The first inkling Earth had was a request from Titan Colony for a new communications channel and a new encryption code, routine enough in those tense times between the Outer System and the Inner System to insure that a communication was extra secure until someone got around to hacking it. But the information Titan forwarded was blockbuster! I got my turn at the message six hours after it arrived on Earth.
It was from a Belter spaceship exploring the last HX discovery—the one out nearly to Altair. The report was a talking head mixed in with some trajectory charts—really primitive and anachronistic by today’s reporting standards. As I watched its opening I thought, “I’d be assigned to Moscow for sending something this hastily prepared,” and had half a mind to simply move on to the next one and leave it for one of my people to review. My job’s not to digest raw infofeed!
But the next report up was the N-teenth one that day on something boring (I don’t even remember what, now) and I let the Belter’s head start talking—like the amateur it was, without stating the context.
“To Titan Defense Command, for forwarding to all relevant agencies.
“We were watching the action. From what we can tell, Ship A was chasing Ship B. Ship B was engaging in evasive maneuvers but its future did not look bright. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, something big hit Ship A and it started tumbling lifelessly. After Ship A had drifted for over five hours, Ship B came back to Ship A and, as best we can tell, started looting it. Our best guess is that Ship B had deliberately led Ship A into some kind of a mine.
“We thought that was the end of the matter. When Ship B left, we routinely came in for our turn at looting Ship A. Our exploring party was supposed to come out in 24 hours or less, otherwise maintaining comm silence—radio traffic attracts the curious. We took up station nearby. But some thirteen hours after our party went in, Ship D was spotted heading our way. Note: There was no Ship C. A miscalculated ‘C’ trajectory has been deleted from the accompanying charts.” The Belter sounded more and more urgent as she went on. I automatically leaned forward.
“We backed off. So far, all this was SOP, standard operating procedure, for the near-Sphere environment. Ship D did not make contact and proceeded out of the area.
“Eleven hours after we moved away, with our exploring party now due out but not reporting, we headed back for Ship A. Then Ship A restored power, at least partially, and ejected our exploring party’s bodies, so we backed off again—tragic, but that’s life out here. Twenty hours later Ship A hooked back up with its interstellar drive unit (you probably know that most ships out here have a separate interstellar traveler base unit) and within another hour fired up its main drive and started heading away—for the Solar System, as best we can tell!
“Ship A is not in good shape, but that does not, I repeat, that does not automatically mean it is vulnerable to Earth-technology weaponry. That is why we moved away when it powered up. Its current ETA at the Solar System is roughly 12 months, planetary time, from when you receive this message.
“We have recovered the bodies of all crew.
“Aidah bint Jaber, captain, Pulkovo, out.”
Yes, the presentation standard was totally unacceptable, but the news was blockbuster! I checked the accompanying charts and threedies, discovering among other things that Ship A was some 200 meters long. And now I had a lot of preparing to do.
Oh! I’m Gian “think of it as John” Gauci. I was head of Disastrex Earth, the quasi-governmental quasi-private body set up to replace PEMA (the Planetary Emergency Management Agency) after its irrecoverable PR disaster in the 23rd century. At Disastrex, the Disaster Business Is Our Business! And if there was anything that everyone on Earth agreed spelled disaster, it was the coming of an alien ship packing HX technology. This was a worst case scenario that we’d all worried about since before Bomorov first came back from his Honeycomb Comet.
Six hours after I read this there was a public message that both the Belt’s president and Titan Colony’s CEO would be headed to the Inner System for a flyby real-time conference with the presidents of Earth and Mars. Most of the public would assume this was yet another attempt to defuse Inner/Outer System tensions, with the flyby being the fastest way to get officials close in the physical sense, but I knew it would now have a very different agenda.
I had a lot of homework to do before it convened. As always at summit conferences, the purpose would be to gain a final measure of the players. They wouldn’t start with anything like, “OK, what do we do now?” That question would already have been answered.
In the four months leading up to the flyby summit, over the normal communications links with their hours-long turnarounds, staff on all sides had to report to their principals what alternatives were available, help them winnow that list down to what was practicable, and probably make a final obvious choice for the big cheeses to ratify. If by any chance the choice wasn’t obvious and worked out before the conference even convened, the principals might actually have to decide between a Plan A and Plan B—at very undesirable worst, among Plans A, B, and C. In any case, most of the flyby’s limited time would be devoted to affirming and praising the choice to all the System’s journaloggers. Media impact was the reason for a real-time conference.
My homework for the summit was my biggest assignment ever up to then. But potential disaster is at the heart of every contemporary alien-comes-to-Earth scenario, and at Disastrex we’d repeatedly wargamed them all.
* * *
When summit day finally came, I was not a happy puppy. Preparations had been profoundly frustrating. As always for Disastrex, the Disaster Business Was Our Business! But for my government associates, Their Business Was Business as Usual. They were all in denial! Sure, they gave lip service to disaster planning, but in their hearts they were planning on fighting this thing—and winning!
As a result, instead of declaring a civil emergency, Nash Mostromo, Earth’s President, had declared a military alert, and the planning had been strictly about a military response. Which meant I couldn’t kick any of my machinery into action.
God, it was hell! Not a week had gone by over the last four months that I hadn’t intended to hand in my letter of resignation to the president. I should have … but this was my moment! Whoever was head of Disastrex over the next year would be remembered for the next century and more.
Likewise I heard dark rumors at least once a week that President Mostromo wanted my head for rocking the boat. If so, he couldn’t act publicly because shaking up Disastrex would be a prima facie admission that the whole alien invasion thing actually was a real civil problem, not military—and not, as he publicly hinted, some kind of Titan Colony-inspired hoax designed to get them leverage at the virtual negotiating table. In fact, Mostromo had used that suggestion to leverage himself into a sweet, sweet seat. Sweet … as long as the aliens really were a hoax!
But there was every indication that a real alien ship was coming to the Solar System. So, sadly, every day the Earth president played his games was a day the Earth was less prepared. A real shame, because with that much notice of a specific disaster, there was so much we could have been doing!
Instead we had this odd situation where Titaners, Belters, Marsers, and Mercurians were already battening down the civil hatches as well as manning the military cannon while Earth was saying, “Impending doom? What impending doom?” and my agency was stuck in the middle. Christ!
I can tell you what Earth should have been doing. My people had been working on the hypothetical problem almost since Disastrex was formed, with a major update in 2291 when we got our first actual data on aliens, and every decade or two since. Over the last four months we’d been burnishing the plan as much as we could with our short staff.
As we prepared for the conference, this was the summary of Disastrex’s response scenario that I was recommending to my associates.
The HX Alien Invasion (HXAI) Scenario is a variant of the Asteroid Impact Scenario (AIS). The main difference is that in HXAI, impacts are intelligently aimed. Thus, instead of impact being completely random—meaning most likely being the oceans in order of size followed by anywhere on the continents—the most likely impact point is Shanghai and environs, the largest collection of buildings and machines on the planet by area, followed by other metropolitan areas in order of the value of their total infrastructure.
Therefore, Disastrex recommends orderly evacuation of all major metropolitan areas, relocating first to nearby locations with sufficient infrastructure to support the refugees followed by dispersal to remote and sparsely inhabited locations: Central Australia, North Central Asia, and Antarctica. Where artistic and historic treasures cannot be protected in heavily hardened structures at random locations on the globe, their best protection will be to conceal them among the refugees’ possessions. The goal is to spread out Earth’s wealth and people as evenly and as rapidly as possible, so evacuation of smaller metro areas may follow.
We can do this fairly quickly, but not cheaply. Massive movement of both people and wealth will inevitably cause large economic dislocations.
(Disastrex pronounced HXAI “hack-see” and AIS was just A-I-S. My predecessors’ putting the S for “Scenario” on AIS but not on HXAI amused me. Presumably it had been the usual TLA—Three-Letter Acronym—effect that’s been operating ever since acronyms hit the public consciousness.)
In getting cooperation to implement HXAI, we were running into not just a brick wall but a gag wall, too. Even if the government wouldn’t allocate funds, Disastrex could have been promoting the scenario publicly and getting the private sector involved out of our regular budget, but a Presidential Order had forbidden all spending on HXAI PSAs before we could even produce any.
Mostromo and I had had a meeting early in Month Two. As I was opening with a summary of my recommendations, Mostromo interrupted with, “Whoa! Are you saying we just give up Earth’s cities without a fight?”
I replied, “You’d rather give them up with a fight? Please remember, Mr. President, that even given as little as we know about it, it’s not even probable that we can defeat this ship. It routinely opposes full HX technology ships and weapons; and since it hasn’t been destroyed, it must have won or, as in the recent incident, at least pulled a draw.
“It’s as though we’re trying to defend our jungle island with war canoes and clubs against an armored landing team using rapid-fire rifles and grenades, with bigger guns in reserve. Sure, at last report the alien ship is heavily damaged, and maybe they’ve been unable to repair all that damage. That just means their ground team doesn’t have air support, but they can still mow us down, sink our canoes, and then have some fun with our women and kids.
“So what we need to do is to round up our household goods, our families, and our dogs and go hide in the jungle. And hope some gung-ho corporal doesn’t decide to set fire to the trees before they go away.
“Now, as I was say—”
But Mostromo was already waving his arms. “No. No. No! We must present a strong front. Not just to these aliens, but for the electorate as well. If we tell the public what you’re telling me, there’ll be panic in the streets. I won’t have that.”
“Panic? You get a panic when something unexpected happens. People all over the world have expected the aliens to come. Most figure we’ll get our butts kicked, some believe that we’ll somehow kick theirs, and a few expect that they’ll bring a new era of peace, love, and harmony to all sentients. But everybody’s familiar with all the scenarios!”
“Not in this real world, they aren’t. Sorry, you’ll have to keep your planning low-key for now. I mean just that: Low-key.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for my next meeting.”
That was a lie. I’d been assigned a full half hour of precious presidential time, and our conversation had taken maybe five minutes. But the lie showed Mostromo wasn’t going to listen.
So I walked out and, except among my Disastrex folk, kept my mouth shut and the agency blog blank as ordered … but the policy was insane to begin with, and grew more so every day.
I tried to backchannel around Mostromo, but as I went from associate to associate in the government, I found the president was actually being a moderate on the subject!
Basically, I got two kinds of answers: A few sympathized. But those said, “Look around you. In times like these, what can I do?” Most said, “You’re a goddamn defeatist! Get out of my office!” And as I watched the newsfeeds, I realized my sympathizers were right: As scared as we all were, war fever was gripping Earth.
And now it was summit conference day.
As the opening statement over the conference vid link, Bull Kogi, the Belt President, came out with, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem.”
Over our private channel, Mary Elizabeth Ranson chuckled and, in a pathetic attempt at a rich bass, delivered a punchline: “What do you mean we, Earthman?” I chuckled in answer. MaryLiz is my counterpart on Titan, its “Director of Disasters” to give her the usual jokey title. We’ve met at some disaster-control conferences, and done some drinking together, so we’re on familiar terms. Her joke made fun of that corny adventure series you’ve probably heard of, The Lone Lawman, with a heroic square-jawed human and his impossibly subservient “faithful android companion”. It was nothing you could say out loud in a serious meeting, but it made a valid point. Relations among Inner and Outer Systems were seriously bogged down in a lot of carping over molehill issues.
Then President Kogi played Captain bint Jaber’s initial report. When that had set the stage, the CEO of Titan, Alima Kouyate, gave him his cue for the next point. “Do we have any idea what these aliens’ capabilities are, or their intentions?”
“One intention is likely to be repair,” Kogi answered. “If the aliens are anything at all like us, setting down in a gravity well—light or heavy—will make that easier. What materials they will need to acquire, if any, we have no idea. But if that were their only intent, they could have chosen a planet, moon, or asteroid around Altair. So are they coming to rape women and kill cows or vice versa?” My estimation of Kogi briefly went up; at least he raised the question. “Not likely, but we know so little that it’s hard to tell. All we can say, from the style of their ship, is that they’re Romeo-10s!”
He hadn’t really said anything about Romeo-10 military capabilities, but those were now well known: Less than nearly all other races’ playing around the Altair Sphere, far greater than ours.
Martin Suheimet, Mars President, took his turn to proclaim that a great crisis was at hand, and all of the peoples of the Solar System must work together to face it.
Then Mostromo declared, “I’d like us to hear what Earth military has to say. Admiral Maika, if you please.”
The Admiral began droning through her presentation. “The Inner System Defense Group still has some issues it has not resolved with the Outer System Defense Group.
“First, the Inner System Group would like to face this invader in the gas giant belt, perhaps as close as at Jupiter’s orbit. However, we recognize that this is uncomfortably close to the home of much of the Belter population, so we are willing to compromise and face it in the Kuiper Belt, at roughly Makemake’s average orbit.
“Second, we still have to decide how to share the technology we may find when we have neutralized the alien ship’s threat.”
About then the phrase “sick headache” occurred to me, as in “retired to her room with a sick headache”, the most interesting bit in a neo-Edwardian virty that I’d watched with my wife. Unfortunately, I was stuck where I was, listening sickly to the wrong-headed lectures and discussions purr on until lunch time.
Over our lunches, MaryLiz ranted on our private line. “What do these people have in their pleasure capsules? I haven’t seen so much crazy sunshine spread around since Jérôme Abimbola held a press conference promising to have his troops home by Armed Forces Day! I can’t believe that even politicians could seriously talk about fighting off, even capturing, the aliens!”
“Can I say, ‘I told you so, MaryLiz!’ and then eat my TC2-style tofu in honor of your greater rationality?”
“But Gian, when the inevitable happens, this won’t just have been political suicide, it’ll be physical suicide! I hope you personally have been taking precautions.”
“I have. I’ve moved the wife and family to an Outback town in Australia.”
“And you?”
“Damnit, I’m head of Disastrex! The best I can justify is being in Albany, miles away from one of the potential Ground Zeroes, but I can’t be halfway around the globe!”
“Well, I for sure will be inspecting the disaster-readiness of a Rubyzin facility orbiting Saturn! And if you care, my lunch is Szechuan-style free-range jumbo vole. Overpriced. Raised by happy pseudo-peasants at the Xinjin Historic Village outside Chengdu. Two cheers for cultural interchange!”
I was first up at the conference after lunch. I opened with, “I hate to be the Vector of Clinical Depression, but that’s my job, isn’t it?” I was hoping for a mild chuckle from the assembled dignitaries—even two—but I got a silence that felt disapproving.
So I pretended my smile hadn’t happened and gave the group what I’d tried to tell Mostromo at our Month-Two meeting, minus the colorful comparison. After I said my piece Kogi took the vid again. In the tone of an emcee to a child who’s given an embarrassingly bad performance, he said, “Thank you, Director Gauci, for those sage words. I urge that none of us forget them.”
Then he asked, as though it made sense, “Admiral Maika, how soon will your fleet reach Titan Colony for the latest HX-derived armaments upgrading?”
Well, I’d had my moment in the spotlight. As soon as we stopped recording the session feed, I expected Mostromo to personally hand me my head, but he just thanked me for my dedicated service. I guessed he didn’t mind my doing my job as long as it had no effect on “the electorate”. When I consulted a few instapolls, his ratings were barely fazed during my speech, and actually up a few points for the day, which certainly justified my reprieve.
* * *
Two months after the conference, the faint point of gamma ray light that was the alien ship’s braking thrusts became visible to Solar System telescopes, and the coordinates of the “alien star”—still six months away from arrival—were news all through the System. Mostromo hated it, but he couldn’t shut up the journaloggers, and the rest of the System governments abetted them with official data as they continued their preparation efforts.
After my conference speech, the Mercurian government even began implementing “the Disastrex plan”, as they called it, taking advantage of their extensive tunnels well insulated from solar radiation and flares. Of course their version involved only two cities—their North and South Pole Bases—which they didn’t completely evacuate, and far fewer people and only a handful of irreplaceable treasures. I texted my impromptu analogy of jungle islanders hiding from a modern landing force to João Mbundu, the Disaster.gov rep on Mercury. He turned it into a cute/scary animation that rapidly went viral. Some remixes added gore-porn and rape-porn inflicted by the modernly equipped soldiers—gratuitous perhaps, but all too plausible, both within the scenario and in its real-world parallel.
Mars doesn’t have any visible cities; only very minor concentrations of people are aboveground. Nevertheless, the Marsers did some camouflaging of those, as well as of tunnel entrances and other installations, and they protected many of their prime cultural artifacts more robustly.
Meanwhile the Earth-Mars fleet, replete with new HX tech upgrades provided by the Titaners, was heading out for a Makemake orbit rendezvous. The Belter fleet, which included Titan’s single warship, waved them good-bye and dispersed. Unofficially, they had no intention of taking any part in a “war canoes face armored troops” fiasco. Their official position was, “If the Inner System’s twenty mainline ships can’t deal with this situation, our ten ships won’t change the result. We are happy to play the part of reserve.”
Mostromo’s off-the-record retort was, “Yeah, and let’s see how much technology we let them get from the salvage.” I found myself sympathizing with his attitude, which worried me for a little while until I realized which ships were about to become salvage, and then I was just back to being frustrated.