Excerpts from Rise of the Terran Empire

Book I

And Behold, a Whirlwind Was Coming Out of the North

Mankind visits Zeta Tucanae

The reader is probably familiar with the events leading up to the founding of the Terran Empire. However, some key events took place over a decade before Empress Anita I was placed upon the Iridium Throne. The most important event preceding the War of Survival, which was the catalyst for the Empress's ascension, was the discovery of the Grey populace on Zeta Tucanae 2.

In the days before the Terran Unification, Terra was a balkanized world of over a hundred semi-independent nations. For the purpose of most internal laws, these nations had fairly free hand to do whatever they felt was best for their people. An organizational body, the United Nations, regulated international trade and settled international disputes. The United Nations had been around for over three centuries, and it had slowly increased in importance as the world economies became ever more interdependent.

One of the extended powers of the United Nations was the exploration and surveying of worlds both within and without the colonized star systems of the United Nations. This mission, conducted under the control of the United Nations Department of Scout Services, provided the UN a way to find new worlds for colonization and economic development -- an important consideration for the over seventeen billion Terrans who relied on imports from space to keep their world alive.

In IY-24 (2290 CE, by the old calendar system), a UN Scout vessel entered the Zeta Tucanae star system. It found a system of twelve planets orbiting a very Sol-like star. The scout ship approached the second world of the system for a brief time, since it was within the life band of Zeta Tucanae. The scouts were delighted to find a living world -- they could see signs of plant life from orbit.

The vessel was not equipped to conduct a dirtside survey of Zeta Tucanae 2, so the crew made notes of the system and continued their survey. When they returned to Terra with news of ZT2, the UN Scouts made their top priority an extensive survey of the planet. They went to the General Assembly to lobby for the funds needed to build a proper survey vessel and equip it with a good crew.

The UN General Assembly agreed to fund the mission, and the Scouts made plans to recruit a crew to staff the UNSS Discovery, which was under development.

In IY-19 (2295 CE), the UNSS Discovery departed on her maiden voyage, staffed by a carefully selected crew. The Captain of the vessel, George Pliny, was an ex-American Navy captain who had commanded several military ships during his career. The rest of the crew was more outstanding: Sergei Kovalev, one of the top engineers crucial to the reverse-engineering projects of the War of Survival, was the Chief of Engineering. William Ordenburg -- "Rocky", now the head of the TTCA Marines -- was the geologist for the mission, thanks to his background as a prospector in the Terran planetoid belts. M. Sean MacLaren, the first medical doctor to earn the title Xeno-Physician and the namesake of the MacLaren Hospital on Zeta Tucanae 2, was the Ship's Doctor. Jill MacKay, daughter of Empress Anita I, was aboard as the Sensor Operator.

The crew and ship arrived without incident in August of IY-19. However, once they made orbit, things became interesting. Princess Jill MacKay's memoirs will provide an interesting recount:

"I remember when we made orbit at ZT2. I think all of the crew -- all twelve of us -- were on the bridge, looking at the planet below. We were all quiet. I think we were all in awe over seeing another world so like our home. Nothing we'd seen on any of the other worlds of the United Nations could match this -- not even Mars with all of the terraforming that had been done.

"We had just deployed the lander module -- it had all of the survey equipment and supplies for the ground team. While we were orbiting the planet, I was running standard sensor sweeps. We had picked a fairly large continent that extended between the equator and the Southern Polar Continent for the survey's dirtside headquarters. During about the second orbit, after we had deployed the lander, I got some odd returns from the sensor systems.

"I called out to the rest of the crew, and they crowded around my station on the bridge. I had this image, which showed some suspiciously regular looking patterns in the flora on the continent we were landing our crew on. Someone -- I think it was the Executive Officer, Gregor MacAllister -- asked the ground crew if they were armed.

"Right about that time, there was a loud crashing noise from the rear of the Discovery. I wondered if whoever was down there had opened fire on us. The power went out, the gravity went out. For a moment before the emergency lights started glowing, we were in the darkened bridge -- the only light was coming from the front viewport -- listening to a whistling noise. Our hull had been breached. There was a bit of chaos as everyone scrambled to get suited. Captain Pliny must have taken it pretty badly, since we had to help him into his suit and make sure he was secure. The journalist, Heidi Daniels, had gone into a hysterical screaming fit. Doc MacLaren suggested leaving her life support systems off for a while until she passed out. I don't think the doctor was kidding.

"Sergei found out that we had suffered a hull breach in engineering, and that the engineering pressure door had been damaged and knocked out of alignment. The ship's boat, which was supposed to be used to ferry the crew dirtside, had been wrenched from the hull. And, as if that wasn't enough, we were tumbling.

"There were a few crazy ideas for stabilizing the Discovery, but we came to our senses and boarded the lifeboat and left orbit. It was a rough flight -- the Discovery hit the lifeboat while it was orienting for the reentry. Fortunately, no one was killed by the reentry or the rough landing that followed."

Several of the crew were injured by the crash, however. Captain Pliny had become unresponsive, and the crew were left in the capable hands of Gregor MacAllister, a Scot with a penchant for heavy drinking. He organized the crew into a defensive perimeter just as the local natives arrived. Two Grey farmers, Draxuni and Nisom, had wandered across their field to investigate the pre-dawn crash of the Discovery's lifeboat on their crops. Despite paranoia among the humans, the two were gracious and friendly hosts. According to some accounts, Rocky passed out when he saw them, since they resembled the aliens featured in a number of 20th and 21st Century movies.

The crew were invited to stay in the farmers's barn, since the house was not scaled correctly for them. After tending to the wounded, the rest of the crew ingratiated themselves to Draxuni and Nisom, perhaps with the hopes that a retalitory attack could be prevented -- after all, they were aliens who had crashed on a strange world.

Hospitality Abound

There was never a retalitory attack, of course. The Greys accepted the strangers with little curiosity. The farmers led the crew to the local town, Ruarb Bettermire (Rosewell), for a Harvest Day celebration. During this celebration, a raiding party from the Troks, the other sentient species of Zeta Tucanae 2, entered town. The humans were able to quickly dispatch the Troks, in spite of the heavy plate metal armor the Trok raiders wore.

The humans realized that the Grey village was very poorly defended, and they attempted to organize the village of farmers into a militia. Unfortunately, the only Greys interested in participating were a few young children who had no duties related to the harvest.

Late in the day, a local defense contingent arrived in town and escorted the humans to the local Lord. There, they found that the capitol of the Grey people was near the equator. The humans wanted to know about their landing craft, but the most likely answer would be found with the Chief Historian, Misha. Thus, the humans set out for a three-month journey across the Grey Continent.

The humans found that the Greys across the continent were more than happy to accept the humans as overnight visitors, even though it was during the winter, when supplies were limited. Throughout this journey, Rocky made a point to record conversations with the Grey hosts, as well as convincing them to read selections from a book he collected in the church in Ruarb Bettermire. This invaluable lexicon of the Grey language, both written and spoken, was the primary linguistic source through much of the Terran Confederation years, due to the needed militarization of the Zeta Tucanae system.

The crew arrived at Terpriwis, the Grey capitol, in the early Spring months. There, they discovered that the Greys were not indigenous to the planet -- something that Doctor MacLaren had suggested before they had left Ruarb Bettermire. Indeed, the Greys were survivors of a shipwreck, and they still had artifacts from the mothership in their capitol, including a still-functioning scout vessel. Reportedly, Rocky again passed out when he saw the Grey scout disk. Sergei and Rocky were able to open the scout and found it was programmed to fly to a spot on the Southern Polar Continent. With Gregor aboard, they let it fly to its destination.

Sergei, an engineer obsessed with tinkering and experimenting, found that this scout vessel, which had been in the Grey capitol for over 10,000 Terran years, was far more advanced then anything human technologies could match. He was able to understand a few components well enough, however, that he was instrumental in developing the thruster technology now found on every starship in the Imperium.

The Grey Truth

The crew of the Discovery would never have guessed at what they would find. After a very fast flight across a quarter of the world, they arrived at a valley in the Southern Polar Continent that was completely filled with a disk shaped starship, well over a kilometer in diameter.

The scout landed in a hangar on the upper surface of the gigantic starship, and the humans received the next shock of their journey -- the starship was a sentient, psionically aware entity. It greeted them with a chilling "Interesting. Your brain-wave patterns match those of the target world."

Through lengthy conversations, the humans were able to determine that the colony ship had been en route to Terra to enslave the early humans over a dozen millenia ago when the second in command rebelled and successfully forced the craft to crash on Zeta Tucanae. He sabotaged the interstellar drives to prevent anyone from leaving the system, and he built a new society radically different from the one they had left.

There were already Grey advance scouts in the Terra system, and they had been there for millenia. The colony ship knew the location of their Lunar base. It also told the humans that the main colonization fleet was due at any time. The humans decided, after a debate about the virtues of giving up technology and becoming farmers, that they had to warn Terra. Rocky named the colony mothership Hoser God, meaning "Hands Off, Eh? Galleon of Doom". HG allowed the humans to take control of the remaining scout ships, so Rocky configured one to allow him to fly it like a military fighter plane (which he had flown before becoming a prospector in the Terran belts). HG was able to fabricate a replacement part for the damaged reactor of the Discovery, so the humans set about repairing and reawakening their starship.

The urgency to return to Terra was great. HG didn't have details of the approaching colony fleet, but it was clear that it would consist of several colony vessels as large as itself. If any of them were armed for ship-to-ship engagements with the advanced weaponry that HG had alluded existed, there would be little hope for an unprepared Sol system, much less the outlying worlds of the United Nations.

The Discovery crew left Zeta Tucanae about three and a half months after arriving. They rushed back to their home system and participated in the raids on the Grey Lunar base and the Grey Asteroid base. Details of both of those operations are still classified, although Empress Anita I has promised to make the details known at some time in the next few years.

Continue to Book II.

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Last Updated 4 Jan 2000

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