Various members of the crew paused in their duties to stand at attention and salute as he marched past their stations. He responded in kind, barely aware that he was doing so. In the eight years since he had become a hero of the human race, he’d developed an instinctive ability to acknowledge the gestures of respect and admiration without any conscious awareness.

Grissom’s mind was still distracted with thoughts of how much everything had changed with the discovery of the alien bunker on Mars… a line of thinking that was not surprising given the unsettling reports from Shanxi.

The revelation that humanity was not alone in the universe hadn’t just impacted Earth’s religions, it had far-reaching effects across the political spectrum as well. But where religion had descended into the chaos of schisms and extremist splinter groups, politically the discovery had actually drawn humanity closer together. It had fundamentally united the inhabitants of Earth, the swift and sudden culmination of the pan-global cultural identity that had been slowly but steadily developing over the last century.

Within a year the charter for the human Systems Alliance — the first all-encompassing global coalition — had been written and ratified by Earth’s eighteen largest nation-states. For the first time in recorded history the inhabitants of Earth began to see themselves as a single, collective group: human as opposed to alien.

The Systems Alliance Military — a force dedicated to the protection and defense of Earth and its citizens against non-Terran threats — was formed soon after, drawing resources, soldiers, and officers from nearly every military organization on the planet.