Rorschach Explorer Missions

Buckle up for this chilling novella tale of first contact! When three probes sent to Mars suffer suspicious catastrophic failures, a clandestine manned mission is dispatched to investigate the probes' wreckage for clues to explain their demise. The manned mission is led by Lieutenant Colonel Avery Lockett. He is joined by flight engineer, Captain Nick Reed, and mission specialist, Dr. Christine Baker. Together they embark on a dangerous journey aboard the spaceship Cetus Prime - dangerous because they know what awaits them around Mars. UMOs, or unidentified magnetic objects. UMOs are believed to be an electromagnetic life form feeding on ions caught between Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere. The elusive creatures appear as nothing more than small bright lights, but they are capable of supersonic speeds and non-ballistic motion. Space exploration authorities have, at various times, provided benign explanations for these bright lights; melting frost shed by spacecraft caught in sunlight, solar wind particles or flaming meteors bouncing off the Earth's atmosphere, to name a few. Anything but an alien life form. Disavowed for decades, the UMOs had been viewed as harmless, amoeba-like blobs that existed only around Earth, as none had ever been observed by deep space probes to other planets in the solar system. But that perception changed with the final photographs snapped by one of the doomed Mars probes. The pictures showed a swarm of UMOs descending upon the probe in the moments before communication was lost. Instrument readings from the same probe showed huge spikes in electromagnetic radiation in its last transmission. No one knows for sure what happened to the Mars probes, but authorities speculate the UMOs destroyed them. Now, Avery, Nick and Christine must travel sixty-five million miles to Mars and gather evidence to confirm what destroyed the probes without attracting a swarm of the lethal creatures. For if a swarm of the UMOs appears, Cetus Prime is ill-prepared for a fight and too slow to escape. UMO, a novella, is a prequel to Skywave, the first book of The Rorschach Explorer Missions, a new sci-fi thriller series from mystery-thriller author K. Patrick Donoghue. The Prologue from Skywave is included as a free bonus chapter in UMO. Skywave is targeted for release in late November 2018.

No one knows what to make of the mysterious clicks. To Ajay Joshi, the amateur astronomer who discovered the strange sounds with his radio telescope, the clicks represent proof of aliens on Callisto, a moon of Jupiter, a theory dismissed as quackery by space agency radio experts. They contend the clicks are nothing more than terrestrial interference, so-called skywaves, or similar electromagnetic interference emanating from Jupiter or Callisto. To Dr. Kiera Walsh, an aerospace engineer introduced to Ajay and his findings, the consistent, repetitive pattern of the clicks points to the possibility of a lost Martian probe caught in Callisto s orbit. She shares this view with her employer, billionaire and space exploration privateer, Augustus Amato, and is surprised to learn Amato disagrees with her conclusion. He believes the clicks herald something more ominous orbiting Callisto. Compelled to learn the true source of the clicks, Amato launches a fleet of experimental probes to investigate the Jovian moon. A mission that produces a string of startling discoveries, revelations that shake the space exploration establishment to its core and spark a controversial race to preserve the discoveries before they are destroyed or suppressed. The Rorschach Explorer Missions leads readers on an epic journey that challenges conventional views of ancient aliens, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and humankind's place in the universe.

Fresh off their historic discoveries on the Jupiter moon Callisto, the crew of the Rorschach Explorer, and their colleagues in Mission Control should have known better. Space is not a lifeless vacuum. Dark and forbidding, it is a jungle where the rules of survival are no different than those on Earth: Keep your head on a swivel. Trust nothing you think you know. Kill or be killed. Icy and vast, it is an ocean where the divide between life and death is often more dependent on forging alliances than individual prowess. There is always something bigger, faster, smarter, and hungrier than you. Spartan and unforgiving, it is a desert where the daily struggle for existence requires constant ingenuity and adaptation. Oases are few and far between and there is no respite from danger. But the crew was lulled by an easy start to Rorschach's maiden voyage and they let their guard down. And sure as the Sun rises, savage predators emerged from the darkness.