Skywave

by K Patrick Donoghue

  “Will do,” Brock said.

  Pritchard rose from the desk chair and pushed back the curtain to peek out the window. Thankfully, the pitchfork-and-posters crowd had yet to reassemble at the end of the street, but he could see a few television-station vans were still parked around the corner. Looking at the darkened windows of the surrounding houses, he imagined his neighbors were still livid that he had turned their quiet side street into a mob scene of media and protestors. If not for the police intervention, Pritchard thought many of his neighbors would soon have joined the mob. But the police had cleared out the rabble and now patrol cars barricaded both entrances to the street.

  He looked at his watch. If he left now, he could get to the office before the media got wind of the latest news. “I’m leaving for the office as soon as I hang up. I’ll call Amato on the way…Scratch that. I need to give the White House a heads-up first.”

  “I’m almost downtown, Dennis. I’ll try to get hold of Amato. I’ve got his cell number. See you when you get here.”

  With the call disconnected, he dashed up the stairs to change into work clothes, searching his phone contacts for Brett Shaw’s cell number on the way. There was a fair chance the national security advisor already knew what had transpired. NORAD would have immediately alerted the White House Situation Room, and the duty officer’s first call would have been to Shaw. He pressed the phone number link and mumbled, “There’s going to be hell to pay for this one, Augie.”

  A3rospace Industries Command and Control Center

  Mayaguana Island, The Bahamas

  The hectic activity in Mission Control continued for another hour after the Fleet program was activated. While there had been a momentary respite when their data screens showed the six surviving CUBEs aligning into formation around CUBE-11, a new crisis sprung up that sent the team back into scramble mode.

  An enormous swarm of UMOs had appeared in the rear-camera views of all the CUBEs. They approached at a speed that would have quickly overwhelmed the ragtag fleet if not for a bold decision by Dante. He had ordered Kiera to activate the fleet’s radiation shield, creating an ion bubble around the six CUBEs. The sudden appearance of the forcefield had confused the UMOs and the swarm had quickly disbanded. Within a minute, the horizon behind the fleet was devoid of any bright lights.

  Dante wasn’t sure why it had worked, but at this point he didn’t care. His main focus now was trying to sort out what had stimulated the attack, contacting Amato and determining what to do next.

  He had dispatched Ajay to wake Amato’s assistant, Mark, who was tasked with contacting Amato, but Mark soon appeared in Mission Control to inform Dante he’d been unsuccessful in locating Amato.

  “He’s not answering his cell and he didn’t answer the phone in his hotel room. I woke up his pilot and had him go to Mr. Amato’s room and bang on the door, but no answer. He got the hotel manager involved, and they entered the room. Mr. Amato wasn’t there. I’ve left messages everywhere. The pilot’s left the hotel for the place where Mr. Amato had a meeting last night, but it’ll be a while before he gets there,” Mark said.

  “What about the person he went to meet?” Dante said. “Did you try him or her?”

  “The person Mr. Amato went to see doesn’t have a home phone or cell number,” Mark said.

  “Great,” Dante said. “Who is this mystery person anyway? Where was the meeting?”

  Mark hesitated. “It’s confidential, I’m sorry.”

  “Damn it, Mark, this is an emergency. We need to track him down fast,” Dante said.

  “I understand the urgency,” Mark said. “I’ll keep trying.”

  After Mark left, Kiera approached Dante. “Got a minute?”

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “The shield is draining our batteries fast, much faster than we anticipated,” she said. “I’d like to power off the CUBE engines while we diagnose the issue. It’ll slow the drain and allow us to see how much of the problem is the shield versus the engines.”

  “Shut down for how long?”

  “I don’t think it’ll take more than an hour to sort out the issue. Then, we can lower the shield, have the CUBEs reorient their solar panels and recharge batteries. We’re talking six hours, all in, if we want to get the batteries back up to full charge. We can come back online sooner if you’re willing to live with less battery charge.”

  “Okay, but before you do it, I want to set a new course for the fleet,” he said, donning his headset. “I can’t reach Amato, but I don’t think we can wait any longer.”

  “Where to?” Kiera asked.

  “Guidance, this is Flight,” Dante said into his headset. “Plot new course heading for Fleet.”

  “Roger, Flight,” Guidance said. “Standing by for new heading.”

  “Target is orbital insertion around Callisto,” Dante said. “When you’ve plotted the course, send me the data and give me ETA at present speed.”

  “Are you sure you want to do that without talking to Mr. Amato?” Kiera asked.

  Dante covered his headset microphone. “I doubt we’re going to get another shot at this for quite a while after what’s happened. Besides, if he disagrees, we’ll just turn the fleet around.”

  Thirty minutes later, Kiera appeared in the doorway of Dante’s office with two coffee cups. “Hey, can you talk or should I come back later?”

  Dante, in the thick of analyzing the data from the UMO attack on the fleet, looked up from his computer screen. “Yeah, come on in. Take a seat.”

  “I just heard you rejected a slingshot around Mars,” Kiera said, handing one of the cups to Dante.

  “That’s right. I don’t want to risk running into another swarm,” Dante said, sipping the coffee. “Not until we know what caused the attack on the fleet.”

  “You’re making a mistake,” Kiera said. “A slingshot would shave off half our fly time to Callisto given how all three planets are lined up. We won’t get another opposition opportunity like this for years.”

  Dante understood what Kiera was driving at. Earth’s most recent opposition with Jupiter — the point in the two planets’ orbital cycles when they were closest — had occurred in May. As fate would have it, Earth’s most recent opposition with Mars had occurred in late June, just one month earlier. That made the relative distance between the three planets about as small as it would ever get. The fleet now had the opportunity to travel the shortest possible route to get to Callisto — a circumstance that would not occur again until the summer of 2022. To boot, the slingshot maneuver would allow the fleet to use the momentum of Mars’ gravity to boost their speed, which would push the CUBEs to reach Callisto faster than traveling directly there. Combined with the three planets’ relative positions, it was an opportunity any space explorer would find hard to pass up.

  “I know,” Dante said, “but if UMOs are still around Mars, the fleet could get wiped out before getting the chance to slingshot.”

  “Yep, I get it,” Kiera said. “But what if we don’t send the whole fleet?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if we just send CUBE-1 to Mars, hold back the rest of the fleet until we see what happens. CUBE-1’s already damaged. If it gets knocked out, we skip Mars and send the rest of the fleet straight to Callisto,” Kiera said.

  Dante took another sip of coffee and nodded. “We could do that, but it means risking our backup command probe.”

  “True, but, if CUBE-1 slingshots without issue, we’d get to Callisto in less than four months. And if we do encounter UMOs, what’s to say they don’t give CUBE-1 the same kind of speed kick they did on the way to the Moon?” Kiera said, placing her cup on the edge of Dante’s desk. Leaning forward, she pressed her case. “We might be able to get to Callisto in sixty days…seven months faster than if we head straight to Callisto. That seems worth the risk of one CUBE to me.”

  “All good points, but you’re overlooking a very important factor.”

  “What?”

  “
Time,” Dante said. “Around Earth, we could react to what was happening to CUBE-1 in real time. That won’t be the case around Mars. We get CUBE-1 in orbit, turn up its engine to attract our spinning UMO ball, and if something goes wrong, it’ll be over before we can do anything.”

  “I understand it’s a huge risk,” Kiera said, “but it’s also a huge opportunity. Even if CUBE-1 gets destroyed, we’ll learn something out of it.”

  “Learn what? Stay away from Mars? I think that lesson has already been learned.”

  “Oh, come on, Dante,” Kiera said. Standing up, she paced the office. “Think about it. There have been easily a dozen probes sent to Mars over the last fifteen years, and most of them are still in orbit. MGS, MRO, Odyssey, MOM, Maven…and that’s not even counting the landers, Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity…Should I go on?”

  “No need. I get your point. But don’t forget — there have also been six probes in that same stretch that were lost under odd circumstances: Beagle, Nozomi, MCO…Should I go on?

  “Gotta admit, odds are in my favor, two to one.” Kiera smiled.

  “All right, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll raise the possibility with Mr. Amato when we get hold of him. In the meantime, the fleet stays on course for Callisto, and you help me figure out what caused the attack on our CUBEs.”

  As Kiera prepared to respond, Mark entered the office. He looked at Dante and said, “We’ve got problems.”

  “Mr. Amato?” he asked.

  “No, let me show you,” Mark said. He walked around the desk and used Dante’s computer to access the Internet. He typed in the URL of the largest circulation news website and stood back. When the page loaded, a bolded red headline appeared in all caps. “PILE-UP IN SPACE KNOCKS OUT PHONE AND INTERNET SERVICE FOR MILLIONS.”

  The subhead read: “Calamity started with explosion of A3rospace Industries’ experimental spacecraft.”

  Dante quickly scanned the story’s opening paragraph as Kiera came up beside him.

  Earlier this morning, experimental spacecraft launched by A3rospace Industries exploded in orbit around Earth, sparking a chain reaction that has thus far disabled more than a dozen communication satellites, knocking out phone and Internet service for millions. Department of Defense officials, speaking off the record, expressed concerns that the outage could dramatically escalate as the debris field spreads.

  “Bullshit,” Dante said. “Our CUBEs are too small to knock out one satellite, let alone a dozen.”

  “Keep reading,” Mark said.

  “An emergency summit is under way at the White House at this hour to determine steps to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control, but an unnamed NASA source said there is very little NASA or U.S. Space Command can do at this point to stop the destruction from expanding.

  “Repeated attempts to reach A3rospace Industries’ company officials, including chairman and chief executive Augustus Arturo Amato, have been unsuccessful, but an anonymous source at the company’s Orlando headquarters confirmed the private aerospace venture launched nine experimental probes into orbit yesterday from its facility in the Bahamas.

  “The news comes on the heels of the bombshell announcement from the White House two days ago acknowledging that one of Amato’s earlier experimental probes had traveled to the Moon in less than three hours. Amato has yet to publicly address the White House statement, nor has his company released any details about the stunning achievement, stirring controversy throughout the space exploration community.

  “According to one aerospace expert, Dr. Joshua Higgins, a professor at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, Amato’s continued silence isn’t helping matters. ‘In light of what’s happened this morning, I’m sure I’m not the only one with grave concerns about the stability of Mr. Amato’s spacecraft. And his lack of disclosure is baffling. It’s almost as if he’s trying to hide something.’

  “When questioned about what that ‘something’ might be, Higgins said, ‘Your guess is as good as mine, but I sure hope he’s not trying to hide a flaw in the spacecraft design.’”

  Dante turned to Mark. “This is crazy. Tell me you’ve tracked him down.”

  Mark shook his head from side to side. “I don’t understand it. He’s never been out of touch for this long. I’ve already called HQ and made it crystal clear there is to be no comment, official or otherwise, but I’m not sure if that’ll matter at this point. Mr. Amato’s direct reports are livid they’ve been cut out of the loop. They want answers.”

  “What about Mr. Amato’s pilot? Have you heard from him?” Kiera asked.

  “No,” Mark said. He held up his cell phone. “I tried to reach him right before I came in here. Crickets.”

  “Great. Just great,” Dante said, bowing his head.

  “Dr. Fulton, there’s something else you should know,” Mark said.

  When he looked back up at Mark, Dante saw the anguished expression on the assistant’s face had worsened. He opened another Internet browser tab and typed in a new URL. When the screen populated, Dante found himself looking at an alien conspiracy website.

  “I turned on the television in Mr. Amato’s office,” Mark said. “The guy who runs this site has been on every network. The picture’s gone viral.”

  He pointed at the image on the computer monitor. The all-caps headline above it read: AMATO PROBES HEADED FOR JUPITER. UFOS IN PURSUIT??? Dante glanced at the image and then at the caption to the right:

  “A little birdie just sent me this super-secret satellite tracker image. I’m told the triangle icons are the surviving Amato probes from the satellite crash derby this morning. What’s the circle icon trailing behind, you ask? ‘No comment,’ says my little birdie, ‘but it’s not one of ours.’ Birdie says Amato probes headed for Jupiter at 3x fastest spacecraft evah. Circle icon catching up…SAY WHA???”

  “Oh, my God,” Dante said, burying his face in his open hand.

  “I know,” Mark said. “Is it true? Are the UMOs chasing the fleet?”

  “They did for a little while, but they went away when we turned on the fleet radiation shield,” Kiera said. “The screencap must have been taken before then.”

  “Yeah, but the CUBEs weren’t headed toward Jupiter at that point,” Dante said. “We’re being tracked by NASA or Space Command, probably both. We gave Houston the transponder code for CUBE-1, remember.”

  “True, but we didn’t give the codes for the others,” Kiera said.

  “They’ve probably zeroed in on the CUBEs’ radiation signature,” Dante said.

  “What do you want to do?” Kiera asked. “I don’t think Mr. Amato will want them following us all the way to Callisto.”

  Dante stared off into space for a moment, then turned to Kiera. “Looks like you’ve got your wish.”

  Brock followed Pritchard into his office, shutting the door behind them. With her hand still on the door handle, she asked, “So how did it go?”

  “About as awful as you’d expect. Finger-pointing, blame mongering. Yelling. Threats…and all that before SECDEF even showed up,” Pritchard said, collapsing into his leather armchair. “Believe it or not, it got uglier after that.”

  Brock joined him in the sitting-room area, taking a seat on the leather sofa opposite Pritchard. “Did you see the leaked UMO satellite image?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Pritchard said.

  “IT has already found the source of the leak. Security’s taken him into custody,” she said. “Whose idea was it to pin the destroyed SATs on Amato?”

  “Brett Shaw. In his eyes, Amato’s CUBEs riled up the UMOs that attacked the SATs,” Pritchard said. “Space Command and SECDEF lapped it up. Gives them perfect cover for their plan.”

  “Oh? What plan?”

  “They want to shut Augie down. Have the FBI raid his HQ, send SEAL teams to Mayaguana and Ascension. Confiscate anything and everything they can, jam his comms, detain his people. They even talked about seizing his assets, arresting Augie.”


  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Brock said, clutching her abdomen.

  “I don’t know if it’ll happen or not. The president said he wanted to think on it, but he did authorize SECDEF to put SEAL teams on standby.”

  “It’ll just make matters worse, Dennis,” Brock said. “Amato will go to the press. Spill everything.”

  “The president agrees with you,” Pritchard said. “He’s trying to sort out an alternative to settle things down without resorting to all that.”

  “Thank God for that,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t be too quick to give thanks yet,” Pritchard said. “Part of his alternative involves you and me.”

  13: WAGGLE DANCE

  Benny’s Burger Shack

  Hanalei Town, Kauai

  July 23, 2018

  Amato and Morgan continued to discuss Cetus Prime and the Callisto radio signals deep into the night, a conversation interrupted at 2:45 a.m. HST by the sound of urgent pounding on the restaurant’s front door. “Hello? Is anyone in there? Hello?”

  Morgan turned to the door and called out, “We’re closed.”

  “Hold on, Paul. I recognize the voice,” Amato said.

  “I’m looking for Augustus Amato. It’s urgent I find him. Have you seen him?” said the door pounder.

  “I’m here, J.J.,” Amato said. He turned to Morgan. “It’s my pilot, J.J. Helms.”

  “He sounds panicked,” Morgan said, as he headed for the door.

  Amato followed Morgan, saying, “Yes, he does.”

  When Morgan opened the door, Helms displayed a quizzical expression seeing Amato in the Benny’s T-shirt and board shorts. “Mr. Amato?”

  “Yes, come in, come in,” Amato said. “I’ll explain later.”

  With Helms inside, Morgan closed and relocked the door.

  “Now, what’s this all about, J.J.? What are you doing here?” Amato asked.

  Helms said he’d been asleep at the hotel when Mark called, looking for Amato. “He was upset. Said he couldn’t reach you by phone. Said he needed to talk with you, ASAP. I tried your room, tried calling you. When I couldn’t find you, I called Mark back. He gave me an address, told me to go there to look for you.”