Earth, about one hour before it became an official Imperial holding.



The entire satellite network is gone, including the Deep Black projects hidden in plain sight up there; the Duros ship recovered at Roswell was three hundred years behind Imperial state of the art, and the cloaked killsats and weapons platforms lasted about as long as a snowball in Hell against the expeditionary force and fared about as well as Johnny did in the army. The nukes WERE somewhat harder to hit, and one Victory-class SDs was actually caught before the crew could get their shields to full strength, but the Terrans would pay and pay and pay some more for THAT mistake--in the first ten minutes, about half of the military bases and fifty large cities scattered around the world became radioactive craters; where Cheyenne Mountain once stood now sits a lake of boiling rock two hundred miles in diameter, and the skies are coal-black and choked with debris. Here we see an annoyed Darth Needow, about to explain to the officials in Washington, D.C. the magnitude of the mistake they've made in person--his counterparts are about to have very similar meetings with the British, the Russians and the Chinese. It's just as well, really--the atmosphere is utterly fouled with radioactive soot and fallout, and it will take it years or decades to naturally settle out to the point where agriculture becomes a sure thing again. Without their advanced technology, the primitive inhabitants of Terra aren't likely to survive. The combat forces of Earth are in complete disarray without functional communication networks, and the coming ground battles, while somewhat lengthy, will consist largely of mop-up operations. In the end Earth's annexation will be as certain as it will be swift.



Our first official contact with extraterrestrial life has become the ultimate Outside Context Problem.