Apology

Addendun to climate wars 13.

Sorry, somehow part of climate wars 12 ended up in front of climate wars 13. I’ve corrected it now here .

The part behind the paywall is fine, but the part before should be:

Down on Earth, space-faring nations were trading accusations about sabotage. The first satellite that had been blown up belonged to the EU, and the second to NASA. Trump stopped short of accusing Putin (what on Earth does Putin have on him?), but he beefed up the Space Force and also began to restore parts of NASA. Suddenly the space race was important to him. American presidents have a history of blaming the wrong people (Iraq war post 9/11, anyone?) and Trump blamed the EU for destroying the American satellite in retaliation. Some blamed the Chinese. Only China, Europe (ESA), ISRO (India), JAXA (Japan), NASA (United States) and Roscosmos (Russia) have full launch capabilities, so the choices were few. These countries all became far more selective about whose satellites they launched.

Among the people, conspiracy theories abounded, with the most popular being that interstellar lizards in people suits rule at least one country, often choosing the USA. But every nation with satellites in orbit was suspected of having secretly armed them.

Elon Musk's SpaceX and other space contractors worked feverishly on ways to weaponise their hardware in space, or otherwise make them useful in a space war. The military industrial complex was salivating. AI was turned on the problem.

Captain Cyan decided that it would be better to risk moving before all this got organised, and had the ship move painstakingly slowly towards D.C.

Mimi had materialised in a bathroom in the situation room suite, thus bypassing all security checks, and disguised herself as chief of staff Susie Wiles when she visited it, appropriating her security badges and memories. Wiles was transported up to the ship in an artificially induced coma.

Mimi was wearing a device that emitted the scents both of Susan Wiles and of a Cliden, both Djindans and Clidens having strong senses of smell. She knew that the scents were estimated to run out at midnight local time, so her time was limited. She soon realised that a Cliden was impersonating the vice president.

Trump was a little briefer than usual, though not a lot. He still rambled off topic frequently, came up with crazy ideas like nuclear bombs on foreign launch pads, and expected participants to spend time praising him. He was very keen on achieving supremacy in space wars, not realising how much time and money that would take or how much he had kneecapped NASA. Just at midnight Mimi decided she had learned enough. The Cliden, "J D Vance", was beginning to sniff around. She excused herself and was transported back to the ship as a colleague brought Wilkes back and made it look like she had slipped and fallen and hit her head, which would account for her loss of memory of the meeting. The Cliden would not be able to visit the female rest room to sniff around.

There was a scramble to bring astronauts and cosmonauts back to Earth. Operators of environmental satellites strongly resisted them being repurposed for war. Tensions rose high. The people demanded action.

While sitting in the long, boring meeting (it should have been far from boring!) Mimi had an idea, which, with Captain Cyan's blessing, she carried out as soon as possible. With the help of colleagues, she created a video of J.D. Vance so that he very briefly looked like he was a human in a lizard suit. The hard part was finding a time and place where only one camera would be on the man. The technology was easy for them, it did not look like AI or Photoshop. That really set the cat among the pigeons among the conspiracy theorists, and focused a lot of attention on Vance/Cliden, leaving the Clidens with a dilemma.

"This isn't doing much to help save the planet", opined Captain Cyan. NATO's rising military spending is already projected to cause a large spike in greenhouse gas emissions. Rocket launches also emit greenhouse gases, and they will increase in the event of a space war. We can't interfere in Earth's preparedness for war against the Clidens, so we either have to reduce the emissions for each launch, or reduce the odds of war both in actuality and in the eyes of humans. Not easy once the humans who profit from war get the bit between their teeth.

"So, we either need to make life a lot more difficult for the Clidens, reveal our presence by declaring all out war against them, or give the humans more environmentally technology. I plan to forge full steam ahead on the first and last, but war could break out at any time and we must be prepared. The Clidens obviously already suspect that we are here. They may try to reveal our presence. Ideas, anyone?