of the view panel.
'Uh hello General. This is Lieutenant Phillip Black -speaking.'
'Hello Lieutenant Black. This is General Tabitha Ames speaking. The large mass in high LEO that you are detecting is me. I need you to guide us into the other inbound tracks. Assume we can travel instantly in straight lines. Do you understand?'
'Uh, yes ma'am. How do you want me to guide you? I mean GPS coordinated or what?'
Tabitha turned to me. 'Anson?'
'Well, how about just north, south, east, west, up, and down?' I shrugged my shoulders.
'Can you do that Lieutenant Black?'
'Easy, ma'am. Which track first?' Lieutenant Black asked.
'The one closest to flying over the U.S.' Tabitha ordered.
'Roger that,' Lieutenant Black said. 'One of them is tracking into our west coastal waters airspace at this time. You're approximately the same altitude but are about nine hundred miles north and six hundred miles east of the target.'
I adjusted by vectoring the joystick to the southwest. 'How's that?'
'Uh, hold on.' The max velocity Lieutenant Black was measuring for us was probably making his head spin. 'Okay. Now you are about eighteen hundred miles north and about twelve hundred miles east of the target.'
'Lieutenant, are you telling me I went the wrong way?' I asked a little embarrassed.
'Eh, yeah. Sorry,' he said.
Tabitha seemed to frown but said nothing.
I cursed, almost laughed, and undid what I just did twice. Tabitha expressed to me later that a similar thing had happened to Jim Lovell on Apollo XIII, so I didn't feel as bad about it.
'How's that?' I rechecked my bearings. Somehow I had gotten turned around.
'Okay. Let's see. You should be within a few miles of the target. Perhaps you are a bit low. Hold one . . . yes. You need to go up by about fifty miles.'
'We can't see up or down or right. Hold on.' Tabitha announced.
I raised the facility up about fifty miles. It was weird for me to change from kilometers to miles all of the sudden but miles was still standard in American aviation. I had to do quick conversions in my head before I typed in the altitude increases or decreases. The joystick would've worked for vertical maneuvering, but typing in the exact distance was more accurate.
We still didn't see the spacecraft. 'Hold on, Tabitha,' I told her. I put a slow rotation about the center of the warp bubble. We started rotating and the star field in the camera view began to transit the screen. 'There it is!' I pointed it out to Tabitha.
'Lieutenant Black. We have a visual on the target. Please stand by to confirm target destruction.' Tabitha nodded to me. 'Kick his ass, Anson!'
I adjusted our altitude until we were in the same angular plane with the spacecraft, making sure it was in the center of the field of view.
'Stand clear of MWM two!' I yelled over the talkie.
'All clear, Anson!'
I translated the warp missile up twenty or so meters and pointed it straight at the enemy rocket.
'Lights off!' I pushed the joystick right through where the target used to be. 'Lights on!' Again the red plasma trail followed the missile and again the big red fireball. 'Scratch two!'
Unfortunately, we were out of missiles now; this one died on impact also. One half of seventy-five percent finished of a mini ECC just couldn't generate enough power to take the stress of the impact.
'Lieutenant, locate the remaining target and give us a heading.' Tabitha ordered crisply.
'Roger General Ames. The final target is currently over Irkutsk, Russia.'
'Hold on a minute,' I said. 'I can travel in spherical coordinates also. Tell me how many miles along a curve from my present location to the target. I will adjust altitude and north and south when we get there.'
'Sure. I can do that. You need to travel about sixty-five hundred miles westward then three hundred to the north.' Lieutenant Black was on top of his game.
'Okay, now what?' I said after adjusting our location. It took a second for the communications to catch back up. That was a big jump and it took the TDRSS satellite nearest us a second to realize that it was getting a signal from us. Then it had to determine where to route it.
Tabitha looked perplexed for a split second, 'Lieutenant, this is General Ames are you still there?' Nothing but static. The flat panel was all blue except for the three windows marked front, back, and left.
'Well Tabitha, looks like we lost their signal for now.' I told her. I started rotating the facility looking around for the last missile. 'Do you see it?' I asked.
'No. Keep looking.'
' . . . General Am . . . Lieutenant . . . Bla . . . do you copy?' The blue screens popped back on displaying imagery, missile tracks, and video of Mike the general's counterpart facility. 'I repeat. General Ames this is Lieutenant Black, do you copy?'
'Roger that Lieutenant Mike are you still receiving us also?' Tabitha adjusted the volume slightly.
