And then lost it all, James thought, sourly.  For Britain – or any of the other major interstellar powers – such a disaster would be bad enough, but for the Mexicans it would be catastrophic.  Somehow, he doubted that they’d insured themselves ... and even if they had, there would be years of legal wrangling before anything was paid.  No insurance company had offered a policy against alien attack, prior to First Contact.  It was probably covered under Acts of God.

The aliens, it was clear, hadn't been particularly interested in the system either.  There was no hint that they’d surveyed the handful of asteroids in the system or landed a settlement on Vera Cruz.  It was an empty world, now that the humans had been exterminated; logically, the aliens could have taken it for themselves.  But maybe they had good reason to hold off on landing colonists, he decided.  After thousands of humans had been slaughtered, it was unlikely that the human race wouldn't retaliate against alien settlers.

Landing colonists on New Russia makes sense, he told himself.  Human shields.  We couldn't bombard the planet without killing millions of Russians.

He scowled.  If there was one thing the human race had relearned over the past two centuries, it was that such tactics couldn't be tolerated.  Showing weakness, even an understandable reluctance to accidentally kill friendly civilians, only encouraged the terrorists and insurgents who had fought and died fighting the civilised world.  They were evil, of that James had no doubt, but were the aliens?  Were they deliberately using the population of New Russia as shields or ... or were they utterly unaware of what they were doing?

It seemed impossible, but the aliens weren't human.  They might be humanoid, yet their thinking might be very different.  It was possible that they regarded themselves as completely expendable, let alone human captives and civilians.  Or that they were willing to leave human civilians alone as long as the civilians did as they were told.  But the silence from Vera Cruz suggested that the entire planet was dead.

Unless they’ve decided not to risk using radio, he told himself.  But he wasn't optimistic.

“One of the drones is entering orbit now,” the sensor officer reported.  “It’s still picking up no trace of alien starships.”

“Put the live feed on the display,” James ordered.  “Let's see what happened here.”