The Gemini Divergence (72 page)

Schwerig put his hand out to help Graff up
from the floor as Graff asked, “What the hell was that?”

“I expect that it was an American
thermo-nuclear device, if we would have been this close to the
blast on earth, we surely would have perished.”

As he looked out of the closest window he
could find, he sighed in disgust at the sight of the damage.

The majority of two entire rings were
completely destroyed with portions of the third and fourth rings
damaged or missing parts, and the radar reflecting cone was
dislodged and swaying like a broken and contorted limb from the
side of the station.

“Damn!” complained Schwerig, “Now they will
be able to see us from the ground… We must prepare for battle… They
will be coming.”

“But we haven’t even recovered from the blast
yet,” cried Graff.

“They won’t be waiting… I wouldn’t… I expect
that they will be here as soon as they will be able.”

“What should we do?”

“We need to effectively abandon this station
until repairs can be made to mask it from the earth again. They
could fire a missile at us at any time… Notify all of the surviving
members of your squadron to retreat to their ships and abandon this
station, I only want the repair crews remaining. And for God’s
sake, don’t enlighten them to the dangers of staying.

*~*

General Fitzpatrick was again in his control
room when another technician walked up and handed him a file
folder.

As he opened the file he could see the
digitized image of the exposed portion of the station, and noticed
the fuzzy distorted part of the image that appeared to be the part
of the station that remained hidden from detection.

He then noticed another image that appeared
to have little or nothing on it and queried the technician that had
delivered the file, “What is the purpose of this second image?”

“General Sir, while we were focusing in on
the first station, we were able to detect the exodus of several
spacecraft departing the disabled station and heading back and
forth like a colony of feeding ants to another specific point in
space… The second image is the snapshot of that point in space… If
you have noticed the distortions around the masked portion of the
disabled station, you can then notice that similar distortions
exist in the second image; albeit the supposed station in the
second image is still completely masked.”

The General’s face lit up dramatically, “Do
you mean that we have figured out how to find their shielded
stations in space?”

The technician hesitantly replied, but with a
caveat, “Well sir, we were lucky enough to see the ships coming and
going from that second image, so it was a stroke of luck that we
still found it… We have indeed come across a way to confirm when we
have located them, but they are still well disguised from our
detection systems.”

“Do we still have this one in sight?”

“Yes Sir, we have been tracking it ever
since.”

“Send a communiqué to General McConnell… I
want to dispatch a squadron of Blue Gemini capsules to attack
immediately.”

*~*

The Raumsfahrtwaffe continued their exodus
from the crippled station as hastily as they could manage. It
hasn’t dawned on Schwerig yet that the Americans have now been
tracking the spacecraft moving back and forth between the two
stations.

Graff and Schwerig were looking out of a
window at yet another newer station as Schwerig pondered out loud,
“I may regret contemplating this, but do you suppose that we should
have remained in hiding as well as we could?”

Graff was silent and stunned. He didn’t know
what to think, or how to properly answer, “Do you mean the Jasta at
the former battle station, or the Raumsfahrtwaffe as a whole?”

Schwerig continued, “Two cities, a whole
station and countless spacecraft and crews; is it all necessary?
God only knows what the Americans have in store for us next.”

“I don’t know, Herr Feldmarschall. I suppose
that Führer Von Sterbenbach doesn’t want to be hiding like feeble
rodents.”

“But does bravery have to cost us our
existence… If that is what we truly believe, then why didn’t we all
just stay back in Germany and fight till our deaths?”

“I … don’t know. I guess I never thought of
it that way.”

“When the Japanese were in mass jubilation
over their victory over the Americans at Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto was
considered insolent for suggesting that Japan could still never win
a war against America unless they could muster the resources to
invade their west coast, march across and occupy their entire
country and finally march on Washington D.C. itself.”

Graff stood silently listening as Schwerig
continued, “We don’t have the resources to do that either… We
didn’t have the resources to hold back the Allies when the Third
Reich was in its prime… How the hell does the Führer expect us to
do anything now, but die?”

“What do you suggest we do?”

Schwerig stopped pondering out the window and
snapped back into a serious mode as he turned and said, “I was just
thinking silly thoughts… We will, of course, follow the Führer’s
orders to the letter.”

*~*

General Fitzpatrick received a denial for his
attack plan using the Blue Gemini capsules, but was instead
informed that the Joint Chiefs wished to launch a missile at the
most recently discovered station.

Although, to his dismay, General McConnell’s
desire for political correctness had reared its ugly head and
General Fitzpatrick had been ordered to give the coordinates to the
Navy, so that they may launch the missile at the Raumsfahrtwaffe
station instead of the Air Force.

4 December 1965

NASA launched Gemini 7, carrying astronauts
Borman and Lovell into space.

During the mission, the astronauts were
instructed to look out over the Florida coast and watch the Navy
sub Benjamin Franklin launch a nuclear missile into space.

They watched as the missile rose out of the
atmosphere, then past them out of their view and into space.

Unbeknownst to them, the missile then
exploded, totally destroying the Raumsfahrtwaffe station with a
direct hit on the stations central hub.

AFOAT’s Space Command Detachment confirmed
the explosion with their Vela satellites, by measuring the gamma
ray burst of the nuclear device.

The explosion sent debris into every
spherical trajectory possible, including a large amount that was
now heading towards the earth.

Small debris that was hurled away at a faster
velocity started to arrive within hours.

NORAD became alarmed as they started to track
some of the larger pieces of the station being trapped into slowly
declining orbits by the earth’s gravity.

They became supremely concerned about one
piece that appeared to be extremely massive in weight; immediately
theorizing that it may be the stations nuclear reactor, and it
appeared as though it was going to fall to earth some time in the
coming days.

On Gemini 7s next orbit, they started to
notice objects that weren’t there during their previous orbit.

They radioed Houston Control and asked where
this debris field came from.

Even though Von Braun knew what the fragments
actually were, he had Mission Control radio back that the debris
field was from their booster rocket that was still in orbit and
hadn’t fallen back to earth yet.

Gemini 7 then replied that they also had the
booster and its debris field in sight on the other side of the
capsule. They believed that this may be something else.

*~*

“My Führer, I implore you.” Schwerig pleaded,
“The Americans have figured out how to track and target our
stations in their present locations. They are all just sitting
ducks.”

“What do you propose we do… run?”

“No my Führer, we just need to move further
into space and regroup… Perhaps we could set up a permanent station
on Mars. The exploratory crew has returned from there and reported
that it is even more habitable than the moon.”

“But the Americans have already sent their
electric eyes there as well… I have seen the images.”

“Yes, but they don’t have missiles that can
reach Mars yet… Look, our stations are overcrowded now, and we just
got finished calming the moon panic, now they are panicking again…
I think that we need to start shuttling people back to Colonia
Dignidad until we regroup on Mars.”

“How will we keep their silence while they
are back on earth?”

“We will promise that their only hope of
returning to space is silence, and remaining on the compound in
Parral.”

~~~**^**~~~

The Gemini War / The Kecksburg Incident

NORAD continued to track the largest
threatening piece of the former Raumsfahrtwaffe battle station, as
well as it’s accompanying debris field that was slowly traveling
towards the Earth in ever tighter concentric orbits.

Back when Lemay was in charge; Gus was used
to getting short and blunt phone calls or second hand single
sentence messages or telegrams telling him where and when to go
next, but for whatever reason, General Fitzpatrick always seamed to
have Gus and Jack summoned to his office at Buckley to tell them
what they would be doing next.

“How was space?” Gus asked Jack while they
waited outside of Fitzpatrick’s office.

“Oh man… Don’t hate me… I think I want to
become a front ender.”

“What? You traitor,” Gus answered, surprised
but jokingly, “Why would you want to do something like that?
Besides, you and I are just a few strides from the Air Force
retirement-boot in the ass. They would never retrain you at your
lack of retention… You’re shorter than a circus midget.”

“Mr. Hughes said that I could work for him
after I retire… His business is in California now, but he figures
that the Air Force is going to force his work onto NTS. He was
thinking, if that happened, that he would just move his whole
company to Nevada because they have a much better tax rate.”

“So after twenty years of being stuck in
every God forsaken desert and desert island on earth, you are going
to retire to… a desert?”

“Well, where are you going to go?”

“Don’t know yet, but I’d like to get as far
away as possible from living out of a duffle bag and having no
social life, and having a job so secret that I can’t tell anyone
what I have been doing for the last twenty years… I can only
imagine what a nightmare my first job interview will be when they
ask me to describe what I have been doing for my entire career up
till now.”

Jack chuckled, “I’d love to see the look on
their face it you told them.”

They both laughed as General Fitzpatrick’s
secretary leaned out of his office into the hall and called for
them, “Sergeants Danuser and Jennings… The General will see you
now.”

Once inside, the General had them sit and get
comfortable, “Gentlemen… We have been tracking a very large piece
of debris from the Overseer station that the Navy just took out,
and we are concerned that it may be the station’s reactor… Of even
more concern, is that it could come down on the eastern part of the
country. NASA has calculated a possible crash zone that extends
from Ohio, across Pennsylvania and New Jersey then right out into
the Atlantic; roughly following Interstates 70 and 76.”

“I hope its not going to hit New York City,”
worried Gus.

“God help us if it does… That damn blackout
was hard enough to cover up… I can’t imagine what we would dream up
to cover up something like that… With any luck it will just fall
into the Atlantic.”

“But if it doesn’t?” asked Jack.

“Well, that’s why you boys are here. There
are three Air Force bases along that path, Wright Pat, Olmstead,
and McGuire. I figure it would be best for you boys to fly out to
Olmstead, since it’s sort of in the middle, so that you can zip to
wherever that thing comes down.”

“Why us?” asked Gus, “We have other trained
crews.”

“Because… If it is, in fact a reactor; I need
the most experienced Alpha 4 clean up people that I have, ready and
waiting.”

“Is it just going to be us?”

“No, you will have three subordinate crews;
one at each one of the aforementioned bases, so that we can try to
have as fast of a reaction time as possible… How fast can you boys
usually get in and out?”

Jack smiled as he gloated, “We can get in and
out before they turn their lights on to see why their dogs are
barking.”

They all laughed then the General said,
“Good, that’s what I wanted to hear.”

9 December 1965

People in Illinois and Indiana started to
report falling stars traveling toward the east.

Reports came in from Michigan all the way
down to Kentucky.