“What the fu—” Corporal Marcs scooted his office chair across the floor of his horseshoe-shaped booth to replay what he had just seen on one of his screens. “Holy shit. Major, you gotta see this! VELA just picked up a whale of a radiation spike from the Middle East.”

Offutt Air Force Base was one of the most strategically placed and defensible military bases in the world, home to the Strategic Air Command, the 55th Wing and also the primary hub of the United States military network-centric space command. Its role was to manage the constellation of military hardware orbiting the planet and oversee the billions of bits of information received from their flock of extremely attentive high-orbit birds. Normally the command centre was a place of professional calm. Today all hell was about to break loose.

“What the hell are they doing?” Marcs went on. “This is strong gamma—just gamma—where’s the rest of the radiation package? Is this a detonation?”

Major Gerry Harris was instantly at the corporal’s shoulder. A brilliant military specialist, Harris had been heading up the space command centre for the past eighteen months. His background in physics and information technology were the perfect credentials needed to understand and manage the complex information received by the satellites and translated by the sophisticated computer applications. But these signatures defied logic; they refused to make sense even to his analytical mind. The advanced VELA satellites used radio-frequency sensors to detect electromagnetic pulse prints and could measure the strength of high-intensity ionising radiation even from high orbit. If there was a higher than naturally occurring radiation signature across the X-ray, alpha- or beta-particle, neutron or gamma-ray spectrum, a VELA would see and taste it. But these pulses? Their sudden appearance and strength made them seem almost non-terrestrial.

“Can’t be a detonation,” Harris said. “These guys shouldn’t even have fission capability yet. And if it’s some sort of subsurface nuclear test, why aren’t there any seismic signatures—and why are we seeing this single particle in such concentrations?”

Harris paced for a moment, then started yelling commands across the floor to his technicians. “I need all our birds with digital, thermal and ground-penetrating imaging capabilities looking at these coordinates now!”

Then he reached for the phone on Corporal Marcs’ desk. “Get me General Chilton,” he said. “ASAP.”

Frank and Lorraine Beckett had been driving in stony silence for the past hour. They had left the Interstate at the Limon hub after sharing soggy, coffee-flavoured peanut butter sandwiches and disintegrating donuts—apparently Lorraine had left the top loose on the goddamn thermos, yet again.