More than any other event in Imperial history the destruction of New York City stands out as the singular point of change for Earth and the Empire as a whole. In a week of fire and destruction, the Eastern seaboard of the United States from Boston to Philadelphia ceased to exist.
The war with the Shaloi Hegemony had ground down to a stalemate with both sides doing little more than trading the same systems back and forth along the two fronts. In a bold move, the Matriarch committed all of her reserves into a desperate attempt to cross the Great Barrier and strike into the heart of the Empire. In retrospect, the failure of both sides to understand the underlying cultural differences ensured both the success and ultimate failure of the Shaloi assault.
The Shaloi fleet drove straight through to Earth intending to break the Imperial fleet by destroying the location of its capital and by their world view the only sane place for the true leaders of the Empire to have their nest. Within the Hegemony, all social identity derives from the egg-group into which one is born with the various nest mothers owing allegiance to the egg-group they originated from all the way up to the Matriarch. The Matriarch resides in absolute security on the Homeworld. The idea that she would ever place herself in danger by leaving her fortress on Homeworld was incomprehensible. By extension, it stood to reason that the Imperial Matriarch must reside at the center of our government. The mission of the fleet was simple, to destroy the stronghold of our Matriarch thereby causing us to be absorbed into their Hegemony the same as they would have done if the roles were reversed.
With the bulk of our fleet committed to the fronts, almost no one stood between the invaders and Earth. In a matter of hours after the Shaloi fleet materialized out of jump-space, they had eliminated most of the planetary defenses and began an orbital bombardment of New York City.
After the third day most of Long Island was underwater and the fleet began expanding the perimeter of the bombardment. By the time the Imperial Fleets arrived from the front seven days later everything within 50 miles of the Atlantic seaboard from New York to Boston was devastated and the shoreline had been driven almost 20 miles inland causing both of the cities and most of Rhode Island to cease to exist. As the fleet arrived the invaders played their final card. In a final act of destruction, the invaders set their reactors to overload and crashed them into every metropolitan area within the zone of destruction causing shock waves that were felt as far inland as Chicago. and rendering the zone totally uninhabitable for years to come.
Due to the massive scale of the devastation, an accurate accounting of the casualties was never possible, though the estimates placed the count at around 200 million people.
The outrage at the massacre unified humanity firmly behind the Emperor in a way all his humanitarian acts had never been able to do. The Imperial fleet had always had more ships than crews needed to man them. This was no longer true. From every corner of the globe, every adult who was able swarmed the enlistment offices demanding a place in the fleet. The fleet sent only enough ships back to the fronts to hold the line while the rest of the ships became massive training platforms for the swelling number of recruits. It was a green but enthusiastic fleet that set out 4 years later in the Emperor's response to the "New York Genocide". Driving straight through to the Great Barrier the fleet began to carve a passage through the ancient deathtrap. It took the fleet close to a year to blast a passage but in the end, they poured through the breach like water through a ruptured dam. Taking time only to neutralize the fleets in between the Imperial fleet made a straight path to Homeworld. Once there, the Emperor made his one gesture at a "humane" resolution by calling for the surrender of the Matriarch to answer for the slaughter of New York. When this was refused he proceeded to deliver his response in unmistakable directness. Every stronghold of every egg-mother residing on Homeworld was turned into a crater and the fortress of the Matriarch was subjected to such a massive barrage of fusion charges that the resulting cloud of vaporized matter darkened the skies for three months before dissipating. Within a few short months news of the fall of Homeworld spread throughout the Shaloi fleet bringing an end to the war and the inclusion of the Shaloi Hegemony into the Empire.
Immediately following the end of the war construction began on the ISS Atlancia, the first Imperial Capital ship. From that point on the Imperial center of government would never again be planetary. In the following years the seat of government would change two more times with commissions of the ISS Equestria and later the ISS Utopia.
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