16:02 EDT

The machine controlled by Lucas went through the Gate in fron of him. He began to log into the IFF systems of the police, but it was a hack job, so he was informed that he should not trust it. It was meant to help, but not to replace his own decision making. As soon as he was through, he got a call from the local police, which told him that he was needed 3 kilometers east of his position. Using his positioning system, although without a map that was in any way accurate it lost a lot of its power, Lucas began walking into the direction of the enemy attack. He slowly sped up, and would reach that position in 4 minutes.

16:03 EDT

He gathered more information over the web. It was horrible. The civilian casualties were already in the thousands, maybe already over ten thousand. Why would anyone attack them? And how could anyone think that this attack was a good idea? The UE was, after all, a federation of a thousand worlds, and anyone should realize that the Gates made it impossible for this attack to knockout humanities defenses. It would hurt, yes, but not catastrophically so. And humanities revenge was sure to be brutal. The enemy ships came from nothing, they must have used an unstabilized Gate, right? Which meant they must have realized that Terras civilization was Gate based. Something to think about, although this was, admittedly, not his job.

16:04 EDT

In the city of Berlin, it was dark. The german KSK team, returned from a frontier earth with a native population that this stupid American company had once enslaved, which meant that the UE was obligated to help them heal from the damage done, now stood against one of the first enemy tanks which had been deployed. That every single one of the enemy wore heavy power armor was already bad enough, now there was a freaking MBT in the streets. The local police tried its bests, and could barely damage the power armor, against this thing, they had not a chance in hell. Luckily, the special forces team did have some anti-armor weaponry, so it decided to test how the tank liked that. It did not like it.

16:06 EDT

Lucas finally could see the enemy. There were not all that many there, just around 50, but the local police could only spare 30 of its own to stem this advance, and every single one of the enemy was equipped with power armor. Before, he thought his robot had a chance at surviving at least for a while, but now, it was certain that they must have weaponry that could easily take him out. No matter, he had reinforcements. He checked his ammo level one final time, targeted the nearest enemy unit and unleashed his main weapon. He blew through his ammunition, and belatedly realized that the enemy was a bit more fragile than he thought. He reloaded the internal magazine, and changed over into single shot mode. Hopefully his three hundred shots, well now only 290 would be enough to at least deal with these attackers.

They began to target him, and he used the buildings as cover, returning shots whenever he thought he might hit the enemy, without hitting one of his friends. Those used the distraction he provided to reorganize themselves.

16:07 EDT

Lucas checked his ammo again, and he was shocked at how fast he blew through it. And resupply would take significantly longer than it would take in the game. In fact, they had gotten orders to send their units into the biggest group of enemies they could find as soon as they ran out of ammunition and activate the self destruct. Which generally was considered as a close quarters weapon by the players, with a damaging range of roughly 5 meters. Admittedly, the shrapnel could be dangerous further out, but mostly, it simply ricochet of the armor. The hope was that this would not be the case for the enemy. Soon he would need to take that action. He ordered his AI to find a suitable target.

16:08 EDT

He had run out of ammunition, and at least his AI thought that he had mission-killed 24 enemy troops. He got a nice heat map which showed him where it might be smart to detonate his unit. He went to the brightest spot, naturally, and while some enemies tried to flee, they did not seem to realize what he was planning, which caused some of them to actually close formation.

He got into the middle of that. And then he detonated his unit.

16:10 EDT

He woke up disorientated. He hated that feeling. But then, he was suddenly in another robot. Before he could check what kind of unit it was, out of what his load out consisted, a message flared up before him: “Your Gate will lead you to Washington, near the White House. It is one of the old emergency Gates on Terra, so unstable on this side. Walk 300 meters to the south-west. Then go through that Gate and kill the god damn tanks that are there. You have a heavy coil gun, 3 shots per magazine, 10 magazines in total. Your robot was meant for the next season, early prototype. You are one of the very few with the necessary experience and who isa available to manage the situation. If you still have ammo left afterwards, detonate the unit. The weapon is far to strong to be used against of targets.”

Lucas immediately began following the directions. All the while he opened the communications tab and asked: “Why use this unit? I guess it is not because it is the only thing you have left?”

The answer came almost immediately: “Because the tanks are super heavies, and the local anti-armor teams do not have the firepower to deal with them. There are only three in total, as well as ten more of the normal ones that use the big ones as cover, but we need them gone. We hope that the coil gun is enough, but we actually do not know. So, go on full auto against them, forget about your surroundings. Those things will do more damage than you ever could!”

16:11 EDT

“Understood. Am nearly at the Gate. Direction I should look into to find the tanks?”

“Left, I am needed elsewhere, bye.”

Lucas went through the Gate, immediately turned left, and saw one of the three tanks he needed to take out. If he were not in a state of being unable to control his body, he would have gulped. The thing looked like one of those stupid concepts that old group of racist idiots had, what were they called again? Ah, yes, nazis. Like that Ratte-Panzer/tank. OK, they were right, heavy firepower would be needed.

He called over the TacNet: “Anyone a clue what I should target on the big boys? Have thirty shots in total, and I am guessing simply blasting will not work out well!”

Someone answered: “Thank got someone is here. Shoot the turrets, if that does not kill them, it makes them significantly less dangerous. They have destroyed at least one Gate already, and play on being heavy fire support!”

“Understood, will see what I can do.”

16:13 EDT

Lucas moved his unit quickly in the rough direction of the enemy, trying to stay in cover. While doing that, he used his AI to plan out his strikes against the tank. As soon as the calculations were done, He let loose his first magazine. He hit the main turret twice, just to make certain, as well as the nearest secondary turret.

After he had reloaded in the span of five seconds, he destroyed three more turrets, while analyzing the damage done to the main. Four more turrets to go, at least if his hits had destroyed. While that was going on, after he reloaded, he destroyed the last two turrets.

flashed across his HUD. He sighed with relief, or would have if he could. But the next message took him with surprise: .

Lucas starred at the red dot that was being projected on the enemy tank, and decided that it could not hurt to use the last shot from his third magazine on it. The results were interesting to say the least.

The super heavy did not blow up. But it catches on fire, like completely catches on fire. Something like you see in a bad movie. What the heck did they use for an engine? Well, maybe it was a fluke, or had something to-do with him destroying the turrets first, but he knew where he was shooting first the next time. And considering he needed to take out two more tanks, there would be a next time.

He immediately ordered his AI to back up the footage of the explosion and send it to the analysts with a priority message. It would likely disappear in all the other messages they were getting right now, but every minute passing meant more and more analysts being put on the task, until they would have one for every single person, alien or human on earth at that moment. At that point, that footage would be the first thing of his footage to be searched for clues. At least if he did not find anything more interesting.

Oh, there was the next tank. Great, let’s test that with the engine. “AI, do you know where the engine is again, or do you need more data? And if…”

almost immediately flashed across his HUD, while he was talking. He immediately targeted the dot, and the same thing happened again. This time he could see aliens leaving the tank, unarmored this time.

16:14 EDT

He immediately pinged the TacNet: “Hey, just found out a few things. If you target what my AI thinks is the engine of the super heavies, they burn. Completely. Also, their crew is unarmored, although not unarmed, so someone should take care of them. I cannot. Targeting the last, need a big concentration afterwards to transform into a bomb then. My weapon is strong enough that I would cleanly punch through the smaller tanks, I think.”

The automated parts of the TacNet, which was an AI controlled information network with a whole host of nice abilities, meant for the police to know when and where violent crimes where happening without needing to be loud and have the lag associated with the spoken word included, gave him directions to the last superheavy in Washington DC.

16:16 EDT

The last tank died quickly, at least after Lucas was in range. He followed the TacNet instructions, killed two lighter tanks while underway, although it was lucky that he shot in a slight downwards direction, considering how the street under and behind the tanks looked afterwards. As soon as he was in a crowd of enemies, he detonated his self-destruct. He did not like that the enemy seemed to have wisened up to that particular action, and had immediately scattered. Oh well, this must have happened all over the world against them, considering the likely roughly a million units active.

Although, on that thought, he really hoped he was one of the ones who loosed theirs the quickest, because 5000 units a minute are not enough to replace a million every ten minutes or so. For now, the storage would help, but for how long?

16:30 EDT

Elsewhere.

A group of high ranking military officers looked at the situation. While the Battle-Robots did a phenomenal job, their number of constant actives had been reduced from roughly a million to the best seventy thousand. Already, plans were made to increase the number of factories, although most thought that it would not come to that. The Battle-Robots were useful, yes, but true war machines would cost less and be better in every way. But the control interface was another matter entirely. It would be useful to not loose the soldiers that died permanently. Well, another thing for the analysts and planners to worry about. They would need to fight a war. At least until the civilian population of Terra, the birth-earth of the UE had been evacuated. A few things were already clear.

The enemy had no clue how the Gates functioned. This was not the way they got here.

While the enemy had not used any orbital strikes yet, that could change at any second.

Standard stealth satellites were invisible to the enemy. The launches of those were only visible to him if he had units in a radius oof twenty kilometers. Although that might change when they realize they need to look.

They had not yet seen a lot of the enemies military. A portioned of their armored troops, as well as what likely are special forces, but nothing more. They likely had bigger tanks than the ones destroyed in Washington DC, as well as Tokyo and Moscow.

They needed to make the evacuation proceed. They also needed more and heavier equipment. But they had only millennia old designs. Those would need to be produced, but immediately exchanged. Which would be a pain, but they needed heavy equipment, especially if another earth was attacked before they were ready.