“Welcome! We apologize for the lacking ceremonial niceties, but the situation was rather urgent and we prepared as best we could.”
A stunningly beautiful woman was being led into a very luxurious meeting room, accompanied by a few seemingly standard-issue bureaucrats and a security detail of tall, well-built men in modified ARES uniforms with shields instead of stars on their shoulders.
“No problem, Prime Minister Netanyahu. We’ve been in worse places,” the woman replied with a brilliant smile on her face. She took a seat across a conference table from the Israeli prime minister, accompanied by the bureaucrats. The security detail stood behind them, their impassive gazes and alert eyes seeming intimidating without being angry.
“So let’s discuss the terms,” she continued, the smile leaving her face.
“Please state your terms and we’ll try to accommodate them as best we can,” Benjamin Netanyahu said. He appeared to be much more calm than the members of parliament seated beside him and the nervous security detail behind them, who kept casting what they thought were surreptitious glances at the ARES Aegis team behind the Edenian negotiator.
“We won’t ask for too much,” said the woman. “Just unconditional surrender.” Another brilliant smile appeared on her face as the Israeli representatives across the table from her nearly choked to death on their own saliva.
……
Moscow.
“Leave us,” said the woman who had arrived to “negotiate” with President Putin.
“You, too,” he said to his own entourage.
Both sides’ people left the conference room, leaving only two people seated across the long, oval, white-topped table from each other.
“Whew, I’m finally almost done with this shit,” Vladimir sighed after confirming the two were alone in the room. It had been swept for bugs earlier and Nyx was actively monitoring it now.
“Did you really have to sink the Admiral Kuznetsov?” he whined. “There were far more important targets than that!”
“You can ask Athena when you see her. She’s the one that drew up the strike plans,” the nyxian answered. All of the negotiators sent by Eden were nyxian honeypots, as even straight women would respond better to a beautiful woman than a man. Especially one that had been enhanced and designed to meet the impossible standards of beauty that Nova had determined based on the golden ratio and evolutionary advantage theory. “I’m sure she’ll be happy to hear from you,” the nyxian sniggered.
Vladimir paled at the thought of facing the strict taskmistress. “No need, no need,” he said, waving his hands. “I didn’t like that ship anyway. It’s good that it got destroyed!”
Russia had suffered the fewest casualties in the unification war, only around ten thousand in total, before Vladimir had ordered a cessation of hostilities and general surrender. Thus, the situation there was still rather optimistic and there were a lot of surviving military leaders that were confused as to why Russia had given in so easily.
“How are things in the rest of the world?” he asked. Nova had continued messing with the World Wide Web, even after the coalition countries began toppling like unstable dominos, so he had no idea what was happening outside of Russia.
“Well, we have some time to waste anyway,” the nyxian cast Vladimir a flirtatious glance, “but if you want to chat about something so boring, I guess I can comply.” She heaved an exaggerated sigh of disappointment, her shoulders slumping forward.
Vladimir could have sworn that she even squeezed out a small tear, making her eyes glitter, and he shuddered. ‘Honeypots are downright terrifying,’ he thought, though he didn’t show it on his face.
“Firstly,” the nyxian said, now all prim and proper business, “we’ve sunk every active submarine in the ocean that isn’t one of ours. As for the rest of the coalition fleet, they were either sunk or boarded and captured.
“The European Union is in the process of negotiating a collective surrender. Turkey, however, is still bitter about the suspension of their accession negotiations with the EU, so they’re still stubbornly holding out. Even after we bombed their bridges in the Istanbul Strait and took out their air force, their army is still trying to fight back. But that won’t last long, as without their bases, there’s only so far they can go relying on the supplies they managed to smuggle into the mountains. Once those are gone, they’ll either surrender or starve.
“Australia didn’t make much noise. All we had to do was drop a platoon in Canberra and they almost seemed happy to surrender. I don’t think I’ll ever understand those people,” the nyxian said with a shake of her head, bemused by the Australian attitude toward life in general. They were, by and large, a very sanguine, phlegmatic people with a distinct sense of humor about their own situation. Thus, the only people that weren’t confused by their willing surrender and “it’s your problem now” attitude were the Australians themselves.
“The most interesting part was in Mexico. With part of our initial retaliation being launched from there, practically the entire country’s military descended on FOB Odysseus in Culiacán Rosales. That wasn’t the surprise, though—what surprised us is that all of the cartels joined forces with them. So when they arrived and got their asses kicked up around their shoulders by the garrison we left there, they retreated and formed a perimeter while they waited for their air force and army to arrive....”
As she continued her narration, Vladimir intently listened and a map of the current world unfolded in his mind.
……
The next few hours were the most stressful hours of the entire war, at least for the populace of the countries being invaded by ARES, as Nova continued conducting a symphony of digital information and psychological warfare on the entire world. She had mostly restored access to the internet and, assisted by Panoptes, was carefully curating everything the world was allowed to see. She had truly taken the “hearts and minds” style of warfare popularized by America in the 1960s by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson and made it her own. The things she spread were horrifying, to say the least, and caused the public of every country to pressure their governments into surrendering.
The images of the craters where Islamabad and Delhi used to be were particularly useful for that.
That, plus the ongoing chaos and rioting around the world, had the citizens scared shitless and very susceptible to Nova’s propaganda campaign.
A mere seven hours after the first shots were fired, though, silence returned to the world. The Edenian carriers were busy picking up the troops they had dropped and surrender negotiations were ongoing in the ten “chickens”, as Aron called them, referring to the saying that talked about killing chickens to warn monkeys, but in the rest of the world, silence reigned supreme. Even the riots petered out and died down on their own.
…...
The silence, though it seemed like it would last forever, was broken a few short hours later as nearly everyone on the planet received a notification on all of their internet-connected devices, televisions, and radio stations.
The notifications were sent to every citizen of every country in the world, but they all said the same exact thing. No matter what channel they turned their televisions to, what address they entered in their internet browsers, or what radio station they tuned their radios to, they all said the same exact thing and nothing else.
“Stay tuned for an upcoming announcement.”
