The Invasion of Venus by Stephen Baxter

The Invasion of Venus by Stephen Baxter (Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2010) starts with the narrator, a British civil servant, visiting an old female college friend (and lover). They discuss an alien object called the Incoming which has entered the solar system and appears to be headed for Earth. Later in the conversation he reveals that the current scientific analysis shows that it actually headed for Venus.
The next section sees a later visit to see her at the Goonhilly telescopes, where she and others are attempting to contact the aliens, a controversial undertaking:

Our British Shouters are a mild bunch, but in rowdier parts of the world there has been trouble.” The loose international coalition of groups called the Shouters was paradoxically named, because they campaigned for silence; they argued that “shouting in the jungle” by sending signals to the Incoming or the Venusians was taking an irresponsible risk. Of course they could do nothing about the low-level chatter that had been targeted at the Incoming since it had first been sighted, nearly a year ago already. Edith waved a hand at Arthur. “If I were a Shouter, I’d be here today. This will be by far the most powerful message sent from the British Isles.”
I’d seen and heard roughs of Edith’s message. In with a Carl Sagan–style prime number lexicon, there was digitised music from Bach to Zulu chants, and art from cave paintings to Warhol, and images of mankind featuring a lot of smiling children, and astronauts on the Moon. There was even a copy of the old Pioneer spaceprobe plaque from the seventies, with the smiling naked couple. At least, I thought cynically, all that fluffy stuff would provide a counterpoint to the images of war, murder, famine, plague and other sufferings that the Incoming had no doubt sampled by now, if they’d chosen to.

At the end of this section there is another revelation, which is that there are signs of life on Venus: a hole in the atmosphere has opened up where the Incoming is expected to arrive.
The climax of the story jumps forward in time once more, and (spoiler) they talk about how the Incoming attacked the Venusians, but were in turn destroyed by a gravity wave created by the latter’s destruction of Neptune. They also note that Mankind have been ignored throughout the war.
This is a good, if open-ended, piece, even if it is little more than an interesting notion combined with some philosophical musings about humanity. The story is told, appropriately enough, from offstage—which mirrors humanity’s place in the scheme of the story.
*** (Good), 4,850 words.