NationStates Jolt Archive

It has always gazed down upon Old Haven, its blue seas and emerald green continent beckoning for the masses to colonize it. It was a great shock, then, when the first scientists tinkering with wireless telegraphy discovered that the double planet locked in step with Old Haven (aptly named 'New Haven') found that the world was transmitting at them!

It was a great scientific find, one that was declared to be the second greatest discovery in two hundred years (the other being the invention of the steam engine, which catapulted the Imperium from the iron age to the steam age overnight). The third greatest discovery was what came from what was learned from their neighbors.

On Old Haven (the homeworld of the Havenics), there were many times when individuals would disappear when wandering in the vicinity of certain places. Some persons would report seeing a light blue luminous fog accompanied by lightning and a sudden flash of light in the area, but were normally attributed to heavy drinking and closed injuries to the head. With the inhabitants of the other world speaking the language spoken predominantly on Old Haven, and seeing as the radio had only been recently developed, it was concluded that the missing persons had in fact been teleported to New Haven!

After digging up a strange blue-colored softly glowing ore from the ground in these regions of disappearance, and applying an electrical current to the unrefined ore, the scientists discovered they could make small objects like small pets and billiard balls disappear. With further refinement, it took less and less energy to make something disappear. Ten years after the discovery of the missing Haveics on New Haven, the first accidental transmission of a person occurred when a physicist made the highest known refinement percentage known to science (and the current benchmark for all refinement techniques). Unfortunately, their efforts and an untimely geomagnetic storm resulted in the top three stories of the laboratory building disappearing overnight (the missing structure was eventually found on New Haven partially buried below the ground outside a major city). The Bradford-Hadley Incident was reviewed by an Imperial committee, which concluded that further refinement and experimentation take place inside Farraday Cages (so as to prevent electrical influence from causing another teleportation event).

The first attempt at city-to-city teleportation occurred five years after the Bradfort-Hadley Incident, utilizing a gateway device and an electromechanical computer housed inside of a ten story building to continuously calculate and recalculate the receiving gate's position given initial baseline conditions telegraphed from the receiving gate. The measurements had to be exact, requiring painstaking efforts to survey the grounds, measure sun angles with sextants and map gravitational anomalies. The first test, to send a solid metallic sample and a cage containing three live rats, was passed through the gate utilizing a small cart which was pushed through the gate. The small cart emerged unscathed on the other side, with the biological and metallic samples still in perfect condition. Analysis under electron microscopes showed that the biological and metallic samples were structually and chemically unchanged and that testing could begin with Havenics. Within three months, Havenic travel on foot from one city to another instantaneously was becoming routine. By the end of the year, the teleportation of entire trains was commonplace, completely replacing pedestrian travel.

However, while Old Haven advanced in technological superiority compared to New Haven, more became known about the inhabitants of New Haven. They were a democratic society, compared to the Imperial society of Old Haven. While they had developed wireless telegraphy first, they had still not produced anything beyond simple mechanical computers and had not discovered the potential of the softly glowing blue ore that had brought them to New Haven. The fact they had a non-hereditary leader chosen by the people instead of the Star God infuriated Imperator Adrian Newman, a man of great military genius who had helped conquer the remaining city-states across Old Haven 25 years prior to the contact of New Haven.

Adrian Newman was an old man by the time instantaneous transportation was commonplace on Old Haven, having assumed the throne at age 17 when his father was killed during the Fourteenth Siege of Yaston while attempting to bring rebels back under the Imperial banner. His legions grew restless, looking for new opponents to fight in battle and defeat. Military technology had been slowing down in development, but had ramped up dramatically once a new target had appeared for conquest: New Haven, a world completely untouched by the rapid advances of the legions.

After the development of the transistor, it became possible to launch satellites capable of handling global positioning on Old Haven (and remotely on New Haven with the right equations). With the launching of heavy duty rockets and remotely controlled robots, it now became possible to send a gate to New Haven. Through that gateway, an army worthy of the Imperial himself would pour through and conquer New Haven, and bring its masses under the control of the Imperium of Old Haven.

It started with a series of barely noticeable flashes on Old Haven, as observed by telescope from New Haven. Over fifty heavy-lift rockets launched into space, followed by hundreds of smaller flashes from the motors of intercontinental ballistic missiles, modified to aim up and away from Old Haven instead of back onto it.

The heavy lift rockets carried reentry vehicles carrying Special Operations Legionnaires (SOLs) and all the necessary equipment to stage an initial landing on New Haven. The smaller modified ICBMs carried a flotilla of spy satellites, communications satellites, global positioning system satellites and kinetic impactors that would create global disruptions at the same time as the invasion.

Seven of the eight Princes of New Haven lead the seven of the twenty legions that would cross through the hyperspace gate once the receiving gate was operational on New Haven, and they awaited word from the special forces troops that were enroute to New Haven on the three day journey to the sister world.

The eighth and youngest prince, James Newman, was not leading a legion and was not officially in command of a military unit. He had changed his name to James Taylor so he could actually serve in the war, attaining the rank of Captain after two years of service. In his place back in the Imperial Palace was a trusted body double, who was mistaken for James on multiple occasions by his own family... so it was easy to leave the palace in the middle of the night.

Such deception would not be necessary if his fellow prince brothers hadn't blocked him from military service. It was not because there was a risk of losing all of the Imperator's sons in battle, plenty of Imperators had fielded their sons in battle as military commanders in the past. In fact, military service was usually used to help Imperators determined which sons would make worthy heirs to the throne (although Imperators were chosen by the True Sword of the Imperator, a relic of the Imperial Sun God) or to other posts (provincial governor posts, ministerial posts, senatorial posts, etc.). Privately, that was the entire reasoning behind his brothers attempting to bar him from military service. It would be likely that he would eventually fall out of favor with the Imperator and either be forced into the priesthood or be put into a position of vulnerability where the Praetorian Guard could be persuaded to liquidate him from the Imperial family.

"Captain Taylor!" An intercom call carried to the passenger compartment of the SOL glider from the cockpit. "We are thirty seconds to atmospheric entry. All systems are green and we are on target for our designated landing site. Skies look clear over the target area and we should be able to land

As the interplanetary gliders began their descent, the kinetic impactors made their final approach as well, descending at a rapid, uninhibited pace (unlike the gliders, which were making s-turns and had parachutes to slow their descent). The impactors raced at 18 times the speed of sound toward their primary targets: the three largest cities on New Haven, including their capital of Novus Nisus, Novus Yaston and Novus Spes... free translation from middle to late Imperial: New Endeavor, New Yaston (must have been refugees from the original Yaston) and New Hope. The Imperator liked those names, but only because of the New... they were all new places to siege and conquer at the edge of a sword.

Within seconds, thirty 1500kg kinetic projectiles per major city smashed down with tremendous amounts of energy (28 billion Joules per impactor) into buildings, streets and people, blasting craters up to 15 meters across into their targets. skyscrapers broke apart and collapsed, roads collapsed into subway tunnels beneath, asbestos shot into the sky, people ran for cover as the surprise onslaught continued through a period of five minutes in all three major cities. Given that the attack occurred during peak business hours, fatalities ranged upwards of 200,000 overall (with five times that amount injured by the impacts themselves and the ensuing panic). Local media broadcasts, monitored by the Imperial Military Intelligence Bureau, reported that the democracies in charge of all three nations were reporting mass casualties and were mobilizing their armies to respond to what they were convinced was a natural disaster... it was a far better outcome than the projections indicated: It wasn't just complete surprise, but somehow the enemy was convinced it was a naturally occurring phenomenon... a large scale meteorite shower with 'larger pieces scattered across more lesser populated regions'. It was obvious they had radar tracking, but not sophisticated enough to realize that the 'meteorites' were from Old Haven or that the larger pieces were actually gliders.

Air turned to plasma as the gliders entered New Haven's atmosphere. Atmospheric sensors took accurate readings of the atmosphere during the descent, which would help with fine-tuning the radios (as well as determining the habitability of the atmosphere just to make sure it was completely safe). The measurements were also used to properly tune the parachutes for entry (a mistake in calculations by the primitive computers would cause the glider to smash into the ground instead of gliding to a soft landing).

The gliders slid across the savanna as its underside was still hot from the atmospheric entry. Following on the heels of the gliders were large cargo pods falling from the sky on parachutes. The cargo pods carried the necessary hardware to set up a hyperspace gateway between the two worlds, and it all had to be set up within an hour. Thats where James Newman's company, as well as the four others, came into play.