As he visualized the planet revolving, he tried to switch his mental perspective, just as Galileo had first done hundreds of years beforehand. Locking the sun in place, he instead envisioned Earth as it span relative to it, the inhabitants on its surface racing at a thousand miles per hour toward the sun in the morning, and away from it each night. When he had first learned of the satellites from Colonel Milton all those months ago, it had been difficult to imagine how the four satellites fitted into that picture, but after many months of thinking about them, Jack’s mental image was now clear. The satellites were orbiting against Earth’s rotation, in retrograde orbit. As everyone on Earth revolved into the east to meet the dawn’s sun, the satellites came round in the other direction, flying overhead at phenomenal relative speed and effectively overtaking the sun and the moon as they went. He knew, for example, that at this very moment one of the deadly platforms was soaring far above him, tracing its long arc over the earth. Soon it would head toward the horizon to catch the rapidly receding sun, only to be replaced by another satellite perennially chasing it from the east, and so it went on.

But hopefully not for too much longer. His team’s arrival in Hawaii meant that in just a few more months they would be ready to launch their attack: a massive barrage of missiles flying up into the satellites’ paths, carrying the hopes of humanity with them. Hopefully it would be enough.

For his part, Jack Toranssen was leading the Western arm of the effort to modify the huge battery of GBMD missiles. It was this mammoth job that had brought him to the Hawaiian archipelago where the southern branch of the tactical explosive arsenal was based. There were similar arrays of missiles in Alaska and California, and this was matched on the Eastern seaboard by batteries in Florida, the Carolinas, and Maine. Finally, a string of batteries in the northern US and Canada served to protect the country and its neighbor to the north from long-range missiles that may come over the North Pole from Russia, or, of course, should China get uppity all of a sudden.

For the task at hand the team would only be able to utilize the two large batteries in Hawaii and Florida because of their proximity to the orbits of the satellites. So Jack’s team had travelled with the shipment of the new missile nose cones in a C-17 Globetrotter military airlifter from Hanscom Base, leaving behind an equally large team under Colonel Milton that was continuing to work on more shielding for the Eastern batteries.