Soon into their research effort, they coerced Jim into helping them. They kept all of their research a secret from both Tabitha and myself. I had later asked them why and the three of them said that they knew neither of would let them do it. We both scolded them for violating safety protocols and risking their necks; had the outcome been different they could have killed us all. Since the outcome turned out for the good we let it go. Besides, both Jim and 'Becca are good responsible scientists and Sara is becoming one. One of these days Tabitha and I will have to quit looking at them as children, our children. I doubt that day will ever come. At any rate, their research was very successful. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
* * *
It was one of those days where I was feeling useless so I spent it with Tabitha attempting to help her analyze intelligence on our enemy's war effort. I spent a lot of time squinting at satellite imagery ranging from visible to infrared to microwave to radio maps of the Asian continent. The most interesting imagery that we analyzed was one of the launch sites in south China. The site is just south of Canton and is called Hainan Island. The imagery showed a launch vehicle being moved out to the pad and integrated. From the data it appeared that we would be seeing a Chinese launch in a matter of days. There were images of other launch sites at Jiuquan, Taiyuan, and Xichang that showed identical launch preparations. We were still at least a month from the first working mini ECC. We were in big trouble!
More detailed analysis showed that there was massive naval buildup in the Taiwan Strait between south China and Taiwan. There was also major troop movement and buildup on the North Korean and South Korean border. Some bright analyst brought to Tabitha's attention that there was a launch preparation going on in Kazakhstan and near Svobodny, Russia. Was it possible that the two simultaneous Russian launches were a coincidence? The Chinese and the Russians had been allying themselves for years under the auspices of 'the enemy of my enemy is my ally' philosophy. The Russians had publicly been our allies for years since the end of the Cold War, but, there had been, and will always be, factions of the old Red Party that will forever despise the United States. The other possibility is that the economically ravaged Russians had fallen into the survival-of-the-meanest mode and were overtaken by organized crime. These criminals would do or sell practically anything for the right price. Who knows the motives? The fact of the matter was simple. The Chinese and the Russians were going to launch at least six different rockets with warp missiles on them within the next day or so. They must have already tested them before we built our detector. They were probably waiting on ECCs like we were—but they apparently could make them faster. Chinese naval vessels were most likely going to mount an assault on Taiwan. And the North Koreans were going to take South Korea. World War III was about to begin.
'Oh God, Tabitha, what can we do?'
'Get everybody together, Anson. Five minutes!' she ordered.
Five minutes later we were in the conference room explaining the situation. 'It's obvious that we don't and won't have enough warp missiles ready for launch for weeks. Our only chance is for our missile defense systems to save us, or to go into a preemptive first-strike posture. This will be my recommendation to the President unless we come up with better ideas,' Tabitha explained.
'According to my estimates as to our progress,' I continued when Tabitha stopped, 'we have about seventy five percent of one mini ECC complete. Maybe we can rig something out of that. Maybe a very small more decisive missile.'
'Uh, Anson, hold on.' Jim interrupted. He looked at 'Becca and Sara and nodded.
'Becca continued, 'Jim and Sara and I have been developing a new Casimir effect energy collection system. The system is based on the flubells and is three orders of magnitude more efficient than the original Clemons Dumbbells.'
I was surprised and happy, but we didn't have time for a development program. We had at the most twenty- four hours. Maybe we could launch ICBMs at the launch sites. This would ensure that a global war would start but just maybe the U.S. would survive or even win. Boy it would be nice if we had actually developed those rapid-force deployment spaceplanes that NASA and the Air Force have been drawing pretty pictures of for fifty years.
''Becca that's excellent work and we'll talk about it when or if we survive this upcoming war. We don't have time for a development effort,' I scolded.
'Damnit Doc!' Sara cried. 'You don't understand.'
'Yeah Anson,' Jim started, 'we already built one of the damn things and it's big enough to generate more power than all three of Zephram's ECCs put together!'
'You mean you have a working prototype?' Tabitha was exhilarated.
'Yes!' was uniformly shouted by Sara, Rebecca, and Jim.
'Well why didn't you say so?' Al said.
'Okay, okay, let's calm down. So we have six complete warp coils installed in MWM bodies waiting for the mini ECCs, the modifiable warp field generator, a seventy-five percent mini ECC, and one fully operational large ECC. Not enough.' I shook my head.
'How much time to make more of these new ECCs?' Anne Marie asked.
'A couple of weeks apiece.' Sara replied.
'Too long,' Tabitha noted. Then Calvin came in and interrupted us.
'General, ma'am! You are needed immediately.' He saluted.
'At ease, Calvin. Anson keep at it. I'll be right back.' Tabitha and Calvin departed down the hall.
Five minutes later she returned, pale as a ghost. 'They launched!'
'What do you mean they launched? They weren't quite on the stands yet,' was my response.
'It turns out that the imagery was right. But no integration was required. They just rolled out and launched. Never been done before. All six of them, launched!'
I couldn't believe it. How did they manage to integrate inside without us seeing it, roll out, and liftoff in a period of an hour or so? I have worked payload integration at the Cape before and it takes days. This was a systems engineering miracle. Now we were only half hour to an hour before they could deploy over a target and fire their warp missiles.
'Can we get real-time trajectories announced or mapped?' I wanted to know where they were.
