one that would leave nothing but rubble and some new craters inside Nuada.”

  Inflight aboard A3I-One over Georgia

  November 1, 2018

  When Carillo finally returned Morgan’s call, A3I-One was already an hour into its flight from Orlando to the NRAO Green Bank Airport, a small airstrip abutting the Green Bank Observatory complex.

  It had been a gamble on Morgan’s part to head for Green Bank before talking to Carillo, but he took the risk believing he could convince her to bump the slate of researchers who had booked the telescope for the night. Picking up the SAT phone to answer Carillo’s call, Morgan said, “Hello? Julia?”

  “Oh, my God. Is it really you? How are you? What have you been up to?” Carillo said.

  “Yep, it’s really me,” Morgan said. “Listen, Julia, I’d love to catch up but it’ll have to wait until later. Right now, I’ve got a crisis on my hands and I need your help and I need it fast.”

  “Oh, okay. Sure. Anything. Anything at all,” Carillo said.

  “I need you to throw your weight around and get me access to Green Bank Telescope…tonight. Like, as soon as you can.”

  “Ooh…that’ll be tough, Paul. Green Bank’s booked solid.”

  “I know. It’s not a fair request, but it’s important. You know I wouldn’t ask unless it was.”

  “I’m not saying I won’t try. I’ll ask around, but I just want to be real with you,” Carillo said. “How much time do you need?”

  Morgan looked at his watch. It was 10:15 p.m. “We expect to land at the observatory airport around 11:30. So, call it midnight on through to dawn.”

  “What? That’s like six to seven hours,” Carillo said. “Paul, there’s no way I can get you that much time. Thirty minutes, maybe an hour, but not six hours.”

  “We’ll compensate everyone who gets bumped,” Morgan said.

  “It won’t be about money, Paul
. We’ve got universities doing long-term studies. They’ll—”

  “Julia,” Morgan said, “look, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to cut you off, but this is an extraordinary circumstance. An hour won’t do. I have to have the telescope all night.”

  “Why? What’s this about, Paul?” Carillo asked.

  As much as Morgan had hoped to avoid drawing Carillo into the intrigue he and the others aboard A3I-One faced, there appeared no way around it. He tried one last time anyway. “If I said, you don’t want to know, would it help?”

  “Uh. No.”

  “Didn’t think so.” Morgan paused, then said, “You remember Nick Reed?”

  “Yeah. Of course,” Carillo said.

  Reed and Carillo had been part of the same class of astronauts recruited by NASA in the early 1980s. Until Reed was plucked out of the program to join the Cetus Prime mission, he had trained with Carillo and the other astronauts in the class to qualify for Space Shuttle assignments.

  “Well, he didn’t die like NASA said,” Morgan told her. “He didn’t go down in the Pacific.”

  Morgan told Carillo the public story peddled by NASA to cover the loss of Cetus Prime’s crew was a farce. To all but those who had worked on the Cetus mission, the three crew members had been selected for a simulated deep space mission. They were supposedly sequestered on a mocked-up spaceship at an undisclosed location for an eighteen-month training exercise to assess the effects of long-term isolation on astronaut performance. At the end of the eighteen-month period, NASA announced the three astronauts had perished in a helicopter crash over the Pacific Ocean on their way home from the successful training mission.

  “I don’t understand, Paul. What’s this got to do with needing the telescope?”

  “He died in orbit around Mars.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He didn’t go on a simulated deep space training exercise. He went to Mars.”

  There was a pause. When Carillo finally spoke, her voice turned acidic. “If this is a joke, it’s a sick one.”

  “It’s no joke,” Morgan said. “I was CAPCOM for the mission.” For the next ten minutes, he provided her with a synopsis of the Cetus Prime’s clandestine mission and a partial description of how it ended, including the details of Nick’s death. “He was on an EVA, checking instruments on the ship’s pallet, when UMOs attacked and zapped the hell out of him. His crewmates tried to revive him, but his brain was fried.”

  Morgan didn’t have to brief Carillo on UMOs. She’d seen them firsthand during her Horizon mission EVA. Indeed, the space creatures had been responsible for instigating the chain of events that resulted in her unconsciousness and the severing of her tether. Morgan also didn’t need to delve into NASA’s desire to keep the Cetus Prime mission a secret, as Carillo had faced similar confidentiality requirements after her UMO encounter.

  “I still don’t understand. Why are you telling me all this?” Carillo asked.

  “Because we found the ship, Julia. It’s on Callisto.”

  “Callisto? The moon? The Jupiter moon?”

  “That’s right.”

  A long silence followed. When she spoke again, she pressed Morgan to explain how he knew the ship was there. He told her about the radio signals and Amato’s SatFleet journey to Callisto, touching on the controversial CUBE Moon trip and satellite “orbit-wreck” preceding Amato’s decision to fly to the Jovian moon.

  Given Carillo’s astronaut heritage, she questioned the feasibility of reaching Callisto in three months. Morgan did his best to summarize Amato’s experimental engine and the role UMOs had played in generating the speed the SatFleet achieved. When he finished the explanation, he said, “Look, I know it’s a lot to take on faith. I had a hard time buying it at first myself, but I’m telling you, we know for a fact the ship is there. I’m asking you to trust me on that.”

  “Okay, I owe you that much,” Carillo said. “So, talk to me. What do you need the telescope for? Amato’s got his own setup. If what you say is true, his probes are at Callisto. How does Green Bank fit in?”

  Nut crunch time. “We’ve been blocked. We can’t reach the fleet.”

  “Blocked by who? Why?”

  “Come on, Julia, read between the lines,” Morgan said. “No one, and I mean no one, wants the Cetus Prime story to come out. It opens a can of worms that can’t be closed.”

  “But you do?” she asked.

  “Damn right I do!” Morgan said, his voice cracking. “They were my crew, Julia!”

  He pulled the phone to his lap and began to tear up. Davenport and Chu, who’d been listening to Morgan’s side of the conversation, reached for him, Davenport grasping his shoulder, Chu taking hold of his knee. Morgan let go of the phone. Davenport picked it up from the floor and raised it to talk with Carillo. On the other end of the line, he heard snuffles and then Carillo said, “I don’t know what you want from me…”

  “He wants closure…we all do. We want to know what happened to them,” Davenport said. “Please help us.”

  “But I don’t understand how,” she said. “How will the telescope help?”

  “The ship’s intact. It has power. We want to talk to it…and see if it talks back.”

  Ristorante DeLuca

  Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

  November 1, 2018

  News of Pritchard’s “resignation” flamed through NASA’s worldwide offices within thirty minutes of his dismissal. The move was met with a mix of shock and disbelief. Pritchard had done more to lift NASA’s mission in the fifteen months since his appointment than any chief administrator had in the past two decades. Even the deputy administrator tapped to step in and fill Pritchard’s shoes was stunned.

  Among the first to reach out to Pritchard was Helen Brock. Of his direct reports, Brock was the only one with an insight into the probable reason for his removal. She had tried to call him repeatedly but Pritchard hadn’t answered. After the last failed attempt, she had texted him, “Thinking of you. Hoping you are okay. Call me if you want to talk.”

  But there had been no reply. Brock had been content at that point to leave him alone for a day or two. She had no idea what had transpired at the White House but guessed Pritchard had been painted as the fall guy for Amato’s photographs.

  Then had come the phone call from the Deep Space Network project manager at Goddard. “Some spooky-looking Space Command guys just kicked us out of the control room!”

  Later, as she picked at limp pasta at a Georgetown bistro, barely paying attention to her date as she tried to make sense of the call from Goddard, she spied the television in the cramped bar. Beside a stern-looking news anchor was a graphic bearing the U.S. Marines’ logo with the word “Mayaguana” emblazoned across it. She excused herself from the table and made for the bar. She implored the bartender to turn up the television’s sound, but the bartender ignored the request. The screen switched to a new graphic…a picture of Augustus Amato. Brock uttered, “Oh, shit,” and headed for the exit without a look in her date’s direction.

  She was in her car, heading for Pritchard’s home, when she received another call from the DSN manager. Enterprising as ever, the manager had left open a back door into DSN’s computer system before surrendering the satellite network to the Space Command officers. The manager told Brock the coordinates for the data transmissions were aimed at Callisto.

  “The uplinks are encrypted. We’re working on them, but we haven’t cracked them yet,” the manager said. “What’s going on, Helen?”

  Nothing good, Brock thought as her car came to a stop in Pritchard’s driveway. Against her better judgment, she gave the manager access to her Juno tracking system account. “Reorient the coordinates to look at Callisto.”

  A moment later, the DSN manager said, “What’s this? I see six markers. What are they? Spacecraft?”

  Hopping out of the car, Brock said, “I’ll tell you later. Just keep an eye on them. If you see any unusual activity, call me!”

  Before the DSN mana
ger could retort, Brock hung up the phone and dashed for Pritchard’s front door. The former administrator’s nineteen-year-old daughter answered the door. “Is your dad home?”

  Mission Control

  A3rospace Industries Command and Control Center

  Mayaguana Island, The Bahamas

  November 1, 2018

  Kiera pushed the microphone bar of her headset back into place. On her console was a split screen. On one half, she looked down upon the Marines’ command post from the camera of the drone circling high above. On the other half, a second drone scanned the abandoned runway for signs of Dante and Ajay. The remaining drones circled out of reach of the Marines over the Caribbean Sea.

  For the past hour, she’d broadcasted pleas for help over her Radio JOVE antenna, hoping to catch a ham radio operator tuned to the same frequency. Her message, repeated over and over, “Calling all operators. May day. May day. Please reply.”

  But nothing other than static returned through her headphones…until a faint, frail voice cut through the static. “Hello there, dear. Please identify yourself. South Beach Sweetie out.”

  Kiera wouldn’t know it for several days, but she’d reached Minnie Cohen, a South Florida ham operator and volunteer for the Amateur Radio Emergency Services network, a collection of ham radio enthusiasts across the globe who monitor shortwave-radio communications.

  “Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?” Kiera asked.

  “Yes, I can hear you. Please identify yourself,” Minnie said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Kiera said. Others in Mission Control heard her speak and started to gather around. “My name’s Kiera. Can you help us, please?”

  “Well, I’ll try, dear. Where are you? What’s your emergency?”

  Kiera was caught somewhere between a laugh and a cry and couldn’t answer. Cupping her hand over the microphone, she let out an involuntary yelp. Minnie’s reassuring voice replied, “It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m here, Kiera. Take a deep breath, sweetie. I’m not going anywhere.”