Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [113]
The casualties were appalling. In less than a day a quarter of both fleets was destroyed or damaged beyond repair. The flagships of the Jex and Canavitchi were crammed to bursting with the survivors of their armadas.
But back down on Earth something very strange happened.
The first that most people knew about what was going on high above them was when a series of grave official statements began to interrupt television programmes across the planet, each more sombre than the last. The event, suddenly, became global. A shared multimedia experience for billions of people. Many didn’t believe what they were being told – that aliens were at war with each other above the stratosphere, and that thanks to a unique partner-ship between the United Nations and ‘various member state security organisations’ a defensive web had been set up which could, at least partially, protect the planet from the ravages of the battle. That the first announcements were made during TV prime time in the United States initially suggested that the whole thing was a devious Orson-Welles-like publicity stunt dreamed up by desperate networks looking for ratings. But most people stayed up all night anyway, watching events unfold with a mixture of incredulity and fear. And then across the world, in twenty-four different time zones, when dawn broke with fresh televised pictures of the pyrotechnic display in the heavens most people came to the inescapable conclusion that the end of the world was nigh.
What was most surprising was that they were pretty all right about it.
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A lot of people, it was true, crammed all their worldly possessions into their cars and ventured out of the cities in desperate columns, panicked despite official pleas for calm, and watched the spectacle in the sky from forests and mountains and other isolated spots.
Most, however, stayed at home with families and friends. They held parties with those they loved (or those they liked, or even those they tolerated) and watched the unfolding events with a resignation that was appropriately passive and uniquely human. If we’re going to die as innocent bystanders, the reasoning went, then we might as well have a good time and get loaded before it happens.
And so, for three days, broadcasters across the planet covered the events in the heavens to the exclusion of everything else, taking their pictures from those satellites that weren’t dispensing death to aliens and sharing what information they had. They held live broadcasts from various strategic points that had really good views of the battle above, and filled in the rest of the time with celebrity interviews about the crisis. No one outside the television industry went to work, no child went to school. Businesses and shops closed and everybody got on with the serious business of watching the end of the world on TV.
There were a few, surprisingly few, isolated outbreaks of looting and mayhem (the one in Manila in which fifteen people were shot by the police was the worst). There were some riots in one or two big cities, mostly in America.
(A hastily arranged end-of-the-world rock festival in Seattle turned into an excuse for some rioting but, since the media was occupied elsewhere, hardly anyone noticed.) And there were a few crackpot religious groups who went around wagging their fingers at everyone and saying “we told you so”.
But most people ignored them because, after all, nobody likes a smart arse.
A slew of fundamentalist groups used battle as an excuse to launch verbal attacks on those opposed to their beliefs and generally, for a few days, everybody who hadn’t been invited to an end-of-the-world party was depressed and grumpy.
Not much different from normal, in fact.
A few old scores were settled. Some neighbours took the gun from the cupboard under the stairs, and visited the person next door who played his records extremely loudly at two o’clock in the morning when they had to be up to go to work at