Epilogue
Commander's Journal, Entry #15
It was a hell of a day, in both good and bad ways.
The new Interceptors and especially their pilots proved themselves beyond even our wildest hopes.
Westinghouse-General Dynamics, for their part, were ecstatic, if unsurprised, when they received our glowing report on the Hardbeam-4's combat effectiveness - it is, as their rep had maintained from the start, one fearsome piece o' kit, which did its job and then some. In fact I was watching a rerun of the Star Wars movies the other day, and it gave me an idea. I'm seriously considering refitting at least one Interceptor with a number of the Laser Lances, doing away with the heavy missiles altogether and effectively creating SHADO's answer to the X-Wing - it'd be lighter, and therefore faster and more manoeuvrable, with greater firepower.
And yes, Harmony will be flying the thing. She is, after all, the best choice for a test flight. But I'm almost afraid to tell Gay.
Moonbase's defences held firm, the new laser emplacements proving to be pretty effective, though they could use a little work on the targeting. Then again, we learn by doing; we couldn't know how they'd perform in an attack until it actually took place, and now it has - and all in all, they did pretty well.
Mind you, if you define 'they did pretty well' as 'they helped save Moonbase from severe damage if not total destruction', then they did brilliantly.
But I've decided to retain the mix of automated and manned emplacements; if there is any difference between them, it's too close to call. The combat logs show that the automated guns respond more rapidly, of course, and are generally more accurate; but the live gunners are better at anticipation and harder for UFO pilots to predict, so it sort of evens out. Mind you, there's an extra, human factor in operation there - it seems the gun crews lay bets as to whether or not they can outshoot the automated guns in drills and exercises; the currency being wagered is 12-hour furlough slots. I've decided not to interfere with this new custom/tradition; it provides incentive to improve and raises morale, and that works for me.
One gunner won a week's worth during the battle. He'll be up for promotion if he isn't careful. (grin)
Our casualties overall were amazingly light - in fact we didn't lose a single Interceptor, despite a number of close shaves. (grin) Poor Sabrina's still cleaning the carbon scoring off her Interceptor's drive tube! SKY 3 was hit and went down, but Maryam managed to eject safely (at 124,000 feet!) and was picked up by the SAR team; ejection is always rough on a pilot, but she'll be okay in a couple of months. Virginia volunteered to command Skydiver Three in the meantime. She helped design 'em, so she knows Skydivers better than almost anyone else.
All in all, the last eight years' expenditure was entirely justified; the IAC has approved further enhancements to SHADO, given that we now know the Alien threat certainly hasn't gone away (and we also know we've badly underestimated their military strength), and next on the list will be Moonbase expansion and Moonbase Two, on the far side. I'm not sure exactly when we'll get these, but they're definitely going to happen.
Assuming, of course, that R & D doesn't achieve the photon drive breakthrough I'm hoping for to make 'Thor's Hammer' possible, that is...
The new Mobiles are almost complete, and will be ready for deployment next month. We'd have had them ready long before, if there hadn't been another computer chip shortage caused by yet another earthquake in Kobe like the one in 1995; plus the first batches of armour weren't quite up to spec and it took the engineers a couple of years to figure out why, though at least they did - seems there was some weird crystallisation issue or something.
Just before the coup d'état, we had in fact managed to retrofit one existing Mobile with the newest armour, using it as a testbed - and we got a dramatic demonstration of its effectiveness when that Mobile took a direct hit and survived reasonably intact. Its crew were badly shaken up, but they'll recover soon; they weren't actually injured, thankfully. "All we could see was a flash of light," its CO told me, "it was like the reverse of an eclipse."
The keels for Skydivers Six and Seven will, I hope, be laid next year...after nearly eight years of political infighting to get them built at all - it's Skydiver Five all over again. Once the new Skydivers are built and deployed we'll finally have total ocean coverage, so it'll be virtually impossible for the Aliens to build any more underwater bases, at least. I think the odds of this conflict being resolved in my lifetime have gone up substantially.
Hell, I may get to retire after all!
Andrew Nyquist found the spy for us - and once we had proof I shot the bastard myself. The Aliens have details of our new stealth tech now, thanks to the traitor, but since Captain Masters developed a countermeasure it's useless to them. They won't pull that trick off again, damn them. I've appended a special commendation to his record; that lad's come a long way since Project Discovery. It wasn't his fault the electron telescope malfunctioned, though for all we know maybe it didn't; maybe the Aliens interfered with it remotely to try to stop it taking shots, then decided to destroy it when that didn't quite work.
We did at least get a shot of the local starscape, so we could figure out at least roughly where the damn place is. Preliminary analyses suggest their system's considerably further away than we thought, a few dozen light-years at minimum. Ed's team decided not to equip the B142 with a tracking beacon because the Aliens would probably have detected it, turned back and destroyed the satellite; so unfortunately no-one has any real idea of how far it travelled. It surely has to take them months to get to Earth, even at SOL 8 or more.
Most of all, though, the day wasn't a total loss as regards the peace initiative - far from it. Hell, we learned more about the Aliens in that one day than we had in the forty years previously. I'm not sure how valuable the information will be, given that a lot of it is sociological rather than technological or biological, but at least it's there. But most telling, I think, is the fact that one man, a human, was moved to weep for an Alien.
I'd like to think that's a sign of progress. Maybe we can make peace with them.
I sure as hell hope so.
I don't want to destroy them.
END ENTRY
Coast of Cornwall, outside the Komack-Straker residence
Two days later
It ended as it began, on the beach.
"Well," Ed opened the conversation expansively after Kelly had informally debriefed him, "it seems Project Hope wasn't such a long shot after all."
"No, it had a real chance of succeeding," Kelly brooded sourly. "Dammit, we came so close!"
"I'd argue that, if the military faction knew what the moderates were up to," Ed doubted. "It seems telepathic communications aren't secure."
"No, so Andrew explained later," Kelly nodded. "In fact, even the Aliens can't shield against them. But without that damn traitor, they'd never have been able to sneak up on us and the moderates like that. We could have pulled it off," Kelly fumed. He'd shot the man himself, in utter disgust, once it was proven he'd been in contact with the Aliens. Michael Morrow was on the verge of being dismissed from SHADO for unsatisfactory conduct; such a dismissal would mean his retirement benefits would be annulled.
So he'd found a different way of supporting himself: he'd somehow hacked into the files and discovered the truth about Croxley and Miranda, and reasoned (cleverly, Kelly had to admit) that all he had to do was to let the Aliens know he was available, and their telepathy would do the rest.
It did. Morrow was attached to the technical side of SHADO, and was conversant with the latest stealth technology. He'd passed details of it to the Aliens, who'd adapted it for their own use. The UFOs had been there all along, but invisible to the Utronic trackers; they'd bent the beams around themselves, using what they'd learned from Morrow. Captain Masters had devised a counter to the technique, so it would never work again...but once had been enough.
The IAC did inquire as to how this betrayal could have occurred, given TAPS' renowned expertise and the regular routine tests, but it transpired that, as with Turner, Morrow's treason had been a long time coming. The duration of the conflict was solely to blame; the uncertainty as to how long it would continue was enough to exacerbate tiny weaknesses in certain personality types - so tiny that even TAPS couldn't detect them. Nor had they shown up in the regular psycho-analytical tests, though plans were now in work to address this problem and Dr. Jackson was confident of finding a solution.
"So my educated guesses were right on the money," Ed noted, pleased at the accuracy of his reasoning. "They do have a divided society."
"So it seems," Kelly agreed. "They're closer to the edge than we thought - closer still now, after their losses." He shook his head in amazement, recalling the most astonishing sight of that day. "I don't think I'll ever get over the shock of seeing UFOs firing on each other."
"I'm surprised they went that far," Ed mused. "I wonder how they'll explain it to their populace. Did any of the military UFOs survive?"
"No, they all bought it. But Andrew said the moderates will tell their people the truth, and damn the consequences." He shrugged. "I can understand that; they'd want to be seen as better than the military, by not continuing the lies. Oh, it'll cost them, I imagine, but..."
"Tell the truth and shame the devil, yes," Ed agreed. "Do you think they'll try again?"
"Not for a while," Kelly shook his head. "Sooner or later, though..."
And again, they looked up at the night sky.
But this time, they saw only the promise.
There'd be another day.
Someday...
TO BE CONTINUED
IN
UFO: A QUESTION OF PRIORITIES, REDUX
(Once I finish the damn thing!)