Earth! A Visit from Relatives

War is dreadful—especially if it’s interstellar. The refugees from a doomed planet, exhausted and ready for anything to survive as a race, armed with knowledge from a civilization that had surpassed Earth by centuries, ended up on Earth in the first half of the twenty-first century—on a planet boiling with passion, hatred, wars, and revolutions…

Three groups of alien air-and-space craft were rapidly descending over northern Siberia, over Alaska, and over northern Canada. A short blast of the siren roared, turning the working atmosphere of the National Defense Management Center of the Russian Federation into something similar to the feverish office atmosphere of a large company during an all-out rush. And a minute later, the “urgent” phones started ringing in the bedrooms of the defense minister and the president of the country…