[tshiggins]

(...continued)

Welsh shook his head.

“No, sir. I’m sorry. The cloud of debris from the first encounter wouldn’t lose much in the way of velocity, and it’s moving in the opposite direction of the constellation’s orbit. That means it comes back around and passes through any wreckage, every 45 minutes, or so. Even if somebody had survived the first round, which isn’t likely, we couldn’t send any rescue vessels in to save them, in time – assuming we even had any.”

“My god.”

“Yes sir. Space combat is… new to us all. It’s somewhat surprising that damaged spacecraft made it back to Luna-2. We assumed that the only way to avoid a kill was to not get hit.”

Obama looked around at the Joint Chiefs.

“Could we have anticipated this?”

Gen. Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs and another Air Force officer, spoke up.

“No, sir, not really; we didn’t even know the E-2 NAZIs had those things, and Churchill’s Brits didn’t, either. Our analysis of the imagery we’ve gotten back shows spacecraft that most closely match something called ‘silbervogels,’ or silver-birds. Our Third Reich had something like them on the drawing-boards, which they were thinking of using as rocket-propelled transatlantic bombers, but the war cut off funding for their program. Apparently, the Earth-2 Third Reich found the bucks.”

“What are the chances they have more of them?”

Welsh rubbed his forehead for a moment.

“We think they might have more, but they can’t have many. They couldn’t know exactly what we had loaded, but they had to know the first major interplanetary shipment of men and material qualified as a primary strategic target. Also, they had to know our technology is better than theirs. If they had more ready to go, our analysts believe they’d have sent them, and I agree with that assessment.”

“Well. Thank god they didn’t. Any ideas about countermeasures? We don’t want send our men through a shooting gallery, every trip.”

Selva shook his head.

“No sir, we do not. The DARPA guys, Space Command and NASA are looking at it, hard, but we’ve got a lot of data to digest. Preliminary analysis of radio-traffic seems to indicate the disintegrators worked better than the masers but, really, it’s too soon to say. Both of the spacecraft that made it back had maser weapons, and all of the spacecraft lost were armed with them, too. We’ll know more when we finish matching telemetry data with radio traffic. That job isn’t, ah… isn’t pleasant.”

“I’d imagine not, no.”

The president sighed, and glanced at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

“Alright, General Dunford, let me know what DARPA and NASA need. After this, I don’t think congress will argue about any increases in research budgets.”

“Thank you, sir. Let me say something, though. This was a hard day, certainly, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that, in all likelihood, we have operational control Earth-2 space, from the Luna-2 to LEO. We’re fairly certain that more than 90 percent of the enemy space craft were destroyed, to our less than 30 percent. Churchill says he plans to call this a victory, and he’s right; it was.”

“Well, that’s what I plan to tell the American people, here, in an hour. I doubt the wives and mothers visited by the chaplains, these next few days, will think so.”

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(continued...)