7163-9-7, 15:01 EDT

13 Starships fell out of Hyper. Because observatories were expensive, especially in space needed for them, only very few remained on Terra. None looked at the position were the ships were coming from. Although systems that were meant to look at satellites would soon detect them, at that point only minutes would remain until the first attack hit.

15:24 EDT

In multiple satellite control centers around the world, panic began to spread. How could one miss 13 objects traveling in something that was obviously a formation, were the smallest was 200 meters long as well as 50 meters wide, and the biggest a bit over 2 kilometers and around 500 meters wide? Desperate backtracking began, and asteroid countermeasures were engaged. It was expected that the objects would crash into earth in roughly an hour. Evacuation of large portions of Africa, the middle of the Sahara was the calculated ground zero, were immediately called. Still, the losses of this would be brutal.

15:28 EDT

The objects began to shift course, they would go into an orbit. At first, there was a sign of relief between the observers, until they realized after just seconds of shock what that meant. But before they could begin to plan what to do with this new information, smaller objects began to break away, with clear course on earth. Someone sensible managed to get ahold of the emergency message system and informed everyone on the planet that evacuation would be the sensible thing to do until one knew more.

Ancient, long since forgotten procedures and automated systems sprang into place, organized everything. Total evacuation of earth, aside from personal that either needed to stay there for some reason or the first contact team which was in the process of being created by those automated systems right now, would be finished in roughly 24 hours.

39 seconds into the minute, the calculations of when and where the smaller splinter objects would hit were finished. They would hit all over the world, roughly at the same time in around 8 minutes.

15:30 EDT

Lucas sighed. After the emergency message came through, all in the room panicked. They had a portal right here, for gods sake. And everyone of them should know the basics of entering an address, so there should not be a problem. Well, admittedly, the room the controls were in was closed, but that was an electronic lock. He composed a quick message over the universities system and sent it to the professor. Professor doctor Markus Miller answered near immediately, his message basically saying that the door was now unlocked.

He stood up, went to the door and opened it. Afterwards, he thought about where he wanted the Gate to lead. After a short while standing stupidly in the middle of the doorway, he decided that his home earth of Therion would be a great choice. Something that sounded like invaders from outer space? Right up the alley of the fanatics. Also, Therion were the only ones with the capacity and expertise to build a Gate in space. Might be useful later if those plans got dusted of at the earliest convenience. A short search made certain that nothing was at the equivalent position on the other side, then he sent another message to Therion’s police, saying that he would open an emergency Gate.

15:31 EDT

Lucas rotated himself so that he could see every student in the room: “OK, you need to calm down. I will no set the portal to a safe world, and although I did inform the authorities of that world already, we will end up in the air. Can someone get the platform? We will need it to get down. I will go last, please divide into groups of 5.”

Considering that there were 23 Students, that were only 5 groups. The platform would tae roughly 2 minutes to get down and 5 up, so the evacuation would be finished in 35 minutes, assuming everything went to plan. Of course, Therion’s police might bring something to speed that up, but still. It was too long, but it was the best they had. Hopefully the aliens were friendly. Ok, who was he kidding, they came out of nothing, did not seem to try to communicate and then those splinters? Ah, the wonder of free information, which reminded him that this would need to change. It was a security problem of unimaginable proportions. He thought for a second, while engaging the Gate, and send a petition to the UE, concerning that vital information should be better controlled as soon as possible. He certainly would not be the only one, but everything helps.

He began to understand the enormity what was going on. The UE might be at war in just minutes. It did not have a military. Well, some of its members had, but mostly special forces, which, while certainly useful, were not meant to fight an organized enemy with access to significant amounts of modern industrial assets. And anyone who could launch three spaceships that were 2 kilometers long certainly had that. Especially because he found it quite possible that this was a minor fleet.

15:33 EDT

Finally, the platform was here. The first group, sorted after age, of all things immediately left the room and was on the other side. He got confirmation from Therion, as well as the information, that a helicopter was underway and would reach them in ten minutes. With it, everyone left would be capable of leaving. So the platform only needed to go up once.

While this played out, all over Terra similar things were happening. While there were a lot of Gates, they often were in not the most optimal position to evacuate residents. A lot were meant to still the resource hunger of Terra, to fuel the supplylines. Everywhere on the threatened world, security forces, essentially police and some private enterprises armed themself with the heaviest equipment they could reach, but even assault rifles were hard to come by. Lets hope the enemy does not have any armor whatsoever in the first wave, was a thought crossing those brave mens minds during the wait. Another was of course to hope that they were not hostile and this was just a strange form of greeting.

Special forces, scattered across thousands of earths, were, if in any way possible, recalled and armed with anti-armor weaponry. They would be the main anti-tank force the UE would and could muster. They also would go through the Gates packed with as many assault rifles and personal protection equipment as they could carry, to help arm the police. On some worlds, ancient bunkers were opened, with the hope of unleashing the stored equipment. The main problem was that it was millennia old, the last military retired its heavy equipment after all officially in the year 6354, and that were museum show pieces that were unable to fire their weaponry. The storage bunker, which was closed last, was 1251 years old.

Optimists thought that they could have some equipment battle ready in 48 hours, which was too late. And that was assuming a whole lot of things that might not be true. More realistic were 72 hours.

On other worlds, orders were placed to produce a run of the last versions of military equipment. While everyone hoped it would not be necessary, it would help to find problems for a future emergency, and if it were necessary, every minute could count. Still, nobody placed an order for specialized factories just yet. Those were expensive, after all.

15:34 EDT

As Lucas saw the problems everyone had with heavy military equipment, he remembered the Battle-Robot game. Those were real war machines. Useless, technically, on a real battlefield, artificially limited, although at least some of it was software, so hopefully easily fixed, but they were there. And he knew that more than ten million were kept in pristine and battle ready condition, and the one thing they could do decently was killing armor. Anyone with an idea of what he was doing could take them down quickly, but there were always more. And the factories for them existed and were capable of, he looked it up quickly, producing around 5000 per minute. Of course, this was assuming a steady flow of resources, but that should be manageable in this situation. He send a quick message to a guy he knew who worked for the company behind Battle-Robots, to start the process on their side, and called the police.

He was connected to an AI, and informed it that he had an idea of how to get decent heavy equipment.

15:35 EDT

After some back and forth, it was decided that this was a decent plan, if the unknowns turned out to be hostile. Preparations were engaged, an emergency notice went up on the Battle-Robots website that sadly the game was unavailable for the foreseeable future, but players were still welcome and would, if the worst happened, help defend humanity. A million capsules were at the ready, and more could and would be produced. It would take 30 minutes to start production, and afterwards, one unit would leave the factory every 3 minutes. It would not be much, but everything helped. Battle Robot production was always going on a low level, and could be put on full speed in just 5 minutes. You could after all always put them into storage, if necessary. Battle-Robots programmers sat down to decide which software limitations could be lifted, how easy that was and to build a quick patch that could be uploaded to every unit.

15:36:27 EDT

The first splitters hit the ground. They were armored drop capsules, as could be now clearly seen. A lot of them came down near or in important population centers, statues and other important symbols, as we’ll as government facilities. Which meant that at times their targets were fascinating to say the least. At least one landed in the marianna trench, for reasons which later were theorized to be basically that the boje that marked the great catastrophe that happened there in the year 4321 was just a bit to eye-catching.

15:36:39 EDT

All over the world, troops left the capsules and began to shoot up the area.

15:37:01 EDT

An official statement of the United Earths was send out to everyone, basically saying that the UE was now at war and emergency measures were in effect. First skirmishes between police and the invaders happened. The police showed that while it was thoroughly under equipped and its training was not really applicable to this situation, it still could blunt the enemy advance everywhere it outnumbered the attackers by a factor of at least two, which was significantly better than anyone thought to hope. Every drop pod only had around twenty enemy soldiers in it, so that meant that the police actually could manage to get local supremacy in important areas. They focused on protecting the Gates and keeping them open to continue the evacuation. At least one Gate was nearly taken by the enemy in those first seconds, they basically landed on top of it, but its operator managed to shut it down. He died immediately afterwards.

15:44 EDT

Everyone went through the portal, but Lucas decided against it. When ask why, he answered: “I am one of the better Battle-Robots players. We need heavy firepower, and those can provide it. I will go through the portal on the world were the control chambers are. I have already communicated with the team on the other side, and a helicopter will be in position when the portal is reconfigured. I will then need to travel 12 minutes to the next chamber, and 5 minutes later the machine I will control will be back in the area. It will use on of the side portals of the Academia.”

16:01 EDT

Lucas readied himself. He checked the ammunition of his Armor-Killer Battle-Robot, checked the sensors, whose resolution had drastically improved since he last used one, and checked the tactical AI which also got now access to the full power of the beforehand massively constrained CPU. He was ready. He hoped that he would not be to late.