As Hub Satellite Number 3 continued up over Tibet toward Azerbaijan, it tracked the Pakistani missiles as they left the atmosphere and began their brief, ballistically doomed orbits. Their rocket engines still burned with fury, though now in the silence of vacuum, the sound lost as though drowned out by the expanse of space they were so briefly escaping into. As the satellite eye flew toward the six HATF-VI missiles from the east, it also registered as Russia launched its counterstroke from the north. Out of the heart of Northern Asia came thirty-two flaring rocket signatures. The big missiles, known as Gorgons, were the long-range component of Russia’s massive missile shield. They were capable of exo-atmospheric travel, and they were armed with the latest kinetic cluster warheads. They were blunt tools, they were huge, and they were lethal.

The stealthed AI satellite came surging over the horizon, and watched the two great arcs forming just ahead of it. At this rate, the hub would be right over the surging missiles in a matter of minutes. As it watched, the two arcs continued to form like sides of a massive bridge coming to meet in the middle, a bridge of fire large enough to connect Moscow to Pakistan, over two thousand miles to the south.

The HATF-VI rockets had reached their theoretical peak altitude, with a documented range of two thousand miles they were about eight minutes from disengaging their rocket boosters and beginning their plummet back to Earth. But instead of leveling out and preparing for their freefall, they continued to rise.

Mikhail Kovalenko had spent the last two hours convincing first his superior, then several of that man’s superiors that the missiles could make it to Russia, even though it was outside the effective range of the weapons. So sure enough, the Russian missile control was ready when the Pakistani missiles continued to rise.

Their own missiles adjusted accordingly and they continued their meteoric rise out of the atmosphere to lay their spectacularly destructive munitions in the path of the onrushing missiles. The AI watched the two trajectories continue to angle farther and farther upward, until its own subroutines started to alert it to a new possibility. The paths: they were going to intersect. The Russians had indeed fired high and wide enough, and the giant Gorgon missiles’ onboard tracking systems were now able to plot an intercept course that would lay them in the path of the six aggressors.

But the AI satellite would also be in that path. The machine laid route plan after route plan but the closer it came to the missiles, the plainer it became. The Pakistani missiles were not leveling out. They were continuing their rise. The missiles’ powerful boosters were sending them up into the path of the orbiting satellite, and the thirty-two Gorgon interceptors were coming to meet them.