And then it ended.
The main Earth fleet was still two months away from Earth orbit when the aliens on Earth all packed up and went back to Mercury—one day they were playing cat-and-mouse with Earth defenders, and the next they left.
Two days after the five ships arrived back at Mercury, a much larger ship, apparently the original Ship A, launched towards the Altair Sphere. It passed close to the returning Earth fleet, but didn’t make contact. As soon as it lifted off, the ECM jamming on Mercury stopped, and Mercurians started picking over the remains.
The crisis done, the Solar System had to decide what to do next.
The physical property damage done was huge but not record-breaking—some earthquakes and hurricanes have done more. What has been hideously expensive and time-consuming is damage inspection in the city cores. Who’s ever inspected whole city blocks for massive ozone damage before? The increasingly impatient evacuees didn’t help matters any. Nevertheless, the Disastrex time scale for healing the wounds has been years, not decades.
But what was damaged—the hearts of Earth’s three biggest cities—was spectacular. It was like having the Rosetta Stone stolen—something you never forget.
And the final search for sheep, which spread the aliens over a lot of Earth cities, widened the alien invasion experience enormously. By the time they left, fully one fifth of the world’s people had personally seen an alien ship fly over their home or work—and it was the world’s most influential fifth, its big-city dwellers. They became to some extent participators in this drama, not passive spectators.
Seeing the vids of combat in the cities, reading the journalogs of the pundits and especially the troops—many of them abruptly cut off by combatants’ deaths—and the major loss of life on Mercury, these touched nearly everyone. Combined, they radically changed many people’s thinking. This was especially so for the residents of the Alt-Habs, and even for those in the next tier of cities, displaced closer to home.
Because the whole experience was both so brief and so strange, compared to, say, a world war or economic disaster, it produced hundreds of ideas on what lessons to learn from it. Prominent commercial journaloggers in Los Angeles, Jakarta, and Moscow quickly weighed in on the next possible Alien Invasion Catastrophe, but the debate about how to respond spread to nearly everyone. The range of suggestions put forth with serious intent was mind-boggling, and got more mind-boggling with time, in many cases representing personal feelings more than reality.
The Outer System governments issued a joint statement with Mercury’s, arguing that “Recent events justify even more vigorous HX exploring. We need to find and integrate more HX technology if we are going to defend ourselves.”
For about two years most Earthers agreed with that statement. Earth’s planetary government and most of its federated countries responded by allowing in a lot of previously prohibited or restricted HX technology. To a lesser extent, so did Mars—less because there had been many fewer categories that it had refused or limited. On Earth the construction of and migration into Alt-Habs also continued at a slow but steady pace. Alien attack was now real, so spreading civilization as widely and thinly as practicable now seemed like the same kind of good common sense as having levees and sea walls to protect from hurricanes and building codes requiring strong construction in earthquake zones. Of course all the forces that pulled people into cities persisted, but now they had more competition.
Then two or three years later, just as predicted by the doomsayers, the tech influx did bring unemployment in some sectors and discontent among many Earthers and Marsers. (The triumphant doomsayers didn’t talk about the spectacular fortunes or the nouveaux riches who made them, even though there were a lot of those, too.) By four years after the invasion, the Earth Firsters were winning seats in Parliament again, and even though Earther hawks were still supporting HX-based military technology, the “Yes, but” roadblocks to HX technology transfer thickened again.
So although the people of the Solar System know that there are aliens out there who can kick our butts with one tentacle tied behind their backs, they haven’t agreed on many really effective measures to deal with the threat. That’s not too surprising, I guess. But it means that for humanity to survive we’re going to have to be lucky again in our next encounter with aliens.
And now, six years after, there are even Alien Deniers. The whole thing was a hoax, using secretly hoarded HX technology to produce spectacular effects, that was created by the Earth government, or a Hindu cabal, or Mercurian industrialists, or—let me stop before I puke, okay?
And me? Oh, I got my day in the sun. And a statue in Central Park. I figure if I’d died heroically leading the resistance my statue would be at Disastrex headquarters instead, and there’d be a hundred or two schools named after me. But I survived, and got cabinet-shuffled out of Disastrex five months after the aliens went home. When, soon after, it sank in how badly Nash Mostromo had bungled the whole Invasion and an election had to be called, some people wanted me to stand for office, as the Earth MP from Greater New England or even Earth President. Those with less lofty opinions of my abilities suggested the US Presidency. But despite my wide streak of independence, I’m a bureaucrat at heart, not a politician. After an official separation from my wife, I jumped to Mercury’s Disaster.gov. Not only am I happy here, but I’m likely to succeed João Mbundu when he retires next year.
Oh, and I’ve started my own journalog for the second time in my life. (Fortunately my teen-angst journalogging appeared under a pseudonym, one that you will not learn from me.) Here’s the mission statement from my home page:
Are we prepared for the Second Alien Invasion of Earth? Definitely not!
Do we want to be prepared? I’m not so certain. It’s like asking how sure you want to be about surviving any disaster. What every Solar System government needs to do is to find out how likely another such encounter is and budget accordingly.
This occasional Net log points out relevant reports, assessments, and studies that have been done to that end, and—unfortunately, more often—calls for those that should be done.
Gads, listen to me! Proof positive that I should be a bureaucrat, not holding office.