The Kyreikon Empire expands. It has always expanded, is expanding, and it will always expand. It is the premier power of this galaxy. It has stood the test of time for countless aeons. It expands. It does not matter if that expansion is into unpopulated territory, through diplomatic means, or through means of war. It expands. And it is our duty to make certain it expands. - One of countless Kyreikon Admirals, leading a fleet to new territories. At the time of the invasion of Terra, those words are at least a thousand years old. Origin not entirely clear.

The following document has been painstakingly assembled, from diaries, recordings and eyewitness accounts. It has been translated into the premier human language, and adapted to their measurement systems.

7163-8-24 (14 days to the invasion)

“Report!”

“As you order, Lord Admiral. I have found a inhabited world, not far from here. While the inhabitants have no space flight, or if, only minor capabilities in that regard, they seem to be reasonably advanced for such a civilization. I suspect that a small fleet can defeat them, Sir.”

“You would not advise diplomatic measures?”

“I will of course not presume to know anything, but in my humble opinion, they are primitives. It is significantly easier to just invade and enslave them, instead of figuring out how to talk to them. Especially considering that only one in ten attempts of diplomacy with such a species does not end with us conquering them in the by force anyway. But I and my crew will follow your will, my lord!”

“Good analysis, and correct as always. Return to that world, try analyzing their language. If I decide to invade them, we will later need to talk to them anyway, just to give them orders, so it will not be wasted effort.”, Lord Admiral Tirion of the Kyreikon Empire turned around and looked out of the window.

It was not a real window, of course. That would be a clear weakness in a warship. But the screen used to simulate what a window here would show was very good, and while you could find the pixels with a microscope, it was impossible to do without artificial help. There might be a species out there that could, but to the best of the knowledge of the empire, no such species has ever been found.

He sighed. His command was a very clear show of disfavor. Commanding only a small fleet of warships, and tasked with bringing new species into the empire. The region in which he should find those species was even more telling, the barren stars were not called that way because they teemed with life. More like the opposite. And while you could find microbes and such fairly easily, intelligent life was not known to exist there at all. But this might be it. And small enough that he would not need to run home to get reinforcements. Great.

He would wait until the rest of his ships had returned from their own scouting missions, but, in all honesty, he did not expect any other great finds. This was the fifth ship that returned, from eight he send out originally. The first four had not brought any interesting news, and he expected that the last three also would not bring anything interesting home.

He turned around again, seeing approvingly that his subordinate had left. One must always like when those are actually smart.

7163-8-30 (8 days to the invasion)

The last ship had finally returned. As he had expected, none of the others brought any kind of interesting information, besides maybe some scientific curiosities. Nothing groundbreaking, but rare or otherwise interesting data.

He had called for a meeting aboard his flagship. Twelve of his thirteen captains were here, and the thirteenth captain commanded the destroyer he send to that world he planned to add to the empire.

“You are all likely wondering why I called for you, even though Captain Sonres is still missing. I am certain you have heard a plethora of rumors, some of them correct, or at least partly so, others, not so much. I will clear those up now, and explain our next operation, so I would advise you to listen. Captain Sonres has found an inhabited world. We will add it to the empire. If he has already built up a large enough library of that species’s premier language, so that we will not embarrass ourselves, we will attempt diplomacy. If not, well, I do not want to waste time, and I do not want to embarrass myself, so we will add them forcefully to the empire. Any questions?”

One of the destroyer captains spoke out: “While we have significant troop complements on board, this is an expansion fleet after all, we have no dedicated troopships. We are missing a lot of heavy equipment, and the one we have, we only have in limited amounts. What happens if we meet surprisingly heavy resistance. Do we just kill them all from orbit, Sir?”

“No. We can get reinforcements from Adraskon. In fact, those are already on their way, Although they will connected with us in orbit of that world, which has the temporary name Kylor three. While I suspect that we have enough to take the Kylor three, we certainly do not have enough to pacify its population afterwards. Any further questions?”

The Lord Admiral looked around and smiled slightly. His captains were well trained. There would be more questions. But those would be handled by his and their secretaries. The only reason to ask questions at such an preliminary mission statement meeting was to figure out the objective. Not even the rules of engagement would be discussed here, he would send them out. Maybe early, maybe late. They would follow them. Thus was the way of the Kyreikon Empire.

7163-9-7 (9 Hours before begin of the invasion)

“So, Captain Sonres, did your crew figure out the language of the primitives?”

“No. We just do not have enough data. Their transmissions are really efficient, and not much gets into space. I have taken the safe route and not risked discovery. We cannot even guess at what the little we have thus actually means. But we did observe them a fair amount. The dominant tool using species walks on two limbs, has no tail, and uses two more appendages to use their tools. Those two limbs seem to have a five fingered hand with fairly flexible fingers, but we begin to run into resolution issues. While I originally thought they had no kind of regular space flight and might have send their first satellite up and not much more, I was wrong. They have a lot of very small, and very difficult to detect satellites up around their planet. We actually only realized by accident that they seem to routinely hide them. Their technological level is surprisingly advanced. We could not detect any large scale military installations, but such data is always difficult to be sure of. We are unsure of a lot of things, but we are sure of one thing. Kylor three’s species is capable of interplanetary flight, but they decided for some reason to not bother. There are no space telescopes, which we could detect, although we were able to detect a few ground based ones.”

“Would you advise an invasion?”

“I am not sure. I am reasonably certain that they are peaceful, and do not have any kind of real military, but that could quickly change. And considering their weird tech level, controlling the world after the invasion could be very bloody indeed. But talks could give them the warning they need to oppose the initial landing, transforming that into an even bloodier affair. If we want that world, I think we need to bite in the sour apple and risk a long and bloody campaign against guerrillas.”

The Lord Admiral thought for a moment and decided: “That is my opinion as well. In the next hour I will give my orders. Before this day is over, we will have landed on that world.”

10 minutes before planetfall

“Remember boys. The rules of engagement are clear. Strike terror into the hearts of your opponents and take out their will to fight. - Part of one of the motivational speeches which the leaders of small units held, before the invasion of Kylor three, today known as Terra, began.

“Sir, I think the target has detected us.”

Lord Admiral Tirion smiled. It had taken the inhabitants much longer than he had ever dared to hope. Still, it would have been better if the first warning they had would have been his troops storming out of the landing capsules, shooting. But well, as long as they did not shoot, he would also not shoot. At least until his troops had landed. The longer he kept them thinking he was peaceful, the less resistance his soldiers would face.

30 minutes after planetfall

Everything had gone well. While the immediate resistance was significantly better equipped and organized than he had hoped, it was still within expectations. Now, if he could only figure out where the satellites were through which the enemy communicated, everything would be great. Yes, those new anti-armor teams that popped up all over the world were annoying, but small in number. Everything was going to plan.

“Sir, we have encountered some type of armored machine. Multiple detected across Kylor three! It is some kind of bipedal machine. That must be unstable…”

“You can speculate later on why they would use something like that. What are its capabilities?”

“There are a lot of variants. Some of them are heavily enough armored that our anti-tank weaponry has problems taking them out, others can be taken out by hand-held guns. Not easily, admittedly, but it is possible. Wait, there is something else. Oh, by the emperor, those things suicide?!”

“Soldier, what happened?”

“There are reports all over the world that those machines stopped shooting and then accelerated into the biggest group of our brave soldiers they could find, just to blow themselves and those poor soldiers up!”

“I understand that such action is unprecedented, but we have seen similar things before! Keep calm, or do you need to be replaced?”

“No, everything under control.”

3 days after planetfall

“Can somebody please explain this disaster for me? What in the emperors name happened? What is going on? What are the now suspected and observed abilities of those Terrans?”

A poor aide to the Lord Admiral spoke up: “We know suspect that the Terrans or humans, we actually are not sure what the correct name is, have developed a way to travel to other worlds without ever leaving their home planets atmosphere. Considering we thought such a thing impossible before the invasion, we did not consider the possibilities beforehand. The Terrans also seem to have an impressive industrial base, located mostly outside of the world we attacked. Because of this, and a bit of other, circumstantial evidence, the light defense forces for example, anything heavy had been brought to that world from the outside, we suspect that we have attacked a minor world. Highly populated, to be sure, but if our suspicions of the size of the Terrans empire, called UE, are true, they might be very near our equal. We can however take it as a given that they only have a minor space fleet, if that, which likely is incapable of moving away from the truly important planets. So we are safe from retaliation. But so are they…”

“Wait, why are we safe from retaliation? Their Gates must be capable of reaching our worlds, or not?”

“Actually, they seem to think that Gates lead to parallel universes. There is a lot not understood, and that they began destroying the data as soon as they realized we had found it did not make our task of figuring their capabilities out any easier. But on the other hand, we need to figure out how to build our own Gates before even making the attempt at truly invading them.”

“You said their size is somewhere in the neighborhood of our empire, 18 trillion intelligent beings and 14 thousand worlds. Why?”

“We know they call themselves a federation of a thousand earths. Earth is their name for their capital planet. Considering that that title is fairly old and they never thought any large scale war to impede their expansion, and their empire is roughly seven thousand years old, to our eleven thousand, we have taken that as a reasonable assumption. We know they never had a real drive to colonize new worlds, which balances it a bit out that they had no burned worlds due to war. To be certain to not underestimate the threat, I have chosen the upper limit we suspect to be the number presented.”

“You have done well. Now, I will need to explain this disaster. Please send me everything you have, raw as well as presented. Multiple formats. By the emperor, how could it go so wrong?”