“Three hours, Martin!” he exclaimed when he saw the mission clock, “Shit, what the hell were you thinking? I said not to let me sleep more than an hour. God damn it, we’re nearly over Tibet.” he did not look at Martin as he said this, he was using the plane’s nine-screen control system to page through the extensive information available to him. Any moment now they were going to hit their target deployment area and this whole mission was going to come to a head.

Setting his mind at ease that they had indeed not had any radar hits from ground-based units yet, Jack turned to the upper atmospheric radar with which they were hoping to track the pods as they entered the kill zone.

All across the planet reports were coming in about the debris from the massive conflagration that had transpired above humanity’s heads. From the initial face-off in the skies above Azerbaijan between the HATF-VI Missiles and Russia’s Gorgon Interceptors, to the three massive missile storms that had been launched from Florida, Hawaii, and the disabled HMS Dauntless, no part of the sky had been left unblemished by the fires of Earth’s arsenal. Rumors abounded about the cause of the great conflict being raged in the skies, but within the world’s great militaries, the return fire of the alien satellites had not gone unnoticed.

Over the next few days, the international team that had been born of the curiosity of a hitherto unknown scientist named Neal Danielson would reach out to those governments and let them see the critical information that they had gathered. They would all hear of the double agent John Hunt and what he had done for them. But for now the world was at the highest level of alert since the end of World War Two, missiles were prepped, fighters were fueled and on the tarmac, armies were gathering, and the weapons of doomsday were poised and ready. No one was under any illusions as to how difficult it was going to be to get the world to finally lower its guns and to turn their focus to the real threat that was on its way.

But Jack and Martin had no time to wait for political stability. True to their word as only machines and monks were, a widely spread volley of viral pods were even now making their long, slow falls towards Earth, showing as evenly spaced blips ahead of the B-2. The pods they were seeing had actually been dropped way over the horizon, but the speed of the satellite’s retrograde orbits had slung them around the globe as they fell toward the surface. All across the globe these pods were slowly falling, except over Europe and Africa, which would have been the drop zone of the satellite Shahim had long since dispatched.