UMO: A Chilling Tale of First Contact

by K Patrick Donoghue

Raising her head, she nodded. “I know, I know. I’ll try.”

  “Good. While I’m getting the engines back online, I need you to go through your instruments, see if we captured any data, any video, during the attack. See what you can piece together about what happened.”

  6: BLACKOUT

  Cetus Prime Mission Control

  Goddard Space Flight Center

  Date: 04.28.1995

  Time: 2040 UTC

  At 2030 UTC, the Mission Control dayshift began to hand off to the night shift. At each station, the dayshift specialists were briefing their nightshift counterparts on the day’s developments. Given Nick’s impending EVA, Pritchard and Morgan opted to remain until the spacewalk was completed and the sep-fault issue resolved.

  The briefings had included updates transmitted by Cetus Prime’s computers after Avery’s alert. The EVO officer reported Nick’s EVA preparation was almost complete. The emergency, environmental and consumables management officer noted Nick’s vital signs during depressurization appeared nominal and his spacesuit life support was operating within parameters. The guidance officer confirmed Cetus Prime was still on course to insert into Mars’ orbit on schedule, while the instrumentation and communications officer indicated the sep-fault error message was still active.

  Amid the din of the briefings, INCO reported the first sign of trouble at 2040. “Uh, Flight?”

  “Flight, here, INCO,” Pritchard said. “What’s up, Bobby?”

  “We didn’t receive CP’s 2030 downlink from DSN, so I called the DSN duty officer. They say the satellite network’s not the issue. They say no downlink was transmitted.”

  “Hmmm, that’s odd,” Pritchard said. “Check CP’s last downlink. Any issues with their X-band antenna?”

  “I believe all comm links were green, Flight. Checking again, stand by,” replied INCO. “Flight, X-band antenna was nominal at 2000.”

  “Copy, INCO,” Pritchard said. “Send out a ping to CP, all bands. Alert DSN and TDRS to notify us as soon as they get a response.”

  “Copy, Flight.”

  Cetus Prime carried four antennas, each capable of communicating with NASA, albeit on different radio bands. The X-band antenna was the ship’s highest-speed and most powerful communication link. Its signals were beamed to NASA’s Deep Space Network, a collection of satellites employed by NASA to track spacecraft far from Earth.

  The ship’s other three antennas were less powerful; hence data transmissions took more time to flow back and forth with Mission Control. At the higher end of these less-desirable communication devices was the ship’s Ku-band antenna. Next on the spectrum was Cetus Prime’s S-band antenna, and the team’s least powerful and slowest antenna was reserved for UHF-band communications. None of these lesser devices communicated with the DSN satellites. Instead, they were picked up by a different network of NASA satellites known as TDRS, or tracking and data relay satellites. The TDRS network was used primarily for near-Earth communications, but in a pinch they could be used to send and receive communications with deep space vessels.

  The light chatter around the center began to subside as each station became aware of the missing downlink. When Cetus Prime missed another transmission at 2100, and then failed to respond to pings sent to its four antennas, silence blanketed Mission Control.

  Pritchard paced the crowded room while Morgan stared at his console pictures of Avery, Christine and Nick. For eighteen minutes, time seemed to stand still.

  Finally, at 2118 UTC, INCO’s excited voice raced through the headsets of all in the room. “Flight, TDRS just received a return ping from CP on S-band.”

  Pritchard halted his pacing and began barking commands. “CAPCOM, prep CDR request for CP status. INCO, initiate system diagnostic queries via S-band uplink. EECOM, ditto on crew vitals. Guidance, get a fix on her position. Get to work, people. Let’s find out what the hell’s going on!”

  Within the hour, data began to trickle back, and the picture was bleak. Cetus Prime was adrift, off course. System malfunction alarms appeared on every station screen. The crew bio-monitor was inoperable and there had been no reply from Avery or the other crew members, despite repeated requests for an update.

  There were only two pieces of data that provided any glimmer of hope. EECOM reported main cabin life support was operational, and the crew compartment airlock was in the process of depressurizing.

  Pritchard signaled for Morgan to follow him to a quiet corner of the room. There, Pritchard removed his headset, layering it around his neck. “Looks like they were attacked, you concur?”

  “It’s a strong possibility,” Morgan said, “but not the only one. Perseus might have exploded. That would account for the dead engines and the pallet instrument failures.”

  “Yeah, but the main cabin would have been torn open if Perseus exploded,” Pritchard said.

  “Not necessarily. If Nick was able to resolve the sep-fault, and they deployed Perseus, they would have waited to fire the engine until it was clear of the ship. If the probe engine exploded, it could have knocked out CP’s engines and damaged the pallet without debris striking the main cabin.”

  “Okay, I agree. That’s plausible,” Pritchard said. “What do you make of the airlock depress?”

  “Well, last data we had showed Nick had begun his EVA. Whether UMOs attacked or Perseus blew up, he’d have been in real trouble out there.”

  “So, you think they’re attempting a rescue?”

  “Or they’re retrieving his body,” Morgan said, his tone grim. “But we’re jumping too far ahead. There could be lots of reasons for another EVA. They may be trying to assess damage, fix the X-band antenna, repair the engines. Who knows? Without comms from them, without more data, it’s tough to pin down the purpose of the EVA.”

  “True,” Pritchard said. “Why do you think they haven’t responded to our hails? They must have thought to check the other bands with X-band out.”

  “I don’t know,” Morgan said, “but assuming something catastrophic happened, if I were in Avery’s shoes right now, I’d be hustling to save the ship, save the crew. Talking to Mission Control would be the last thing on my mind.”

  “Well, we can’t do anything to help them until they talk to us,” Pritchard said.

  “I know, but we should still keep trying to reach them,” Morgan said. “Tell them we know they’re in trouble. Tell them what we see in the data. Offer suggestions, encouragement. Help them realize they’re not alone. And I’ll tell you what else we should do: we should get off the pot and tell them about the XGEN-SAT test. Tell them to shut down their spectrometers and disable the XGEN on Andromeda.”

  “You don’t give up, do you?” Pritchard said, exasperation filling his voice. “Look, they didn’t launch Andromeda, so its XGEN was never active. And you said it yourself, an attack’s not the only scenario for their situation.”

  “Does it freaking matter at this point, Dennis? Whatever the cause, they’re hanging on by their fingernails. Unless we get a miracle, the mission is screwed. We should be focused on saving our people,” Morgan said, tapping the photo button pinned to his badge.

  Cetus Prime

  Laboratory Compartment

  Date: 04.28.1995

  Time: 2310 UTC

  Avery was able to restart the engines without incident, allowing him to calculate and guide Cetus Prime into a wider elliptic around Mars. With the maneuver completed, he checked in on Nick again. He was still unconscious, but his vital signs had improved. Avery then returned to the lab for a progress update on Christine’s analysis.

  “I’ve been able to extract data from some of the instruments, but nothing’s jumped out so far. I’ll keep looking,” she said.

  “Okay, sounds good,” Avery said. “By the way, I checked the comms system. X-band antenna is out, same with Ku. But the S-band and UHF antennas are working. Goddard’s using S-band; they’re aware of our situation. I sent them a quick update. Once I’m done with the damage assessment, let’s get back toget
her and compare notes. Then we’ll send them a full report, see what they want us to do.”

  Cetus Prime Mission Control

  Goddard Space Flight Center

  Date: 04.28.1995

  Time: 2330 UTC

  The nightshift INCO leapt from his seat. “Flight! We have a new message from Commander Lockett!”

  Applause and cheers erupted in Mission Control. Pritchard instructed the officer to read out the message.

  “Copy that.” INCO read aloud: “CDR to GSC: CP attacked by UMOs during FE EVA to repair Perseus sep-fault. FE unconscious, vitals stable. Request medical treatment guidance. CDR and MS unharmed. Cursory DA shows minimal damage, mostly pallet instrumentation. Full DA underway. Have altered course to assume wider Mars orbit. Coordinates to follow. COMMS spotty, S-band and UHF only. Hands full, but working the problems. Will provide sit-rep when full DA complete. CDR out.”

  A collective sigh of relief spread through the room. Within minutes, INCO announced the arrival of Cetus Prime’s 2340 systems diagnostics report, commenting, “Commander Lockett must have reset the system.”

  The station leaders, and their dayshift counterparts, began to analyze the new data. Morgan darted a look at Pritchard, who was engaged in a conversation with the flight surgeon. Turning back to his console, Morgan gazed at the crew’s pictures and then began typing. When finished, he hovered his finger over the send button and reviewed the message.

  “CC to CDR: Message received. Standing by to assist. Medical guidance to follow. Disable XGEN on Andromeda until further notice. Same with XRS and GRS on all vehicles. Repeat: DISABLE ALL XRAY AND GAMMA EQUIP ASAP. CC Out.”

  After looking back once more at Pritchard, Morgan pressed the button and said, “Screw it.”

  A single line appeared on the monitor: “Message sent.”

  7: BARKS AND BITES

  Cetus Prime

  Laboratory Compartment

  Date: 04.29.1995

  Time: 0042 UTC

  In the middle of Avery’s damage assessment, Christine called him to the lab. As soon as he floated into the compartment, she blurted, “I don’t think it was an attack.”

  “What?” Avery queried.

  “I think it was more of a reconnaissance, a scouting party,” she said. She directed his attention to a video monitor showing the lights moving around the pallet. “See. They didn’t swarm. And it looks like there were only a dozen of them.”

  “Twelve? Twelve of them were capable of spinning the ship?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Scary.”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  “As you can see, they acted independently until they started to spin the pallet, but even then, they didn’t swarm. They grouped together in a formation, but they didn’t swarm.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “I think I know what attracted them, too,” she said. Christine pointed to the X-ray spectrometer. “Watch.”

  Avery looked at the screen. The XRS showed a wavy line with narrow peaks and valleys.

  “All our spectrometers were active, looking for signs of radiation on our Mars approach. I was hoping we might pick up a blip from Phobos-2 or Mars Observer debris before we deploy CPO. What you see here is pretty normal stuff. Background radiation,” she said. “Then, right before the UMOs showed up…”

  The wavy line went berserk. Huge spikes filled the screen.

  “The readings went on like this until the power went out,” she said. “All of our other instrumentation maintained nominal readings until the UMOs started zapping the pallet.”

  “And one of the things they zapped was the pallet XRS. They took out the GRS as well,” Avery said. “I saw what’s left of them from the porthole.”

  “Right. So, I know this sounds a little out there, but here’s a theory. All animals have some form of sensory threat detection. Visual. Auditory. Olfactory. Even changes in the Earth’s magnetic field can signal threats to certain animals who have receptors capable of detecting the changes.

  “Now, we know our UMOs are electromagnetic life-forms, and we know they feed on ions. But we don’t necessarily know what kinds of ions they prefer to consume and which ones they consider dangerous.”

  “You think they considered our X-ray spectrometer a threat?” Avery asked.

  “I think it’s possible. Remember, Mars’ atmo is very thin. Not a lot of ions to be had there. If there’s a ‘hive’ of these things living around Mars or Phobos, their food supply is pretty scarce. Anything that disrupts or endangers that food supply would be considered an imminent threat,” Christine said.

  “But the XRS just collects X-rays. Why would they consider it a threat?” Avery asked.

  “I don’t know, but back on Earth, they’ve been hanging out between our magnetosphere and ionosphere. Not a lot of X-rays there. Mostly VLF waves.”

  “So…”

  “Well, VLF waves are very low frequency forms of electromagnetic radiation, hence the name. X-rays, on the other hand, are at the opposite end of the spectrum. Very high frequency radiation,” Christine said.

  “Got it. So, they’re into eating VLF ions, not so much X-ray ions.”

  “Either that or maybe X-rays are like a blight to their food source,” Christine said. “What’s weird is they are capable of emitting X-rays. That’s what I think generated the spikes. They sensed our spectrometer, then emitted X-rays to locate the ship, broadcasting them like sonar. There’s no other explanation I can think of to account for the spike in readings. A passing comet might emit X-rays on that kind of scale, but not that sudden.”

  “Hmmm…Still doesn’t answer why our spectrometer would attract them,” Avery said.

  “As I said, I don’t have an answer for that. But, if you recall, Phobos-1 and 2 had X-ray spectrometers. Mars Observer didn’t, but it did have a gamma-ray spectrometer.”

  “But our GRS didn’t spike?” Avery asked.

  “Not until they started shooting lightning bolts,” she said.

  “Why didn’t they swarm and destroy us, I wonder,” Avery said.

  “Proximity to their food source?” Christine ventured. “Phobos-2 and Mars Observer were a lot closer to Mars when they were attacked.”

  “Makes sense,” Avery said. “Two curve balls for you. They also took out the X-band antenna. It’s not a huge problem; we can use the S-band antenna in the short term, and we have a backup X-band in the storage bay we can hook up later. But why did they zap that, too? It’s on the other side of the pallet, and it doesn’t emit X-rays or gamma rays.”

  “Could be something to do with the concentration of the radio beam. X-band sends very condensed signals, even though X-band waves are much lower frequency compared to X-rays. Maybe the UMOs are also sensitive to boosted signals. I’ll have to give it some more thought.”

  “Okay, while you’re doing that, here’s another riddle. Why the spin? Why disable our power? They were obviously able to zero in on the spectrometers, take them out. Same with the antenna. So, what was their purpose in spinning the ship? Knocking out our power? Zapping some of the other instruments?”

  “I’ve been wondering that myself,” she said. “From a biology perspective, the spinning behavior may have been their way of issuing a warning. Lots of animals use physical gestures to ward off predators, competitors. Spread their wings, whip their tails, circle the threat, bark, those kinds of things. Maybe the spin was the UMOs’ way of barking.”

  “All right,” Avery said. “I can buy that. So, they detected the spectrometer and came to check us out to see if we were the ones generating the threat. They determined we were the source and spun the ship to warn us to knock off with the spectrometer. We didn’t respond, so they zapped the instruments. In the process, they hit us hard enough to knock out our power, but not hard enough to destroy the ship.”

  “It fits, don’t you think?” Christine said. “It’s common for animals to bite or sting a threat encroaching on their territory to send a message without killing the sour
ce of the threat. It’s their way of telling the threat to back off.”

  “Right. So, we should ixnay the X-rays,” Avery said. “Which means we need to disable the XGEN on Andromeda and our XRSs. Probably should do the same with gammas.”

  “Goddard won’t like it,” Christine said. “We’re supposed to use the spectrometers on CPO to help find Phobos-2 and Mars Observer, and Andromeda’s XGEN to examine the debris. But I’m with you. It’s not worth risking another attack.”

  “Agreed. You disable the software. I’ll send a message to Goddard, tell them why we’re doing it. Let’s just hope they see it our way,” Avery said. As he prepared to leave, he paused and turned to Christine. “Hey.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Good to see Tamasha ya Rhino back in action!”

  8: TAKE THE HILL

  Mission Control Briefing Room

  Goddard Space Flight Center

  Date: 04.29.1995

  Time: 0114 UTC

  Pritchard watched Ferris’ face turn purple as he read the string of messages between Morgan and Avery. The general had been at the Pentagon when Goddard first learned of Cetus Prime’s run-in with the UMOs. Since then, the Air Force duty officer at the DoD station in Mission Control had provided his superior with updates as they occurred. One of the updates had been Morgan’s last message to Avery. Messages between CAPCOM and Cetus Prime were copied to Pritchard and the DoD officer, given the joint nature of the mission.

  Ferris hadn’t wasted time calling to chew out Pritchard. He hopped in the back of a blacked-out SUV and arrived at Goddard within a half hour. When he arrived, the Air Force duty officer handed him a stack of the last two days’ worth of back-and-forth communiques. Ferris appeared long enough in the Mission Control Center to summon Pritchard to join him in the briefing room.

  Of all the messages, the last two were on the page Ferris still held in his shaking hands. Pritchard looked down at his own copy, reading the first of Avery’s most recent messages.