Magwave (The Rorschach Explorer Missions Book 2)

by K Patrick Donoghue

  “Roger that,” Morgan said. “I’ll meet you at the—”

  An anguished cry ripped through his headset. On his monitor, he saw tendrils of electricity jolting Carillo from all sides, contorting her body.

  “Damn it!” he shouted. He hit the button to close the cargo bay doors. “Kiera, get up here and take the helm! Bob, Ajay, meet me at the cargo bay airlock!”

  He unstrapped from the commander’s seat and propelled himself from the flight deck into the main corridor. Eschewing the GEFF forcefield, he used handholds to shoot his body aft. As he passed the ready room, another scream from Carillo echoed through his headset.

  “Stop!” she cried. “Leave me alone!”

  “Come on, Doctor! We have to go,” Ajay implored Shilling.

  The scientist paid no attention. He was mesmerized by the assault on Carillo, which he was watching on a lab video monitor.

  Ajay tugged on Shilling’s shoulder. “Now, Doctor! To the airlock!”

  Shilling didn’t take his eyes from the screen, and his voice was just above a whisper. “I don’t see them. Where are they?”

  Giving up on Shilling, Ajay ran down the corridor in clunky strides. He reached the airlock just behind the weightless Morgan. Another scream echoed in Ajay’s headset, and this one ended in a series of guttural croaks.

  Kiera emerged from the engine control room. “She’s not moving. What do we do?”

  Morgan cranked the airlock door handle. “Ajay, as soon as I’m inside, close and lock the door immediately. Kiera, get up front and make sure the cargo doors finish closing. Make sure they seal and then start repressurizing the bay.”

  “Roger that,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to get her inside the airlock as quick as I can.” At that moment Shilling finally stepped into the corridor. Morgan shouted, “Bob! Get the med kit and get your ass down here!”

  “But Colonel,” Kiera said, “it’ll take an hour to repressurize the bay.”

  “I know, but we don’t have that kind of time,” he said.

  Morgan didn’t even wait for the airlock door to fully open. As soon as he was able to squeeze through, he pressed his body through the gap and told Ajay to crank the door shut behind him. He raced to get into his spacesuit in the zero-gravity chamber. That was a daunting task even with help from one or two others, and harder still on one’s own — worse still when under duress. It took a full fifteen minutes, and Morgan spent the entire time cursing himself for the decision to send Carillo out alone. But finally, suited up, he took in several deep breaths of pure oxygen dispensed through a mask connected to the airlock’s life support system, locked his helmet into place, activated his suit’s life support module, and started to crank open the outer airlock door.

  This abbreviated attempt to adapt to the change between the pressurized main cabin and the now closed, but still depressurized, cargo bay was far short of the two-hour depressurization required for a normal spacewalk. When the cargo bay airlock door opened, the sudden drop in pressure would begin to create bubbles of gas inside Morgan’s body —and those bubbles could kill him if he didn’t return to the airlock quickly.

  The situation was eerily reminiscent of his famed “Skywalker” spacewalk thirty years before — which also involved rescuing Julia Carillo from a cargo bay mishap. Only this time, he wouldn’t be jetting off-structure to retrieve an unconscious Carillo as she drifted off into space. This time, he’d only have to push forward fifteen to twenty feet into the cargo bay, unhook her tether and pull her back into the airlock via his own tether.

  He’d just have to do it fast and hope for the best.

  Ajay and Shilling had returned to the lab to watch Morgan’s rescue attempt and monitor for signs of more BLUMOs, and now Ajay was picking up a new hissing sound through his headphones. The sound was followed by a faint, quivering chirp.

  “Yikes!” he said.

  “What’s that?” Shilling asked.

  “Shhh.” Ajay pressed the headphones tight against his head. A conversation had commenced between the snake-like hisser and the quiverer.

  Ajay maneuvered the microphone bar of the headphones to his lips. “Colonel Morgan, I can hear them. They’re talking.”

  From the copilot seat on the flight deck, Kiera cycled through camera feeds from the three operational Shield probes surrounding Rorschach. No BLUMOs were evident. She spoke into her headset. “I don’t see ’em.”

  “They sound far away…not like last time,” Ajay said.

  A chime signaled the arrival of a new transmission from Mission Control. On the comms station monitor, Kiera saw the message appear. MAYA-FLIGHT to CDR-TRE: Abort EVA! Repeat, abort EVA ASAP! Await further instructions. MAYA-FLIGHT out.

  In the ice-cold cargo bay, Morgan grabbed hold of the bobbing Carillo. He didn’t bother to examine her, he just unclipped her tether and attached her to one on his EMU utility belt. Pushing off the platform, he pulled on his tether, hand over hand, all the way back to the airlock. The process took an excruciating ten minutes.

  As soon as they were inside, he cranked the cargo bay airlock door closed, turned the pressure equalization valve to the emergency setting, and opened the valve. Three minutes later, the airlock pressure had stabilized, and Morgan was able to turn off the life support functions on his suit, remove his helmet and gloves, and reactivate an airlock oxygen mask.

  Before donning the mask, he pressed the intercom button. “Open the cabin airlock. Bring the med kit.”

  Fighting through dizziness, he tethered the unconscious Carillo to the airlock wall and examined her suit. At once, he saw that her life support module was inactive. “Damn it!”

  He removed her helmet, applied another oxygen mask over her nose and mouth, and felt for a pulse on her neck. He detected her heartbeat and shallow breathing. Through cloudy vision, he surveyed the rest of her suit. It was covered with burn marks but he saw no punctures. “Jesus, Julia, I’m so sorry.”

  As his senses began to fade, he heard a cranking sound from the cabin airlock door. He lolled forward and collapsed next to Carillo, completely unaware of the blue light hovering above him. It pulsed for a few seconds and then vanished.

  Aboard Sol Seaker

  Port Denarau, Fiji

  Through noise-canceling headphones, Anlon Cully listened to the sounds of the BLUMOs surveilling Amato’s fleet. There were five recordings in all, and Anlon had listened to each of them several times. At present, he was replaying the third of the five clips, the one he found most interesting.

  In the first two clips, the new quiver-tones seemed disconnected from the chirp-tones. There was never an exchange between quivers and chirps, just numerous back-and-forth exchanges between chirpers and a few exchanges between quiverers. In a couple of spots, the chirps and quivers overlapped each other, but the sounds struck Anlon as two groups of UMOs minding their own business. All of this suggested that the UMOs traveling with Rorschach had been unaware of the BLUMOs’ surveillance early on.

  That impression changed in the third clip. In the midst of a chirp conversation, a quiver intruded, causing the chirpers to halt their chatter. After a short bout of silence, a sharp chirp sounded out, and an equally sharp quiver answered. This loud, curt exchange bounced back and forth for a few rounds before another bout of silence. Then two more quiver-tones followed —one soft, the other loud. After that, the pattern of chirps Anlon had observed in the first two recordings resumed. There were a few more low-volume quivers, but they once again seemed disconnected from the chirps.

  In his reviews of clips four and five, Anlon hadn’t detected any more chirp-quiver conversations, but the frequency of the independent quivers and chirps increased. Anlon felt this signaled a building tension on the parts of both colonies, as if they both knew a conflict was brewing. That was what made clip three so interesting. It signaled a different kind of pack behavior.

  Jennifer was seated to his right, watching the videos of the BLUMO attack on her l
aptop. Next to her was a printout of the attack chronology, prepared by Amato’s BLUMO working group, and occasionally she would stop a clip to refer to the chronology, then back up and watch a scene again. When something piqued her interest, she would scribble her observations on a notepad.

  Pebbles sat across the desk from the other two, arms folded, head back, staring at the beams lining the cabin ceiling. In front of her sat her copy of the chronology printout, full of highlighted passages and notes in the margins. She’d already had enough of the videos and audio clips and was now just waiting for Anlon and Jennifer to finish so they could discuss their independent observations.

  “Come on, people, let’s wrap it up,” she said.

  Jennifer looked up from the laptop. “Almost done, hold your horses.”

  Anlon removed the headphones and laid them on the desk. “What time is it?” he asked, looking out the window.

  Jennifer glanced at her laptop. “Uh…one-forty.”

  “Wrong,” said Pebbles. “It’s time to quit looking at the damn videos!”

  “Okay, okay. Relax.” Jennifer halted the video and pushed her chair back from the desk.

  Anlon smiled at Pebbles. “I take it you found something interesting and can’t wait to share it.”

  “It wasn’t a pack hunt,” Pebbles blurted. “Well, not like you described earlier.”

  “Diving right in, are we?” Anlon said.

  Pebbles pushed up the sleeves of the sweatshirt she’d layered over her wetsuit. “Well, you did say you wanted to get back to Augie as fast as possible, didn’t you?”

  “I did.” Anlon turned to Jennifer. “Any opening thoughts on your end?”

  “I have to agree with Pebbles,” Jennifer said. “They didn’t surround the fleet. They only did recon from the port side. They went after Rorschach, not just the probes. I saw it as more of a swarm than a pack hunt.”

  “That’s right,” Pebbles said to Anlon. “You said packs lead prey into a kill zone. That didn’t happen here. You said packs go after the weak. The BLUMOs went after both weak and strong.”

  Anlon had been jotting down their observations as they spoke, but now he looked up. “I see what you both mean,” he said, “but I don’t agree. I think it was a pack hunt, with part of it disguised as a swarm. A clever strategy designed by one very crafty alpha.”

  Pebbles frowned. “Really? For what purpose?”

  “To trick the UMOs. To draw them into a fight, separate them from Rorschach.”

  “Right,” Jennifer said. “They viewed Rorschach as a threat and attacked to eliminate it.”

  “Wait,” said Pebbles. “Are you saying you agree with Shilling? The attack wasn’t about food? What about Rorschach’s UMOs? Why did the BLUMOs chase them if it wasn’t to feed?”

  “Because the Cargos broke from the fleet,” Jennifer said.

  “Why would they care about that?”

  “They didn’t want the Cargos to escape.”

  “Come again?” The frown on Pebbles’ face twisted into a glare.

  “Think of Rorschach as the queen of a colony inside a swarm of escorts — the UMOs and the fleet probes,” Jennifer said. “The BLUMOs detected the swarm coming into their territory. They didn’t want the competition for food, so they attacked to wipe out what they saw as invaders. First order of business, get rid of the escorts to expose the queen. Make sure none of them survive. Then take out the queen.”

  Pebbles turned to Anlon. “Do you buy that?”

  Part of Jennifer’s theory aligned with Anlon’s thinking. He agreed that the BLUMOs’ attack was an attempt to isolate Rorschach from the rest of the fleet. But his view diverged with Jennifer’s as to the purpose of this action. “I think the analogy fits up until the taking out the queen part,” he said. “But I don’t think they intended to destroy Rorschach once they got it alone.”

  “But they did come back and try to destroy the ship,” Jennifer said. “The report says the X-band signal from Antonio’s landers lured them back from chasing the Cargos and they attacked the ship.”

  “I don’t think that’s what happened,” Anlon said.

  Pebbles cast him a dubious look. “Are you saying the report’s wrong?”

  “I am. First off, I don’t think the second encounter with the ship was an attack. Read the report again. They didn’t zap the ship with lightning in the second encounter. They didn’t bump it or otherwise impede it.”

  “Right, because Colonel Morgan scared them away,” Pebbles said.

  “No, because Colonel Morgan confused them,” Anlon countered. “And I don’t think the two groups of BLUMOs that led the first attack were the same ones that approached Rorschach once it was alone. I think the alpha split the pack into three groups. One to take care of the Recons, the second to deal with the UMOs and the rest of the fleet, and the third lying in wait to capture Rorschach.”

  “Capture? For what purpose?” Jennifer asked.

  “It’s gotta be food,” Pebbles said. “Rorschach’s VLF engines are huge compared to the probes. All those tasty ions were too hard to pass up.”

  “I agree that seems like the most logical answer, but there’s a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit,” Anlon said. “According to the report, during the twenty hours the BLUMO scouting party followed the fleet, Rorschach’s engines were idle. The first use of VLF engines the BLUMOs observed would have been the Recons after they separated from the fleet.”

  “Maybe they tracked the fleet longer than the crew thinks,” Pebbles said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Then you agree with me,” said Jennifer. “They attacked to defend their territory.”

  Anlon shook his head. “I’m having trouble with that explanation too. Packs are typically ruthless when they confront territorial invaders. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t have finished Rorschach off as fast as possible. The third group wouldn’t have waited so long to go after the ship once it was isolated.”

  “Take a step back,” Jennifer said. “How do you know the pack split into three different groups?”

  “Timing.” Anlon described his theory. The pack was tracking the fleet, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. That opportunity presented itself when the Recons were sent ahead, breaking the fleet into two separate chunks. “The attack happened not long after that. I think it was the opening the alpha was waiting for.”

  Pebbles nodded. “I see what you mean. If Rorschach was the target, the main pack wouldn’t have left the ship just to chase after the Recons.”

  “That’s right,” Anlon said. “Also, remember the report’s remarks about how ridiculously fast the BLUMOs closed in on the fleet after attacking the Recons. Doesn’t it make more sense that a second group was deployed to take on the UMOs and the other fleet probes? I think the alpha sized up the opposition during the BLUMOs’ surveillance and realized the full pack wasn’t needed to deal with the UMOs and the probes. And, wow, was the alpha right. The UMOs were way overmatched. You can tell that from the audio clips alone.

  “In the early recordings, the UMOs didn’t even react when the quiver-tones from the BLUMOs showed up. Somehow, the UMOs didn’t view the BLUMOs as threats. Normally, if forager bees from a foreign colony show up at your hive, you’re going to act quickly to drive them off. You don’t want them getting too close to your honeycomb. You don’t want them spotting weaknesses in the hive that can be torn open, making it easier for other foreign bees to get at the honey inside. The UMOs were way too docile.”

  Jennifer tapped a pen on the edge of the desk. “Yeah, it does seem strange the UMOs let them get so close for so long. The UMOs should have sensed their electrical energy, right?”

  “You would think so. In fact, I’m sure they sensed them. They just didn’t seem to care until it was way too late.”

  “Why?” Jennifer asked.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because they had become domesticated. They were trained by Dr. Shilling to react to certain stimuli, and in the process they lost
some of their instinctual behaviors. Matter of fact, I think Rorschach’s UMOs dumbed down so much, they didn’t even notice the BLUMOs’ first attempt to lure them into a fight.”

  Pebbles, who had been thumbing through the report again, looked up. “What first attempt?”

  “On clip three,” Anlon said. “The sharp interaction between the quivers and the chirps. I think the alpha tried to bait the UMOs by making itself known as a threat, expecting the UMOs to respond. The alpha probably had the BLUMO pack lying in wait, hoping to draw the UMOs away into a kill zone. But the UMOs didn’t do anything but chirp back a few times. It’s almost as if the UMOs closest to the BLUMOs didn’t recognize the quiverer as a threat.”

  Jennifer frowned. “A lot of your theory makes sense. But if it’s correct, why did the third group take so long to attempt to capture Rorschach?”

  “This is pure speculation on my part,” he said, “but I think the sudden departure of the Cargos surprised the third group, the alpha’s group. Especially after Rorschach’s UMOs chased after the probes. I think the alpha was surprised again by Morgan’s ruse, but I’ll tell you one thing: they won’t be surprised like that again.”

  “So you do think the BLUMOs will come after Rorschach again,” Pebbles said.

  “Without a doubt,” Anlon said. “And Lord help the crew when they do. This time, the whole pack will be together.”

  Augustus Amato’s office

  A3rospace Industries Command and Control Center

  Mayaguana Island, The Bahamas

  Amato read the grim summary from Kiera:

  FE-TRE to MAYA-Flight: CCDR attacked by UMOs and severely injured during EVA to repair Cubes. Multiple burns on torso, arms and upper legs. Additional symptoms consistent with decompression sickness due to life support system shutdown during EVA. Will forward CCDR bio data ASAP. CDR also injured during emergency EVA to rescue CCDR. Also exhibiting symptoms consistent with decompression sickness. Extent unknown. We’ve done our best to treat them but need further medical guidance ASAP. FE-TRE out.