Earth Unaware (First Formic War)

job?”
    “I didn’t say you were insane.”
    “You didn’t have to. It was written all over your face. And frankly I can’t afford that. I need you to have an open mind and look at this evidence without having dismissed it beforehand. I don’t care what you think of me. I only care that the information I have gets to everyone on Luna and Earth. That won’t happen if we do this with you trying to disprove it.”
    “I told you I would listen, Victor.”
    “Listening isn’t enough. You need to have an open mind. If you play bureaucrat and worry about how this will affect your standing with that new boss of yours, you’ll only find excuses to bury it.”
    “Remember, I’m not stupid,” said Imala. “I will keep an open mind. You’re simply going to have to trust me.”
    He didn’t want to trust her. He wanted to trust the person five or six steps up the org chart, but what choice did he have.
    He showed her everything: the charts, the trajectory, wreckage from the Italians, video of him and Father and Toron attacking the pod, the hormigas fiercely fighting back, Toron’s death, interviews with the surviving Italians recounting the pod attacking their ships. There was even footage of Victor modifying the quickship and launching it toward Luna. It took nearly two hours to go over it all, and Imala sat in silence the whole time. When Victor finished, Imala remained quiet for a few moments.
    “Play back the part where we see the aliens,” she said.
    Victor found the spot and played it.
    “Stop right there,” said Imala.
    Victor freeze-framed on the hormiga’s face.
    Imala stared at it for a full two minutes. Finally she looked at Victor. “Is this a hoax?”
    “Yes, it’s big elaborate hoax, Imala. I went out and invented a near-lightspeed ship just so I could prank you.”
    “I’m asking, Victor, because it looks completely real to me. Not just the alien, but everything. All the data. The math. The sky scans. It looks authentic, and I believe it.”
    “You do?”
    “Completely. But if this is a hoax then you need to tell me now because I am prepared to help you as much as I can. And if I help you, and this turns out not to be real, I will lose my job, and you and I will go to prison for a very long time.”
    “It’s real. If you can get access to a scope powerful enough to see out to that far, you can see it for yourself.”
    She shook her head. “That will take too long. The only scopes that powerful on Luna belong to Ukko Jukes. And believe me, he won’t help us.”
    “So you’ll take this to your boss?”
    “Of course I’ll take it to my boss. I have to. That’s my job. But not the original data cube. I want that to stay with you. I’ll take a copy. Today. Right after I leave here. But that can’t be all we do, Victor. I’m not putting the fate of the world into the hands of a few bureaucrats in Lunar Customs. I don’t know those people, and even if I did I wouldn’t trust them with something like this. Sad recent experiences have taught me never to trust the people above me. So we’ll follow the proper channels, yes. We’ll start the ball rolling that way. But we also do our own thing. We get the word out our way. Now. Immediately.”
    “How? We go to the press?”
    “No. Not fast enough. The world isn’t watching the Lunar news. I mean right now, Victor. We upload this video of the alien onto the nets. Right now. We get people all over the world watching this video within the hour.”
    “How do we do that?”
    She took her holopad from her pouch, set it on the table, and copied the video from Victor’s data cube to her own holospace. Using her stylus, she selected a section of video featuring the alien attacking Victor and his Father and Toron on the pod and set it aside. Then she selected other bits of video to follow. The interior of the Formic pod. The wreckage of the Italian ships. Select, frightening accounts from the Italian survivors. She then created several frames with additional information, including coordinates, trajectory, and other data from Edimar. When she finished, she played it back. It was just over five minutes long.
    “We can’t make it too long,” she said. “Or people won’t watch it.”
    “It’s good,” said Victor. “It’s just the right length.”
    She was moving her stylus in the holospace, bringing up several different windows. “There are about twenty major sites we can upload this to. They all get a lot of traffic. Other sites