A space battle’s moment of encounter is never in doubt—the ships see each other long before they close—but that doesn’t mean there can’t be surprises.
The battle itself was quick. Our fleet encountered the enemy as planned, where planned. Shots were fired essentially simultaneously from both sides and the final damage tally was one Earth vessel, one Mars vessel, and one alien vessel destroyed. In less than thirty minutes, the Great Battle was finished!
With our war aims achieved, the main fleet reversed its thrust and started its homeward journey, estimated at 18 months on a fuel-saving trajectory. Meanwhile three of the fastest scouts burned up gobs of fuel to match speed and rendezvous with the defeated alien ship, expecting to take 6 months before they could send their first reports on the spoils of war.
* * *
On Earth and Mars the cheering and celebration began immediately and went on for a month. Even Disastrex unbent enough to enjoy that warm, fuzzy, “morning after the big win” stage for a day or two, but we knew, thanks to my constant insistence, that sooner or later something else would blow up and as ever we had to plan for sooner.
On Titan, rejoicing was fiercer but briefer. They knew they had the processing facilities the inevitable new tech would need, so eventually, even with all of Mostromo’s arm-waving about who would get spoils, they’d have to deal with a major up-tick. But in the meantime more was still arriving in the regular waves and had to be dealt with.
The Belters were a lot more cautious. They knew the Belt was going to have to wait quite a while until any Great Battle tech trickled down. Besides, they planned for disasters so routinely that there wasn’t even a separate agency in what passed for a Belter government to deal with them—nearly all the agencies were equipped to handle disasters. The war with the aliens looked over, it smelled over … but one example didn’t make a trend, or even much of a start on developing an SOP for “Invasion by aliens, Solar System response to”.
Other than having even fewer people, it was the same on Mercury. And when puzzling bad news came from there, it almost felt good to have something concrete for us to think about. (Mercury had a contract for assistance from Disastrex, so it was officially also our worry.)
The first mystery bad news was Mercury North Pole Base suddenly stopping all transmissions—everything from the spaceport datacom down to radio navigation beacons. A passenger liner had to divert to South Pole Base, and it reported puzzling difficulty in even seeing the northern city as it changed course. For a few hours, the Mercurian authorities’ best guess was a citywide communication equipment failure that the Northies were taking ridiculously long to handle. Their first response was to go on general disaster alert and send a couple of elite and well-equipped Southie troubleshooters. Those two didn’t report back on arrival, or ever.
The authorities then tried satellite observation. Both real-time feeds and the most recent archived recordings turned out to be unaccountably fuzzy across the electromagnetic spectrum from microwaves through UV. But they were clear enough to show a new hole in the ground developing near North Base, with probably some sort of machines in and around it.
When an unmanned drone tried to get a closer look and was “rendered inert by unknown means” while a satellite watched it, the Mercurian authorities pushed the panic button and called it hostile alien activity, with ECM (electronic counter measures) fuzzing observation.
At first most off-world commentators called bullshit, partly because there was no interference with traffic anywhere else on the planet or in the System; and the aliens were dead and gone, weren’t they? But soon wild speculations in favor of the hypothesis, and even wilder alternative explanations, filled the journalogs. And of course the communications lines to Disastrex filled with the news and speculations.
Two days after the incident began Bull Kogi dignified the Mercurians’ claim by denying that there was sufficient evidence for it … yet. A week afterward Mostromo was forced to do the same. But the returning Inner System battle fleet, still outside Makemake’s orbit, had already switched to top speed. And Disastrex’s primary suspicion was hardening into certainty that Disaster.gov.merc was right: The aliens had cloaked themselves with powerful enough ECM that we had simply missed them on the way in. Whatever we’d shot up in the Great Battle, and that our scouts were still hoping to loot, we hadn’t destroyed them.
Considering that before they’d dispersed over the planet, Mercury’s North Pole had some 50 thousand people, about a quarter of its population, the casualty count ended up light: About 10 thousand casualties, all presumed killed. The Northies away from the city who’d gotten the word in time, or who had developed their own doubts, didn’t go back. A minor exodus from Mercury to the rest of the System began, with Mbundu and others encouraging anywhere but Earth as destinations.
In the meantime, the Earth-Mars battle fleet would be 6 months before they could get into Mercury’s area at flyby speeds, 9 months decelerating to arrive at a speed that would let them orbit.
The Belter fleet could get into Mercury orbit in 6 weeks. But Kouyate, the Titan CEO, wouldn’t go for that suggestion. (It was the Kai Tremolo of Titan’s turn to be fleet flagship at the time.) “What would we do once we got there? Die, like North Pole Base did? No thank you! We don’t like to say ‘We told you so.’ but … ‘We told you so’,” was her response. Nevertheless, two weeks later the Belter fleet fired up. It would deploy four ships to screen Mars, five to screen Earth, and the Tremolo would continue to orbit Saturn. MaryLiz told me that a combination of Belter pugnacity and negotiation by Earther and Marser interests had brought about that result.
For two solid months after the North Pole landing, other Mercurian traffic and satellites continued unmolested. Of course everyone applied state-of-the-art sharpening techniques to all the fuzzy feeds we could get. But no matter how much computer power we wasted, no part of the spectrum showed anything more than machines with unfamiliar outlines and improbable heat-signatures digging more excavations and enlarging existing ones near North Pole Base. That was confirmed by seismic monitoring. Holes were being dug in strange ways by strange machines and we could tell pretty exactly where the digging was happening, but little more. All anyone could deduce was that the aliens were busy at something, probably repairs.
For the first eight days of the Mercurian occupation I screamed, I yelled, I chewed the carpet—as often for Mostromo’s appreciative appointments secretary as for the man himself—but I could not get him to face reality and start evacuating Earth’s cities, not even partially, as the Mercurians had evacuated theirs. I also feverishly worked the back channels, and this time I got a lot more sympathy. There was no room for hawkishness when we were all uncomfortable with Earth having no offensive military option until weeks or months from a decision date, and then of uncertain effectiveness.
That last point was being pounded in by a chip-flake “music” virty. (So sue me, I never appreciated chip-flake even when I was a teen!) It looped old Cap’n Al Musso saying “BB guns to bring to the gunfight” with sound effects escalating through muskets, pistols, rifles, automatics, to modern military side-arms, all under BB-gun fire from First Person’s weapon as you stumble through a Mercury-like landscape, until you literally piss yourself from the fear-infrasonics, which turns the virty off.
Some fun, huh? But it got through to its audience where rational argument hadn’t.
I doubt Mostromo knew about it; he was even less of a chippy than I was. I think what finally pushed him into action was a political cartoon showing him standing complacently on the Earth globe to welcome a distant Earth-Mars fleet even while alien ships buzzed around his “soft underbelly”, as Churchill delicately put it during WWII. Or maybe my back-channel work had some effect.
Whatever his mental gyrations, in our Day Nine meeting Mostromo authorized the Disastrex plan for Alternate Human Habitation facilities. The Alt-Habs barely had time to generate the expected storm of protests and lawsuits from environmentalists before Mostromo gave Parliament a bill to authorize a state of civil emergency. It passed after just three hours of grandstanding, with maybe three minutes of that being actual debate.
Finally, finally, finally, finally, it was our time! For the first time in many decades, Disastrex were taken seriously by all branches of the government and the community. We were providing a believable solution to a real threat. Our only problems were those you love to have: The community wanted us to do more, and do it faster and better. We activated the national emergency-response agencies. We got hordes of people seconded from the Defense Ministry and the various national defense forces. We applied every plan Disastrex had ever developed for communicating faster and in more detail, along with a few the military types wanted to try. Most worked, often better than we expected. We sent the few duds back to be retooled after the crisis and stockpiled some new ideas. It was lovely, lovely, lovely.
And we got feedback not just from the planet but from the whole Solar System. Of course we’d already incorporated everything the Mercurians had learned from their smaller scale implementation. But on the fly we further improved population collection and transportation, Alt-Hab construction, and other logistics, as well as insuring cultural redundancy. After their first knee-jerk reaction, even the environmentalists proposed workable ways to minimize the Alt-Habs damage, not how to block them, and some of those methods greatly improved camouflage. Lovely, lovely, lovely!
So far as we ever knew the aliens weren’t in on these discussions, but they also were busy. The Interval of Good Feeling transformed into the Interval of Breath Holding when the Mercury satellite-watchers announced that ships—that was ships, plural!—had lifted off from North Pole Base. The surface ECM fuzz shielded their number, size, and capabilities from local observation at first, but telescopic observation, coupled with the wondrous human optical system, soon determined that there were five. The next day Mercurians discovered that each of the five was much smaller than the object we’d originally tracked. Two days later it was 90.6% clear and rising that Earth was their target and we had two more months to prepare for A-Day!
Under our HXAI analysis, five ships put the metropolitan areas of Shanghai, Tokyo, New York City, Seoul, and Mexico City, totaling over 200 million people, at most risk. There was no guarantee that the aliens would make only a single pass, or that their targeting criteria would match ours, but it helped us prioritize.
Sending vast numbers of people to brand new housing located in the remotest places on Earth was doable, though not easy, or fun. Of course the rule that applied in the Titanic days, that women and children leave and able-bodied men stay to do what they can, had long ago been abandoned, now that women and good-sized kids are as effective as able-bodied men in all but the most machine-deprived environments. And knowing almost to the day when the disaster would take place, we could apply Plan HXAI-A. Where the able bodies would do the most good was in finishing the Alt-Habs’ construction and developing the logistics infrastructure to support them, so they went first. As construction was completed the young children, the infirm, and their caretakers would go; with modern medical transport, there was literally no one too fragile or sick to risk moving, given time to prepare.
Of course there were problems. Logistics at both ends of the people pipeline predictably clogged up, but we had the tools to handle that. The surprise was the percentage of people who didn’t want to leave on schedule, either wanting to jump the queue and leave early or not wanting to leave at all. By the end of the first day, hundreds of vids had appeared with protesters displaying or chanting the centuries-old rhyme “Hell, no, we won’t go!”, and others with busses and planes leaving hours late and still only half full, or an hour early with standing room only, and scalpers in the cities selling tickets that had been distributed free. We immediately opened up all evac space on a standby basis, no ticket required, and added more. Plus we blitzed announcements assuring the protesters that they were perfectly welcome to stay home and risk getting their asses fried—in those very words, and just as vulgarly vivid equivalents in the official Earth.gov minority languages.
It was Week Three that “dashers” became our biggest problem—people who’d gotten settled in their Alt-Habs and wanted to dash back home, just for a few hours, to get something they’d forgotten. No problem accommodating them in the nearly empty transports heading back, but their numbers were adding noticeable stress to the evacuation vector. We instituted a No-Dash Match program, with people still leaving the cities volunteering to bring stuff out to Alt-Hab people. Yeah, there was risk, and there was misuse and abuse, but a lot of favorite dolls and teddy bears, house plants, stirring spoons (for some reason a major category), and numerous other treasures did get rescued. All the vids of possessions being reunited with their beaming and/or tearful owners were great pro-Disastrex publicity.
Two weeks later, complaints about price-gouging and profiteers peaked. I got emails, tweeties, and sylvesters, as well as some journaloggers writing quietly on their pages or on ours and others loudly sticking mikes and cameras in my face, all wanting to know why Disastrex wasn’t controlling prices. I rehearsed and several times delivered an answer.
“We’re doing the best we can to get scarce resources allocated efficiently,” I said. “Fairness is immediately behind that priority, but it is behind it. When we saw it was necessary, we set the evac ticket prices below zero with our standby program, which has nearly eliminated scalping.” I said “nearly” because a few suckers were still paying for counterfeit tickets. “But we at Disastrex don’t know exactly what’s right. No one does! We’re letting the people closest to the scene determine that. Yes, there will be some abuses, but I appeal to buyers and sellers to cooperate. This is the first time we’ve seen this kind of disaster, and we all need to see it through as best we can.”
It also became clear that even with free market conditions, Alt-Hab housing would handle only 57% of the displaced by A-Day. So in Week Six we started asking people to move into temporary accommodations all over the world: small cities outside the metro areas, off-season resorts, and so on. It was messy, but it was actually easier to do than the Alt-Habs.
On A-Day minus Four, we were ready! The top five metro areas were vacant except for emergency responders against fire, looting, and vandalism, military liaisons, stubborn stay-putters, and brave or foolhardy journaloggers. Cultural redundancy was maximized throughout the Earth. We shifted our resources to evaccing the second tier of five: Moscow, London, Mumbai, São Paulo, and Los Angeles.
On A-Day minus One, Mostromo announced, “Earth is ready. Our defense forces are at peak states of readiness, and the full Belter fleet of ten ships is now headed for Earth. They will arrive in just a month.” That was less than half true. Those originally designated for Mars would take another month to arrive, and I had it on good authority that one would stay behind, as would the Kai Tremolo out at Saturn unless Kouyate changed her mind. But if anybody asked, I hadn’t noticed Mostromo’s error—or lie, which he was perfectly capable of.
* * *
As with the earlier Great Battle, there was no surprise when contact would be made.
We monitored at Disastrex Emergency HQ in Albany as the five alien ships began entering Earth orbit on the opposite side from the Moon. Whereupon the missile batteries of two unmanned artificial Earth satellites fired long-range missiles—as expected, to no effect—and were silenced by return fire before their second round went off—no surprise there, either. This showed what the generals, and all of us, had hoped against, that the aliens’ overwhelming Mercury was no fluke. Now came the tough choice: Committing more forces with live people operating them, or adopting a Fabian strategy of waiting for the aliens to show a weakness and then exploiting it.
Well, it must be something in human nature; in his day, the Romans had hated Fabius Maximus, insulting him as Cunctator, the Delayer. Mostromo gave the hawks a go-ahead, and ten hours after those preliminary shots the most massive launch of human firepower in history occurred. Part of those ten hours was occupied in last arguments over whether to launch everything simultaneously, hoping to overwhelm the aliens’ tracking systems, or launch so that everything arrived simultaneously, hoping to overwhelm their defensive matrix.
We knew so little it made no difference. But making no difference didn’t make it unimportant—reputations were being made and lost based on which side a general took. The second faction won the day. So from bases on the back side of the Earth from the aliens, Earth Defense started the launch wave with almost two thousand big missiles. Before it was half completed, they knew Earth’s hardware was hopelessly outclassed and aborted the wave. This time, the aliens didn’t bother to retaliate. They simply took up a different orbit, casually accelerating at 10G into the upper atmosphere and out again in a different direction. Earth’s hardware wasn’t dumb, just futile; lots of it tried to keep up, and as the volley crossed into the sun’s light, those on the right side of the planet had two unique sights: An alien spaceship parade followed by a showier missile parade.
Twenty-five contrails interwove through the low ionosphere above Shanghai, followed thirty minutes later by the also-ran swarm of the couple thousand missiles from Earth Defense, which became a huge fireworks display as Earth Defense detonated what couldn’t catch the aliens but that air drag would suck down to Earth, greatly reducing the damage that the tons of falling metal did.
Meanwhile, the aliens had taken up a polar orbit and seemed to be waiting for what would come next. On Earth, the generals now remembered that Fabius Maximus Cunctator eventually defeated Carthage with his strategy, becoming a hero of the Republic, and they too waited.
After twelve hours of inactivity, the aliens swooped down on Shanghai once again. This time they came lower and slower, sweeping deep into the stratosphere, causing sonic booms, followed by the booms of Earth Defense aircraft and the screech of medium-range anti-air missiles. Those last were quick to produce, and many had recently been added around all the major metro areas. This time the aliens did use their weapons. There were Earth Defense casualties but, as best we could determine, no alien casualties.
Immediately after, the aliens similarly drew out and destroyed some air defense forces at Tokyo, New York City, Seoul, and Mexico City—the other cities that Disastrex had predicted. But somehow being right didn’t feel that good.
Then … they went away! They headed out in the direction of the Sun, put out a huge puff of some kind of cloud, and Earth Command lost track of them.
“It’s the goddamn ninja trick!” I muttered listening to the reports. “Don’t get suckered in!” And we issued a “special Disastrex update”: “Be vigilant! This crisis is far from over.”
Twelve hours passed. … No change. Twenty-four hours passed. … No sign of aliens. Was it over? Had Earth gotten off that lightly? Had we really scared them off with that silly parade of missiles that never came close to touching them?
No, we hadn’t. Fifty-five hours after they’d disappeared, the aliens used their formidable ECM to sneak back into Shanghai, Tokyo, and New York City. Suddenly huge rumbling dome-shapes of lightning a couple of kilometers across spouted up from the centers of them.
The Aliens Have Landed! screamed a thousand journaloggers.