Magwave (The Rorschach Explorer Missions Book 2)

by K Patrick Donoghue

  A hot poker to the gut would have felt better than the sensation searing inside Amato’s abdomen. He looked up at Dante.

  The mission director turned his eyes away. “I’m sorry, Mr. Amato. It’s my fault. We sent them the EVA abort message, but it didn’t arrive in time. We had an uplink in progress. Even though we killed it to send the abort, enough had been transmitted to delay Rorschach’s receipt of the abort.”

  The principal sacrifice in switching to UHF-band from X-band is a drop in data throughput. While radio signals of all frequencies travel through space at the same speed, the speed of light, the amount of data that can be transmitted is dependent on the frequency of waves in the transmission. At lower frequencies, less data can be transmitted. At higher frequencies, the opposite is true. For example, an SHF transmission over an X-band antenna can deliver ten times more data at one time than a UHF transmission. This means downlinks and uplinks of data via lower frequency bands can take much longer.

  “It’s not your fault, Dante,” Amato said. “It’s just bad luck.”

  “All the same, I feel responsible.” Dante sighed, his head lowered. When he looked back up, he said, “The flight surgeon sent a list of triage questions and initial treatment suggestions to Kiera. Once we get her answers back, the doctor will provide more specific treatment options. In the meantime, I’ve got the team next door prepping for mission abort.”

  Another stab to the gut. “You’re right, of course. I should have listened to you earlier.”

  “I could have fought harder if I felt that strongly about it. Like you said, just bad luck on our part,” Dante said.

  “Mark the time and send the command.”

  “Roger that.”

  As Dante stood to leave, Myers entered. “Mr. Amato, I have Dr. Cully on the line. He says he needs to speak with you urgently.”

  Dante looked to Amato. “You want me to stay?”

  “No, go ahead and transmit the abort. If he has something important to share, I’ll have Mark patch you in.”

  CHAPTER 9: SENTINEL

  Dr. Dante Fulton’s office

  A3rospace Industries Command and Control Center

  Mayaguana Island, The Bahamas

  September 4, 2019

  Dante stared at the blinking cursor on his computer screen as midnight came and went.

  “How did everything fall apart so fast?” he muttered. Short of Rorschach’s engines exploding, killing everyone aboard, Dante couldn’t imagine a bleaker scenario.

  The fleet of support probes was scattered and disabled. Rorschach’s only experienced astronauts were injured, possibly incapacitated. The hobbled ship and crew were more than 200 million kilometers from Earth, being hunted by lethal aliens, with no weaponry to defend themselves, no means of escape and no ability to communicate with their attackers.

  Back on Earth, despite their collective brainpower, Mission Control was powerless to do more than transmit suggestions over radio waves that took thirty minutes to reach Rorschach.

  The adage “a day late and a dollar short” kept rattling around in Dante’s head. Aborting the mission was easier said than done. And turning for home provided no guarantee the BLUMOs would call off their hunt.

  Anger swelled within him. How can we get out in front of what’s happening? There has to be something we can do to buy the crew time to regroup…some way to confuse or distract the BLUMOs.

  A knock sounded on his office door. Dennis Pritchard stood in the doorway. “Hey. Rorschach’s latest downlink is coming through. A couple of the files have already finished. You need to see them…right now.”

  Dante sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “Jesus, what now?”

  During the short walk to the Mission Control Center, Pritchard briefed him. “One of the files is a video of the attack on Major Carillo. I won’t BS you, it’s disturbing to watch. The other is Kiera’s triage report on Julia’s injuries. It’s just as gruesome. But damn it, Dante, together they paint a whole different picture of what’s going on up there.” The news sounded awful, yet Pritchard actually seemed excited by the new information.

  As they approached Pritchard’s station, Norris Preston’s head appeared above the console. “Just reached Dr. Brock. She received the files.”

  “Good. What about Augie?” Pritchard asked.

  “Mr. Amato’s on the phone right now, but Mark said he’d slip him a note.”

  “But you sent the files, right?”

  “Roger that.”

  Pritchard gripped Dante by the shoulder. “Sorry about the breach in protocol. I know I’m ordering your people around, but this was too important to wait until I tracked you down.”

  “No worries, Dennis. Just tell me what you discovered.”

  Pritchard pressed a couple of keys on his console, and a video of the Rorschach’s cargo bay began to play. Carillo was floating over the CubeSat docking platform at its center. “Watch carefully,” he said. “The lightning’s about to start.” He pressed another key, switching the video to slow-motion playback.

  Dante leaned forward and strained his eyes to spot the BLUMOs. An electrical discharge spiked out of nowhere, hitting Carillo on her helmet. Even in slow motion, it was so abrupt, Dante flinched.

  Carillo’s body lurched forward. Another jolt sent her backward until her tether tensed. Two more shocks followed. Then another six. Dante cringed at Carillo’s twisting and flailing.

  Pritchard paused the video. “I muted the sound. If you want to hear it, I’ll plug in my headset for you. Just don’t want to freak out everybody around us.”

  “I’ll listen to it later,” Dante said. “What are you wanting me to see here? The fact that the BLUMOs aren’t visible?”

  “That’s surely significant, but it’s not the most important part. Watch again. Focus on the order of discharges and where they strike.” He replayed the video.

  The first jolt hit Carillo on the helmet. The second one zapped her in the chest. The next several hit her arms, legs and torso. Thank God they didn’t hit her oxygen tanks, Dante thought. It was hard not to view the video as a savage attack, but on the second viewing, he began to see nuances that changed his interpretation.

  Before he could share his impressions, his cell phone vibrated. As he pulled it from his pocket, Preston reappeared. “Dr. Pritchard, I’ve got Dr. Brock on the line.”

  “Can you pipe her to the conference room phone?”

  “You got it.”

  Dante looked at his phone. It was Amato calling. “Hello, Mr. Amato?”

  “Are you with Dennis?”

  “I am.”

  “Good. I’ve got Anlon on the line, and I just finished watching the video Dennis sent. We need to have a group discussion right away.”

  “Yes, sir.” Dante rose to follow Pritchard to the conference room. “Dr. Brock’s called in. We’re on our way to the conference room. I’ll call you back from there and patch in Dr. Cully.”

  “Finally, a glimmer of hope,” Amato said before ending the call.

  As Dante raced to catch up with Pritchard, his mind grappled with the implications of the video.

  The BLUMOs hadn’t attacked Carillo.

  They’d scanned her.

  Office of the Chief Administrator

  NASA Headquarters

  Washington, D.C.

  Helen Brock muted the call and scribbled a list on the nearest piece of paper on her desk. Handing it to her assistant, Mary Evans, she said, “Have Houston send me these files from the Cetus Prime archive. Tell them I also want anything and everything they have on the UMO attack on Nick Reed, including his medical files.”

  “Yes, Doctor. It may be a little difficult though, given the time.”

  Brock looked at her watch. It was after one a.m. “So be it. And track down Dr. Mazari. Tell him to stand by for my call.”

  As Evans rushed out of the office, Brock unmuted the speakerphone, where the conversation had been continuing without her.

  “If true, it’s rema
rkable,” Amato was saying. “Are you sure, Dennis?”

  “I can’t be one hundred percent certain until we compare the data with what we downlinked from Cetus Prime, but it looks too much alike to be a coincidence,” Pritchard said.

  Brock agreed. She hadn’t been part of the Cetus Prime mission team, but she’d spearheaded NASA’s internal investigation of the files Amato’s team had extracted from the ship’s computers the preceding November. Those files had included video footage of the UMOs’ attack on flight engineer Nick Reed. He had been in the midst of a spacewalk to investigate a malfunction on the ship’s girder-like pallet when a small party of the alien beings surrounded him and zapped him with electrical discharges. Those bolts of electricity had rendered him brain-dead…or so the Mission Control flight surgeon had declared. To the surprise of his crewmates, Avery Lockett and Christine Baker, Nick awoke from a coma two days later. Their surprise turned to astonishment when they learned the encounter with the UMOs had left him with a crude ability to communicate with the aliens.

  “I didn’t notice the similarity at full speed,” Pritchard continued, “but when I saw Kiera’s diagram of the burn locations on Julia’s body, it was a déjà vu moment.”

  Brock cut in. “Dennis, forgive me for interrupting, but didn’t Avery’s report indicate Nick’s burns were aligned with his flight suit’s sensors?” Nick had worn a flight suit beneath his EMU, with sensors sewn into the fabric to measure his pulse, respiration, circulation, body temperature, blood-oxygen saturation and other life support metrics.

  “Yes, that’s right, Helen. I wonder, though, if Avery might have been wrong about that. And we never had the opportunity to examine his injuries directly.”

  “Anlon? Are you still on the line?” Amato asked.

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “I sent Dr. Cully the working group report on the first BLUMO attack and Ajay’s video-audio clips of the BLUMOs preceding the attack. He’s reached an interesting conclusion. In light of Dennis’ discovery, I think we should hear Dr. Cully’s theory. Anlon, the floor is yours.”

  Brock only half-listened to Anlon’s summary of his findings as she rewatched the video of Carillo’s encounter with the BLUMOs. There was something tugging at her mind about the sequence, something beyond its similarity with the assault on Nick Reed.

  She stopped the video and clicked on the file containing the drawing of Carillo’s injuries. The document featured a pre-printed outline of the front and back of a female human body, on which Kiera had added small circles indicating the locations of Carillo’s burns. Brock could see why this had captured Pritchard’s attention. The burns clearly weren’t random. Center of the torso, right and left sides of the upper chest, the undersides of both forearms and the fronts of both thighs.

  If Nick’s burns had been in the same locations, Brock could understand why Avery Lockett had linked this symmetrical burn pattern with the electromagnetic sensor locations in Nick’s flight suit. But over the twenty-five years since Cetus Prime launched, flight suit technology had evolved, and so had the biometric sensors incorporated into the suits. Modern suits had more sensors, and the placements were different than they were in the 1990s. Which led Brock to the same conclusion Pritchard had reached: the burn locations had nothing to do with the suit sensors.

  But there was a clear pattern — which indicated a purpose. The question was…what was that purpose?

  Anlon was just finishing his summary. “So you see, I don’t think the BLUMO attacks were about territory or food. They were designed to isolate Rorschach. And in light of what you’ve said about the attack on Major Carillo, how it jibes with what happened to Nick Reed, I think I now understand the BLUMOs’ purpose. They’re trying to determine whether Rorschach is friend or foe.”

  “You mean they want to know if Rorschach is another Cetus Prime,” Dante said.

  “Yes, I guess that’s a better way of putting it. You can understand the BLUMOs’ confusion. Cetus didn’t travel with a fleet of probes, and the presence of Rorschach’s UMO colony would only have added to that confusion.”

  “Because the UMOs didn’t behave as the BLUMOs expected,” Amato said.

  “Yes, that’s what it suggests to me. But I would run it by NASA’s UMO research group and have their animal behaviorists review our conclusions. They may disagree.”

  “We will,” Amato said. “But assuming you’re right, then the attack on Julia was part of that assessment process. To see if she was another Nick Reed, possibly?”

  Amato’s question pushed an answer to the front of Brock’s mind. She murmured, “No, not Nick Reed…”

  “You’re thinking what I’m thinking, aren’t you, Helen?” Pritchard said.

  Brock gazed at the diagram of Carillo’s burns again. Center of the chest. And in the video, the BLUMOs had zapped Carillo’s helmet, too. The discharge hadn’t made it through the helmet, so she hadn’t been burned…but her head had definitely been the target of their first shot. The back of her head.

  “Dennis,” she said, “can you remember — did the UMOs zap Nick’s helmet? The back of his helmet?”

  For a moment, there was silence over the speakerphone. Then Brock heard a gasp, and a female voice said, “Oh my God, Anlon. They thought she was a Calliston!”

  “Bingo!” Pritchard said. “Think of the order of the discharges. Head first, chest second.”

  Brock recalled the murals of Callistons found inside the Nuada spaceport by the Cetus Prime crew. They showed aliens that had humanoid features in some respects, one head, two arms, two legs, but with several differences, none more noticeable than their elongated, crested heads. To the biologists NASA hired to study the Callistons, the cranial feature looked similar to the crest of a dinosaur known as Parasaurolophus2. And while there was no consensus among paleontologists as to the purpose of the Parasaur’s crest, a prominent theory suggested it was a resonating chamber for producing and receiving low-frequency sounds. This theory appealed to the space agency’s biologists, given the Callistons’ apparent ability to communicate with UMOs. The scientists speculated the Callistons’ crest tubes transmitted and received low-frequency electromagnetic radiation instead of mechanically produced sounds.

  And then there was the rounded feature in the center of the Callistons’ chests. Some scientists speculated that was an anatomical feature beneath the Callistons’ clothing; Brock thought it looked similar to the display-and-control module attached to the chest of NASA astronauts’ spacesuits. Regardless of what it was, Brock couldn’t now ignore that the BLUMOs had fired their second shot at Carillo’s chest, right at the spot where the Callistons had a bulge — as did the astronaut.

  “I’ve got to admit, I think I agree,” Dante said. “The video sure gives the impression the BLUMOs scanned Major Carillo. I mean, if they really meant to attack her, they could have killed her easily given the kind of damage they’ve inflicted on our probes.”

  “True,” Amato said, “but why such an extensive scan?”

  “If I may offer a suggestion,” said Anlon, “it is not uncommon for animals to use multiple methods to distinguish friend from foe. Scents, calls, gestures. When the BLUMOs didn’t get the response they expected from the first couple of jolts, they may have determined Major Carillo was not a Calliston, and then they used the follow-on discharges to figure out what else she might be.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean,” Brock said. “Like another Nick Reed.”

  Another unidentified female voice came through the speakerphone. “Anlon, going back a sec, you mentioned calls. Do we know if the BLUMOs tried to communicate with Major Carillo before they started with the electric shocks? You know, the quiver-chirps or something like that?”

  “Actually, they may have tried to communicate with her,” Dante said. “While we’ve been on the phone, Dr. Shilling’s report on the attack arrived. The report says Ajay picked up a hissing sound on the HF receiver.”

  “Really? Is there an audio recording?” Anlon as
ked.

  “Hold on, let me check,” Pritchard said. “Uh…nothing yet. The rest of the downlink is still in progress.”

  Brock frowned. HF receiver? No, that was the wrong frequency. “Excuse me, Dante, but if the BLUMOs thought Carillo was a Calliston, wouldn’t they have tried to communicate with her on VLF?”

  “Good point,” said Dante. “You’re thinking about the Callistons’ head crest?”

  “That, and the fact Nick Reed built a VLF antenna to communicate with the UMOs around Mars.”

  Amato jumped in. “Rorschach has a VLF antenna. Has it been deployed, Dante? If not, we should instruct the crew to deploy it immediately. The BLUMOs may be attacking because they’re trying to talk with Rorschach and the ship’s not answering.”

  “They have two different VLF antennas, one for receiving, the other for transmitting,” Dante said. “The receiver antenna is on the instrument array but inactive. Kiera thought it would be useless when Rorschach’s engines were active. Same with the radiation shield. Too much interference to pick up anything from the UMOs. All they have to do is turn on the receiver in the comms center and they’re in—” He paused. “Hold on.”

  Through the speakerphone, Brock could hear muffled conversation.

  “Dante?” Amato said.

  “Yes, Mr. Amato, hold on please,” Dante repeated.

  The muffled conversation continued. Possibly an exchange between Dante and Pritchard.

  “Is something the matter, Dante?” Amato asked.

  Three sharp pounding sounds came over the phone, followed by a burst of grumbled expletives. Brock wondered if there’d been another unwelcome development. She closed her eyes and prayed the BLUMOs hadn’t launched another attack.

  She was in mid-prayer when another possibility popped into her mind. Had Carillo or Morgan taken a turn for the worse?

  “Dante, answer me. What’s going on?” Amato demanded.