“I figured it was nothing as soon as the system warning came up,” Orbital Monitor Jones said, shaking his head.

“Then what’s the system attacking?” asked General Fitzroy. Nuclear Missile Defense was just one of the duties of his new position, and he wasn’t entirely familiar with it yet. Looking at the monitor-covered wall, the general attempted to locate the intuitive graphical displays they’d had at the NASA control center: a red line snaking across the world map, forming a sine wave atop the map’s planar transformation. Novices found this inexplicable, but at least it let you know that something was shooting into space. But there was nothing so simple here. The lines on the screens were a complicated abstract jumble that was meaningless to him. Not to mention all the screens with swiftly scrolling numbers that had meaning only to the NMD duty officers.

“General, do you remember when they replaced the reflective film on the ISS multipurpose module last year? They lost the old film. That’s what this was. It balls up and then unfurls in the solar wind.”

“But … it ought to be included in the target screening database.”

“It is. Here.” Raeder brought up a page with his mouse. Below piles of complicated text, data, and forms, there was an inconspicuous photograph, probably taken with an Earth telescope, of an irregular white patch against a black background. The strong reflection made it difficult to make out details.

“Major, since you’ve got this, why didn’t you terminate the launch program?”

“The system ought to have searched the target database automatically. Human reaction times aren’t quick enough. But data from the old system hasn’t been reformatted for the new one, so it wasn’t linked in with the recognition module,” Raeder said. His tone was a little aggrieved, as if to say, I’ve demonstrated my proficiency by managing to pull this up so quickly in a manual search when the NMD supercomputer couldn’t, but I still have to put up with your clueless questions.

“General, the order came to switch over to actual operational state after the NMD moved its intercept headings into space, but before software recalibration was completed,” a duty officer said.

Fitzroy said nothing. The chatter of the control room annoyed him. Here in front of him was humanity’s first planetary defense system, but it was nothing more than an existing NMD system whose intercepts had been redirected from various terrestrial continents and into space.

“I say we should take a photo for a memento!” Jones said. “This has got to be Earth’s first strike at a common enemy.”

“Cameras are prohibited,” Raeder said coldly.

“Captain, what are you talking about?” Fitzroy said, angry all of a sudden. “The system didn’t detect an enemy target at all. It’s not a first strike.”

After an uncomfortable silence, someone said, “The interceptors carry nuclear warheads.”

“Yeah, one point five megatons. So what?”

“It’s nearly dark outside. Given the target location, we ought to be able to see the flash!”