UMO: A Chilling Tale of First Contact

by K Patrick Donoghue

  NASA had no idea whether an EMP charge would kill or injure the UMOs. It was quite possible it would just piss them off. And the damn little space fireflies could move at supersonic speed. Firing one of their missiles at a swarm of them would be like shooting a pop gun at a moving train: one would have to guess their path and fire ahead of it. Unlike a train, however, swarms were capable of changing direction in a heartbeat, whether bees, starlings or electromagnetic alien life-forms.

  Still, thought Avery, it was better to have something that might fend off an attack than to face the creatures with no means of defense. And Avery took some comfort in the belief the missiles might provide Cetus Prime a means of escape, even if they missed their target.

  Each missile carried a lure of sorts, designed to attract and draw the UMOs away from Cetus Prime and its cadre of probes by emitting a stream of ions in its wake. Again, the concept was a total swag, but it made sense to Avery. The UMOs fed on ions trapped between Earth’s magnetosphere and ionosphere. If the weapon system worked as advertised, the swarm would follow the missile, gobbling up the ions in its trail, until the EMP warhead exploded. If the resulting EMP blast didn’t kill them, the Pentagon and NASA hoped it would act like a shock grenade, disorienting them long enough for Cetus Prime and its probes to retreat or fire another missile.

  But if the missiles proved useless, Cetus Prime had no backup weaponry. Their only choice would be to turn and flee, and Avery knew they couldn’t outrun the UMOs under normal conditions. He couldn’t begin to imagine how fast they might fly if enraged.

  “Okay, mission accomplished. Can one of y’all flip the switch in the pallet control room, please,” Nick said over the intercom.

  “Roger that,” Christine said. “I’ll take care of it, Commander.”

  “Copy,” Avery said.

  Moments later, Christine said, “Switch isn’t working.”

  “Try jiggling the fuse. Might’ve come loose when I was looking at it,” Nick said.

  Sure it did, Avery thought.

  After a short delay, the pallet lights appeared on Avery’s monitor. Nick gave a thumbs-up to the pallet camera and said, “Let there be light. Requesting permission to proceed to Perseus.”

  “Permission granted,” Avery said.

  At 2011 UTC, Nick arrived at the platform upon which Perseus was anchored. While Christine watched him from the pallet porthole, Nick began to examine the probe’s docking clamps. At the same moment, the X-ray spectrometer in the laboratory compartment began to record violent spikes.

  Out of the black appeared a stream of UMOs…hurtling straight for Cetus Prime.

  4: CROSSED WIRES

  Cetus Prime Mission Control

  Goddard Space Flight Center

  Date: 04.28.1995

  Time: 1758 UTC

  When Colonel Paul Morgan entered the astronaut program as an Air Force captain, his aim had been singular: make it into space. He hadn’t cared if it was a rotation on Skylab, a Shuttle mission or something more exotic, like a trip to the moon or Mars. In fact, he’d have ridden into orbit strapped to the side of an Atlas rocket, if necessary.

  His dream came true in ways he could never have imagined. He’d been to space four times, logging over eight hundred hours beyond Earth’s confines. Three Shuttle missions, two of them as flight commander, a rotation on Skylab and forty hours of spacewalking made Morgan one of NASA’s most decorated astronauts.

  Around the halls of NASA’s facilities, however, Morgan was revered more for a single, selfless act of bravery than for his illustrious track record. The year was 1989, and Morgan had piloted the Space Shuttle Horizon to deploy a classified satellite for the Department of Defense. The mission had gone smoothly until the satellite was released from the Shuttle’s cargo bay. With the satellite a safe distance from the Shuttle, an attempt was made to remotely activate the satellite’s rocket, which would propel the payload to its intended orbital location.

  The rocket did not fire, however, leading to the possible loss of a vital surveillance asset at a time when the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse and tensions were escalating in the Persian Gulf. A decision was made in Houston to have Horizon “catch” the drifting satellite and manually activate its rocket by pulling a lever on the side of the satellite with a makeshift lasso extended from the Shuttle’s cargo arm.

  It was as dangerous an impromptu work-around as ever contemplated by NASA, for there was a chance the rocket had failed to fire due to an engine fault, rather than a command fault. Activating the engine manually risked an explosion, which would destroy both the satellite and Horizon, killing all the astronauts aboard. Further, the lasso had to be weak enough to break free from the cargo arm once the lever was pulled or else the tethered satellite might crash into the Shuttle when its engine ignited.

  Two astronauts had performed EVAs to observe the DoD payload’s release from the cargo bay, and they remained there as Morgan maneuvered the Shuttle to close the gap with the powerless satellite. Inside Horizon, other crew members worked together to construct the makeshift lasso. Once constructed, the astronauts in the Shuttle bay attached it to the cargo arm. They then extended the cargo arm and lasso, but the lasso was too flimsy to hook onto the satellite’s engine lever without assistance, so Mission Control instructed one of the astronauts to climb the cargo arm and hand guide the loop of the ten-foot-long plastic lasso over the lever.

  At seventeen thousand miles per hour, separated by no more than twenty feet, the two spacecraft flew in tandem. With one arm clutching the cargo arm, Mission Specialist Julia Carillo reached up to take hold of the plastic lasso just as three golf-ball-sized lights zoomed in front of her helmet. Startled, she let go of both the cargo arm and the lasso. “Jesus, what the —”

  On the flight deck, Morgan’s eyes darted to the cargo bay camera feed. “Repeat, Julia. What’s going on?”

  The satellite, pulled toward the Shuttle by the magnetic wake created by the illuminated objects, crashed into Carillo, striking her helmet. The satellite began to tumble, knocking her away from the cargo bay.

  “Oh, shit!” Morgan said.

  “Horizon, report,” said the voice of CAPCOM in Houston.

  As Carillo drifted toward the rear of the Shuttle, her safety tether reached its end. The whip of the taut cable caused her to bounce off one of the cargo bay doors, rendering her unconscious. The other astronaut in the bay, Mission Specialist Benjiro Saito hunkered down to seek cover just as the tumbling satellite clipped the cargo arm, snapping it in two.

  “Horizon, abort SAT engine start,” instructed Houston.

  At the same time, chatter erupted from the crew watching the drama unfold from inside the Shuttle. The spacecraft lurched right when the cargo arm snapped, initiating a roll. Morgan looked up to see debris spray past the windows.

  “Oh, no,” Morgan said.

  With only seconds remaining before catastrophe, Morgan went into action. He steadied the roll with quick taps of the thruster controls, then employed stronger bursts of the thrusters to lower and slow the Shuttle, allowing the careening satellite to shoot forward of the ship. As he completed the maneuvers, an ear-splitting scream filled his headset. The flailing portion of the cargo arm still attached to the Shuttle had cut through the unconscious astronaut’s tether, knocking her limp body away from the ship.

  “Astronaut off-structure!” called one of the crew.

  “Get her, Benji! Get her quick!” yelled another.

  “Horizon, abort. Repeat, abort!” CAPCOM ordered. “Get Horizon out of there, Paul.”

  Saito, still hunkered down in the bay, arrived too late to reach the broken tether. “Damn! Damn! Damn!”

  “Eject cargo-arm,” Morgan ordered his copilot. Once it floated free, Morgan turned the ship to go after his drifting crewmate, relying initially on visual observations provided by Saito. “Give me a bearing, Benji, where is she?”

  “Horizon. Acknowledge abort.”

  Guided by Saito, Morgan managed to
get within a hundred feet of Carillo by the time the doomed DoD payload began to break up from the stresses of its high-speed tumble, sending pieces flying back toward the Shuttle.

  “Horizon, alter course immediately!”

  Fearing the debris would damage the Shuttle, or further endanger the drifting Carillo, Morgan made a fateful decision. Silencing his headset, he turned control of the ship over to his copilot with a pair of terse instructions. “Change course and I’ll beat your ass. Keep us as close to Carillo as possible.”

  While Houston continued to demand Horizon veer away from the path of satellite debris, Morgan headed for the cargo bay airlock, where he began to put on his spacesuit.

  Mission Control, monitoring the ship’s functions, noticed the activation of the display and control module on Morgan’s suit. “Commander, Horizon. Sensors indicate EVA prep in progress. Report.”

  Morgan ignored their hails and clipped into an experimental jet pack stored in the airlock. It had last been used in 1985, but Morgan was familiar with it. He had been the guinea pig who tested it during a spacewalk on a previous Shuttle flight.

  Before Mission Control could piece together what was happening, Morgan pulled an oxygen mask from the airlock control panel. He took several deep breaths of pure oxygen, cast aside the mask, locked his helmet into place and exited the airlock. By the time he activated the jet pack, Mission Control had surmised Morgan’s plan. “Commander, Horizon. Abort EVA. Repeat, abort! Acknowledge!”

  Morgan never considered his own safety. He knew he risked decompression sickness or death, and he knew the jet pack might fail, but there was no way he was going to watch one of his crew float away into oblivion from his seat on the flight deck.

  To the amazement of his speechless crewmates aboard Horizon, Morgan fired the jet pack, captured his comrade and returned to the ship in the span of ten minutes. While the satellite was lost, the Shuttle escaped major damage and Morgan saved Carillo.

  The rescue did come with consequences, however. Morgan incurred the bends as a result of skipping NASA’s multihour airlock decompression protocol, though it only affected his joints and he recovered by the time Horizon returned to Earth. In addition, the flight director relieved him of command for the duration of the mission for disobeying the repeated abort orders.

  Upon returning to Earth, however, a board of inquiry cleared Morgan of wrongdoing. The crew contended Mission Control’s communications had been garbled and none of them had heard Houston’s abort commands.

  Given the classified nature of the mission, no word of the satellite mishap, Morgan’s daring rescue or his disciplinary hearing ever made it into the public domain. He never went into space again but he never regretted his decision. And his courageous actions made him an instant legend among his astronaut brothers and sisters, earning him the nickname “Skywalker.”

  Thus, he had been the perfect choice to serve as CAPCOM for the Cetus mission. His experience, grace under pressure and heroic actions provided the crew of Cetus Prime a “been there, done that, have the patch to prove it” advocate and advisor at Mission Control.

  These traits were especially important given the critical nature of the mission — and the inexperience of the crew. Though none of the NASA brass would admit it, they thought it unlikely the astronauts aboard Cetus Prime would return to Earth. As such, they chose a group of eager rookies whose thirst to explore trumped their sense of danger. NASA knew full well that balance would shift the longer the mission wore on, and when it did they wanted a level-headed compatriot for the crew to lean on. Someone who could coax them to press on when things got tough. Someone they admired and respected. Someone they would not want to fail.

  Morgan understood his role and accepted the assignment primarily because he knew the green crew was being led to the wolves. But first he had tried to convince the mission director, Dennis Pritchard, to let him pilot Cetus Prime instead of Avery Lockett.

  “Look, Dennis,” Morgan had said. “These are pups we’re talking about. They need someone more seasoned than Lockett.”

  “It’s not my decision, Paul,” Pritchard had replied. “DoD wants an active-duty officer at the helm. And don’t sell Lockett short. He’s had combat experience. He’s been in high-stress situations.”

  “I don’t care if he’s freaking Captain America, he’s never been in space,” Morgan had countered.

  Pritchard rejected the plea. Only later, when Cetus Prime was three months into its flight to Mars, did Morgan learn the real reason he’d been passed over for the ship’s command. Over a late-night bottle of whiskey, a drunk Morgan had complained to Pritchard about the snub. An equally lit Pritchard told him, “Damn it, Paul! Don’t you get it! They aren’t going to make it back. Strike that. It will be a miracle if they do. NASA couldn’t risk losing its biggest hero to these blasted UMOs.”

  As Morgan read the “beekeeper” message from Avery, he thought of that conversation with Pritchard. And of the half-truths he’d been forced to relay to the crew about the MAG-SAT experiment results. While he knew the powers that be at NASA and the Pentagon cared about the mission’s success, he was increasingly concerned about their commitment to the crew. The top brass would never overtly declare the crew expendable, but Morgan sensed that sentiment growing the farther Cetus Prime traveled away from Earth.

  It was the reason Morgan had taken to wearing a button clipped to his ID badge with the astronauts’ official flight photo. He also taped candid pictures of each around the display of his CAPCOM console. The pictures had been taken at a prelaunch picnic held in the crew’s honor and showed them in casual summer attire, talking and laughing with other members of the mission team. Morgan couldn’t force the decision makers to keep the crew’s welfare in their thoughts, but he could damn well make sure they were reminded of them.

  And he could also make sure Avery and his crew weren’t completely in the blind, even if he wasn’t authorized to fully disclose certain developments. His decision to transmit Dr. Braun’s message to Christine the previous day without editing out Braun’s gravitation toward the Pentagon’s predator theory was one such act. He had felt an obligation to warn the crew, and looking at Avery’s reply, Morgan was relieved to know his warning had been received.

  Pritchard had been livid when he found out about the unedited Braun missive, questioning Morgan’s loyalty when he confronted him. Morgan could recall every word of the exchange.

  “What the hell good does it do now? They’re there. We can’t do anything to help them,” Pritchard said.

  “Bull!” Morgan bellowed. “We can tell them to leave Andromeda in hibernation. Better yet, tell them to turn around and haul ass out of there.”

  “You know that’s not my call. This is a joint mission. I can’t abort it without buy-in from above and General Ferris.”

  “They’re prepping to wake the probes, Dennis. Tomorrow. We can’t wait any longer. If they launch Andromeda and the UMOs detect its X-ray generator, they’re dead.”

  “You don’t know that,” Pritchard said.

  “You’re joking, right? You saw what the UMOs did to the XGEN-SAT…and there were only two dozen of them. What happens if Cetus Prime runs into a swarm with hundreds of them, like Phobos-2 did?”

  “Ferris contends the XGEN test was inconclusive. He won’t support aborting the mission.”

  “Who gives a bleep? The crew should be told of the potential risk,” Morgan said.

  “Use your head, Paul, not your heart. If we tell them to deactivate the X-ray generator, there’s no guarantee the UMOs still won’t attack. As Ferris pointed out in the debrief, neither Phobos-2 nor Mars Observer had XGENs onboard.”

  “Yeah, but Phobos-2 had an X-ray spectrometer and both Phobos-2 and Mars Observer had gamma-ray spectrometers,” Morgan said. “The XGEN-SAT test may be telling us the UMOs are sensitive to high-frequency, high-wavelength electromagnetic radiation.”

  “That may be,” Pritchard said, “but spectrometers don’t generate X-rays
or gamma rays, Paul. You know that. They only detect and collect the rays.”

  “True, but spectrometers do interact with the rays they collect, and they do excite them to separate waves of different intensities,” Morgan said. “Who knows, maybe they create electromagnetic noise that the UMOs consider dangerous.”

  “I hardly think spectrometers create detectable electromagnetic interference, especially in space,” Pritchard said.

  “Not to us, but maybe to them. Think about how the right tone can shatter glass, or how dogs howl at sounds we can’t hear. The UMOs may be very sensitive to artificially created EMI, even at levels we find undetectable,” Morgan said.

  “If that’s the case, how do you explain the fact that there are more than a dozen X-ray telescopes orbiting Earth, each with spectrometers, and not one of them has ever been attacked?” Pritchard asked. “Face it, all we learned from the XGEN test is that the UMOs may have a potential sensitivity to the broadcast of X-rays. And, remember, we boosted the hell out of the X-ray signals in order to generate any interest from the UMOs.”

  “Regardless, I think we should tell them to shut down all their spectrometers until after they try to locate the debris with cameras.”

  “Look, without CPO’s spectrometers, it will be impossible for Cetus Prime to locate debris from Phobos-2 and Mars Observer. And without Andromeda’s X-ray generator, they can’t examine the internal damage in any debris they do find. We need to know whether the damage was random or selective. It’s the whole purpose of the mission!”

  “Dennis, Andromeda has better cameras than Phobos-2 had,” Morgan said. “Assuming pieces of Phobos-2 and Mars Observer are still in orbit, and there’s no guarantee of that, Andromeda can maneuver close enough to get the intel we need without blasting the debris with X-rays. We should tell them to turn off their XRS and GRS and try to locate the debris with other instruments.”