Kelsey Duffield had already stepped over to the second plane—she was gently touching it, running the very tips of her fingers across its smooth ebony surface as if it were a skittish young colt. Watching her carefully, she noticed, was the security guard Sandy, with Sasha the red Doberman right beside her. “This must be Dragon,” she said. “It’s very pretty.”

“Right, Kelsey,” Jon said proudly. “Our newest and best project—the AL-52 Dragon airborne laser anti-ballistic missile weapon system. We modified a B-52 H-model Stratofortress bomber to carry a zero-point-seven-five- megawatt diode-pumped solid-state laser, along with laser radar arrays for detection and tracking. I call it our newest system, but it’s actually been in the works for eight years. We were part of the original competition for the Air Force’s Airborne Laser.”

“You just lost out to Boeing, TRW, and their 747 variant,” Cheryl reminded him.

“We didn’t ‘lose out’—Boeing just had a more aggressive marketing strategy,” Jon said defensively. “We spent a tenth of what they did on marketing and almost won it.”

The new bomb doors of the AL-52 Dragon extended halfway up the side of the fuselage, exposing the entire bomb bay and midfuselage space, and Kelsey looked up inside the open doors. There were four large curved devices, the laser generators, on each side of the fuselage. Forward of the generators was a large stainless-steel container, the laser oscillator, with a large steel tube coming from the chamber forward along the inside center of the fuselage. Behind the laser generators were the capacitors that stored enough power to “flash” the diodes to produce a pulse of laser light. “Beautiful,” she said in a tiny voice. “Just beautiful. You did such a good job with those laser generators, Jon. They’re so small, but you can get about fifty thousand kilowatts out of each one, right?”

“That’s right. We can push it probably to two hundred each, but we don’t have enough generating power on board.”

“It looks like we can fit a few more laser modules in there if we make smaller capacitors.”

Jon liked it when Kelsey said “we”—it was that exciting to work with her. He almost hated to say anything negative around her for fear of discouraging or distracting her—it sometimes seemed as if she was talented enough to cure a rainy day. “Doesn’t really matter—we just don’t have enough power on board to make a bigger laser.”

“Can’t we put more generators on board?”

“We’ve got as many as we can hold,” Jon said. “We’re maxed out on capacitor size too—it just generates too much heat to increase the size any more.”