With computerized calm, the AI hivemind tracked and monitored tens of thousands of ships, submarines, planes, tanks, and battalions of soldiers as they all began to move in an impossibly complex dance. The world was readying itself for potential nuclear holocaust. The earth had stockpiled an estimated twenty to thirty thousand high-yield nuclear missiles: enough to destroy mankind forty-two times over. Each of the fifty or so nuclear submarines that England, France, the US, China, and Russia had in the world’s various oceans had enough firepower to wipe out half of humanity on their own. If any proportion of that arsenal were fired en masse, the satellites could not hope to stop it. Nothing could. It was just this realization that had brought the team of eight Agents to this world in advance of their Armada. The last thing the Mobiliei wanted was a broken and charred planet; they just wanted an empty one. They needed us gone, but they needed to eradicate us methodically, in an orderly fashion.

Their plans were predicated now, as they had always been, on the premise that as long as their presence remained unknown they might still infiltrate the world’s nuclear powers deeply enough to mitigate their might from the inside. But not if there was a war tonight. Not if the insanity of a few insurgents started the conflagration that would render the earth both uninhabited and uninhabitable.

Even with the world’s great powers unsheathing their claws and baring their fangs, the AIs operated under the assumption that this could still all end peacefully. Study of Earth’s history as well as their own showed that this was not the first time either planet had been pushed to the brink of nuclear war. Like the Mobiliei, the humans had discovered that the atom was as powerful a deterrent as it was a weapon. Both races had only ever dared to use it once, the sight of the weapon’s power showing each world that if two nuclear capable nations ever went to war it would be the last thing the race ever knew. But even with such a massive deterrent staying the hands of the world’s super powers, events like the Cuban missile crisis had still been one of many events that had taken the world to the very brink of annihilation.

So on this night, as the world once more teetered on the edge of the precipice, the four satellites roaming above were ready to take on the role of unlikely guardian. They would watch over the humans and try to ensure that this was just another false alarm. Under no circumstances would they allow the six Pakistani missiles to reach Russia, but nor would they risk exposure unless it was absolutely necessary.