Ajay looked toward his unconscious commander, and another thought darted to the forefront of his mind. “No! Friends!”
He clutched his head. The thought was accompanied by a sharp throb and unfamiliar images. No — not all of them were unfamiliar. He recognized one of them.
“Why am I thinking of Saturn?”
He unbuckled from his seat, tapped his GEFF watch to turn off the magnetic forcefield, and glided to Kiera. He nudged her gently and whispered her name, but though her snoring stopped, she didn’t wake. He tried again, this time shaking her and calling her name loudly, but still got no response. He tried to wake Morgan and Carillo as well, with the same results.
Finally he powered off Rorschach’s engines. There was no point in draining their batteries. The UMOs were still in control of the ship and, until the others woke up, Ajay was just along for the ride. He wondered if the UMOs had been successful in trapping and killing the creature they hunted.
And then he remembered Shilling. He propelled out of the flight deck and down the corridor to the medical bay. To his relief, he found Shilling was alive, though still unconscious. He adjusted the man’s straps and floated back out.
In the crew galley, he raided their refrigerated storage for two pouches of water and two chocolate-peanut butter protein bars. Cupping his booty in one arm, he pushed off the wall, angled his body through the galley door and returned to the flight deck.
Strapped back into his seat, he sipped water and munched on one of the bars. According to the flight clock, which displayed the time both in Coordinated Universal Time as well as in Eastern Daylight Time, it was 11:26 p.m. on Mayaguana. That meant it was 11:26 a.m. the following day in his hometown of Namche Bazaar in Nepal. Saturn popped into his mind again as Ajay thought of his father’s favorite planet. He wondered if his family was thinking of him and whether his father was still watching the stars at night.
Ajay smiled. The old man had told him before the mission that he would track Rorschach’s progress on the A3I website every day and train his telescope on the ship’s coordinates every night. “Someone has to keep an eye on you or you will get yourself into trouble!”
Looking around at his unconscious shipmates, Ajay muttered, “Hope you’re still watching, Papa. We could use some help.”
As he looked over at Kiera, he noticed something he hadn’t seen before: two blinking green lights on her station’s desktop. Why didn’t he see those before? Perhaps her floating hands had blocked his view.
The flight engineer’s station had three panel sections below the monitor displays. The digital gauges on the center panel allowed Kiera to monitor the VLF engines. The mini-displays on the right helped her surveil the reaction control system performance and ship’s orientation. The left section showed status information for their fleet of probes. And that was the section where the lights were blinking.
But all the probes were gone, except for the docked Cargo-4. So why would two lights be blinking? He could understand one, but two? Was it the Recon in the cargo bay? No. He was certain it had been powered off after Carillo finished locking down the CubeSat. In fact, Ajay remembered it was definitely off when he and Kiera tied Shilling to the companion docking station.
His curiosity was strong enough to temporarily push aside the incessant cycle of images that just wouldn’t leave his mind — a spaceship, a moon crater, an ice castle and Saturn. He stowed the half-eaten bar in his breast pocket, unstrapped from his seat and floated over to Kiera.
Angling himself past her bobbing arms, he studied the two blinking lights. Inside the rectangular green digital flashes, white labels read “LAND-1” and “LAND-2.”
Ajay frowned. “How did they turn on?”
Cargo bay — the Rorschach Explorer
With his GEFF toggled on, Ajay knelt by the two landers, or the “squids,” as he liked to call the drones. These four-foot-tall, football-shaped domes were adorned with antennas, booms, satellite dishes and cameras, and were anchored to their docks by clamps that pinned their six folded legs. Fully extended, the legs would raise the crest of the black domes by six feet. Dotting each of the folded segments of the legs were rotating thruster vents that looked to Ajay like suckers on squid tentacles.
He watched the solid and flickering lights on their control panels and listened to the churn of their computers. Concentrating on the lander closest to him, he leaned forward to study the abbreviations beneath the active lights on its midsection control panel. He was distracted by a sound.
He looked up to see a camera on the probe rotating. It stopped with a click. Then it moved another quarter turn and made another click. By the time the third turn and click occurred, Ajay realized what was happening. He looked back to the control panel and ran his finger across the labels until he found it: a solid green light above a single white letter ‘X’.
He was too late to hop up and stand in the way of the camera’s lens when it snapped its fourth and final photo, but it didn’t matter. He turned and dashed for the airlock.
As he passed through into the main corridor, he heard Morgan’s voice over the intercom. “Where are you, Ajay? Report.”
Running at as full a sprint as GEFF would allow, Ajay shouted toward the open flight deck door. “We have comms! We have comms!”
Flight deck — the Rorschach Explorer
September 6, 2019
It took Morgan and Ajay several minutes of cajoling before Carillo and Kiera finally stirred, and a dozen more before the still-blinded Kiera was coherent enough to walk Ajay through how to access the dashboard for Land-1’s control program.
“Now tell me what’s on the screen,” she said.
“Uh, a bunch of menu options.”
“One of the options should be either history or activity.”
“Yep, I see one called activity,” Ajay said. “Should I click that icon?”
Morgan and Carillo stood behind Ajay as he worked at Kiera’s station. Kiera was seated at Shilling’s station.
“Yes, that’s the one,” Kiera said. “There should be a collection of folders.”
“Right, there are six. Uplinks, downlinks, firmware updates, application updates, diagnostics, and the last one is—”
“Skywalker,” Morgan said. He pointed at the screen. “Open it.”
Inside the folder was a listing of nine files. The date stamps shown to the right of the file names indicated they’d been uplinked to Land-1 within the last three hours. All but one were text files. The last was an image file. The oldest of the files was named OPENFIRST.
Ajay opened it.
The text of the file appeared. Ajay read it aloud for Kiera’s benefit while Morgan and Carillo read from the screen.
“MAYA-FLIGHT to CDR-TRE: Received your transmission. Please acknowledge receipt of ours. We have reestablished tracking of TRE through Land-1 and Land-2. We are aware of your position and heading but are in the dark as to your status. Please advise. There have been MAJOR developments requiring your IMMEDIATE attention…repeat…IMMEDIATE attention. Review follow-on files for more details. Everyone at Maya, NASA and just about everywhere else on Earth is thinking of you. We are all standing by to assist in whatever way possible. Be strong and be good to one another. MAYA-FLIGHT out.”
Morgan wiped his eyes and ordered Ajay to move out of the seat. Turning to Kiera, he asked, “How do I send a message back?”
Kiera smiled. “Easy-peasy.”
A few instructions later, Morgan’s text reply was on its way to Mayaguana. He then turned to his crew. “Let’s get the rest of these files open, find out what’s going on and start working on a new plan.”
Set of Expedition to Callisto
World Network News Studios
New York, New York
September 6, 2019
Jenna Toffy stood in the glow of a spotlight on a darkened set. She wore a sleeveless pink dress with a #bgood21another photo badge pinned above her left breast. Holding a rolled-up script with both hands, she looked into
the camera with an expression akin to that of a minister offering condolences.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Expedition to Callisto. I’m your host, Jenna Toffy. For twelve weeks on this program, we have provided our viewers the unique opportunity to ride along with the crew of the Rorschach Explorer as they attempted to make history.
“During that time, we were afforded exclusive access to the crew and the men and women supporting the mission at A3rospace Industries. That backstage pass allowed us to present you with amazing video footage, compelling interviews and a chance to get to know the people leading Rorschach’s grand adventure. An adventure that took the first of several chilling turns last week during this very program.
“For reasons that have yet to be made clear to WNN, Augustus Amato chose to cut our access after last week’s episode, leaving us, like you, in the dark to everything that has happened since. Thankfully, there are heroes with intimate knowledge of the events confronting the brave crew of the Rorschach Explorer who have come forward to share information Mr. Amato could have shared but chose to withhold. WNN has reported news of those events as we’ve learned of them.
“And tonight, on a special edition of Expedition to Callisto, we have more breaking news to report. As we have done with all the Rorschach news stories, we reached out to A3I for comment. But, as has been the case since last week, they declined our request.
“Before turning to our team of reporters who’ve been working this latest twist in Rorschach’s journey, one final thought. Some have called our reporting irresponsible, claiming we are undermining A3I’s efforts to save the crew and sowing fear among the public. To those voices we say: the public has a right to know, whether the news is pretty or not.
“This isn’t just a story about desperate attempts to rescue brave astronauts, or a story about how ego and impatience set the stage for a bungled mission. It is a story about human contact with aliens that may forever reshape life on Earth. On all counts, the public has a right to know. On all counts, Augustus Amato should know that.”
Mission Control
A3rospace Industries Command and Control Center
Mayaguana Island, The Bahamas
A row of camping cots had been set up against the back wall of Mission Control so exhausted off-duty controllers could try to catch whatever sleep they could while their on-duty counterparts manned the center’s stations. Though Dante prodded the staff to return to their Mayaguana dormitory rooms when off-duty, no one would leave, especially not now.
After it appeared that Morgan’s gamble to break free from the BLUMOs had failed, and after it seemed Mayaguana’s attempt to link with the Whave Technologies’ drone-landers had flopped, a cloud of despair had descended upon Mission Control. But then the improbable had occurred. The landers pinged Mayaguana. The hour delay in their response was still unexplained, but nobody cared. They could reestablish contact.
It wasn’t until later, when Antonio Wallace arrived at Mayaguana to review the data transmitted by the landers, that he was able to come up with a reason for the communications downtime. The unique, multi-pronged antennas dedicated to lander comms on Rorschach’s instrumentation pallet had found it challenging to find a gap in the BLUMO web surrounding the ship.
“The BLUMOs must have changed their configuration, creating the gap we needed,” he hypothesized.
The energized mission control team had spent the next hour uplinking messages to and downlinking status information from the landers. But for the following three hours, there was no response from the Rorschach crew. Either they hadn’t noticed the landers were active, or they were unable to reply. This cratered emotions once again — until someone suggested activating the drones’ cameras.
When the downlink with photos arrived another hour later, Mission Control was heartened to discover that not only was the cargo bay intact, but there was evidence of a visitor. The airlock door was open in one photograph, and the partial shadow of a person’s body was visible in another. The two together implied the crew was aware the landers had turned on and had come to the bay to investigate.
A tense hour passed after that, with controllers hovering near Whave Technologies’ station in the center, waiting for news of a downlink from Rorschach. The place went bonkers when Morgan’s text file finally arrived.
CDR-TRE to MAYA-FLIGHT: Roger your transmissions. Clever solution. Good work to all! Beers are on us. TRE status: escape attempt failed, BLUMOs still controlling TRE, but alpha is MIA now. No change in crew status other than some whopping headaches. Appreciate everyone’s thoughts, prayers and assistance. Will review files and respond ASAP. You be strong, too. No thumb-sucking here or there. That’s an order. CDR-TRE out.
Now the center awaited the crew’s next transmission. As confident as Morgan’s message had been, everyone in Mission Control, including Dante, Pritchard, Antonio and Amato, wondered how the crew would react to the news of the Saturn flashes, the UMO bugout from the Callisto spaceport, the destruction of Cetus Prime and photograph of the alien spacecraft in the Nuada crater.
No one was leaving the center. Not now.
Crew ready room —the Rorschach Explorer
Flying through the asteroid belt
The crew immediately latched on to the Saturn flashes and the photograph of the alien ship in the Nuada crater. They had all experienced the same rotation of unfamiliar images. Carillo explained the images were similar to those communicated by the BLUMO alpha during their exchange of thoughts. “It sounds like the alpha connected with all of us,” she said.
“That explains the bolts of electricity,” Ajay said. He shared how the alien had shot bolts at Morgan and Carillo. “But I didn’t see any lightning hit me. I just remember talking to Kiera and then…nothing.”
Kiera nodded. “And I was just listening to Ajay when a thought blocked out what he was saying: ‘No! Friends!’”
“I had the same thought!” Ajay said. “What does it mean?”
“That was the alpha communicating,” said Carillo. “She said the same thing to me. She must have figured out Paul’s plan. I think she was trying to tell us not to try to escape.”
“All right, let’s try to put the pieces together,” Morgan said. “We all received images of Saturn, a crater, an ice-covered structure and a big-ass black ship identical to the one in this picture.”
“And we now know about the Saturn flashes,” Kiera added.
“I think it’s pretty obvious, don’t you?” Carillo said. “The Callistons have returned. The BLUMOs are taking us to meet them. That ship is on Callisto. She shared visions of the spacecraft.”
Kiera’s blindfold had fallen down over her nose. She pushed it up and tightened the knot behind her head. “Is it obvious though? The vision I had of the ship doesn’t look anything like the Calliston ships Cetus Prime photographed. And the structure isn’t the one on Callisto.”
“I agree,” said Ajay. “And why would the BLUMOs think the Callistons are friends if they demolished Cetus Prime?”
Morgan studied the photograph of the ship. “I think it’s time to stop guessing and get some answers. Julia, can you summon the alpha again?”
Carillo shrugged. “It worked before. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work again.”
“Uh…aren’t you forgetting something?” Kiera said. “She zapped all of us. I’d say she’s pretty pissed we tried to escape.”
It was a hard point to argue, but Carillo did. “It sounds counterintuitive, but I don’t think she was pissed. I think she was scared we might leave.”
Kiera rubbed her forehead. “She has a strange way of showing she’s scared.”
“They don’t have another way to get our attention,” Carillo said. “And she didn’t just zap us, she communicated the images. She was trying to tell us why we shouldn’t escape.”
“True,” said Morgan. “And if she was really that pissed, she would have killed us and destroyed the ship. But she didn’t. The BLUMOs are very interested
in us meeting that ship. We should try to find out as much as we can about why.”
Kiera sat with arms crossed and her forehead wrinkled into a frown. “If we’re going to try, and I get the reasons why we would want to try, we need to communicate our concerns about Jupiter’s radiation. If we exit the belt and they take us on a course close to Jupiter, we’ll cook.”
Morgan nodded. “Agreed. Julia?”
“I’ll do my best,” she said.
Flight deck — the Rorschach Explorer
Flying through the asteroid belt
When everyone was buckled into their seats, Morgan sent another text file to Mayaguana.
CDR-TRE to MAYA-FLIGHT: Transmissions reviewed. Additional perspective VERY valuable. Thank you! We believe BLUMOs are leading TRE to the Nuada crater to meet ship in photo. Long story, no time to tell. CCDR to attempt conversation with BLUMO alpha to learn more. Will transmit more info after CCDR convo. CDR-TRE out.
Then he nodded to Carillo. “Ready when you are.”
She closed her eyes and focused on projecting her thoughts to the BLUMO alpha. “Talk? Scared. Please talk.”
While she waited for the tingle she had felt in her earlier summoning, images of her children and husband filled her mind, and frightening moments in her life drifted up. She recalled her mother hugging her, her father’s soothing voice. Emotion swelled inside her. She pursed her lips and breathed deeply — a technique she’d used many times as a fighter pilot and astronaut.
She felt a throbbing sensation in her chest. “Something’s happening.”
The throbbing sensation felt almost like a wave of energy. It was strong…and oddly comforting.
Magwave (The Rorschach Explorer Missions Book 2) Page 21
