"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.
"Yes, down the hall." Tabitha said.
"I want where they are announced every five. We're not out of this game yet. We have a modifiable warp field generator and a lot of damned power. And I ain't afeard to use it!" I put on my worst Southern.
"What are we going to do, Anson?" Anne Marie asked.
"We're about to pull a damned rabbit out of a hat sweetheart. Just hide and watch. Jim get that new ECC hooked up to the new modifiable field generator like five minutes ago. 'Becca you and Sara go get the almost completed mini ECC, divide it into two separate supplies, and get it connected to two of the completed MWMs. They may not go faster than light, but they should still pack a mean wallop and be controllable in space. Two missiles are better than none. Al you help them. Tabitha, I need a layout of this facility. I mean everything—power plant, plumbing, elevators, rats, you name it. As soon as you can get it, Annie get it to me in my office instantaneously." I didn't mean to take control and Tabitha never let on like I had, but I had things to do and I didn't have time to okay it all with the general. A good commander knows when to let her troops do what they need to do, and that is just what Tabitha did.
"Anson, I'm going to alert the President that we have an offensive weapon but most likely cannot stop the incoming weapons. Is this correct?" Tabitha wanted confirmation on what we were doing.
"That's the best we've got Tab. Sorry. I love you too," I told her. Then we each went about our separate tasks.
I went to my simulation system and I started mapping out warp fields containing large masses in the flat space of the warp bubble and stresses on the system due to slow impacts on the outer bubble. We could warp from point to point with these things but real-time steering was a bitch because you couldn't see out of the Van den Broeck bubble. Then I remembered my old Star Trek: TNG. Anytime the Borg would attack, you would modulate the Enterprise's protective shields. That's it! Modulate the damn Van Den Broeck bubble. It was so simple a child could have done it! I laughed when I thought that. Isn't that what McCoy told Kirk when he learned how to put Spock's brain back in?
Sara's lights-off lights-on method would work. I would set up a function generator to drive the outer bubble on and off every few microseconds. I would add a half wave phase shift to that switching signal and use it to drive the sample frequency of the high-speed video cameras we had in the lab. So, the video cameras and the outer bubble would be completely out of phase with one another. When the bubble was on the camera would be between video frames. When the bubble was off the camera would take a frame. Now the big question would be where to put the camera and how to connect it. Oh, connect it to what you ask? Hold your horses, I'm getting to that.
Annie and Calvin rushed in pushing a roll-around cart loaded with notebooks full of blueprints and facilities drawings.
"Great guys, thanks. Annie, find me a top-level drawing of the entire facility, preferably, one with some dimensions on there also. Calvin, find out where there are outside video cameras with the best view of the outside world. Then have somebody take these three cameras here and swap them out. Mount them however you can, but get me that video signal down here, ASAP. Also, get me a global positioning system mounted up there and route that data to me here. Figure out how. We have about twenty minutes."
Calvin rushed off with the three high-speed cameras. Annie began flipping frantically through the books. "Annie, I'll be right back. I've got to see Jim a sec." I told her. I ran two doors down the hall to the main lab where I was just in time to overhear Jim shouting.
"Owwch! Goddamnit all to hell!" He let a crescent wrench slip and fall on his fingers.
"Jim, you all right?" I asked, any other time I would've -chuckled.
"Yeah."
"How's progress here?"
"I'm ready to fire it up and test it. You got the control algorithm ready?"