Axis of Evil

Chapter Thirty-Six: Preparations

Churchill Space Centre

French Guiana, South America

8^th June 1941

The massive shape stood on the launch pad; a single massive cylinder, propped up by two rockets. It was basic space shuttle technology, modified in ways that only the truly innovative could have thought of, matched with the political will to make it work, whatever the cost.

“They made fun of this in the papers,” Goddard said. He’d been delighted by the proposal; the new computers made calculating little details like orbital paths and velocity easy. “They kept asking what was the point of sending up empty tanks.”

Dashwood chuckled. “Reporters only have imagination when it comes to imagining romances and scandal,” he said. “The very concept of building a space station in space from fuel tanks never seemed to occur to any of them, even though we’re launching three Goddard rockets a week.” He waved a hand at the rocket on the pad. “Look at it, Doctor; an Armstrong-class tank launcher.”

He grinned madly, pacing around the room. “It’s a very simple device to mass-produce and it’s cheap as anything; hell, you could buy a car for the cost of the rockets, now that I got some good accountants working on the budget. All that is needed is the tank itself, then once its in LEO, the team can build themselves living quarters.”

“We also have to continue the Goddard launch schedule,” Tempest reminded them, consulting his PDA. “Now that we have corrected the… bad quality control on the Goddard-class, we can continue launching satellites and complete the satellite grid.”

Dashwood scowled at the reminder of the launch disaster. The three successive successful launches hadn’t quite dimmed the concern that had spread over the Ministry of Space, even though the name was hardly official yet. Even so, the reconnaissance over the entire planet was improving steadily; the RAF, for one, had been delighted, even though MI6 had been working hard on sending agents into enemy territory.

“The main priority now is to get the station built,” Dashwood said. He glanced down at his own PDA. “By next week, I want all of the first tanks in orbit, just so they’re there for us. According to the manufactory, we should have the first Clarke-class heavy lift rocket in a couple of weeks, by which time we’ll have launched most of the supplies into space. How are the astronauts coming along?”

“They’re doing fine in the rigged-up water tank, although we did have to swear upon a massive stack of bibles that it wasn’t a trick,” Tempest said. “That dratted show really buggered up the public’s trust in space flight.”

“Bastards,” Dashwood agreed. “And the simulations?”

Tempest hesitated, forming his thoughts. In several respects, the space program was far more advanced than the first steps in the original timeline; they knew far more about space flight and space technology than their predecessors. Computer-generated simulations, for example, ensured that the entire operation could be practiced time and time again, with every contingency planned for and counter-steps devised.

Which, of course, didn’t change the fact that some of the technology was from 1941 and wasn’t always safe to the nth degree. If something had gone wrong on one of the designed SSTOs, the crew would have a good chance of making it back alive, but if the Clarke-class heavy lift rocket, which would carry a large capsule into space, went wrong, it would explode like a roman candle.

“They’ve been simulating for a long time,” he said finally. “They think that it will take two weeks to assemble the main core of the station once they’re in orbit, using the equipment we’re supposed to be placing in orbit. Once that’s done, we can start putting up a regular crew and expanding further.”

Dashwood nodded, smiling to himself. Once a person was in Low Earth Orbit, they were halfway to anywhere in the solar system. His plans, the ones that Hanover and himself had discussed, were boundless; war provided an excellent way to spend money without much oversight by short-sighted politicians.

He wants a silver bullet, Dashwood thought grimly. The prospects of a land war being fought all the way through Germany to Moscow were horrifying, even to the most enthusiastic proponent of the war. Orbital weapons could make the war shorter, even with the technology they were used to working with, and that was worth any price.

“I think we can clear for launch,” Tempest said, checking his watch. The informal air had dissipated with the first disaster. “The launch window is opening now.”

“Excellent,” Dashwood said, tapping a button on the computer. The launch sequence began, counting down the ten minutes until the launch. He watched grimly as the final checks were made and the crew hastened to evacuate the launch pad.

“I confirm launch commit,” Tempest said, as the counter ticked down. “Armstrong-class confirmed for dispatch. Launch telemetry online and downloading into secure storage.”

“Do you think we’ll ever get used to this?” Dashwood asked, as the counter reached zero. “Launching.”

The two boosters on either side of the tank began flaring in perfect unison, slowly pushing the massive tank into the air. It picked up speed as the power grew, lifting it into orbit without bothering with stage separation. The boosters, too, would be useful to the orbiting station, once it was constructed.

“Telemetry indicates stable orbit achieved,” Tempest said. He grinned. “We have laid the first stone of the first space station ever to exist in this timeline.”

Ten Downing Street

London, United Kingdom

8^th June 1941

The roar of jet engines and the strange putt-putt-putt of the V1 pulsejets could be heard echoing over London as the air raid sirens howled through the streets. After nearly five months of peace, London was being raided again; Germany had launched nearly five hundred V1’s at the city, as well as other primitive cruise missiles at the RAF bases.

If they had launched them during the invasion of Norway, during those final desperate battles, it might have had a real effect, Hanover thought, watching out over London from the windows. His security staff had tried to convince him to go to the bunker, but he’d refused, not only from the best of motives.

“There are people out there who have no shelters, no security and no hope if we are attacked as badly as we were during the Battle of Dover,” he’d said. “I will share their danger, as far as I can.”

An explosion billowed up from the Docklands, sending a blast of fire into the air. Hanover shook his head; the Germans were concentrating on terror bombing, rather than strategic attacks that might have severely embarrassed the British. It would have made sense from the strategic point of view; even nearly a year after the Transition, Britain still had difficulties in replacing the Eurofighters, on the rare occasions when one of them was lost.

Should have concentrated on our airfields, Hanover sneered, even as he understood their logic. A V1 was not accurate by any definition of the term; a five hundred-metre impact near the target would be lucky. Still, if the V1s had been hurled at the airfields, and actually managed to hit something important… it could have been very bad.

The computer display, updated regularly from PJHQ, changed as he watched. RAF Tornados and Eurofighters swooped and danced across Europe, hunting down the launchers and destroying them. Others moved in a finely coordinated dance with the ground defences, knocking down the V1s as they headed blindly for their targets. The battle was unpleasant, but there could be no quarter.

“Message from Oxford, Prime Minister,” his secretary said. “The Royal Family is safe out there.”

“Oh, joy,” Hanover muttered. “Can’t that pompous twit get anything right?”

He returned to staring out of the window and thinking rapidly. His concerns over Norway, over the reports from Russia, blended into one; the team in Russia was reporting that Stalin was planning to expand into Sweden before the Allies could arrive. He scowled; the covert – very covert – support to the Finns wasn’t having the effect he had hoped. While the Finns were willing to fight, they wanted Allied guarantees for Finland afterwards, and Hanover knew that they were in no position to make such guarantees.

He shook his head. It was the Kurdish and Shia situation all over again. Why should the Finns fight against tyranny if the Allies could just cut and run at any moment? Even the handful of SAS teams in Finland, using satellite reconnaissance to warn the Finns, couldn’t convince them.

“Prime Minister, Major Stirling is here to see you,” his secretary said. “Shall I send him in?”

“Please do,” Hanover said absently. He nodded politely to Stirling as he entered the room, carrying the latest in intelligence from Norway. “Good afternoon, Major,” he said.

“Good afternoon, sir,” Stirling said. He looked more confident than he had the first time they’d met. “I have the latest briefs for you.”

“And has anything come in on the air attacks?” Hanover asked, placing the first thing first. “It’s rather important at the moment.”

“We seem to have broken it up,” Stirling said. “Strike Command thinks that the Germans were expecting to launch several more from each launcher, judging by the explosions after the RAF struck at them. The Germans have been experimenting with radar-guided systems again, to judge by some of the flak, but only one plane was damaged.”

Hanover lifted an eyebrow. “It made it back safely,” Stirling assured him. “There were only a handful of real piloted aircraft, heading down as low as they could across the sea. Fortunately, the AWACS saw it and the planes took them down.”

“I wonder what they thought they were doing,” Hanover said absently. “What’s happening in Norway?”

Stirling activated the display projector and displayed a tactical map of Norway. “The American 1^st Army, under General Patton, is advancing on Oslo, something that they’ve been doing for the last week and a bit. The problem is that Norway is a very bad country to fight a land war in; the Germans launched sea borne invasions against all their major ports. We’re having to do it the hard way, marching across the country, and logistics are a pain in the ass, pardon my French.”

Hanover smiled. “Cheerfully pardoned,” he said.

“On the plus side of the ledger, we’ve demonstrated the success of the Hercules bomber, in fact we’ve done that so well that Patton has reinforced his demands for heavy bombers in the United States,” Stirling said. “The JDAM knock-off seems to have proven itself, along with the MOAB and the collection of dumb bombs. The Germans simply don’t have a good defence; in fact, they don’t have any defence now that we’ve cut most of their supply lines.”

He coughed, and then tapped a German tactical icon. “That force was moved into Sweden, and is now making its way north,” he said. “Unfortunately, the Swedes don’t seem willing to confront the Germans directly, particularly with the presence of the German division near Stockholm. I think we might end up having to support them directly, and the Germans are way closer to their government than we are. It looks as if Hitler and Stalin have agreed to divide Sweden between them.”

Hanover scowled. “Are there any plans for the situation?”

“PJHQ did suggest launching missiles against the Soviet forces massing on the border,” Stirling said. “We could move a submarine closer, if we had to.”

“True,” Hanover said. “Did Patton give any estimate of when he would take Oslo?”

Stirling nodded. “For the moment, they’re concentrating on exterminating the smaller German holdouts as they extend their logistical lines eastwards,” Stirling said. “We’re helping with that with precision bombing and some reconnaissance, but Patton is confident that he can get near to Oslo – near enough to launch attacks – within a fortnight at most.”

“You’d think that the Germans would surrender,” Hanover muttered.

“Spy satellites suggest that the Germans are digging in,” Stirling said. “Patton is expecting a hard fight, even with bombers ready to strike at Oslo.”

“A fortnight,” Hanover mused. “22^nd June 1941. Wasn’t that the day that Hitler marched east into Russia?”

“Yes, sir,” Stirling said. Hanover allowed himself a brief flush of pleasure that he didn’t sound surprised. “Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa on that date.”

“Let’s hope it’s not a bad omen,” Hanover said. “Now, what about Redemption? Can we launch on the same day?”

“I don’t think so,” Stirling admitted. He changed the display; tactical icons flickered over the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East. “We’re moving forces around as fast as we can, even after losing Baghdad to the Russians – fortunately that’s good defensive terrain – but we won’t be remotely ready to launch Redemption for at least a fortnight if we push it, according to Rommel. General Flynn is less eager to move fast; he wants to ensure that we have everything we need in place first.”

“I’ll go with Flynn,” Hanover said. He scowled down at the display. “How are the preparations going?”

“We’re launching air and cruise missile attacks on Greece from Crete, as planned,” Stirling said. “The raids have reached as far north as Serbia, or what would have been Serbia in our time. Sir, by the time this war is over, the ethnic makeup of the region is going to be very different.”

“I know,” Hanover said grimly. He’d considered threatening the Germans with nuclear attacks; only the sick certainty that Hitler would have called his bluff had deterred him. “We can’t do anything about it, Steve.”

“I know,” Stirling said. “They’re doing it everywhere, from Iran to Poland to Central Asia, exterminating peoples who would have posed a problem to them in the future. The ethnic makeup of the world is going to be a poorer place in the future.”

“I know people who wouldn’t have thought that that was a bad idea,” Hanover said grimly. “Still, we can’t do anything about it. Did the satellites plot out the German supply lines for us?”

“Yes, sir,” Stirling said. “They’re very weak, sir, and they can be taken out as part of Redemption. Once we have the RAF ready to sortie from Egypt and even Crete, we can utterly destroy their defence lines. Still, Egypt may pose a problem.”

Hanover nodded. Egypt was something of a problem; the nationalistic public wasn’t keen on the British. The new treaty had given them major trading advantages, in exchange for a peaceful rear area, and also a limited veto over British military operations from their territory.

“Once the benefits of being within the Commonwealth become apparent, they will be unable to leave,” he said, and smiled. They’d also given the Egyptians control over the Sudan, under the single condition that they treated both Christians and Muslims equally. As the Muslim Brotherhood was still trying to decide how to view the Republic of Arabia, the Egyptians had agreed to the condition.

“And the new railways are completed,” Stirling said. Hanover nodded; the American-built railways might be only 1941-era technology, but they were very simple and easy to use. Building a massive rail network throughout North Africa and the Sudan, as well as the former French and Belgium territories, had been intended to replace shipping through the Mediterranean Sea after Gibraltar fell, but they had grown into systems to pull the fragmented nations together. Egypt had agreed to the railways – on the understanding that there was no question of them paying for them – and they had found them very useful indeed.

“True, true,” Hanover said. “Finally, what about the Ministry of Space?”

Stirling smiled. Like Hanover, he’d been a big backer of the space program, even coining the term. “The latest report was that the first space station component has been launched into LEO – Low Earth Orbit – in a fairly stable orbit.”

Hanover narrowed his eyes. “Fairly stable?”

“In a hundred years, it’ll burn up in the atmosphere,” Stirling said wryly. He grinned, his enthusiasm showing though. “Major Dashwood believes that the entire station can be built in several months, once we have a team up there working permanently. He did ask me to ask you what the station should be called.”

“I’ll think about it,” Hanover said. “A question; if the tanks, as they seem to be called, are going up empty, what about the supplies?”

Stirling tapped the display, altering it. “The supplies will be launched into space using a number of Clarke-class and Goddard-class launchers,” he said. “It’s rather like the first space station, Skylab, where massive boosters push most of the supplies into orbit. Over the next few months, everything that would be needed will be placed in orbit, and then the first team of astronauts will be sent into orbit. They’ll do most of the work of assembling the station, mainly by moving all of the fuel tanks into one single mass, then they will pressure the station by filling it with compressed air.”

He tapped the display. “We don’t plan on doing anything too fancy with the first space station,” he said. “There’ll be solar panels for power, and a number of sensors for staring down at the Earth.”

“And there’s no way that the Germans can get at her?” Hanover asked grimly.

Stirling shook his head. “They might be able to launch a missile at it, but we’d see them building it on the ground,” he said. “Sir, with space-based weapons, we can win the war!”

“I have no intention of losing,” Hanover said dryly. He smiled at the young officer’s enthusiasm. “We’ll get the weapons built, and then we’ll get them into space, and then we’ll use them. Still, the Ministry of Space will be even more important in the post-war period.”

Stirling blinked. “You’re thinking that far ahead?”

“It’s a good habit to get into,” Hanover said. “The last time we fought this war, the post-war government fucked up badly. This time… this time there will be no mistakes. The nation that has the strongest presence in space will be the superpower of the new timeline… and Britain is going to be that power.”

He shrugged. “Not that it matters for the moment,” he said. “So… Oslo in two weeks, and Redemption as soon as possible after that. The war might just be within shouting distance of being won.”