Conner turned to the closest Secret Service agent as the screen flickered off. “Find someone we can trust to ride herd on them and get them over there as quickly as you can.”

“Yes Mr. President,” the agent said before leaving.

Normally Conner wasn’t one to use his protection detail as glorified errand boys, but right now his secretaries were all busy, as were his advisors. Given where they were, about the only people who didn’t have every waking moment taken up in pursuit of their primary skill set were, in fact, his detail. He rather suspected that the risk of assassination had gone down massively over the last few hours, and would probably drop more over the coming days.

Assuming we survive them, I suppose.

There wasn’t much the agents could do to throw themselves between him and the alien drones, he supposed, so for now he was the one who had to find a way to protect them, and everyone else on the planet, and come hell or high water he was going to do just that.

Across the world the situation was descending into chaos as the first twelve hours after the alien assault came to an end. Despite near constant bombardment from above, the cities of Beijing and New Delhi still stood and still housed more human beings than any other place on the planet.

In the first few hours the casualty rate of first-responder units was beyond obscene. Hundreds of police died in each city, along with thousands of civilians, before the first military units could arrive.

Those arrivals were, almost without exception, far too lightly equipped for the task at hand, but they’d been trained to combat the Confederation. They thus threw themselves enthusiastically into the defense of their homelands with all the fervor they would have mustered if their foe had worn Confederate blue instead of alien red.

As the clock moved on, more and more units arrived at each of the drop points worldwide, some just hammering the areas infected with high explosives and deep-penetration bunker busters. In other places a more tactful approach was taken: Heavily armed special operations units stationed in Japan, Germany, and the Middle East were dropped into major cities across the globe with weapons intended to take out Block and Confederate heavy armor. Cities became war zones unlike anything the Earth had ever seen.

In twelve hours, over fourteen million people had died, as many or more from collateral damage as from the Drasin weapons.

Many nations saw the numbers for collateral damages and considered it a fair trade. Many did not.