A excerpt of an school book, published in the year 7928:
The trial of Alrick McCreadie was a well publicised affair. It was incredibly well documented, for the prosecutors did not want to make a mistake and let the terrorist get a lesser punishment because of a mere technicality.
But, while the UE was angry, they also let justice reign. Nobody would be unjustly punished, no matter how deserving they were when taking the circumstantial evidence into account.
Which meant that some of the mercenaries who took slaves, or tried to at least would get by with lesser charges, for it could not be proven that they knew of the bioweapon. Even though not everyone was happy with the arrangement, it ensured that it was more difficult to present the UE as an uncaring tyrant.
This did not stop some. But it reduced the number and made certain that their claims were not real. Which in turn helped the counter propaganda. Still, crazies existed everywhere, and even the UE had not found a way to reliably prevent them from showing up.
Still, the UE used this trial to clean house a bit. Figuring out how Alrick McCreadie had managed his attack showed a lot of issues in some of the more sensitive procedures in the UE.
This would, sadly, not be totally effective, but it would make it easier to find the responsible parties and providing a chain of evidence.
The one thing that would prove, time and time again, to not only be effective but sensible as well, were the permanent troop concentrations that would be deployed to the Protectorates.
Their official mission was to prevent any attack like the one which hit Terra. It was, however, clear to everybody (and documents published at different points proved it), that they had a secondary mission of finding any such attack as Mr. McCreadie had carried out, as well as providing instantaneous manpower in case something happened. It is important to note, that the soldiers to prevent a Terra style attack were light on heavy anti-space weaponry, but had an enormous amount (especially relative to their size) of trained doctors (and top of the line equipment for them), Search and Rescue Specialists and similar occupations in them.
In fact, that stratagem became so all-encompassing that a common joke was that you needed to search with an electron microscope for those actually trained to shoot. This joke was of course false, for everyone in the deployments was a soldier who at least went through basic training, in which they were taught to shoot their guns, even though there were rumours to the contrary. It was however true that very few of them were trained in the use of the heavier equipment those troops possessed. Which would prove to be problematic when one of the Protectorates was attacked in 7784.
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The trial of Alrick McCreadie was a somber affair. The loss in life, the near genocide he was directly responsible was reprehensible. It was unimaginable. The judge, it was latter said, could not believe that someone could do something like that. He would do his duty, but the shock had not yet propagated throughout the UE. The trial was also not an simple affair.
Nobody had ever truly imagined that someone could do anything like that, and evidence of who knew what was difficult to get. Something the government was already in the process of fixing. Which in tun meant that it was sadly considered likely that someone would escape.
But the fact that Alrick McCreadie did not show any shame, did not try to repent, but was instead proud of what he was done, helped in that regard a bit. He was smart enough to realize what would happen however, and tried to make multiple deals, giving up his coconspirators in the process. The UE however was not only unwilling to do anything like that, it was also unable.
To discourage imitators, to feed the lust for blood that the general population had developed in relation to this case, to ensure that everything was above board and nobody could accuse the UE to either be light in its punishment, and thus providing some legitimacy to this act, or being to har in it, and thus raising legitimacy of the conspiracy theorists who liked to say that the UE was a tyrannical entity.
In the end, Alrcik McCreadie would come to live for the rest of his life in prison.
As would many of his coconspirators, lower level helpers and so on. But many of those, especially if they were relatively low in the hierarchy either had very small punishments or escaped completely, because it could not be proven that they knew what was going on.
In the end, the public reacted positive to the trial. The UE was hard enough on the perpetrators as well as careful enough while never stepping over the law even once. The fury of the population had been sated, and no new enemies created. All in all the best thing that could have happened. Which was not to say that everything was good. Not by a long shot.
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Life went on. While the trial was happening, and its consequences would prove to be far reaching, the military was planning to take the war to the Kyreikon. There was just one small issue that the high command was being informed of. Most of the slowly built up army would need to go to the Protectorates. Which meant upping the manpower estimates by a lot and increasing the amount of training centres. While it was only a temporary setback, it was a setback and might mean funding issues in the future, when the threat of the Kyreikon was defeated, for the amount of men send to the Protectorates, as well as the equipment they were bringing with them, was not cheap. That a lot of them were specialists, did not help one bit. Which meant another shift in training to provide the necessary manpower.
The UE was a juggernaut. It showed in its reactions, in its actions, in how it looked at itself and others. Its resources, while unimaginably massive were not inexhaustible, especially not its manpower. While it technically had a significant class, estimates range from ten to thirty percent of the entire population, which either worked primarily in hobby-entertainment or not at all, it was difficult to mobilise this part of the population. There were programs to solve that issue, to reduce the amount of them, but they would take time to become effective.
And the parts of the population which did want to go into the military came primarily from the most productive parts of the population, those that were necessary to keep the armies supplied. The issues of a post-scarcity society could be interesting.