They parked fifty miles beyond the Kármán line, which is what NASA considers the edge of space. That's sixty-two miles from Earth. Well, you can imagine what happened when it was confirmed. Chaos. Hysteria. Even after seeing it for themselves, a lot of guys just didn't believe it. I have to admit, I was one of them initially. I thought it was a trick from China or Russia. Maybe a software attack to make us look like fools. Sadly, it was real.
There were fifty-one ships in their little flotilla, and they surrounded the Earth. There were two types of ships. The large vessels, their transport ships, were over five hundred meters long and seventy-five meters wide. There were thirty-eight of those. Spaced between the transport ships were a leaner, shorter ship that didn't park in orbit but patroled between them. These were their battlecruisers, and they brought twelve of them to protect the fleet. Bit of overkill, really.
After we spotted them, they sat there for five hours. Five hours for everyone down here to scramble frantically about what to do. I heard there were planned responses for things like this, but none of those plans could be dusted off and reviewed quickly enough. I mean, who stays up to date on the response to extraterrestrial visitors. We got no calls, no greetings, no threats, no communication of any kind from the aliens.
The President and his science team were discussing attempts to communicate with the aliens using various means. Blinking lights, satellite, radio, even pictures, but they didn't have enough time to implement anything. Politicians don't work like that. They have to discuss everything, have panels, meetings, maybe even a poll. (He pauses, takes a sip of coffee.) Five hours was just enough time to cause a panic.
Word leaked quickly. You can't keep something like that secret. We had reporters from every magazine, news channel, and vlog that existed. They had shots of the ships in orbit, some of them with pretty good quality. Who knows where they got them from, but there are some excellent civilian telescopes, and the ships weren't that hard to see.
The reporters were to be ignored until someone had an answer for them, some information to share, but nobody had any, so officials were told not to accept questions. That didn't stop the press from their usual doom-and-gloom broadcast, only this time it was true. That's when the panic in the cities started. Fortunately, the panic wasn't that bad because everything happened too fast. If the Veech had sat there for days, the whole planet would probably have erupted in riots or something. But most people didn't even hear about it until it was too late do anything. A lot of people never even heard about it. I have to hand it to the media – they're quick. They got that story out much faster than the government could have. Still, it was too late.
After those five hours, we picked up activity from the battlecruisers, deadly looking things that moved lower into the atmosphere. They launched missiles at us. Well, they weren't exactly missiles, but it was undoubtedly a launch. Our missile defense systems failed against them. Miserably! There were just too fast, and our systems weren't designed for those speeds. Not even close. It was like a raptor flying against a World War 1 bi-wing.
If it hadn't been so terrible, it would have been laughable. We even had some of our pilots try to ram the things, but they were too slow to even intercept them. Then they hit. Every city in the world with over one million people got hit, with only a few exceptions. San Antonio was one of the lucky ones for some reason. Of course, D.C. got hit.
For a heartbeat, we thought maybe something went wrong with the weapons. We didn't see explosions or fire. Some even cheered when they saw our great cities standing. It didn't take us long to get images from our satellites. Sonic weapons. That's what they used. It still boggles the mind. I mean, I don't think anyone had ever thought of using sound weapons like that, and certainly on such a scale. There's no doubt about how effective they were. Everyone within a ten-mile radius was killed instantly, with those further out becoming deaf or having a host of other medical issues. Twenty-five million gone in a minute! That's not counting the old or young that died shortly after from their wounds or those that died in rioting, crime, or accidents from people freaking out in the following hours and days.
Of course, China got hit the hardest as they had sixty-five cities with more than a million people. Estimates are that they lost over three hundred million in the initial attacks. We don't know for sure because they've never given us any information.
After the attacks, a lot of communication was spotty. Some people believe it was the Veech who did that, but I think it was just unmanned networks going haywire. Those people who still had landlines got lucky because those worked just fine.
The President and a few of his advisors survived because they were well below ground, but the older ones died from the impact despite being ten stories underground. After the first round of strikes, the Veech just sat there. There was no second round of strikes. They didn't hit military bases or infrastructure – only our big cities.
The prevailing thought is that the Veech ran out of missiles. We were later told the Veech can't make the missiles and had to buy them from another race. They're expensive and the Veech wanted the most impact for their money. Hence the cities. They were probably going to clean up the rest of humanity through conventional means since they didn't consider our military a threat. The Jhi told us they’d used this method before and it worked quite well.
Anyway, immediately following the strikes on the cities, those thirty-eight transports ships deployed shuttles,
