The Gemini Divergence (81 page)

NASA reported that astronauts errantly
destroyed the cameras vidicon tube by accidently pointing it at the
sun, but rumors persisted that the crew had actually videoed
several saucers patrolling the space over their landing zone, and
that the footage had been confiscated the moment they returned to
Earth.

Even though they had dreamt of this moment
for their entire lives, they forwent the living of the moment, and
slapdashedly scraped up some rocks, climbed back into the capsule,
and departed.

*~*

General Adlerkrallen reluctantly endured his
spurning from Von Sterbenbach about the recent intrusions onto the
moon.

Von Sterbenbach reminded him that he was not
the only Raumsfahrtwaffe general that had dreamt of taking
Schwerig’s place, and in no uncertain terms informed him that the
next Apollo mission had better not get a speck of lunar regolith
onto its landing gear… Or else!

11 April 1970

Apollo 13

After the Apollo 12 surprise in the clouds,
NASA made sure to have more than adequate fighter support in the
sky around Apollo 13.

The Overseers had taken notice of the
circling fighters within the atmosphere, but were not aware of the
Blue Gemini fighters already in LEO as well as higher orbits;
waiting for Apollo 13 to launch so that they could follow it into
translunar injection, then escorting it to the moon.

After assessing the new situation,
Adlerkrallen decided that the mission’s weakest point was when
Apollo 13, as well as her Gemini escort capsules, were arriving at
the moon and transitioning into their lunar orbits.

On April 14
^th
a Raumsfahrtwaffe
Kugelblitzen managed to sneak past the escorting Gemini capsules
and blast the Apollo command module with his directed energy
Strahlenkanone.

The jolt of electricity ran through every
wire on the module, finding its way to an electrical connection
within the oxygen tank and causing a massive explosion that blasted
the side of the Command Module wide open.

Being taken by surprise at the massive amount
of damage that had been inflicted upon the Apollo craft, the
Overseer retreated into the darkness to avoid conflict with the now
alerted Gemini pilots and reported back to Adlerkrallen that he
believed that Apollo 13 was a total loss. He further explained that
he didn’t believe that anyone could have survived the amount of
damage that he had inflicted upon it.

After an assessment by systems engineers on
the ground, Mission Control alerted Apollo 13 that they didn’t
think that their navigational computer could withstand another
Strahlenkanone blast, and that the only way to preserve it would be
to turn it off and play dead.

They were ordered to suit up and turn off the
entire electrical system for their circumlunar return trip and not
to show any life or movement of any kind during the dark side
crossing of the moon.

Much to the dismay of the Apollo 13 crew,
Mission Control also ordered the Blue Gemini patrol to abandon the
damaged capsule and fend for themselves, just as if they had
actually lost Apollo 13.

As they journeyed through the cold darkness,
they saw the lights that all of their predecessors had seen before
them… including the Apollo 13 Commander, who was no stranger to the
presence of the Raumsfahrtwaffe, having already been a veteran of
Gemini 7 and 12 as well as Apollo 8.

They sat as motionless as possible as they
were approached by pair of Overseer craft that had come to
investigate their condition and verify the reported kill.

Adlerkrallen ordered a capture craft to
retrieve the Apollo 13 module when it returned for its second lunar
orbit… but that never occurred, because once Apollo 13 rounded the
moon, they used the LEMs landing motor to escape the Lunar orbit
and return to Earth.

When Apollo 13 failed to round the moon
again; Adlerkrallen assumed that it had crashed onto the Earth side
of the lunar surface.

1 May 1970

Schwerig and the Raumsfahrtwaffe
expeditionary force had been on Mars for two years now and have had
little problem producing oxygen, as plants readily breathed the
Martian atmosphere and expelled oxygen while transferring the
carbon into plant life. They’re only primary need to nurture plants
on the Arean surface was to keep them at a warmer temperature and
shielded from the harsh Martian winds.

Most of the settlements had been buried to
protect them from the freezing temperatures and deadly dust storms.
Much of the Overseer sprawl had been covered with exposed green
houses to try and catch what little sun actually found its way to
the Martian surface.

They had found solar power to be very
problematic and built nuclear power stations at all of their
surface cities.

They had found the need to actually install
grow lights into all of their green houses and install exterior
wind diversion fences very similar to snow drift fences on earth,
to keep the annoying dust devils off of the green houses as well as
protecting them from the awesome overburden of weight that the
regolith drifts could amass.

They found that it was extremely easy for
them to keep their dwellings at a reasonable temperature, once
buried beneath the Martian weather, much like earth, the ambient
temperature of the subsurface remained above freezing year round.
They had also found ample supplies of liquid water once they
drilled deeper into the surface, although they dared not drink it
directly for fear of possible Martian microscopic life. They
remedied this by electrolysis; separating the Hydrogen and Oxygen,
expelling the dry waste, and then rejoining the two elements
through fuel cells.

They found that the iron rich red Martian
regolith along with what they had called the ‘Virgin Carbon’ of the
atmosphere made for an extremely high quality steel. It was about
in such abundance, that they used the steel for the majority of
their building needs. Even though the oxidation of iron on mars was
evident by the red regolith, in actuality, with the lack of
moisture and oxygen in the atmosphere, oxidation occurred at an
extremely slow rate. It must have taken millions of years for Mars
to actually turn red.

While mining beneath the Tharsis Bulge they
found many veins of heavy metals such as, Gold, Uranium, Lead, and
Copper. They also found strata of a Martian variant of limestone
within the walls of Valles Marineris, which became very useful for
making cement.

They were building habitat within the very
mines they were extracting the metals from as they worked. As they
dug, they filled the voids behind them with infrastructure and used
the waste ore to cover their exteriors.

One of their largest cities was at the foot
of Olympus Mons, sitting atop of the mile high cliffs at its
base.

The peak of Olympus Mons was hundreds of
miles away… So far that it didn’t even appear as a volcanic peak.
When viewed from the city at the foot of the mountain, it only
appeared as a warped horizon. The grade of the Olympian incline,
just barely steep enough to remain above the curvature of Mars
itself.

Overcrowded space stations, battered by the
war around the Earth, kept showing up, one by one. Every few weeks
another one would show up with more supplies and seemingly endless
ocean of Raumsfahrtwaffe personnel.

So many people were showing up that the
amount of people arriving from complete clerical errors was
staggering, but luckily a cottage industry of private enterprises
began to pop up within the cities. Entrepreneurs with no orders or
assigned jobs began to fill the void of needed services that were
not being provided by the Raumsfahrtwaffe leadership, and gladly
taking the money from the people who have been receiving pay for
over two years now, without a single place to spend it. There were
now restaurants serving fancier foods than the Martian patrons had
been able to taste in some time, and carpenters to remodel their
dismal and cookie cutter like homes more to their individual
tastes.

Instead of clamping down on this free
enterprise, Schwerig encouraged it. He realized that this activity
would automatically take care of many of the loose ends that he had
passed over for more important matters in the past years while
ruling over the latest exodus.

Some entrepreneurs even made new scientific
breakthroughs, one in particular found that in Mars’ lighter
gravity and lack of magnetic field, it was possible to anodize or
metal coat on a microscopic level, enabling them to create micro
thin metal sheets and insulators. They later found that they could
use these new materials to make super powerful capacitors and
condensers at a fraction of the normal size. Another Entrepreneur
took these new micro power packs and created a new rifle called a
schmelzengewehr, which would use the new power packs to ignite a
rocket powered projectile of burning Magnesium and Phosphorus.

Even though the new weapon still fired a
metallic projectile, it appeared to be a laser gun when fired, as
the burning round traveled through the air like a laser but
whistled like a rocket instead of a normal gun round. Schwerig soon
purchased many of these new weapons and outfitted all of his
military men with them.

Hermes was also showing up every six month
with the packed up remnants of the Raumsfahrtwaffe’s lunar
industrial and mining complex, as well as the people to re-assemble
and run it.

Schwerig thought back to how this industrial
relocation was so very similar to the Soviets packing their entire
wartime industry onto trains and moving it to Siberia to escape the
German advance. He thought back to how shocked he was to see Soviet
citizens standing in the mud and the snow running huge industrial
machines that were just set up on blocks in fields, building planes
and tanks right under the stars and inclement clouds; enduring the
freezing Siberian winter without complaint.

Schwerig had accomplished so much in such a
short period of time, that his followers started to nickname him
“King Ares”, and “Mini Führer”, much to the chagrin of Von
Sterbenbach who was growing evermore jealous of Schwerig’s
popularity.

~~~**^**~~~

From Gemini to Apollo
/ Contact

Volmer colluded with Kasparov in trying to
contact Schwerig again. They both highly suspected, but didn’t know
for sure, whether Schwerig was in charge of the alleged Overseer
exodus to Mars.

They decided to leave a note within the
Soviet Kosmos 419 probe for Schwerig to find, but they were
disappointed to hear that Kosmos 419 had been shot down by
Adlerkrallen’s men before leaving Earth’s orbit.

Not dissuaded by the first failure they left
another message in the Soviet Mars 2 probe. This probe managed to
elude Adlerkrallen and made the trek to Mars where the Russian
probe dispatched a rover that descended to the Martian surface,
where the Soviets reported that it was destroyed upon impact.

Schwerig’s men collected the Soviet rover
debris and lay it out on a hanger floor for his inspection. Upon
looking at the wreckage, Schwerig noticed a tube or vial that did
not look like it belonged within the wreckage and didn’t seem to
serve any purpose. There were no wires or plumbing entering or
leaving the small enclosed tube, so he unclamped it and picked it
up; unscrewing the cap to discover a note, which he quickly read.
He was immediately astonished to discover it to be a message,
solely for him, from Volmer.

He quickly looked over his shoulder to see if
anyone had noticed his discovery… They had not, so he nonchalantly
shoved the note back into the vial and slid it into his pocket. He
then proceeded to inspect the rest of the wreckage like nothing had
happened.

Once into his office, he locked his door and
sat to read the note in its entirety.

He could not believe his eyes, but it seemed
as though the very people that he had been fighting for the last
two decades had suspected his new assignment as well as his awesome
new dilemma, and appeared to be somewhat sympathetic to Schwerig’s
plight.

He realized that in actuality, Volmer and
Kasparov recognized that some of the Raumsfahrtwaffe just wanted to
retreat into space and be left alone, and it didn’t matter how
hawkish Schwerig had been in the past… He was the obvious leader
for these lost people and the only one with the intelligence and
the wherewithal to be able to pull off a successful coup.

He was also the only one that they had ever
carried on a conversation with, and even though they greatly
loathed him as a person, they realized that he could be bargained
with and that there was something to be gained by both parties if
they could make contact with him again.

Schwerig was equally repulsed, and though he
had no trust of Volmer or Kasparov, he indeed saw the opportunity
and quickly contacted Faust, who was on Von Sterbenbach’s space
station behind the moon and gave him an urgent new task to take
care of… discreetly.