Her communicator buzzed against her breast. “Commander, the lunar ship is ready to depart,” Lieutenant Ramah said. “Do you want to observe the proceedings?”
Salamander shook her head absently. “No thank you,” she said. “I have to complete this task. Bid them bon voyage from me.”
“Yes, Commander,” Lieutenant Ramah said. He was wise enough not to argue. “It shall be done, superior female.”
“Oh shut up,” Salamander said crossly. The sudden arrival of space travel, mixed with alternate history, had brought many phases into common use. She disapproved of it, but even a Commander had limits. Lieutenant Ramah signed off; she drifted over to the main computer and checked on progress.
“Wow,” she breathed, as the lunar ship departed. It was a large construction; four massive tanks and a single set of engines pushing it. The five SSTOs had been busy bringing up personnel for the new base on the moon, one that would stake British control of the moon for the rest of time.
Shaking her head, she turned back to her work. A major railway junction, near Moscow, was a major target. Was it more or less important than a series of bridges near Gorky? The PJHQ would check the targets she’d picked, but she knew that they wouldn’t get it quite right; they never did.
“Targets designated,” she muttered finally. “Boom bitches.”
The White House
Washington DC, USA
25th June 1942
Ambassador King stepped inside the Oval Office with a feeling of relief. He’d been very worried about the invasion of Europe, nearly four weeks ago, and success had been a relief. He’d known, far more than any Contemporary person, just how chancy the entire invasion was. In 2015, it would never have worked, not against a force that knew what the hell it was doing. The Wehrmacht had been brave, but they’d been unable to counter-attack without massive losses.
“Ah, Ambassador,” Truman said. “Come on in.”
King took his usual seat. He was surprised to see General Groves, General Eisenhower and Ambassador Quinn present as well; the meeting must be important. Truman nodded absently at him, and then gave orders for the room to be sealed.
“As you may have heard,” Truman said, nodding to King, “the Germans appear to have a working atomic bomb.”
King felt the room spin around him. Groves had had remarkable success, just from knowing the future, and he expected that whoever was on the German side would have had similar access to information, even to the level that Oliver had provided them. He had a very quiet suspicion that Hanover had passed the information to Oliver for him to pass on to the American Manhattan Project; it had simply been too detailed.
“It seems very likely that they will have been able to duplicate our success,” Groves said. The heavyweight general – a less charitable person would have said fat – scowled around a thick cigar, which was blowing puffs of foul-smelling smoke around the room. King had attempted to convince Truman to ban smoking from the White House, on general principles, but he had failed.
Groves unlocked a secured briefcase and started to pass papers around. “Once we had the information, creating the atomic bomb became an engineering problem, rather than a scientific problem. We took the fastest possible route compatible with security, producing what I am assured is a Thande Fission Breeder Reactor.”
King shuddered. The British scientist had designed the ultimate fast-fission breeder reactor, simply as a scientific project. To add to the compilations, he’d then published the design, where it had provoked the Iran War. No one in their right mind would have used the design – it made the Chernobyl design look safe – but the Mullahs hadn’t been in their right mind. It didn’t require any effort to imagine either Himmler or Stalin having scruples about building an entire network of them – and so the United States of America had had to go down the same road.
He scowled angrily. The German u-boat that had sunk the Queen Elizabeth had killed two Americans from the United Nations Nuclear Commission, which had been given some extra teeth following the Iran Crisis. Either of them could have made the process far safer, rather than risking Groves’s team on the job. As it was, there were some parts of Nevada that would not be safe for a very long time indeed.
Groves coughed. He had absorbed a radiation dose himself. “We built nearly a dozen of them,” he said. “Two of the round dozen are not ready to operate yet, but we will have enough material for around fifty bombs in five years.”
Eisenhower frowned. “The Axis of Evil will not be around in five years,” he said. “I need something that we can use at once, should the Axis deploy the rumoured nuclear weapon.”
“You do not believe in it?” Truman asked. “It would have thought that it was hard to risk disbelieving in.”
Eisenhower coughed. “If they had such a weapon,” he said, “it could have utterly destroyed the landing in the Netherlands. If they have it, then why not use it. Is it lost somewhere, waiting for us to stumble across it? Is it in Himmler’s hands? Stalin’s hands? Some resistance group we don’t know anything about?”
“Or the so-called Free German Army,” Groves said. “I don’t trust their political leader; he smiles too much.”
“Ambassadors normally do,” King said. He had to admit to some concern over Ambassador Ernst Schulze’s determination to end the European Union – and French influence – before it had even begun. Schulze had been exiled from the mainstream of German politics… and King had always wondered why. “It’s part of the job.”
“You would know,” Eisenhower said dryly.
Truman sighed. “I’m running a madhouse here,” he said tiredly. “Generals, Ambassador, we have to work on the assumption that the weapon is real.”
“Then we have to strike first,” Groves said. “We know where the Waffen-SS is based; we have Fat Lady on its way to Europe. One single explosion and the problem will be solved…”
Eisenhower hit the table hard enough to bruise his fist. “General, you are talking about… contaminating a vast stretch of Russian territory that we’ll have to fight our way through. You’ll do that over my dead body.”
Groves glared at him. “That could be arranged,” he said. “We cannot risk them letting off even one nuke.”
“Does this position of President not come with some authority?” Truman asked icily. There was instant silence. “General Eisenhower, who isn’t President yet, is correct to say that we dare not start…”
“Irradiating,” King supplied helpfully.
“Thank you,” Truman said. “We dare not start irradiating vast regions that our men will have to fight their way through,” he said. “We know” – he waved a hand at Groves’s face – “of some of the dangers and I will not expose American troops to that.” He sighed. “I have discussed the matter with the British Prime Minister. In the event of the Russians using a nuke against our troops, we will destroy Leningrad.”
King spoke into the dead silence. “No,” he said.
Truman lifted an eyebrow. “You think that we should not retaliate against them?”
“No,” King said, ignoring the very childish look that flickered across Groves’s face for a short moment. “I question, however, the choice of target. Leningrad, or Saint Petersburg as it was known in my time, is a place of considerable cultural value. It’s also very close indeed to Finland, which is one of our allies.”
“If only in a nominal sense,” Eisenhower said. King nodded; the OSS had been supplying the Finnish resistance with weapons, and the USAAF had managed the occasional bombing raid to support attacks against Soviet positions, but the never-to-be-sufficiently damned logistics had prevented Patton’s dreams of a march across Sweden into Finland.