We were conquerors.

We took whole planets at a time as we spread the empire, and we had ways of doing it without ever having to use the halo cannons-- we did it without using any force at all. We preferred it that way.

Take Me To Your Leader!

It was usually simple to find the leadership of a planet or system of planets. The palace is always where the rulers reside, it never fails. Find the palace-- the big one.

Taking over a planet isn't usually as hard to do as it might sound. That old cliche of ’take me to your leader’ isn’t really a thing-- we always know where the leaders are, and we have ways of talking with them without having to ask. They nearly always agree to our terms, and usually without much question when we materialize in their quarters the way that we tend to do. We are conquerors first, and diplomats later when the agreements are reached.

Expanding the empire was usually easy work; bring some superior weaponry and technical prowess, coupled with the conqueror’s spirit like ours, and from there our methods of conquest were predictable and effective. Our guns are surely like nothing they’ve ever seen, and most rulers wisely agree to be toppled as soon as they get the idea of wielding that same power for themselves.

Planet Kay

We never had any trouble taking a place over, with the recent exception of one little planet that we dropped in on 75 hours ago. It was a puny little orb with a name that was unpronounceable for any of our crew, so we called it ’Kay’ for ease of communication. Planet Kay.

We’ve conquered some gigantic planets before-- have you ever seen what a single halo cannon can do? This ship had four of them, always ready to polish up any problem areas in the galaxy. Anyway, here’s this little gnat of a planet outside of the Vexios Region, this Planet Kay, and the first thing we notice is that there’s no particularly large palaces on Kay. The structures were built in various sizes, but no obvious castle with royal this-and-that plastered on flags as we often see. It was unusual.

Perhaps the king’s palace is fortified underground, was one suggestion from the crew, but of course it came as wishful thinking from our gunner, always eyeing the triggers on those cannons, ever eager to test the fearsome weapon on some resistant planet. (I’m not sure why I assigned the crew’s most unnerving psychopath to the position of gunner-- but it was probably because nobody else wanted that dirty job; no decent human being would ever think of pulling that trigger. I held the key to the cannons, so he was free to be crazy as hell when and if I said so, and not before.)

Flying Gizmos

We circled the planet a few more times, and finally went into stealth mode to float down for a closer look. We could see all sorts of gizmos flying around in the air, from long transport busses to tiny delivery drones, all equipped with their magnetic bumpers-- this population had mastered the time drive engine system long ago, and the landscapes of Planet Kay were naturally sporting a few of the typical flying museums that we often see on planets at this stage of development, floating monuments commemorating the discovery of time-tech.

Each dwelling on the surface of Kay was powered independently, the subtle signals of their whirlpool units were lighting up our monitors with little green blips. This whirlpool technology is always a concern for our Progress Engineers, as they often depend on the ability to disable a power station or two as a way to get the attention of troublesome emperors-- this kind of power-outage seems to happen on many of the planets that we visit. Here though, the type of decentralized system that Kay is protected with takes away that option, and these little whirlpool units were everywhere on this planet, quietly powering everything below.

Scouting The Surface

Planet Kay looked like a park. Each inhabited region was equipped with numerous greenhouses and various agricultural plots-- there would be no food shortages for us to manipulate here, these people had everything handy.

There was hemp growing everywhere, but it wasn’t being burned, as my Progress Engineers had pointed out; it was used in the many millions of household replicators to manufacture everything right there in their homes-- transmuting the plant matter into anything imaginable in a few seconds.

The vivid imaginations of these Kay people! We focused on a vast machine approaching one of the larger cities, and here was a mechanical flying horse, with no life forms on board, and nearly as big as a galactic freight cylinder. It was time-tech that kept it aloft of course, but with the majestic wings moving gracefully, watching this massive horse flying across the sky was quite magnificent to behold. We guessed it to be a sort of timekeeper, like every day at two o-clock a giant horse flies over, but it could have simply been another time-tech museum.

Some of the time-tech water art on display around this vibrant planet was nearly beyond description, and we were all mesmerized as we watched an airborne fractal water display towering nearly all the way to the clouds, billowing out geometric paisley upward-falling waterfalls. I ordered the helmsman to land the ship near this colossal dancing form.

While the landing party prepared their weapons and armor, I tuned the translator so that I could begin practicing hearing some basic greeting words (I’ve found that people are more receptive if at least a few of their words are used before the translators come on, it helps establish some initial trust and a sense of friendship before the whole empire shows up to assume control over their factories and resources.)

The name of the planet sounds like Kaych’throo’lryn with a tricky roll on the ‘o’s. I then found that the closest thing to “take me to your leader” in this language was something like “Lead me to your taker” which gave me a pretty good laugh. The team was ready so I turned on my shield and we stepped into the grass of planet Kaych’throo’lryn.

This wasn’t grass that we were standing in. It was a carpet of thyme, and the ship’s landing fields had already brushed some of the aroma into the air around us. Even the lawns were edible-- everything is so handy on Planet Kay!

Meeting The Natives

We approached a group of people sitting in the shade along the edge of the thyme, and it turned out to be an eight-year-old boy teaching a class on the care and maintenance of some sort of amphibious lizards. Before we could hear more, another boy of around the same age walked up to us with some curiosity on his face. When I smiled, he laughed in a charming way, and I turned off my shield. “Hi!” I said, and I must have said it right, as he returned the greeting, and began walking towards me.

I explained that we were visitors from another world, and that we were looking for whoever was in charge. I told the boy that we were looking for some grown-ups at least, but we really wanted to talk to the President, the King or Queen, or the Emperor. He pointed to another group of trees nearby, where an old guy was sitting on a park bench by a little smoking kitchen car, with a sketchbook balanced on one knee. Perfect, I thought. I thanked the boy, and the landing party and I went to talk to the guy.

The old guy’s name was Daart. We sat in the shade that day-- my landing party, Daart and I-- and we had a nice discussion about the planet Kay. it was enlightening and mind-blowing, and now I feel that there would be some value in sharing what we learned from Daart that day, and ultimately why I was unable to conquer a planet for the first time in my military career. I didn’t even really know that I’d been defeated until we were back in orbit, but we were defeated.

Defeated

Daart had never heard of a thing like a King, or any kind of ruler. Daart couldn’t understand how a king or emperor could keep themselves busy all day, and seemed genuinely confused by the whole concept.

He couldn’t imagine the use of a power plant when, as he put it, “we’re swimming in power.”

Finally I asked Daart what would be the best way for me to conquer the planet, since there seemed to be no snake to cut the head from. The trouble with this was, that there is no word in Daart’s language for ‘conquer’. The closest I could find to asking “how do I conquer this Planet of yours” in their language was something like “Show me how I may carry your load, and the load of your planet.” The question made no sense to me, and I could tell it didn’t translate correctly when Daart replied, ‘thank you, friend’.

We were conquerors. We easily defeated whole planets at a time, and we were skilled and trained for it. One failure is not what makes us who we are, and my crew seems to understand this, even as they all seem a bit listless these last few hours. Planet Kay will have to remain a secret for now, obviously, and we are all having to look at ourselves now in a different way.

We didn’t conquer Planet Kay, we left in peace. We didn’t even fire up the halo cannons, that would have just been pointless. It also would have been a bad idea since I’ve decided that I’m going to accept the offer from Daart and his artful planet-- I’m going to turn this ship around and go back to Planet Kay to live. The food there-- I didn’t even mention the food! Perhaps another time I’ll do a post on the food of Planet Kaych’throo’lryn. I’ll be making tacos on the edge of thyme for a while, and Daart said that if I went East to the end of thyme that there was a great place to get a veggie sandwich.

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all pictures in this post thanks to Pixabay, story is complete fiction

@therealpaul