After letting this go on for a few seconds, Barbeau raised her hands, smiling broadly, until the chanting finally ended. “But while he’s been warning us of his plans to cut the military in a time of ever-increasing danger to our country and our allies; while he’s warning us he’s ready to cut social safety-net programs and benefits meant to assist the most vulnerable of us; while he threatens to run up huge deficits to try to deploy these pie-in-the-sky space things, do you know what he did earlier today, my friends? Today, he fired a directed-energy weapon from space, a microwave laser, in direct violation of the Space Preservation Treaty. While the treaty has not yet been ratified by the Senate—an omission I will remedy when I take over the White House, I promise you—its terms have been closely followed for the past eight years so as to ensure peace. And do you know the worst part? In order to hide his program from the world, he disguised this act as an innocent undergraduate college experiment.
“That’s right, my friends. You’ve heard or read about the first teenagers in space, and of course, Casey Huggins, the first paraplegic in space, gifted young scientists who have the courage to travel in space to conduct this experiment. Well, it’s all a big lie. With the help of a Nevada defense contractor and the support of President Phoenix and Vice President Page, these students built a directed-energy weapon that orbits above our heads right now, and today was successfully fired at a target on Earth, all in the guise of a solar power plant that can deliver electricity to any part of the globe to help underprivileged communities or researchers in far-off parts of the world. Like we say down on the bayou, my friends: That dog don’t hunt.
“They tried to fool us, my friends,” Barbeau went on. “They tried to trick us. But one member of the so-called Project Starfire team couldn’t stand the hypocrisy any longer, and he called our conference chairman, Dr. Toby Nukaga, and told him the truth. That brave young man’s name is Kim Jung-bae, a gifted engineering student from United Korea, who was a team leader on the project but was not allowed to voice his opposition to the test firing. He is a hero for exposing this charade.”
Her face turned somber. “We also learned today that a terrible tragedy has occurred related to this directed-energy weapon—maybe you have already heard about it,” Barbeau went on. “One of the groups represented here, Students for Universal Peace, organized a protest over the Starfire test site. They hired two brave men to fly a small plane near the Starfire target. They knew the danger, but they wanted to do anything they could to stop the test. I’m sorry to report . . . the plane was shot down by the illegal space weapon. Yes, shot down by a microwave-laser beam from Armstrong Space Station. The two brave individuals aboard were killed instantly.” The room became completely silent except for a few sobs and gasps of horror, and all the attendees at one table immediately shot to their feet in shock and anguish and headed out of the hall.
Barbeau let the silence linger for a few moments. Then, slowly, gradually, her expression changed: no longer somber, but red-hot angry. “Enough of the double-talk, Mr. Phoenix,” Barbeau said, aiming her words and pointing a finger directly at the network and cable news cameras that had hastily been set up at her suggestion for her speech. “Enough of the lies and deception, enough of wasting our hard-earned tax money on dangerous and illegal weapons programs, and enough of killing innocent Americans who wanted nothing more than to voice their outrage and do something, anything, in the name of peace. Deactivate that space weapon immediately, abandon it, and allow it to deorbit, burn up, and crash into the ocean. Do it now.” More thunderous applause and chanting, “Do it now! Do it now! Do it now!”
“When I become president of the United States, my friends,” Barbeau went on after a minute of cheering and chanting, “I will restore faith and honor to this country, our military, the White House, and in the eyes of everyone around the world who yearns for freedom and prays for a helping hand. Our military will be number one again, not struggling to stay number three. When the oppressed and peace-loving people of the world look overhead, they won’t see rockets from their own government being fired at them, and they certainly won’t see an American military space station ready to turn their village into ashes or blast an airplane out of the sky with an invisible beam of light—they’ll see a transport plane flying the red, white, and blue of the flag of the United States of America, carrying food, water, medicine, doctors, and peacekeepers to assist them. And when Americans look for help and ask their government for assistance in feeding their children and getting jobs, they won’t hear about their president spending hundreds of millions of dollars taking a joyride into space or secretly building death rays—they’ll get the help they desperately need. That I promise!”
The applause and chanting were even louder than before, and this time Stacy Anne Barbeau let it go on and on and on.
THE KREMLIN
MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
SEVERAL HOURS LATER