Just in the Movies

In 2038, after President Gomez declared a state of emergency in America, the NSA seized all impact simulations, trajectory data, and astronomical calculations from all American universities and laboratories (as well as data shared with foreign universities and labs) under the guise of national security and global disaster law.  The Armed Services was eventually “reprocessed,” converting the Air Force and parts of the Coast Guard into an elite corps of aeronautical soldiers whose primary responsibility was to attack the asteroid head on.  America sent squadrons of rebuffed astronauts into space by the tens of thousands in Boeing-issued Air Shuttles, their missions varying from terraforming uninhabited quadrants of the moon, building new lunar colonies for military and scientific missions, rescuing the third generation Mars refugees (who arrived in escape pods after the oxygen ventilator stopped working), repairing faulty lunar colonies on Io, and constructing suburban emergency habitats in space to analyzing and ultimately figuring out a way to launch an ICBM at Bad Boy before it entered the earth’s atmosphere.  But blowing up asteroids just happens in the movies.  Detonating nuclear weapons in a vacuum, as nuclear experts pointed out at universities from Beijing to Nuuk, could block out the sun’s U-V rays, create an ice-age on earth, destroy global satellite communication systems indefinitely, not to mention render outer space hostile for millennia and splinter Bad Boy into a thousand little meteorites, each gargantuan crumb, capable of taking out a continent all by itself.  And it was in this state of global turmoil that the Soldiers for Christ was formed, right in the midst of America’s first police state.  Somehow, though, there just wasn’t enough of either to save most Earthlings from their fate.