Part 1: The Colonizers

“Holy crap, is your tail on fire?” Rondo asked through panting and vocalized exhaling. “Damn, they were pissed! Oh my Lord I barely got the door closed in front of those bastards…” As he sat down heavily in the earth-toned padded control chair, the panoramic viewscreen lit up the entire control room, displaying their surroundings from floor across the domed ceiling. Mitra, bent over from exertion, patting at her smoldering tail, began to cry a little bit as she sat in the control chair next to Rondo.

This is serial 1 of... I dunno, probably around 10 serials of a novella, The Colonizers. I'll try to do about one serial per week. PLEASE give me feedback, and post on your socials if you like it... Tag me if you think about it. My accounts are all @TropicalMoses (Insta, TT, BS, Sora, except Twitter, which is @TopicalMoses... Some psychic bastard took TropicalMoses several years before I got to it.)

THE COLONIZERS: Part 1.

As agents of the elite Ministry of Scouting and Security of the glorious and ancient Empire of the Golden Star, Mitra and Rondo had seen many, many failed missions. It was the nature of the job. A planet that could support life usually already did so. Finding one of those planets and preparing it for colonization was a very tricky process. You couldn’t just kill everyone already there, as that tended to kill most of the elements that made the planet able to support life. You couldn’t just pretend to be one of the existing denizens forever, as their disguises weren’t perfect and tended to be discovered eventually, as had just happened. The dossier didn’t mention the Flavians, as they called themselves, used scent as their primary sense. The Empire’s scent masking technology wasn’t great, and after a week of suspicious interactions, the Flavians discovered the ship and set Mitra’s tail on fire while chasing them out of the settlement.

“You mind if I take first shower?” Mitra asked.

“Your tail is still smoldering, by all means.” Rondo responded courteously. He was always a gentleman. Mitra appreciated that. 

“Thank you.” Mitra smiled. “What’s next?” She asked. Rondo pulled up a file on a square tablet and handed it to Mitra and she stared at it, sliding her claw along the screen. “Mammals. I actually prefer that. Scales are so immobile and itchy.”

“Agree. If you have to be corporal, mammalian life is the best. Squishy and soft… Nice planet too. Lots of water, smaller mountains, only one moon so the tides are calm, tons of carbon in the air… Pretty.” Rondo shrugged. Mitra smiled and waddled off to the back of the room, held her claw to the wall and a door opened in the screen wall now featuring open space and stars. She walked through with her shoulders slumped and her head down as the adrenaline began to ebb.

When Mitra reemerged and sat next to Rondo, she was an attractive middle aged human woman with a fun whip to her long auburn hair and wearing a nice navy blue business suit. She had an uncomfortable smile and wide eyes as if she couldn’t stop her mouth from spreading.

“Takes a bit of getting used to.” She shook her arms and legs. “I feel like my hands are too far away… Ugh. Wait until you see how they excrete waste. Disgusting.”

“Not my first mammal. You think that’s gross, wait until you see how they reproduce. You genuinely wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Honestly. And they want to do it. Desperate to do it.” He shook his head. “God has a disgusting sense of humor.” And he handed Mitra a tablet sized screen with the new dossier displayed.

“Well, whatever. Hopefully we can subjugate them quickly and get out of these bodies… I guess it’s better than the lizards. Can you imagine being stuck like this? Excreting and reproducing uncontrollably all over the place? Horrible.” Mitra’s awkward smile was replaced with a dramatic mix of shock and disgust, overly displayed by her inexperience with the human toolset.

“You got the panel? I’ll go and change.” Rondo said and began to walk to the back of the control room while Mitra sat and plotted their wormhole.

“Yeah. Take your time.” Mitra said without looking back at him.

As they transited through the wormhole, Mitra took the time to deep dive into the dossier and download all of the language and social interpreters. Called “Earth” by the current dominant species, a mammalian species with verbal language who called themselves “Human”. Mammals who evolved in a highly competitive environment tended to be cooperative, intelligent, and rather fissiparous. These humans definitely fit the bill, parsing themselves into tribes both geographically and philosophically, though their philosophies tended to be loosely held and easily malleable according to who they lived next to, and how it would justify whatever they were already doing in a given circumstance. This particular species was about halfway to interstellar colonization.

“Hmm. Standard divide-and-conquer strategy, I’d guess.” She said to herself, and indeed, the strategy tab suggested just that: information inflammation and sabotage pitting one tribe against another until they thinned their own ranks and became exhausted, then offer a lasting solution in the form of enforced peace provided by joining the Empire of the Golden Star, then colonization and slow subjugation to yet another servile species. “Not sure what we’d have these gross bags of excrement and foul physical procreative obsession do, but, above my pay grade.” And she unconsciously rubbed her hands on her chair, attempting to wipe the human off herself.

Rondo returned in the skin of a bland, middle aged man with thinning hair and broad shoulders wearing a nicely tailored charcoal gray suit and a white shirt with no tie. As he walked toward Mitra, a flashing yellow star with a glowing silver orb in the center emerged on their screen indicating a priority message.

“Crap.” Rondo said as he sat down next to Mitra. Mitra gritted her teeth and slid her hand across her control panel. As she did so, the image of a silver sun dominated the screen and a recorded message played in a distant, deep, cavitated voice, as if it was being translated from whale song.

“Ministry of Scouting and Security agents. You have filed a planet abandonment report regarding planet 8-F-4244B. Flavian single homeworld. This was a priority target. Your success rate has dropped below standard. You will be reviewed. End of message.”

“Crap.” Rondo said again and put his elbows to his knees, holding his head up with his hands. “I knew it was coming, but I was hoping they might not notice.”

“Damn. This is bad. How long does the review take?” Mitra said with a significant amount of trepidation.

“It’ll take a while. We’ll have time for this next planet at least… We’d better move fact an get this one. Maybe it’ll put us back into the green.”

“Oh man. Did you read the whole dossier? It’s a pretty complex society: lots of tribes, diseases, ecosystems. They’re wrecking them all pretty good already, but it could be hard to get them to really turn on eachother.”

“Nothing to be done about it. We’ll have to just, I dunno, do a good job. Are they suggesting divide-and-conquer with a longer term strategy?”

“Yeah.” Mitra said. “Seems pretty standard, but they’re more advanced than the Flavians. Dumber, but more cooperative, so more advanced.”

“Well, this dossier is a bit old. We’ll just have to see what their status is when we get there… Let’s lock in on this one.” Rondo said, making direct eye contact.

“Agreed. It feels weird when you make eye contact. Their range of view is so narrow. They can’t even see infrared. You have to dedicate so much of your tiny range of perception to focus on me. Weird.” Mitra couldn’t unlock her eyes from Rondo.

“I know. So limited. I can barely move my eyes away from yours. Makes me feel funny… I feel like this is going to be a strange one.” After a silent pause staring at eachother, Rondo broke the spell and shook his head, stood and meandered away.

On the advice of their automated analyst, Bletchley, they set down just northwest of Las Vegas, in the remote desert. Their ship, a perfect cylinder twenty five feet in diameter and thirty feet tall, was outfitted with material that would display the view of the landscape behind it, providing a cloaking effect that made it nearly transparent. It wasn’t entirely perfect, as when hit with a strong wind or dust storm, which caused a distinct ripple effect across the ship. As the ship landed on its circle end, it extended a drill into the ground that ported with the critical trunk fiber optic cable directly beneath them, and the automated analyst began imbibing data. Mitra and Rondo sat in their control chairs and eagerly absorbed the intelligence streaming to their dome screen in the form of pictures, videos, and charts showing economic expansion beginning with the Industrial Revolution, a map of the world split into countries with languages and political systems, world religions by region, military power, human methods of war with frequency, methods of acquiring political power, sports, comedy, and most importantly, methods and modes of effective communication. Among the many advantages of their species was their ability to effectively absorb information in a single exposure.

“Well they already know how to fight eachother. That’s good.” Mitra shrugged. “Unfortunately, they’re incredibly paranoid. Did you see all their conspiracy theories? Usually mammals are smarter than lizards. Not these dummies. They turn everything good into an object of suspicion. It’ll be hard for us to stay hidden for very long.”

“Are you calling us something good?” Rondo said with a smirk. Mitra laughed.

“I guess not for them.” Mitra continued laughing.

The analyst finished imbibing and posted its recommended course of action: angled information designed to promote intratribal suspicion and intertribal hostility. Create flashpoint events. Appear with the solution.

“I didn’t need that recommendation.” Rondo rolled his eyes. “No creativity. Nothing new or interesting… Whatever. We’ll need to do this fast to get our average up. We land this planet, the review will be meaningless.”

“You think?” Mitra asked hopefully.

“We hand them a brand new water-heavy planet, what are they gonna say? You’re fired? They’ll give us a medal or a promotion or something.”

“Damn. Alright. Let’s get at it!” Mitra said and pulled up a program designed to create natively formatted information. “Bletchley, give me some suggested provocations for information penetration.”

“I’ll go get on the panel downstairs and start designing some kinetic provocation.” Rondo stood and exited the control room. 

After an hour of perusing the recommendations list, Rondo returned to the control room in a pensive mood. He sat next to Mitra who had finished her list and was equally pensive, staring up at the pale blue sky and intense desert sun as displayed on the dome screen. After a minute of silent thought, Rondo broke the silence.

“What did you think of your list?” He said and Mitra made a thoughtful hum before turning to him.

“It seemed awfully… cautious.” She said, diplomatically.

“Yeah. Me too. A very subtle, slow process.” He said with a hint of dissatisfaction. “Start with some midnight industrial sabotage, a little political corruption, then ramp up to fires after a year. A year! We don’t really have that kind of time if we want to quash this review.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking. These humans are very tribal. If their leader says there’s nothing to worry about, well, they’re not going to worry, which means we’ll be here burning down buildings for, like, a lot longer than we’ve got!” Mitra said with her hands up near her shoulders.

“Look, we’re trained experts at this kind of thing. We’ve got some discretion here. If we think it’s overly cautious, we can push the timeline. Push the agenda a bit.” Rondo declared.

“Right!” Mitra confirmed. “I mean, what was all that training for if not to use our judgment? I mean, we’re just pushing it a bit. Nothing dramatic.”

“And like you said, they just need a little jumpstart to make them notice. Nothing too big… Maybe we aim a little harder on the political systems early, and let them build their own dispute a bit.”

“I don’t know that I said it, but your idea sounds good to me… I’ve got a couple of provocations we could launch simultaneously rather than in successive elections. See what happens.” Mitra offered. Rondo tapped at his chin in false contemplation of a decision he had already made.

“Ok. Ok, we go with your plan. Let’s put it together.” Rondo said in a decisive way, pointing and walking around in short, rapid strides, as if to simulate the pace of action he’d like to deploy. “Let’s double up, shorten the timeline. Just a bit, just a bit… Bletchley, give us a double time pace. Deploy the influence campaign on their political process.”

“Are you sure?” Came Bletchley’s smooth, calming voice that couldn’t help but make one feel something was going to go horribly wrong. “That is not the advised path.”

“Yes, Bletchley. We’re sure. These people are too resilient, and the proposed timeline is too drawn out for our needs.” Rondo commanded.

“With your final approval, I will assemble and deploy.”

“Final approval authorized. Please assemble and deploy.”

“Assembly will occur during the next 18 hours. Deployment will begin and last for seventeen days before analysis and assessment.” Bletchley droned.

“Yes, yes, fine. Please assess constantly during the deployment phase.” Rondo waved his hand dismissively. “Ok. Now we wait.” He said to Mitra with a confident smile, catching her eyes with his in a hypnotic moment, again shaking his head to dislodge his brain from hers. 

“Are you sure?” Bletchley said after a quiet moment.

“Yes damn it!” Rondo yelled and attempted to gather himself. “Yes, please.”