The Governor of Earth

by Catfish Russ

part 1 of 3

Recorded in the History of Her Ostentation and Flagrancy, the Empress of the Golden Carapace First Family of the Empire of the Pleiades.

April 16, 2041

Official Record of the Governor of Earth

Today humans blew up the port terminal couplings, just seconds before a Pleiadean ship was about to dock. The hitch on the ship ploughed into the building and caused an explosion that killed 57 Pleiadeans. The fire is still burning, and rioters are still destroying their own property in the neighborhood surrounding the space port, as if to say ‘rather than share this, rather than live under even a benevolent rule, we would rather destroy everything.’

I ordered 57 humans chosen at random and grafted into trees and planted in the lawn of the state capitol. That will show them. I have sent a report to the Proconsul and soon expect these harsher measures to bear fruit, which hopefully will be the content of future slipspace communications.

These are the single most difficult beings I have ever seen or heard of. They are tiny and fleshy and fragile, but their machines are robust. They are bristling with weaponry and have a knack for improvised munitions.

They are inscrutable as well. A worker, gracious and reliable will persist as a great employee for months at a time, then one day she comes in with a high-yield explosive device attached to her person and kills a handful of Ceratopsian guards or even the courtiers of a visiting dignitary. Holy Creator may it never be the Pleiadean Grande Dame.

We give them free medicine centuries ahead of their own and they complain. Food is free. Electricity is free. Yet their youth roam the streets fighting and setting fires and hacking into our computer systems.

Dr. Robinson agreed to let Tylaxian doctors operate on the President, but only if guards were present. I told her that there would be no violence and no attempts on his life. Then of course that very day her aide was struck and killed by a random projectile from one of these devices that hurls lead from an explosion in a tube.

Her aide was Maxian, very high-ranking in her region and a political problem for me. I mean we cannot endure another period of enflamed relations with the Maxian government. Their neighbors secretly trade with us: Helium 3 from the surface of asteroids that circle Zeta Reticuli I. The harsh yellow giant irradiates the surface of this asteroid belt and creates hydrogen and the highly potential helium isotope at enormous rates.

I was hoping for a post at Station Center or on Zeta Reticuli. I am growing tired of baby-sitting violent, immature species. Frankly, I felt my time at Alpha Centauri was enough. There was rebellion and civil war, and we prevailed nonetheless. I never complained. I had three aides killed. I had a limb shorn off that had to be replaced at Tylaxia Station. I was there for an eternity.

Then this mote in the Creator’s eye gets invaded and suddenly someone discovers this place has more element 79 than any place in the occupied region. So I am summoned and told that since I did such a bang-up job at Alpha Centauri, the Council, ever wise like the daughters of the Empress of the Empire, wish me to “show her Goldeness that my talents once lauded at Alpha Centauri can stabilize the situation here.”

Oh thank you! Just the new career direction I was looking for.

I am 799 cycles old. It is time for me to slow down, not speed up. Not try to please the Monarchy with brave service into my middle age. I may ask for retirement officially if this goes on. Or perhaps I can inject myself with a local parasite and use the excuse to retire.

No, it may not be extractable.

Ambassador Thon had some kind of worm from Epsilon Eridani injected into her thorax and later learned it could not be removed without killing her. I would rather work here in this pit than have anything born here injected into me.

The humans tell me I have a powerful aroma. Oh, I despise this place so. Good, I say. Great blessings that I stink to you the way you and your milkshake swilling, Elvis Presley-addicted, weed-smoking vermin stink to me.

Governor of Earth,

The Honorable Fourth Son of the Winds of the First Outer World Mathematicians Line.

April 17, 2041

Official Record of the Governor of Earth

Ceratopsian forces captured a ring of insurgents hiding in a warehouse near our compound in New Detroit. It was the first good news I have heard since we arrived. Before I could send the news along the slipspace, one of the insurgents sprayed a hallucinogen into the air and two Ceratopsians turned on their Dame and killed her.

I hate my life.

Governor Earth,

The Honorable Fourth Son of the Winds of the First Outer World Mathematicians Line.

* * *

May 3, 2041

Caleb and his inbred clan have officially changed their names to Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys. They were a wild backwoods northeastern Colonial insurgency that fought a guerilla war against the British regulars occupying the New World, all wildly loyal to Ethan, who stole the credit entirely from Benedict Arnold for the feat of capturing Ft. Ticonderoga.

That was fine. Good choice of names as well. I just hated the new coding I had to keep my troops up with. OK everyone, Caleb is now Ethan. And The Hudson River Rats are now The Green Mountain Boys. OK? OK.

A few days ago Caleb... Ethan scored a big hit on a big Pleiadean Grande Dame Bug Bitch. A little shroom gas in the air and he had her own guards freaking out and they cut her head off her huge translucent lightning-etched 8,000-pound space-cockroach carapace with their noisy-ass shoulder-mounted rail guns. So, he gets to change his name and his crew’s name. When you ace a Grande Dame, I mean damn, you can change your name.

I wish we could communicate with some of the inner outposts. I’d love to know how the resistance in Kansas City is doing. The Los Angeles insurgency is doing great, and the Pleiadean Viceroy and her Ceratopsian guards are surrounded in utter chaos.

The Ventura Vendetta, Crips and Bloods Together, Chicon Avenue Berserkers, M113, all of them are driving the occupational forces back into their bunkers. They say now there’s two Grande Dames in LA, one highly electrical and colorful, but both hidden from site because we’ve gotten so good at killing them.

But the other day something happened that I took notice of.

Quietly. And I will remain quiet about it until the next Jamboree, or at least a regional guerilla forces meeting takes place. But a week ago, a Pleiadean battlecruiser docked in LA, and while the Outworlder-controlled TV media played prepared tapes, we had a hidden camera feed showing it to us. You could definitely tell there was a nuke impact and melt signature on the left lateral hull plate. Plus large, discolored plating rings, a characteristic signature for plasma guns.

That tells me two things: Their truce with the Maxians may be faltering, or they are at war with the Maxians outright. And the Maxians are hurting them.

Good. Eat it, bugs.

Later.

Thadius, Free4All.

May 2, 2041

Official Record of the Governor of Earth

A Pleiadean battle cruiser, The Empress’ Chariot of Love and Death in Homage to the Proconsul Thule, docked in Los Angeles Terrestrial Repairs station. We broadcast images of a perfectly shiny hull, but the truth is she came in because Maxians had ambushed her and damaged her so severely that she could not complete the jump sequence from Zeta Reticuli to Epsilon Eridani without new baffle plating.

The Maxians are leasing technology from the noosphere and they hit the Empress with high-temperature plasma mines. These bloated, floating flying-cloud dwellers covered in horrid bony spikes and photospheres are actually one of hundreds of nations; mostly perfectly peaceable, but in no condition to stop the aggressive and vicious predation of their one bad country. A country with so little national pride that they don’t even make their own weaponry. They have no identity or lasting tradition other than pirating Pleiadean trade routes in the dark of space while they send diplomats to taste food from all over the galaxy and get high on our Mazul.

I would plant Reticulan worms in each Maxian if I could, and watch them eat their way our of their cartilagenous exoskeletons. An agonizing way to die, something the Pleiadeans are masters at. Grafting endoskeletonals into plant life is another agonizing way to die that we use to subdue these vermin.

The convict is injured and then placed into a solution that matches and combines the metabolisms, flesh and perceptions of the plant and the convict. The result is a convict bodied with the tree, yet it feels the pain in plant time, excruciatingly long and slow.

The sufferer lives as long as the plant, motionless, helpless, for sometimes thousands of cycles, and bears the pain the entire time. Yet no matter how many humans are grafted, the violence against us gets worse. I have suggested to the Quadrant Proconsul a gamma-ray blast that would essentially kill everything on this rock, but he said it was no longer allowed now that liberals controlled the parliament.

Oh I miss the days when the Pleiadean Empire was a muscular Empire that treated these stinking subspecies as the property they are.

On another topic, I guess everyone knows that war has broken out between our Empire and the Maxian pirates. I asked my egg clone about an assault on Maxia. He did not answer me. This is strange, as he has been indentured to me since inception and with one word I could have his carapace ripped off of him. But it has been almost a cycle and no word. Yesterday I telemetried a query about the war to the Empress News Line and got back nothing.

I think this is bad news. Regarding the assault, that was... is... our biggest fleet. The lead battle cruiser, the Flamboyant Sword of the Creator and Memorial to the Battle at Ne, is the largest, deadliest weapon of the Empire. If it were to be destroyed, or even defeated, the psychology of this would rock every insect in the settled worlds. The Exchange Bourse would reel. Occupied outworlds all along the celestial equator would rebel at once. It’s too much to think about.

I took some Mazul today to help ease my mood. My physician says I am using too much of it. In my opinion, there isn’t enough Mazul in the universe to make this assignment palatable.

Creator, what have I done?

Governor of Earth,

The Honorable Fourth Son of the Winds of the First Outer World Mathematicians Line.

Proceed to part 2...