10: FOR THE GREATER GOOD
Cetus Prime Mission Control
Goddard Space Flight Center
Date: 04.29.1995
Time: 1213 UTC
General Ferris entered Mission Control. In Dennis Pritchard’s headset, one of the team said, “Fire-breathing dragon at your six.”
Pritchard turned to see the red-faced leader of Space Command heading right toward him. He stopped in his tracks when he saw Paul Morgan sitting at the CAPCOM station.
“What in Sam Hill is going on?” he seethed.
“Good morning, General,” Pritchard said, rising from his seat.
“Stow it,” Ferris said. “What’s Morgan doing here? He’s relieved.”
“I reinstated him,” Pritchard said.
“What the hell for?” Ferris asked. “He went behind your back, Pritchard. Countermanded your order.”
“It was a misunderstanding. It’s been sorted out,” Pritchard said.
“Why isn’t Perseus out of dock? What’s all this about a delay?” Ferris demanded to know.
“The crew’s provided some new information. We told them to catch some sleep while we analyze their data,” Morgan said, joining the impromptu briefing.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Ferris said, his voice carrying throughout the room. “Wake their asses up! Get them moving on Perseus.”
“If their data pans out, there may not be a need to deploy Perseus,” Morgan said.
With fists clenched at his side, Ferris said, “Get that God damn bird off the deck, do you hear me? I don’t give a crap what kind of data they have, we’re testing those EMPs.”
“Perseus is staying in dock until the analysis is complete,” Pritchard said. “If you want to run it up the chain, be my guest.”
For a moment it appeared Ferris might start swinging, but instead he made an abrupt turn and walked away. Pritchard and Morgan watched him head for the DoD duty officer, two stations away from Pritchard’s. He barked out the man’s name and the two disappeared from the center.
“Think he’ll go back to SECDEF? Get the president involved again?” Morgan asked.
“Probably, but at least it will buy us some more time,” Pritchard said.
At 1242 UTC, Ferris reappeared in Mission Control with the duty officer. The junior officer returned to his station, while Ferris approached Pritchard. In a calm tone, he said, “Would you and CAPCOM please join me in the briefing room. I’d like to hear about this new information.”
With the three men behind closed doors, Morgan provided a summary of Christine’s theory, touching upon the video evidence and the XRS readings. Ferris peppered both men with a stream of questions, stopping on several occasions to take notes.
In Mission Control, the DoD duty officer layered on a headset and began typing, every so often looking around at the others in the room. Ten minutes later, he pressed one last button, powered down his station and left the room.
At 1310 UTC, with Pritchard and Morgan still huddled with Ferris, INCO received an alert from Cetus Prime. “Holy crap.”
He bolted up out of his seat and looked toward Pritchard’s station. Seeing the post vacated, he pushed the microphone of his headset toward his lips. “Flight? Flight? Anyone seen Flight?”
The EECOM officer in the row of stations in front of INCO replied, “Think Flight is in Debrief-1. Why?”
“Andromeda just separated from the pallet. Someone go get Flight, ASAP!”
Morgan and Pritchard burst into Mission Control and ran to their stations. INCO waved to Pritchard, pointing at his headset. Pritchard pulled his on and heard INCO say, “I can’t stop it, Flight. I’m locked out. CPO is free, too.”
“Flight, Guidance here. CP is turning toward Mars.”
“INCO here again, Flight. S-band is out. I have no comms with CP.”
Morgan threw down his headset. “Ferris!”
He raced out of Mission Control and back to the debriefing room, where he found the general sitting back, hands behind his head and smile on his face.
“What have you done?” Morgan yelled.
“You didn’t have the balls to do what’s necessary. I did,” Ferris said.
Back in Mission Control, INCO’s voice echoed through the headsets of everyone in the room. “Jesus, no! Flight, Perseus is powering up. Turret is turning!”
Pritchard tossed off his headset and made for the debrief room, too. When he came through the door, Morgan and Ferris were screaming at each other. Pritchard grabbed hold of Morgan’s arm. “Perseus is getting ready to fire!”
“What?” Morgan said, staggering backward.
“We can’t stop it, he’s locked us out of all controls,” Pritchard said.
Morgan took a swing at Ferris, clipping him on the chin. “Bastard.”
The blow toppled the general over a chair. Morgan said to Pritchard, “Do what you can.”
He pulled the conference room door open so hard the knob punched a hole in the wall. Morgan dashed down the hallway, around a corridor and up two flights of stairs. Out of breath, he burst into Hector Jimenez’s office and said, “Hook me into TDRS! Now!”
Cetus Prime
Crew Quarters
Date: 04.29.1995
Time: 1300 UTC
A captain knows his ship, even when he’s asleep. The spit of the thrusters, the creak of the hull, the rumble of the engines. All the ship’s sounds and motions seep into the subconscious and unconscious of a flight leader. And so, when the first thruster pushed Cetus Prime inward toward Mars, Avery awoke.
Then came the throaty churn of the main engines, pushing the craft forward. The sudden movement tugged at the cocoon-like bag in which Avery slept, rocking the bag back and forth. Confused, he shook his head and listened. Was it a dream? Clanks echoed from the rear of the main cabin. The high-pitched hiss of more thrusters filled the room.
This was no dream. Avery pushed out of the bag, calling to Christine. “Wake up! Something’s wrong.”
He didn’t wait for her to answer. He propelled toward the flight deck, passing through the lab and comms center. By the time he had strapped into the commander’s seat, he could see Andromeda and CPO jetting toward Mars.
He tried to override the RCS thrusters to no avail. Cetus Prime continued toward Mars, picking up speed. Christine appeared through the floor hatch. “What’s going on?”
“Goddard’s taken control of the ship! They’ve launched Andromeda and CPO. Get to pallet control. See if you can recall them.”
Mouth open, stunned, Christine hovered in the hatchway.
“Damn it, Chris! Move your ass!”
His shout stirred Christine to action. As she disappeared through the hatch, Avery thought, “We’re screwed without Nick.”
Christine bounced her way to pallet control. She tried every switch, button and command she could remember. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the turret of Perseus begin to turn. She gasped. “No!”
Punching the intercom button, she yelled, “Perseus! System’s hot, she’s getting ready to fire!”
In the cockpit, Avery’s fingers moved with frantic precision, working through every protocol he’d been taught about the ship. Nothing worked. Cetus Prime lurched forward, its engines at full power. He rained down blow after blow on the console in front of him, screeching obscenities at the top of his lungs. Out of breath and out of options, he pitched back in the seat, his eyes looking upward at the array of buttons and switches above his head.
And then he saw it. The circuit breaker box. Crushing a closed fist on the intercom, he yelled to Christine, “Circuit breakers. Switch ’em off. All of them. Do it, now!”
As he spoke, he disabled the breakers in the cockpit and then descended to the comms deck. Within a minute, the breakers in every cabin were off. Cetus Prime was dead…but still flying toward Mars at thousands of miles per hour.
Christine met Avery in the comms center. Together, they ascended to the flight deck. As they strapped in, Christine stuttere
d, “Wha-what’s…happ-happening?”
“We’re being sacrificed for the greater good,” Avery said.
Out the cockpit window, they saw a swarm of UMOs appear from the dark side of Mars, heading for Andromeda.
11: ABANDONED
Cetus Prime
Flight Deck
Date: 04.29.1995
Time: 1324 UTC
Andromeda and CPO went up like fireworks on Independence Day. Avery and Christine watched in terror as the swarm turned toward Cetus Prime. Though the ship had no power, its engines still glowed hot with radiation. To Avery’s chagrin, his decision to cut Cetus Prime’s power rendered Perseus impotent, leaving them no means of defense as thousands upon thousands of bright lights zoomed toward the crippled spacecraft.
Cetus Prime Mission Control
Goddard Space Flight Center
Date: 04.29.1995
Time: 1410 UTC
Chaos reigned in Mission Control. Station leads, desperate to revive control over the spacecraft they’d tended for seven months, punched in abort commands, tried to reset systems, typed in override commands. Not one of them stopped working the problems…until their screens went blank at 1410 UTC.
In a remarkable demonstration of devotion, the station leads stayed on until sunset the following day, trying every trick in the book, and then some, to restore communication with their lost charge. Tears were shed, anger vented, prayers offered, but no amount of brainpower or emotion could bring them back.
Paul Morgan’s last message to the crew on their UHF channel never made it through, scattering into the void of space long before it reached Cetus Prime’s last known position. It read, “CC to CDR: All bets off, save yourselves! Get the hell out of there! CC out.”
EPILOGUE
When the president learned what Ferris had done, he relieved the general of command and eventually Ferris was court-martialed. A joint tribunal of NASA and DoD executives conducted an exhaustive review of the entire Cetus Prime mission, including a painstaking evaluation of Mission Specialist Christine Baker’s “queen bee” theory.
The tribunal featured a rigorous scientific review of the data transmitted by Cetus Prime before communication was lost, the XGEN MAG-SAT test, and data from the earlier Phobos and Mars Observer missions. It also included testimony from Dr. Braun and other animal behaviorist researchers.
The conclusion: Christine Baker had been right. The UMOs were not predatory by nature. They were reacting to electromagnetic stimuli in the same way a honey bee might, confronting analogous conditions.
Astrophysicists at JPL determined the faux “queen bee” call was linked to the type of X-ray spectrometers aboard Phobos-1 and Phobos-2. The Soviet RF-15 XRS produced a distinct radiation signature unlike any other model X-ray spectrometer deployed in space. As to Mars Observer, though it carried no XRS, its GRS produced a strikingly similar radiation signature as the RF-15.
In the twenty-three years since communication was severed with Cetus Prime, no American spacecraft sent to orbit Mars has carried an X-ray spectrometer, nor a GRS of the same model as deployed on Mars Observer. In that time, four other Mars probes — two American, one Japanese and one British — have mysteriously disappeared in orbit around the planet. The Japanese and British spacecraft both carried X-ray spectrometers. It is not known whether they deployed before their sudden and unexplained “lost communications.”
Since the 1995 XGEN MAG-SAT test, there has never been an observed hostile act by UMOs orbiting Earth. They continue to multiply in direct proportion to the propagation of ions in the upper reaches of the planet’s atmosphere and are routinely captured on video by cameras aboard the International Space Station.
Though the Mission Control Center for Cetus Prime was repurposed two months after losing communication with the ship, a Goddard Space Flight Center team was tasked with monitoring all four of the ship’s radio bands for a period of time thereafter.
On July 18, 1995, at 2207 UTC, a corrupted data file was received by TDRS on the UHF channel. It took weeks, but a trio of radio experts plucked from NASA’s DSN team were able to restore a portion of the file. It was an eight-second grainy video showing Avery Lockett and Christine Baker seated in the laboratory compartment of Cetus Prime. In it, Christine spoke to the camera. There was a smile on her face. On both their faces. Her words cut in and out, no matter how much the DSN radio engineers tried to resample the audio. “…VLF antenna…don’t know…taking us…”
The date stamp of the video, displayed in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, read 06.10.1995, 0825 UTC, forty-two days after Cetus Prime disappeared.
NASA remains at a loss to explain the additional thirty-eight day gap between the receipt of the message by TDRS and the date stamp recorded on the video. While some suggested Cetus Prime’s recording system had displayed the incorrect date, others suggested the disparity indicated the crew had run into difficulties restoring their UHF antenna causing a delay in the transmission of the previously recorded message.
Another unsolved mystery is the transmission’s point of origin. Data from TDRS indicated the message was broadcast from an empty sector of space, 297 million miles from Earth…232 million miles from Cetus Prime’s last reported position.
Subsequent attempts to contact the vessel were unsuccessful, and no further transmissions from the doomed ship were ever received. NASA ceased monitoring all deep space radio bands for messages from Cetus Prime on the one-year anniversary of its last transmission.
As the mission had been classified as a DoD Special Access Program black operation, the families of the Cetus Prime crew never knew their loved ones had traveled into space. Instead, the crew had been instructed to tell their families they had volunteered to participate in a special, eighteen-month training assignment to simulate the isolation effects of deep space travel, occupying a mocked-up spaceship at an undisclosed NASA facility.
In March 1996, NASA informed the families that a tragic accident had taken the lives of their loved ones. The families were told the helicopter returning the astronauts home at the end of their training mission had disappeared over the Pacific Ocean. After an exhaustive search, the helicopter and its occupants were declared lost at sea.
Paul Morgan kept his button with the pictures of Avery Lockett, Nick Reed and Christine Baker. To this day, on the anniversary of their last transmission, Morgan pins on the button and travels to Arlington National Cemetery to place flowers at the feet of the tombstones marking their empty graves.
So ends UMO. Fast forward twenty-three years to the opening chapter of Skywave, book one of The Rorschach Explorer Missions series. Skywave, a full-length novel, is set for release in the late fall of 2018.
BONUS CONTENT: SKYWAVE PROLOGUE
ALL HAIL 3LR0Y
Apartment 4B, Cocoa Waves Condominium
Cocoa Beach, Florida
May 11, 2018
Kiera Walsh clicked the hyperlink embedded in the text message and waited for her tablet to connect to the podcast. During the wait, she stared out at the ocean and mumbled, “I can’t believe I got suckered into doing this.”
The site took a full minute to load, providing Kiera enough time to lay her tablet on the balcony table and head inside for another glass of iced tea. When she returned outside, she set the glass down next to her tablet, catching a glimpse of the podcast home page. She lifted the tablet to take a closer look and began to laugh. “Oh, my God. Unbelievable.”
The center of the screen was dominated by the frozen video image of a scraggly-bearded man wearing a paper crown from a popular burger chain. The crown was cocked to the side of his head, presumably to reinforce the “gangsta” vibe apparent on the rest of the page. Kiera assumed the man in the video was none other than the channel’s host, “hizz boi 3lr0y,” as she noticed the T-shirt he wore depicted the sixties cartoon character, Elroy.
Below the video was a caption that read, “Dey keep throwin shade, but 3lr0y unswayed!” Kiera laughed again. “Ah, our
boy Elroy is a gangsta and a poet. How awful! No wonder NASA shot him down.”
Her opinion of 3lr0y, a.k.a. Ajay Joshi, didn’t improve as she scanned the rest of the site. The right sidebar provided thumbnail images of other recent video diatribes, each displaying captions with cringe-worthy, rap-inspired rhymes. Beneath the center-screen feature video, there was a section titled “Da truf is 0ut der!” It contained links to recent “news” articles about UFO sightings, alien conspiracies and the like.
But the most hilarious section ran down the left-hand sidebar. Here, 3lr0y had created a pithy bio that was more of a dating-site profile than a listing of his bona fides, with categories such as favorite places to stargaze, best sci-fi flicks and hottest superhero vixens. For turn-ons, he listed “all thangs Jupiter,” while he limited his turn-offs to “suck hole non-believers.” This latter category had accumulated over five hundred thumbs-up votes. For grins, Kiera clicked on the vote tally to view the list of 3lr0y’s like-minded visitors. As expected, the avatars and usernames revealed his followers to be a collection of anti-establishment, aliens-are-among-us fanatics.
Kiera hadn’t paid attention to the vote totals below 3lr0y’s videos when she first scanned the page, so she scrolled up to check out the stats. She was surprised to see that several of them had over a thousand views, each with hundreds of thumbs-up votes. While perusing the tallies, she noticed a flashing banner at the top of the page. It hadn’t been there when the site initially loaded, so she presumed 3lr0y was in the midst of updating the site. The banner read, “Stay tuned, dawgs and bitches…New pruf coming 2m0rr0w!”
UMO: A Chilling Tale of First Contact Page 7