March 21, 1956 was a typical first day of Spring.  It was warm in some places and snowing in others.  In Newgate, there was still snow on the ground and most people traveled underground or by transporter so they wouldn’t have to be outside. 

Out in the Kuyper Belt, transdimensional sensors picked up some intruders that were constantly shifting dimensions to try and elude detection.  But they were discovered anyways.  A hyperlight speed warning signal was transmitted to Newgate to prepare for an alien invasion.  Most of the starships were too far away to come back to fight the fleet of nearly 1500 heavy cruisers and shock destroyers.  It looked like the Alliance wanted to wage KBW 3. 

The scientists and ACE personnel in Newgate sprang into action.  A detachment was sent to the moon bases and from the back side, a small fleet of 300 cruisers left over from KBW 2 shifted into other dimensions to replicate into 3000 more ships by using material from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to make the cruisers.  All of them were manned by synthetics. 

Other men and synthetics were sent to Mars to activate another small fleet of cruisers.  There were another 500 slightly larger cruisers removed from underground hangars that had been there since before the pyramids of Egypt were built.  So they had older hyperlight reactors and both beam and discharge weapons that had to be handled carefully.  Since the language was barely translatable, the people and synthetics had to guess what the writing meant.  But with the future of Earth on the line, there wasn’t much time for trial and error. 

The 500 that had no replication ability joined the 300 primary cruisers and 3000 replicated ones to take on the Alliance.  They constantly shifted to try and hide their numbers and to try and get an advantage over the enemy. 

While the cruisers were getting ready to engage the enemy between Mars and Jupiter, millions of space mines were launched from the moon and Newgate via transporters.  They were launched three layers deep.  The first layer was positioned between Mars and the moon.  The second was about a million miles closer to the moon.  And the third was another million miles closer.  As long as the Alliance was coming in from the Yukon Station region of the belt, the mines would hopefully catch and destroy a number of Alliance ships.  But another million were scattered within a million mile radius of Earth and the moon just in case.