On the surface, Year Eight did not look a lot different from Year Seven. The anarchy continued as people with crazier and crazier ideas got their chance to try running governments. The increased craziness brought increased violence, and historians have called this period a civil war. But underneath it all, confused people were slowly getting less confused. In some places, people had worked out how to live in this new world, and they were throwing out the kooks. In their places were coming stern disciplinarians who were restoring order. The biggest problem with these new disciplinarians was that some were crazy underneath, and they wanted glory as well as order. These leaders brought serious large-scale fighting to the civil war and large-scale pogroms to the local communities.
A curiosity was that while the Mirondian starship recruiting drive was in full gear now, the number of recruits seemed low... at least as best anyone could determine in these troubled times. The Mirondians said they were looking for a fifty thousand Solar System people to man their ships, and after the first ten thousand, the recruiting seemed to slow to a trickle. But the Mirondians didn't seem worried. When asked about this, the Mirondians replied, "We have done our studies of the Solar System situation. We are confident that the recruiting situation will change dramatically over the next year, and that we will have our people by Year Ten."
The "ace-in-the-hole" that the Mirondians seemed to be counting on showed up in late in Year Eight and it continued on into Year Nine. The civil wars being fought in various communities were being "won" by one side or the other. As the wars ended, the winners found themselves with a lot of prisoners, a lot of government debt, and a lot of discontented community members. They also found themselves meeting with Mirondian representatives who were ready, willing and able to help them solve their discontented people problems with a "special recruiting drive". Those leaders who "played ball" with the Mirondians found themselves with a lot fewer trouble makers, and a lot of relief to their fiscal problems.
And that is how the Mirondians filled their ships on schedule.
At the beginning of Year Ten, the two Mirondians ships departed, on schedule. The old one was large, the new one was huge, and the Mirondians were very proud of both -- the trading with the Solar System had gone very well. There were Mirondians crewing both, and both had a mix of older MSE's and newer Solar System people.
There was one surprise wrinkle at departure time. Given the chaos, and the new wealth of the Mirondians and MSE's, perhaps it was inevitable, but when it happened it was a surprise to the Earth people. About five thousand of the ten thousand MSE's decided to stay in the Solar System, and they decided to stay on Earth! In another flashy display of Blip!-in-action, just two weeks before ship departure, the Earth-loving MSE's set up a colony in the center of the Amazon forest. How much the world had changed in just ten years! If the Mirondians had attempted that when they first landed, the whole Solar System would have fought them off tooth-and-nail. But, as signifcant as it seems now, so many other strange things had happened by then that little was said about it at the time, and no action was taken. It was just another strangeness of the time.
The two weeks after Amazon Colony was established were filled with celebrations and farewells. Then with little additional fanfare, the ships engaged their drives and began their departure from the Solar System. Earth's first contact with an alien civilization had drawn to a close.