Southern Gate

It decides who gets warned and who doesn't. It decides which planes stay in the air, which bunkers close, and how many minutes a president is allowed to think. Satellites watch every launch on Earth, bombers stand ready, interceptors wait in their silos, and in Colorado a young officer sits in front of a screen that holds the whole planet.

It does not decide what comes after: the gyms full of cots, the checkpoints on country roads, the people who look up at the night sky and don't know what has happened. And it has no provision for anyone who doubts when there is no time left to doubt.

Southern Gate plays out one invented November night in the near future, a night in which every part of this system does exactly what it was built to do: in the command centers in Washington and Colorado, aboard a bomber over Siberia and an airliner that has lost radio contact, in a small town in Kansas.

A war thriller about the logic of deterrence, and about what it demands when the day comes. With an author's note on the facts behind the fiction.