And so the increased relative speed of the satellites made it both harder to track them and harder to escape them. No matter where you were on Earth, every forty minutes a satellite soared overhead, unseen, its eyes upon you, its weapons ready. Only at the poles were you relatively safe, but still the satellites’ orbital distance allowed them a constant, if oblique view of all but the most remote parts of each pole, and they could, Hunt had warned, adjust their orbits to some degree, should they need to follow some unfortunate soul into colder reaches.

After reconciling this and compiling some semblance of a tracking algorithm, Neal had set up one of the online computers in his office to continuously gather a sea of seemingly inconsequential data from each of the facilities he now had access to. The online computer did nothing with the data, remaining impartial should it be scanned by the probing virtual eyes of the satellites many viral systems. But it did store the data on a drive that was also accessible, via a hard-wired, passive link, to one of his bank of offline computers. This secure PC then culled the information it actually needed from the sea of decoy data and parsed it through the algorithm Neal had designed. It was a long and convoluted process, and one that would no doubt need many tweaks and adjustments before it was capable of providing tracking data of targeting quality, but already it had given them a real insight into the movements of their quarry.

Colonel Milton and his small but elite team at Hanscom had then been able to use this information to extrapolate various options for destroying the orbiting threat. Given the information provided so far by John Hunt, a brute force attack using ICBM nuclear missiles would no doubt work, but it would be very difficult to gain access to nuclear weapons, and there was always the huge risk that launching them may facilitate World War Three, thus replacing one extinction scenario with another. Clearly nuclear weapons were, at best, a last resort. But they had some other options; quite a few, in fact. The large selection of long-range ballistic missiles in NATO’s arsenal included many that were non-nuclear, but which were designed to traverse the globe like their radioactive cousins, their chemical engines carrying them to some predetermined point in low orbit then cutting out and relying on gravity to bring the warheads crashing back down to earth. It was this ability to travel long distances outside the atmosphere that made them a strong potential option for attacking a target in space.