Sykes nodded. “No doubt. You might give away intel to other countries, other companies, or even the Deltans, if they’re watching us with any sort of keen eye. You declassify it, you lose control.”
Lydia put a hand over Gordon’s and squeezed. “I’m sorry, Gordon. Again. I know how much building Windward up has meant to you. It’s been your life, and now you’re losing it because we wouldn’t believe in you.”
Gordon favored her with a bittersweet smile. “Honestly, I’ve been so caught up in the project that I let the company slide. It’s not your fault I let it come to this. What you did didn’t help, but I’m the one ultimately responsible.”
“Well, along with removing obstacles, we probably could free up some indirect funding. I mean, we bail out corn and railroads, why not spaceships?”
Gordon smiled softly. “Okay, give me six months and a little quiet funding, and I can give you a probe that will bring back the intel you need to go public with the Deltans. Support me fully, and I can give you a damned warship that’ll give anyone pause, alien or not.”
Sykes grunted. “And here we’d been getting along so well. I’m all for peace through superior firepower, but there’s still a few too many unknowns to go the warship route yet. We haven’t even assessed a threat, and you’re ready to fire the first shot anyway.”
Gordon’s brow sharpened as he looked at the retired Air Force general. “I’m ready to be ready for anything. If the Deltans are benign, no big deal. Whatever we spent on preparations will be eclipsed by everything we gain just by being in their presence. If they’re indifferent to us, we’ve taken at least the first steps at meeting them as equals and forcing them to take notice. And if they’re hostile, if they’re inimical … well we’ll be ready for that too.”
“Ready? As if you could ever be ready for anything as unknowable as a hostile alien force. They’re coming here from twenty light-years away, Lee. They’ve expended massive amounts of energy and resources to fly here physically for whatever reason they have. How could we possibly hope to contend with them as any sort of real adversary?”
“Interesting position for the Deputy SECDEF, don’t you think?”
Sykes’ face darkened. “I’ve fought for this country in and out of war for 36 years. I’ve seen even battles and I’ve seen when one side clearly outclasses the other. I know what to do for each situation, whether it’s on the offensive or defending territory. In this case, it’s ludicrous to believe that we could hope to really contend with the Deltans in any sort of combat sense. What we’ve uncovered from your plans is that you and Kelley are planning an offensive defense-in-depth, hitting them far out, heavy, and often, should it prove necessary. But don’t you see that’s doomed to failure? They’ve already expended more energy than we’ve released as a species throughout all time and shown off more than enough capability to prove that they can destroy us without a second thought. Your tech is impressive, but it’s not alien-overlord impressive.”
“What would you do then, General?”
“I’d face up to our limitations. I’m all for your probe, and I’d even back up a manned mission if you have the tech to make it happen, but as an ambassadorial effort only. Try to reason with them or divert them, and in the meantime work on defenses here at home. Your tech could be used to build some very effective bunkers and fixed emplacements. We don’t know what they want, but it can’t be to simply destroy us. If that was it, they wouldn’t have even bothered to slow down. They could kill the whole damn globe with kinetic energy alone. And they can’t be coming to our system for resources alone. They’ve had to pass by too many closer solar systems and they’ve expended too much energy for this to be about simple materials.”
“I’ve said much the same thing before, and I agree that we should be applying ourselves to expanding our planetary defensive capabilities, but how can you believe it’s better to begin the fight here rather than off the planet, whether we have any reasonable chance or not?”
“I don’t want to begin any fight at all, Lee. Our only option is to try to work out a benign contact, and then prepare for a dug-in defense in case that fails. All an early attack will accomplish is to piss them off, ruining any chance we’d have at a diplomatic solution, and increasing the likelihood that they would just glass the planet when they got here.”
Gordon threw his hands up. “You can’t possibly know that! We have some pretty effective weapons in our arsenal, and that’s before I’ve even turned my project engineers toward upgrading and adapting them. We might be a hell of a lot more capable than you’re making out!”
“That’s wishful thinking on your part. What little you might be able to send against them in the next 15 years or so would just be nuisance making, and a distraction from developing our defenses on the ground. Face it, when you saw their turnaround flare it was already too late.”
His face turning red, Gordon snarled, “I might have been ready to send more if you people had given me the support I asked for when I first came to you!”
Lydia laid a hand on both of their arms, taking over before more than words were exchanged. “This is not the time or the place for this. Let’s just take it as accepted that both of you have … passionate but differing views about the details of our defense. That’s not what this meeting is about, though. This is about finding out what you need for now. We can work out the next step, calmly and sanely, later when we all have more than personal arguments to go off of.”
She waited for them to nod before moving on. “Six months and funding will get us a probe, right?”
Gordon took a slow breath, pointedly looking away from Sykes. “Yes.”
“And I’m assuming one probe won’t satisfy anyone with any experience in space operations, so more funding and a little more time will give us more probes, right?”
“Yes. I can’t give you a better production time until we make up the prototype, but I’m assuming it will be a lot less than six months for each probe.”
“And how long will it take to get data back from those probes?”
A hint of a smile touched the corner of Gordon’s mouth. “Well that depends on a lot of things: how far away the Deltans are, how fast the probe is going, and what sort of flight profile you send it on. Do I send it straight at their ship for a fast flyby, or do I send it in for a meeting situation? And do I maneuver it overtly or covertly?”
“It’s your probe, Gordon. The administration officially has no involvement, so you tell us.”
“Okay. If they continue tracking as they have, the Deltans are now 1.7 light-years away and moving at 20% the speed of light. If we shoot out a probe and accelerate it at one g continuous for a fast flyby, I can have some intel back in about two and a half or three years. That includes the time to travel out there, and then the time for the report to come back here. Now that’s somewhat misleading since that assumes we can maintain that acceleration for that long, or that a probe could even survive approaching 90% the speed of light, and even if it could, you’re going to get some piss-poor photos at those passing speeds due to Doppler shift.
“A better bet would be to arrange some sort of covert meeting situation, where we accelerate off-axis and then reverse our acceleration halfway out, while still keeping our drive corona pointed away from the Deltans. That lets us match speeds and approach them from the side without totally giving away our presence. That’s the same profile a manned mission would take as well.”
“Better plan, Lee,” Sykes grumped. “If there’s only going to be a couple of these probes, we don’t want to waste one of them on a recon that only nets us a blurred picture or two. I’d rather wait than waste a shot.”