Shattered Heart, Shattered Stars

What if...? What if the current world order collapsed? What if the world were reorganized along new political boundaries? What if new world powers emerged to replace the old? But what if nothing really changed? What if those new powers still fought, and competed, and battled against each other as before? And what if technology improved to the point that the consequences of those battles became more and more deadly? What would it take to get those powers to stop fighting each other?   What if...? What if extraterrestrial life was finally encountered? What if that extraterrestrial life was so unlike our own that communication with it was impossible? What if this life form was also utterly hostile to our own, engulfing entire planets and turning them to their own purposes? What if there was no alternative but total extermination... either of our species or of theirs?   What if...? What if that decision to exterminate an entire species led to the complete fracturing of our own? What if it forever shattered the ties that bound us together and set the human race on divergent paths? What if one group of humanity refused to accept the decisions of the other? What if that group was determined to subjugate the other... at any cost?   What if...? What if it also broke the bonds of two human beings? What if it set a newly married husband against his wife? What if it made both of them question their loyalty to causes they had sworn to follow their entire lives? What if they were pushed to lengths they never thought they would go? What if the answers to those questions reshaped the entire galaxy?   What if...?