The attack started with our satellites falling down from orbit, all of them. Military, weather, communications, mapping, experimental, whatever the reason for it to be in orbit, and whatever the orbit, it went down, all dropping from the sky like solid lead balloons on fire, it was quite the spectacle on those parts of the planet still facing away from the Sun. Most of the satellites disintegrated on the way down, some did hit the ground. We are not even sure how our attackers did it, intense magnetic fields, directed energy impulses, all beyond our capabilities. Crazy theories flooded the internet, many religious cults claimed that this was the apocalypse they were warning us about all these years, and some governments prepared for war against their historical enemies. Eventually it was clear that there was no way humans could have done it, and solar flares were not the cause either. We all suddenly remembered that we had humans in orbit, and the recordings from the International Space Station went public: altitude alarms signalling the beginning of its fatal descent to Earth, the initially calmed but increasingly panicked response from the astronauts aboard the station, everything they tried failed, nothing could be done, for inexplicable reasons they were entering the Earth atmosphere, the run to the escape vehicle was by that time followed in real time by many incredulous impotent spectators back at home, the station was already tumbling down when they launched the escape pod, too late to control the angle of attack their vehicle never managed to control their descent in any survivable way. Losing all satellites and the ISS was traumatic, but we soon forgot about them.
As soon as Earth orbit was clear of human made objects, the next phase of the attack commenced. Rods made of very dense metals crashed down into the ground at hypersonic speeds. The first targets were launch pads, offices, factories, and building sites of the space industry. The pattern was starting to be clear. First, get rid of any human made objects in space, next, destroy any means of sending more. Some missile silos were also targeted but only the main ones with ballistic intercontinental rockets. The rods were not big but they were falling at enough speed to cause devastation wherever they hit, their immense kinetic energy released in an instant. Huge craters and clouds of debris were the only remains of the previous structures. We were not able to fully identify the composition of the rods, only a handful of molecule sized remnants of dense and exotic metallic materials were found where we were sure they did not exist before, but it did not really matter, knowing what they were made of did not help us to stop them. Even if we knew what and how they were launched it would have been impossible for us to prevent their damage, too fast to detect and to follow, their energy too big to be easily blocked. Some targets did have defensive weapons that created a wall of bullets as defence against incoming missile attacks, but they did not do much against mega joules of kinetic energy flying towards them as apparently indestructible rods.
Once our space capabilities were greatly diminished, it was the turn of power stations and anything that could be used to create electricity. Dams caused havoc downstream when they broke. Refineries exploded in huge balls of fire. Big solar farms were reduced to clouds of dust. Oil wells converted into burning craters. Interestingly, nuclear plants were only indirectly targeted, we guessed that they were looking at ending our civilisation, not the planet. Some wind farms were also indirectly targeted, their windmills too distanced from each other to be an easy target, their connections to the main grid were destroyed instead. The biggest electrical substations also converted to rubble. Our civilisation was at that time heavily dependent on electricity generation, the movement to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels had been very successful, but the capacity to distribute and store energy at the edge of the distribution network was still less than ideal, most of the distribution work was still done manually and the human operators were quickly overloaded, which made our centralised dependency on electricity a dramatic weakness for our species. As more and more generators went offline, compromises were made, more and more power was redirected to critical infrastructure, government institutions, key services like hospitals, fire departments, or the police; everything else went dark. Many discovered then that electricity was required even for their gas boiler to work, the fact that many processes required electricity was a surprise, and only a very limited number of machines had a battery attached to them, a socket was always at hand when you needed it until it wasn’t.
All of this happened in a matter of days, the rods from the sky crashed down at a rate of 8 or 10 per minute. The few that managed to keep cool and pay attention started to notice that the attacks only originated from a limited number of locations over the Earth orbit, 8 locations in fact, but it was not easy to keep track, their movements seemingly random or at least not predictable enough to track them. The fact that nothing was visible at the point of origin of the descending rods was a puzzle, presumably some kind of camouflage system was in use, we were unable to detect any kind of radio emissions either. They were able to get close to Earth without being noticed so being invisible was not that surprising. None of the Space Surveillance networks alerted us of any incoming objects before the attacks, they were designed to detect asteroids in intercepting orbits with the planet Earth, and obviously their sensors were not advanced enough to help against a clearly technically superior adversary.
The big transport hubs were next. Airports, sea ports, rail stations, big highway crossings, tunnels, strategic waterways, anything critical to keep things moving around the planet. Planes scrambled to land on small airports, or even highways. Container ships stranded at sea, no port deep enough was available for docking. Ground transport feared better, it was a highly redundant network, but trips took longer than they did before, sometimes just a matter of one hour longer, sometimes days longer. This became a huge problem later on. We had become a global market, all resources and products were hauled from one side of the globe to the other, not a single nation or state was self-sufficient, not even for basic commodities, and not a single product was fully built or developed at a single location, everything depended on everything. When movement of materials stopped, everything stopped.
Then it was the turn of radio communications, TV stations, telephone and internet hubs, any emitter of any frequency with enough power to reach several towns was targeted. Undersea internet cables were left intact, they were too deep to be easily targeted, the attacks concentrated instead on the land-based stations where they emerged, making them useless. Internet was heavily redundant, but many paths depended on big internet connections that were easily broken. Many countries had built national firewalls to prevent the spread of information against the government, and those so called self defence mechanisms now worked against everyone else, many subnetwork connections could not be established and after a while there was nobody to do it manually, or even the capacity to do it. The lack of electricity hit many hard, but the lack of any communication from government officials was the final nail in the coffin for many, like headless chickens they did not know what to do or how to react. Without direct communication chaos was ensured, there was no way to easily organise anything of magnitude.
Soon, humanity was reduced to a collection of isolated Wild West towns. Things keep working more or less as usual for a while. Recent pandemics had teach us to stock essentials, although some still thought mistakenly that filling your garage with toilet paper was a good strategic decision, they eventually realised that its nutritional content was very low and when planted nothing grew of it. Once electricity started to fail, and fuel became scarce, panic started. The food distribution chain was broken and information was scarce. A handful of people had solar panels or hand-crafted generators that helped at night. Families congregated around portable radios and mobile phones to hear messages of hope from their peers. Networks of person to person news appeared organically, some driving from town to town to share news or gather them.
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Some brave souls did try to help our cause. A handful of military jets reached the edge of space, trying to lock their weapons onto something but it was fruitless, some of them discharged missiles in frustration and in vain to where they thought the rods were coming from, hoping that they could find a target by themselves before their fuel was exhausted. Nothing worked. Some nations launched ballistic missiles and detonated their nuclear warheads in space. The huge spherical explosions did not stop the attack in any measurable way, they actually caused more problems for us than for them, the electromagnetic pulses fried electronics in the ground within several tens of kilometres below the point of discharge. At least the auroral displays illuminated our dark nights.
It was curious that no government or military organisations were attacked, at least directly, leading us to believe that our attackers did not consider them essential to our defence, perhaps the contrary, did they think that leaving the previous rulers in place could do more harm than good? I wonder if humanity leaved to their own devices could have done better than under the rule of governments more interested in self preservation than in the global good. What did governments do those days? Initially they all tried to cover up that anything was wrong, then when that was impossible they started to blame each other and organise the military for a counter attack to their historical enemies. When everything was starting to be clear and that the attacks were universal and not country limited, it was already too late, our infrastructure was falling downhill and they focussed in saving themselves and their rich friends, someone had to rebuilt the civilisation once it was all over, right? The military was sent to protect strategic targets for our theoretical counter attack, everyone was expecting and imminent ground invasion soon, which meant that the civilians were not only left to their own means, they also had to compete with the military for access to food or resources. Instead of maximising the amount of survivors, the government decided to focus on maintaining the quality of life of the privileged. The few outgunned the many. Everything quickly descended into chaos, looting was widespread and armed confrontation was common on countries with relaxed gun laws.
The attacks continued for weeks, hitting smaller and smaller targets. The pattern repeating: power sources, radio sources, and transportation hubs. The frequency of attacks reduced to 4 or 6 per minute, the rods smaller or at least they caused less destruction.
The knowledge they had of our infrastructure and its weak points was astonishing. They must have gathered information for a long time without being detected. Their sensors were also outstanding, when our emitters moved so did their attacks, our communications had to be at very low power or incredibly focused in order to avoid destruction from the sky.
It was also worth mentioning some structures that were not targeted at all, even if we created them for the specific purpose of surviving the end of the world. The most notorious example were the seed banks, none of them were attacked directly, some were affected by nearby attacks but they were all mostly perfectly functional. Also functional were the big plantations or greenhouses that kept the world fed till then. None of that made any sense initially, if they wanted to get rid of us an obvious target would be to remove our capacity to grow food, right? Well, the reasons for why they were not targeted was very clear later on, they all became eventually useless.
The total number of casualties on those initial days was not actually that big, probably in the low millions. Chaos and confrontation almost caused as much victims and death in the following weeks. Some pockets of survivors tried to organise themselves, poorer countries were actually in better shape than the so called First World, their citizens more accustomed to day-to-day struggles. The more modern and cosmopolitan the town, the harder it fell, globalisation made us too dependable of resources created on the other side of the globe, and when distribution was stopped so were the means of survival for many. The big cities were disaster areas and people started to fled for the countryside, growing your own vegetables seemed like a good idea now, we all discovered that our fancy technology gadgets were not very useful against hunger. Many people took the fast way out, when you see not future what is the point of waiting? To suffer? if you have never really suffered at all, then you are not prepared for it, how is life possible without shopping and socialising? Where am I going to get a good haircut? Do you mean I have to search for food and cook it myself? Some were terrified of watching their kids grow up in misery, they preferred to saved them from the suffering. Millions were gone like that.
And then the sun went out. Not everywhere and not all the time yet, nobody noticed it for a while, too busy finding food or news. The first ones to realise that something big was going on were the only few that looked at the sky for understanding and not for fear. Sun eclipses were becoming a common occurrence.
It was the beginning of springtime in the northern hemisphere. Days should start to get longer, and they did, but they were not as bright as they should be during the whole day. The fact that many dark clouds lingered in the sky for weeks due to the myriad of explosions did not help. When summer arrived the horror was undeniable. The Sun was getting darker.
How was that possible? The Sun is huge compared to the Earth, how could it be getting darker? The reality was not that the Sun was switching off, the real problem was that something was blocking the amount of light reaching us.
The few amateur astronomers that had powerful telescopes that did not require a steady power supply were the ones that tried to distribute the first images of what was blocking the Sun. A dark disk was growing in front of the Sun, slowly but surely it was getting bigger.
This was the first time we had a visible target in the sky and the few government that had missiles capable of leaving the earth orbit started launching them towards the dark disk occluding us. Mind you, they keep most of the missiles for themselves, they may need them to defend their territories from their traditional enemies once this is all over, of course. Many missiles did managed to reach space, but them they all exploded close to the Earth, most not even reaching the orbit of the Moon. We realise that the enemy rods could be launched at much greater frequency and accuracy when they were targeted at targets in space, no atmosphere friction meant less material was needed to cause destruction and hence they could be launched faster. By now we had figured our they were using some kind of railgun weapons, the frequency of attacks depended on the size of the projectiles, their weapons needed to accelerate them to enough speed to be dangerous, which required either time or energy, more of one reduced the need of the other, the rate of fire depended on the size of the target and what obstacles were in the way. Space is almost empty which means that moving objects had little resistance, which means they had to accelerate them less than if they were trying to hit the ground on our planet.
It is possible that a handful of our nuclear weapons reached the target, but we did not notice their effect, the dark patch on the sun kept growing.
The final plan was clear now, first destroy our means of defence, then our means of production and organisation, finally just make it almost impossible to survive in the surface of our planet. If they managed to successfully block most of the sun heating our planet then a limitless ice age was our fate. Do you know how many people manage to survive in the artic regions? Not many, and they rely on warmer climates to provide food and resources. Now, extend that environment to the rest of the planet, how many humans or even animals do you think will survive after a year? Not many. If this happened slowly and with time and resources to prepare then it would have been possible. We could build farms underground, or probably better under the icing seas. But it happened in a planet with a broken infrastructure and with billions of panicking humans not accustomed to having to fight for their food.
How was even possible that the aliens, which is what everyone was calling them by now, could block the Sun? That is impossible right? It is so big! We did not really have an answer, the structure that was growing was far away from Earth to not be easily visible, but it was close enough to not need to be much bigger than the actual planet it was covering. We guess that it was only just a thin disk of rotating material, it could be possible to use materials from the asteroid belt. They must have factories ingesting asteroids and producing something that could be organised into an opaque disk.