The general jerked his head to the left. “This way.”

He led Eric into one of the large sprawling buildings of the spaceport, in through some security sections, and finally into the mission control room that had been used during the early days of the facility. It had been revamped, updated, and generally brought into the new century at some point in the last few years.

Eric wasn’t sure why. Mission control wasn’t a priority for near-Earth travel, but he was glad to see it all the same. The holographic displays that wrapped around the room showed telemetry from every major station on the planet as far as he could see, including the main feed from the Pentagon.

“We’re tapped into every available feed,” the general said, “including some of the Block links.”

“They gave you their codes?” Eric asked, somewhat incredulous.

The general laughed. “Not a chance. No, they stopped encrypting the latest feeds in order to simplify and speed up setup times. They were getting hammered worse than we were, and setting up new encryption codes every time one of their hardware decrypts was destroyed. Near as we can tell, the aliens don’t give a damn about what we’re saying to each other, so we’ve pretty much given up on encoding.”

Eric nodded in understanding. Military-level encryption came at a cost in terms of time and equipment.

He walked over to the local area geomap, examining the tracks as they drew across the display. The sky was full of them, both coming down and going up, and that made for a right mess to decode, but he’d been doing it for years.

“You’ve brought in a lot more SAMs than should be here,” Eric said finally.

“The whole planet brought in a lot more SAMs than should be here,” the general grunted. “We’ve been pulling the things out of mothballs ever since those damned aliens showed up. There’s a mountain cache just west of here with a thousand more still being recommissioned. I never realized just how much the government overbought when it came to these things.”

Eric nodded. “Marines still have a few hundred Harriers sitting in warehouses somewhere, General. The military can be worse than a hoarder at times.”

“That explains why most of these munitions were dated forty years ago.”

“They seem to work fine,” Eric commented.

“They’re early-model HVMs, mostly scramjet-based kinetic kill vehicles.” The general shrugged. “There’s nothing on them to go bad. Just add fuel and fire.”

“No school like old school,” Eric said, satisfied.

“Just not too old,” the General said. “We’d have a hell of a time if they had chemical or nuclear warheads. Those things don’t age well.”

“We’re going to have to go out and clean up the ones that slip through,” Eric said, sighing heavily, “No option but getting our hands dirty there.”