The first projectile entered the Earth's atmosphere above the Coral Sea - a two-kilogram steel ingot at a speed of one-hundredth of light. None of the eyes saw the process of the fall: the flight through the atmosphere lasted only a hundredth of a second. Simply between the sky and the sea an infinitely long, thinnest, dazzling as a thousand suns, a line of hot plasma, which turned the projectile and the air in its path, appeared instantly.
A few meters around the line of the projectile, the air pierced by downpours of high-energy particles also immediately passed into the state of plasma. Above the ocean, a monstrous pillar of fire, similar to a ball of fire in a nuclear explosion, broke out, but more deadly because the force of its effect was falling more slowly from a distance. Heat radiation within a radius of several kilometers from the place of impact evaporated the top layer of water and ignited everything that could burn - ships, trees, buildings ...
The hot air on the line of the fountain strike rose to the stratosphere, carrying ash, dust and water vapor from the surface, and on the spot of the pillar of fire rose many kilometers of smoke, wrapped in a curved column of a tornado ...
Two seconds later, a second shell followed, over Mindanao, then a third over the Aleutians. People who were unlucky were staring into the sky at man-made lightning bolts. Who was lucky enough to see them only on the screens.
Huge alien ship, much larger brother of the one who met with "University X", hanging with a large retinue in high orbit, shot the planet with impunity. Strangers aimed at places that were not the most populated, but did not bother to move their sights, if suddenly there was a city or a port.
The earth wasn't defenseless, not at all. Nuclear and gamma-laser charges, vacuum-fire weapons, a huge variety of missiles, satellites, armed ships and exoframes, all capable of holding weapons - the arsenal, which was preparing for a possible encounter with aliens who exploded their observation posts at the risk of detection by humans, was very wide.
But no one was preparing to meet the aliens, who are able to fly faster than light without the help of the Catapults. This is impossible!... That is, it was considered impossible.
The Earthlings still gave the fight with all their might.
But we lost.
Everything people have built-in space in a hundred years, they have been deprived of it because the light goes from Pluto to Earth.
All they could do in return was damage to a few damaged ships.
Is it easy to hit a target that may not even dodge but run away from the laser beam? And even the missiles and shells that hit them got caught in the clouds blazing around the alien ships, and the lasers were powerlessly sparkling on the sparkling cladding.
There were only two small successes, two small victories. One of the gamma-laser nuclear bombs in Earth's orbit was able to hit the enemy. Unfortunately, it was not possible to find out how badly the alien ship was damaged - it immediately disappeared.
The second victory was brought by the assemblers of orbital objects from Ibrium shipyards. Their exoframes, strong, protected and well equipped, allowed them to make their way aboard a small alien ship.
These were invaluable shots of the battle with the legendary "green men". Or gray, who will take them apart. These small, fragile, but very fast, heady creatures still couldn't resist an organized assault by the installers, despite the same protective clouds as their ships.
And even more priceless were the images of the captivity of a group of earthlings. Aliens of some other kind were just as easy to control with gravity as their ships were flying at a speed higher than their lightships - and hollow-core installers were only able to resist them for a short time.
The way "Universe X" in the opposite direction was much longer and harder.
Heavenly mechanics were interfering.
When moving from Earth to Fortune, all subsequent catapults were in front of each other in orbit relative to the arrival points. That is, you could simply direct the bow of the ship to the Catapult, turn on the engine and fly. Unless you turn around halfway forward with engines and slow down so you don't have to fly past the Catapult at too high a speed at which it won't work.