Jack kept his eyes focused on the distant sky, and taking the colonel’s silence as permission to carry on, said, “Sir, if I set aside, for a moment, the problems of getting control of the missile defense system, not an insignificant task I’m sure you’ll agree, there is still the glaring gap in our attack plan around how we are going to handle the fourth satellite. We simply do not have enough munitions in our GBMD system to mount a third attack and maintain security on our borders.” Barrett nodded and went to speak but the captain carried on, “Of course, this does not factor in that we will have to wait to attack the final satellite till it is in range of our missiles, by which time it will be alerted by the destruction of its cohorts.

“Something tells me that if it knows how we took out the other satellites it will be markedly more proactive in its defense than the first two will have been. Colonel, I shudder at the thought of the kind of damage that final satellite will do to our defense network before we can even get our missiles to it.” And with that, Jack did actually shudder. It would have been funny if there were anything even vaguely funny about the thought of a high-powered laser cutting up military targets in Western Europe and the eastern US like a hot knife through so much butter.

The colonel stood firm, baring so little as he always did. He was not insensitive, but he had long ago learned that he must remain resolute in the face of unavoidable casualties, disconnecting his mind from human ramifications in order to focus on whatever role he had to play. But he had considered this at great length, and he had done his share of soul searching, and he would not stop his search for an alternative.

Until one came to them, though, he had reconciled himself to the cost they would pay. But he had developed an even bleaker worse-case scenario than the captain, “Jack, I’ll be frank, it is clear to me that if we leave one of those machines up there, then the remaining components of our missile defense system should be considered compromised. We should assume that if we allow it to, there is a good chance it will obliterate any remaining GBMD arsenal before we can even bring it to bear.