###INCOMING TRANSMISSION###
source: r/hfy
author: u/h2j1977/
subject: Four hours, Seventeen minutes
note: The following message appears to be a record taken from a
history class conducted by teacher of unknown race. The record
indicate possibly reptilian humanoid species.

---BEGIN MESSAGE---
Four Hours, Seventeen Minutes

The invasion of Earth lasted only four hours and seventeen
minutes. It was the shortest campaign in the Kavoxian Hegemony’s
history, which is saying something, as we had conquered 31 other
civilized planets before them. We first detected the human
civilization twenty-five years ago through our deep space antenna
network that picked up their various broadcasts and entertainment
feeds. We focused our long-range sensors in that direction and
waited for more information.

Good afternoon class, my name is Telex Hoon, and I was the Minister
of Military Intelligence fifteen years ago when we sent the
invasion force to Earth. My team poured through thousands of
terabytes of data, trying to determine culture, mindset, military
capability, and anything that might be useful in the invasion
strategy. The first problem we encountered was filtering out the
facts from the fiction. Humans, as it turns out, are a particularly
imaginative and prolific species. We Kavox have our own
“entertainment” sector, that is responsible for creating
educational and instructional long and short form holovids, as well
as written manuals. However, we have been told that we are not a
particularly creative species. Perhaps it stems from our ancestors
being reptilian, or perhaps it simply stems from the fact that for
most of our existence, we have had to fight and claw our way
through life, and things like art and fiction are not particularly
vital to survival.

Anyway, I digress. We quickly found that much of the information
our antennas picked up was either fictional, trivial, or just plain
wrong. What we did manage to verify is that Earth was not a unified
world, instead ruled by many nations with vastly different agendas.
We also detected no signs of FTL travel. Lastly, despite what their
movies and sci-fi entertainment suggested, they did not have
advanced shielding technology or energy weapons. Armed with these
key indicators, we reported to the military tribunal that this
should be a simple invasion, as we were dealing with a pre-FTL
civilization.

Earth was ten years (Earth years, about 8.17 Kavox years) away via
FTL travel, so we began building up the invasion force. After ten
years, we had built one hundred and thirty ships specifically for
the Earth invasion. We placed twenty-three million Kavoxian
soldiers, pilots, and engineers into stasis, and transferred them
into 30 long range Quylar-class ships (named after a Kavoxian super
predator that carried her young in an armored belly pouch before we
hunted them to extinction). The armada had 30 Quylar class ships,
30 Bylun class hunter ships (the human equivalent is a battleship
if I recall), 40 Swygian class ships (destroyers and frigates in
human terms), 10 Podas class hospital ships, and 20 Aghon-Ka class
control ships. The Aghon-Ka ships, as most of you know, is how our
fleets can travel vast distances through space by creating an FTL
field large enough to pull multiple ships with it, all while
providing command and control functions to keep the whole fleet
data-linked as well as synchronizing combat maneuvers.

The day came for the fleet to depart Novamus, our homeworld. We
don’t celebrate the way humans do, with grand events, big flowery
speeches, or other meaningless displays. So, on the 33 day of Reol,
in the year 2357, after a thirteen-minute speech by our Supreme
Apex in which our invasion force was reminded of their duty to be
fearless, loyal, and victorious, the fleet quietly slipped out of
the solar system and jumped to FTL with no complications.

The next ten years were also mostly uneventful. Our ships are
incredibly reliable, with several redundancies built into all vital
systems, and are crewed by function-specific AI robots with
Kavoxian engineer overseers.  Those engineers must always be
remembered for their sacrifice. They spent the prime third of their
life in deep space surrounded by the cold void, lifeless robots,
and the knowledge that they would never see Novamus and their
clutch mates again. You must understand that the engineers knew
that they would die on Earth as part of the occupation force,
because they wouldn’t live through a second ten-year trip exposed
to cosmic radiation. The average 30-year life span of a Kavoxian is
reduced by approximately a year for every two spent in FTL,
according to the Ministry of Health.

We arrived at the edge of the human controlled solar system and
staged at what they call the Oort cloud to mask our ships while our
troops were brought out of stasis and final battle plans were
written up. We detected a small colony on the 4th planet (Mars, so
named for some god in their ancient history), a nasty looking
series of weapon installations on their moon, and several dozen
defensive satellites surrounding the planet. The decision was made
to attack the faction with the largest and most advanced military
when their moon installation was on the far side of the planet. The
North American continent was to be our beachhead.

We did a synchronized micro-jump to within the orbit of their moon
(approximately 350,000 of their kilometers) and began attacking
their defensive satellites.

Hour one: We attacked and disabled the twelve satellites that
covered our initial attack vector with only minimal losses. Within
the first twenty minutes, we saw resistance build in the way of
small ships, barely large enough to carry two or three crewmembers.
They were firing ballistic weapons that were ineffective against
the armor of our larger ships but proved quite formidable against
our Swygian class destroyers and frigates. Their lack of unified
tactics, and the fact that there was such a massive amount of
variation in the ships made planning a counter to them quite
challenging. After a few minutes we were able to listen in to their
communications. To our shock, these were not their military force
that were attacking us, but civilians in their own personal
shuttles. This first failure in our intel gathering was
disappointing, but nothing we couldn’t overcome.

At about the thirty-minute mark, the first military vessels engaged
our fleet. These ships were far more formidable, but still no match
for our Quylar and Bylun class warships. These human vessels were
equivalent to our Swygian cruisers, and armed with ballistic
weapons, missiles, and even a couple high powered rail guns. We
focused our attacks on the rail gun equipped ships after one of
them ripped Thelp’s Respite (our lead Podas class hospital ship) in
half with a well-timed barrage.

At the end of the first hour, we had lost ten Swygian class
destroyers and the Thelp’s Respite. Another dozen Swygian cruisers
were damaged, but still in the fight. Two Quylar and 5 Bylun ships
had taken damage, losing some weapon placements and hull plating,
but were otherwise fully functional. The humans had lost over 300
of the shuttle class ships, 130 fighters and 30 destroyers. We were
taking a few more losses than anticipated, but within acceptable
parameters. The invasion was on schedule.

Hour two: At about two hours and twenty-eight minutes into the
invasion, our sensors detected a massive fleet of human battleship
class vessels that just materialized out of nowhere. The commanders
later reported watching in horror and shock as one after another
ship materialized into the dark void of space. At first, they
thought it was some sort of extremely advanced stealth technology.
But the truth was so much worse.

It turns out that humans are paradoxically both impatient and
extremely cautious. They had determined long ago that space travel
was too time consuming and dangerous, so they abandoned FTL
research. Instead they developed wormhole drives. This species of
hairless apes had done what no other species in the galaxy had even
dared to try: Bend the very fabric of space because they didn’t
have the patience to travel at FTL speeds. They developed wormhole
drives because long distance space travel is dangerous and comes
with serious health risks. Let me restate that. These humans
decided that getting into a ship and flying at FTL was too time
consuming and dangerous, so they instead developed technologies
that allow them to RIP A HOLE IN THE FABRIC OF SPACE so they can
travel anywhere nearly instantaneously.

It took twenty-two minutes from the arrival of the human fleet to
break our assault. Admiral Rejka sorrowfully ordered full retreat,
and gave the command to prepare to jump to FTL and regroup a weeks
travel away from the solar system. It took another ten minutes to
calculate the FTL jump and disseminate it through the Aghon-Ka
ships to the rest of the fleet. That became known as the longest
ten minutes of Kavoxian history. After receiving confirmation that
all ships had received and plotted the FTL course, Admiral Rejka
issued the command to retreat.

Hour three: Upon issuing the retreat command, everyone braced for
FTL, which nearly all of the invasion force (except for the voyage
engineers) had never experienced, because they were in stasis for
the initial journey. However, instead of the stretching lurch and
blinding light and sudden total darkness of FTL travel, every
monitor on every ship displayed the image of a human wearing an odd
white hat with a wide up swooped brim that dipped slightly in the
front and back. Then every speaker on every ship opened up:

“Welcome to Earth. Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Admiral
Coleman of the United States Space Navy. It appears we’ve had a bit
of a rough first contact. It seems you’re in a rush to leave, but I
must insist that you stick around a while. Allow me to show you how
we Texans feel about trespassers.” With that the screens went
blank, the speakers were silent, and a rare feeling began to creep
into the minds of all but the most stalwart warriors: fear. These
humans had just broken through our security protocols, disabled our
FTL capability, and broadcast audio and visual to every device
capable of receiving the transmission across the entire fleet.

Admiral Rejka ordered all of the Bylun and Swygian class ships and
half of the Aghon-Ka ships to form a picket line to protect the
Quylar ships, the Podas hospital ships, and the other half of the
Aghon-Ka ships as they retreated at full impulse away from this
death trap of a solar system. As the Quylar ship group began to
make a break for it, the humans surprised us again. Wormhole
missiles. Missiles with warheads capable of creating wormholes that
would suck the affected ship into wormhole space and shunt them out
at a predetermined location. That location was inside the
chromosphere of the sun. It took 30 seconds for the entire picket
line to re-materialize and be vaporized by their sun.

At ten minutes into the third hour, Under Admiral Olgk surrendered
the remaining fleet. Admiral Coleman reappeared on all screens and
speakers. “I graciously accept your apology and surrender. I do
feel a might sad about what was done to the other half of your
fleet. As you’ll notice we didn’t destroy your troop carriers or
the other fleeing ships, these, uh, Ag-hon Kay class vessels? We
have rules of war here that don’t allow for killing those in
retreat. I wish I could say the same for y’all, but after reviewing
the first two hours of combat footage, that just isn’t so, now is
it?” Admiral Coleman looked away for a second, his face showing
several emotions – sadness, anger, and then back to this
affectation of polite charm. “I tell y’all what. We’ve just
finished decrypting the data those command ships were relaying. I
think we’ll pay a visit to your home world of Novamus. I’m sure
we’ll be able to clear up this whole mess in no time. Y’all just
sit tight and follow the instructions of the boarding parties that
will be coming by in the next few minutes, and we won’t need to
have any more of this unfortunate business today. Okay, ya’ll take
care and sit tight.”

With that, the monitors and speakers went quiet again. Under
Admiral Olgk could only watch in horror as seventy-five battleship
class ships dematerialized, knowing they would be at the home world
in moments.

Hour four: The human fleet materialized inside the atmosphere of
Novamus and immediately opened fire with rail guns and missiles.

Seven minutes later, every orbital defense platform, gun battery,
missile silo, and military installation on and protecting Thrux,
our main continent, was destroyed or disabled.

Seventeen minutes later the Supreme Apex issued an unconditional
surrender over every broadcast platform, flanked on either side by
humans in combat exosuits. The population was in shock. Kavoxians
don’t panic, as we don’t have the emotions wired into us that would
cause it. But I tell you this with all sincerity, our society
nearly fell apart in that very instant. Everything that we had ever
known was questioned. We had never lost a war or failed to conquer
a system. No invading force had ever made it into our solar system,
much less actually broken our atmosphere. But in only four hours
and seventeen minutes we had gone from being the conquerors to the
conquered.

Then, Admiral Coleman spoke to everyone on Novamus: “Greetings from
planet Earth. I wish I could say that under better circumstances,
but we play the cards we’re dealt. I apologize for the damage to
your infrastructure. We did our level best to avoid civilian
casualties, but unfortunately war is like painting a portrait with
a mop. We’re not here to conquer you, or to enslave your people to
serve our needs. We’ve long since moved past that phase of our
history, which, if I read this intel right, your kind have not yet.
But, no matter. We’ll help you get that sorted out in no time.
Personally, I’m excited to meet our other new neighbors and make
friends. Whether or not we can become friends is up to you. But I
do hope you make the right choice in that matter.”

Admiral Coleman then concluded: “I’ll be on my way, but we’ll be
back to check in soon. In the meantime, I think you may have
misplaced these. You can have them back on the condition that you
keep your toys in your yard from now on.” With that, the remaining
Kavoxian fleet materialized in atmosphere, above the capital
building, their shadows darkening the city. Just as quickly, the
human fleet vanished.

And that, students, is the story of the invasion of Earth. Today
marks the fifteenth anniversary of the conquest of Novamus. Your
homework is to write a 500-word essay on the impact of the humans
on the Hegemony. You may include cultural examples, political
examples, and the liberation of the 31 subjugated planets. Please
have it on my desk in one week. Dismissed.
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