This Day We Will Remember in Infamy

[Eichann Rush]

PROLOGUE
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The engineering staff was very exicited. Today was the first Drop-Ex test for the new space-to-surface aresol dispersant rockets. They all looked on with anticipation, orbiting the tiny moon of Shannon in a freighter modified for observation.
As they watched, two tiny points of reflected light streaked from the gunboat a kilometer away. When they lost visual track, at once their heads swiveled down to check their instruments.
The rockets had originally been developed by a brilliant engineer for use in agriculture, spreading fertilizer over a hundred times the area at a tenth of the cost of flyovers.
But that was three years ago. The rockets launched from the LNS Chekov were three times the size and sure as hell didn't carry fertilizer.
VX gas is nasty. Very nasty. In this case, it dispersed harmlessly over dead rock, but had this been a Rhein city, each citizen below would choke and die as breathed it in and absorbed it through their skin, and for months the area would be inaccessable to anyone not in a hazmat suit.
The test was successful. Both rockets had delivered, and the new jamming systems onboard had given the slip to automatic SAM missiles installed on the surface of the moon for this test.
The scientists and engineers headed back, with a gunboat launch platform, two fighters for escorts and a freight stuffed to the gills with chemical weapons.
They would be back in a week to test a new set of missiles.
The only problem they would encounter was that they were not alone.

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