Insertion

The air whistled in through the holes in the fuselage as Major Nicholas “Stormy” Lincoln pulled off his helmet, puked on the deck and watched the contents of his stomach mix with the sticky residue of his co-pilot as he felt his ears pop.
United States Space Force operational protocols dictated that, in the case of fuselage compromise, his space helmet remain attached to his pressure suit until the crew chief gave him a thumbs-up. But he’d been holding that in since the seven punctures appeared in the canopy screen on the right side of the cockpit, two days ago, and the chest of Capt. Lance “Knight” Doyle had disappeared through the bulkhead behind him.
Chest and bulkhead had exited the right side of the fuselage at approximately 16 kilometers per second and put the SB-1 spacecraft conversion into a murderous spin that almost tore off the right wing and must have sent a fragment through the right-side engine, which promptly shut down. Lincoln had used most of the helium in the tanks of the reaction control system to correct the spin, and was down to less than 100 ksi by the time he set the crippled craft down on the Selenean landing pad on Luna-2.
The adrenaline crash had almost caused him to throw up in his helmet when the pad began to lower into the hangar buried nearly 20 meters below the regolith.
The Earth-2 NAZIs were pock-marked evil rat-bastards, no lie, but they sure as hell knew how to fly.
The constellation (“Operation Pencil Sharpener.” What Pentagon pencil-neck thought up that one?) had made the transit from Luna-2 orbit to Earth-2 LEO in 31 hours – a trip that had taken the Apollo missions about four and a half days, nearly five decades ago and a parallel universe away.
The magi-tech fusion impulse engines (almost literally) dreamed up by Star Trek nerds made space-flight a dream.
The constellation completed the burn for the insertion into the prograde orbit with 54 degrees of inclination, just fine, and had proceeded along a track that took them northeast from the Pacific coast of South America, across the Gulf of Mexico and then the North Atlantic to the vicinity of Great Britain, and then south again across Eastern Europe to the Indian Ocean and the southern Pacific.
On the first orbit, the EUSF guys and the converted SB-52s delivered a little payback for the kinetic weapons the NAZIs had used to attack Earth-home. It wouldn’t bring back the lives lost, but nobody would be able to use the harbor at Saint-Nazaire, in NAZI Occupied Northern France, for the duration of the war – or for a long time afterwards, either.
It also meant this world’s Great Britain wouldn’t lose the 169 dead and 215 commandos taken as POWs, which is what happened when the Earth-1 Britain executed their version of the successful raid, more than 70 years ago.
After the crowbars dropped, the orbital bomber pilots got busy making after-action reports, while everybody except the SE-3H Star Sentry crew and the guys on the two Nimrods settled in, alert but calm, to watch the sun rise above the deceptively serene curvature of Earth-2.
Down there, some weird-ass version of WWII raged and occasionally spit death at what the folks back home had started to call 21st Century Earth, or simply “Earth-home.” The crews of the three SWACS spacecraft had to sort through the noise and clutter of all the comic-book crap in Earth-2’s LEO.
About 55 minutes later, the every alarm on those three birds shrieked at once, as they suddenly realized that not all the noise and crap from the east came from solar EM, Earth-2 military satellites or space junk. A squadron of 21 NAZI spacecraft in a freakin’ retrograde orbit had started a burn that would bring them to an “encounter” with the expeditionary constellation at greater than 16 kilometers per second (more than 35 thousand miles per hour, for the armchair pilots back home).
About 20 minutes after that, people started to die.
Col. Mallory had done the best he could, under the circumstances. He’d ordered everybody to burn like hell toward atmo, angle of insertion be damned, and had the escorts – including Lincoln’s modified B-1 bomber, to form up to the east of the transports.
When the NAZIs were two minutes out, targeting computers had started to lock. At 20 seconds out, everybody (including Lincoln’s SB-1B) launched mostly-experimental space-warfare missiles and started to pray. At 12 seconds out, Lincoln could’ve sworn the radar screen pixellated as the NAZI squadron launched a f***in’ surreal number of rockets (no locks, and no locks meant ECM was f***in’ useless).
At 10 seconds, the NAZI spacecraft started to explode and the target-tracker software puked itself as fragments of blasted machines continued to close at 16 kps along wildly unpredictable vectors, and everybody started to pray.
At three seconds out, the NAZI rockets exploded into sprays of shrapnel and ball bearings, and automated point-defense disintegrators and masers began to fire. Two seconds later, shields flared and constellation spacecraft began to spray apart.
(A split-second flash of a crazy memory of dad and Uncle Clive, slightly drunk, shooting glass bottles off a stump with a 12 gauge on a summer camping trip when he was a kid.)
The two command shuttles armed with disintegrators came through fine. The beams hit the rockets and spacecraft shrapnel, and mostly teleported the atoms that comprised them in random directions. Lincoln figured he and Doyle did okay with their masers, because their craft was dead lucky enough to be on the edge of the attack, where it didn’t get too many close.
Most of time, the masers did less well. They disintegrated targets into a fine metallic dust that the shields mostly blocked. However, he’d seen the right side of at least one bird get scoured down to the fuselage frame and lose that side’s engine in a flash that blasted fragments through the spacecraft’s mid-section.
Fine metallic dust moving at 35,000 mph still did a lot of damage. Human bodies hit by that would vanish into a mist that rapidly dessicated into red dust.
By the time the cloud of fragments and the few surviving NAZI craft had vanished to the west, they’d lost four spacecraft. One other got hit, but had enough spacecraft left to peel off and start a fast limp back to Luna. The rest, including Lincoln’s SB-1, continued to burn down toward Earth-2, although Mallory had them shallow out the angle and prep for a hard retrograde burn at 100 klicks altitude.
They didn’t want to skip back out of the atmosphere instead of down into it. Down there, rockets had real ranges and destroyed vessels flew apart and then fell down and they didn’t turn into high-velocity kinetic weapons that killed you, anyway. Christ.
Everybody was just about ready to rotate around for the hard burn to kill their velocity and shallow the angle of attack when the fragment cloud appeared above the eastern horizon, again. However, by then they were well below its orbit (and wouldn’t that be a bitch to clean up after it formed a deadly metallic ring…) and thought they were okay.
And then the few surviving NAZI spacecraft started their second attack-run.
Too close to atmo and moving too fast to dive for cover, and all they could do was put up the shields and arm the point-defense masers and hope the targeting computers didn’t glitch and before “Stormy” Lincoln could complete that thought, exactly seven holes appeared in the canopy and the chest of Capt. Lance “Knight” Doyle had been reduced to red ruin, blood blowing out into space along with the cockpit pressure.
Seven holes that went all the way through his spacecraft and set it spinning, and then sent him back to Luna-2 with one engine and what was left of his RCS pressure, hoping to hell the O2 tanks hadn’t been punctured, because there was no way he could take his crippled bird down into atmo.
Exactly seven holes. He’d been counting them, for the past two days.
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General Mark A. Welsh III had worked with a lot of people, during his 38 years in the USAF, including a lot of black men. During that nearly four decades of service, and his life in Texas before then, he’d seen them in all sorts of physical and emotional states.
However, it was only in the past 18 months that he’d served as chief of staff of the Air Force that he’d seen that particular shade of gray undertone in the face of one. President Barack Obama had it, again.
“What were our total losses, general?”
“We lost six birds destroyed in the two orbital engagements, plus two more lost in atmosphere. Two others limped back to Luna-2. The lost men and machines are in the report, but it totaled eight craft lost, and two others crippled, out of 26 sent. One of those lost on re-entry broke up when it entered the lower atmosphere at trans-sonic speeds, over Earth-2’s Yucatan. The second lost power at subsonic speeds, over their Gulf of Mexico’s Bermuda Triangle. That was an EUSF cargo craft, and the Europeans say the crew managed to bail out. President Roosevelt advises us his Coast Guard is looking for survivors. This was the biggest loss of flyers in a single engagement against enemy pilots since… well, since Korea.”
“Is there any chance any of our pilots could still be alive, in a crippled vessel, in orbit?”
Welsh shook his head.
“No, sir. I’m sorry. The cloud of debris from the first encounter wouldn’t lose much in the way of velocity, and it’s moving in the opposite direction of the constellation’s orbit. That means it comes back around and passes through any wreckage, every 45 minutes, or so. Even if somebody had survived the first round, which isn’t likely, we couldn’t send any rescue vessels in to save them, in time – assuming we even had any.”
“My god.”
“Yes sir. Space combat is… new to us all. It’s somewhat surprising that damaged spacecraft made it back to Luna-2. We assumed that the only way to avoid a kill was to not get hit.”
Obama looked around at the Joint Chiefs.
“Could we have anticipated this?”
Gen. Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs and another Air Force officer, spoke up.
“No, sir, not really; we didn’t even know the E-2 NAZIs had those things, and Churchill’s Brits didn’t, either. Our analysis of the imagery we’ve gotten back shows spacecraft that most closely match something called ‘silbervogels,’ or silver-birds. Our Third Reich had something like them on the drawing-boards, which they were thinking of using as rocket-propelled transatlantic bombers, but the war cut off funding for their program. Apparently, the Earth-2 Third Reich found the bucks.”
“What are the chances they have more of them?”
Welsh rubbed his forehead for a moment.
“We think they might have more, but they can’t have many. They couldn’t know exactly what we had loaded, but they had to know the first major interplanetary shipment of men and material qualified as a primary strategic target. Also, they had to know our technology is better than theirs. If they had more ready to go, our analysts believe they’d have sent them, and I agree with that assessment.”
“Well. Thank god they didn’t. Any ideas about countermeasures? We don’t want send our men through a shooting gallery, every trip.”
Selva shook his head.
“No sir, we do not. The DARPA guys, Space Command and NASA are looking at it, hard, but we’ve got a lot of data to digest. Preliminary analysis of radio-traffic seems to indicate the disintegrators worked better than the masers but, really, it’s too soon to say. Both of the spacecraft that made it back had maser weapons, and all of the spacecraft lost were armed with them, too. We’ll know more when we finish matching telemetry data with radio traffic. That job isn’t, ah… isn’t pleasant.”
“I’d imagine not, no.”
The president sighed, and glanced at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
“Alright, General Dunford, let me know what DARPA and NASA need. After this, I don’t think congress will argue about any increases in research budgets.”
“Thank you, sir. Let me say something, though. This was a hard day, certainly, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that, in all likelihood, we have operational control Earth-2 space, from the Luna-2 to LEO. We’re fairly certain that more than 90 percent of the enemy space craft were destroyed, to our less than 30 percent. Churchill says he plans to call this a victory, and he’s right; it was.”
“Well, that’s what I plan to tell the American people, here, in an hour. I doubt the wives and mothers visited by the chaplains, these next few days, will think so.”
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Hauptmann Hildegarde “Baroness” von Richthofen sat stiffly in the chair as Oberst Hartwig Adenauer leafed through her report.
Normally, she would have stood at ease, but her left ankle didn’t work properly, at the moment.
Adenauer removed his reading glasses and rubbed at his eyes.
“The rockets launched by these future-Americans seem devilishly accurate, hauptmann.”
“Jawohl, oberst, better than we had hoped, if not quite so advanced as we feared. To be honest, had the future-Earthers not displayed such inexperience with orbital combat, our losses would have come more quickly, and we would have inflicted fewer casualties than we did.”
Adenauer heaved a sigh.
“I am forced to concur with your evaluation, Hauptmann. Unfortunately, it will not sit well, with the Führer. We have lost 18 of the 21 silbervogels we launched and, while they are replaceable, in time, experienced space-combat pilots are not.”
“I understand, oberst. Still, the attempt had to be made.”
“It did, hauptmann, and the results were better than we could reasonably expect, if not so great as we had hoped. The addition of the solid-fuel boosters served us well – an excellent idea, as it turned out.”
“If one cannot learn something from an enemy, then that enemy hardly counts as worthy, oberst. We lost two craft during launch, but those boosters allowed us achieve that retrograde orbit.”
“Ja, and that was key. So. You are grounded, for a time, hauptmann.”
Von Richthofen blinked in surprise and the corners of her mouth turned down.
“May I ask the reason, oberst?”
“Oh, there will be a command inquiry, which will clear you of any wrongdoing, of course. Mostly, it will just give you time to heal. Also, to be honest, someone must train a new group of space pilots, and no one is better qualified.”
The hauptmann relaxed a bit, and allowed her face to show a brief flash of frustration.
“I would prefer to fly back into space, oberst, and try to pick off stragglers.”
“Of course you would, Baroness, but that would be irresponsible and you know it. We need someone to supervise the construction of the Mark II silbervogels, which require some redesign if we wish to continue to use solid boosters for initial launch. Your own craft came through remarkably well, even though it came in too hot and lost its landing gear – which is just about the least bad thing that could happen with no fuel and a damaged space craft. We’ll learn from your craft’s customizations, and I understand Hauptmann Erich Warsitz has been assigned as the test pilot for the new designs. We also need someone to revise tactical doctrine, and then train new pilots in its application. Whom else would you suggest?”
Von Richthofen’s shoulders slumped, and the squared up, again. She rose from her chair and saluted.
“Understood, oberst. I am most pleased to learn of Hauptmann Warsitz' assignment to this project, and I will do my best to make spacecraft and pilots ready.”
Adenauer stood and returned the salute.
“Very well, Hauptmann von Richthofen. Two things, though. Firstly, stay off that ankle for at least three days. That’s an order. The doctor said you needed at least two weeks, but we both know you won’t listen. Don’t overdo it, and I won’t have to order light duty.”
“Jawohl, oberst. And the second thing?”
"I have good news. Your cousin, Hans, apparently landed his aircraft safely, in Poland, after his squadron was attacked during its relocation from the Russian Front. He is badly injured, but survived. I understand he has not yet regained consciousness, but thought you would like to know.”
“Danke, oberst. That is good news, indeed.”
The oberst dismissed her and Baroness took her leave. Outside, as expected, Oberleutnant Walter “Dragonfly” Koenigsmann (a good man, but a bit… protective) was waiting for her, his left arm in a sling. He tossed off a quick salute, and fell in beside her.
“Well, hauptmann. When will they let us fly, again? Will they let us fly, again?”
“To answer your second question, first, Walter, ja, they will let us fly again. But there will be an inquiry, and they plan to redesign the silbervogels to make better use of the solid boosters.”
Koenigsmann looked relieved.
“Well, that is good news, at least. Light duty for us both, I assume?”
“For now. The oberst said he plans to keep an eye on us, so we need to actually comply. What is the word on your spacecraft?”
“Some parts are salvageable, I understand, although the craft, itself, is a total loss; it did lose a wing and spin out, after all. Oberfeldwebel Linden almost wept, when he saw what I’d done to ‘his’ spacecraft.”
“My derriere was a bit tender after Zimmer saw what had happened to mine. Well, good. Once repaired, we use the two remaining craft, plus the four that weren't ready by the time of the attack, for training. Hopefully, by the time the Mark IIs complete pre-flight checkouts, we'll have pilots for them. Also, Oberst Adenauer said Hauptmann Warsitz will act as test pilot for the Mark IIs.”
"That is yet more good news. Things may be looking up."
Koenigsmann paused for a moment, and took a quiet glance around. No one stood near, but he lowered his voice, anyway.
“These future Americans…. Their technology is amazing, Baroness. I… well, I don’t think the war is going well, for us.”
Hauptmann Richthofen looked at him for a long moment.
“We will do what we can to defend Germany, Oberleutnant, and die doing so if that is our fate. Still, if things go badly, or we are betrayed by our new… ally, to the east…, well. It may be a good idea to have a position upon which to fall back.”
Koenigsmann nodded his agreement.
“My family has some land in the Drakensbergs, in South Africa, Hauptmann. I understand yours does, as well. Perhaps it is time to contact the caretakers?”
“Nein, Walter. That time may come, but it is not now. I received some good news, today. My cousin, Hans, survived the crash of his jet, and is in hospital. Once he recovers, I will go see him, and hear what he learned at the Eastern Front.”
“Ah, this is excellent news, Baroness. Most excellent. I shall return to my quarters, and have a drink of schnapps, and toast his health!”
“A fine idea, Walter, and I shall do the same. We have a lot of work to do, so if we’re ordered to rest, we should take advantage of it, I suppose.”
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Archduchess Leticia, commander of the Ministerium of Clandestine Excursions, read the most interesting report, took a quick walk and enjoyed the blooming lace-blooms (it helped clear the mind, wonderfully), and then returned and read it, a second time.
Most interesting, indeed. A murmured word, and her armillacom's memo feature, appeared.
"Item. Regarding the events in orbit of Terra, two days past. The future-Earth spacecraft displayed an inexperience with space combat that bordered upon the amateurish. By contrast, the German spacecraft performed brilliantly, and exceeded our best estimates."
She thought for a moment.
"Inquiry. Agents in place in Third Reich command to secure access to the after-action report of the engagement. Assess if the superior performance of these 'Luftwaffe' space craft may be attributed to skilled leadership. If so, evaluate the possibility of clandestine support for any such leader. End."
Category:Five Earths - Vignettes