SF Drabble #437 "The Hinge Of Fate"

We won the Battle of the Kuiper Belt with mass drivers and x-ray lasers and by the skin of our teeth. I counted the UNAF ships left undamaged at the end of the battle on my fingers, but the Woolies' invasion task force was an expanding cloud of gas and debris in a highly eccentric cometary orbit around Sol.

We spent a year building for the counterattack. I hear things were bad on Earth during that time, with planetwide rationing and fuel shortages, everything going towards the war effort.

But it was Midway: we never lost a battle after that.