We Will Destroy Your Planet (22 page)

Closer to the Earth, you ought to seed the Oort cloud – the dust and gases remaining from the creation of the Solar system – with detectors, especially ones that will detect gravitational disturbances and variances in mass. The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is deceptive, and would not make as good a setting for sensors as you might expect. This is because gravitational and centrifugal forces have caused it to form a relatively flat belt, as an orbit in the plane of the ecliptic, like the other planets. It would be better to distribute an array of sensors and detectors in a spherical formation around the solar system, since there is no guarantee – or even likelihood – that any space travellers would enter the system on the plane of the ecliptic, from outer planets to inner.

After the problem of detecting approaching rivals or authorities, the next order of business will be for you to actually prevent your rivals from attacking or landing on your newly conquered Earth.

Minefields might work against incoming starships, if the mines are close enough together to provide good coverage. Again, however, this would require englobing the entire planet, and at a distance further out from the surface than any effects from detonation could reach. That would require an incredible amount of mines, bearing in mind that you will need to put them around in all dimensions, not just a belt around the plane of the ecliptic, as most proposed minefields in terrestrial fiction would have it.

The requirements could be worse, mind you. As you may have seen in the
Blake's 7
transmission
Star One
, the fictional Terran Federation in that series proposed having a minefield protecting the entire galaxy from incursion from the neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy. Disappointingly, this particular media entry seemed to believe that simply having a patch of mines at one spot at the edge of the galaxy would do the job, with no suggestion that the extragalactic invaders could simply go over, under, or around the field.

This, in fact, doesn't occur to the invaders either, indicating that they're not really suited for the job.

It's also debatable whether minefields would be of any help against vessels jumping from one point in space-time to another through an intermediate alternate medium such as hyperspace. Obviously a minefield is no barrier to wormhole travel either, or any form of matter transmission. Nor are such types of travel likely to be detected by any sensor array in either the Solar or neighbouring systems.

The best way to keep anyone from physically landing on the planet would be a force shield of some kind that completely englobes the planet – but it had better be damn strong, as mass-driven asteroids would make really good battering rams. Your other option is to use surface-based weaponry to try to destroy motherships in orbit, and shoot down invasion craft as they descend.

To protect against incoming wormhole or matter transmission signals, you ought to be looking at that which would disrupt the signal. It is always possible to affect wormholes by the use of gravity, which is a useful way to sabotage attempts to send information, data, or physical reinforcements or equipment to Earth by such means. Likewise the wormholes would also affect gravity.

Some physicists believe that a navigable wormhole would require asymptomatically ‘flat' space for a huge distance around it, and thus mean that the entrances and exits would have to be situated far away from any noticeable gravity wells, and perhaps even outside the Roche limit of a star. (If you pick up some holiday reading on Earth, you'll find this limitation in the works of Iain M. Banks.) Some have even suggested similar limits for being able to warp space around a ship, or access hyperspace.

In terms of non-navigable wormholes which could carry data – or even the data required to reintegrate a teleported object – there are some more interesting developments to consider, in any defence against the like. For one thing, it is now known on Earth that there is a set of what NASA calls ‘X-points' or ‘electron diffusion regions' – essentially direct pathways – connecting the upper atmosphere of the planet with the surface of the Sun. These regions act as portals, giving uninterrupted links from one to the other, and causing heating and geomagnetic storms on Earth – but they surely also offer obvious possibilities as to diverting unwanted intruders who attempt to interfere with your conquest.

Defending against temporal incursions is a trickier matter, as gravity strong enough to warp space-time will be at least as dangerous to the planet and your occupying forces as to any attempt to travel through time. This fact does offer a detection method, thankfully, and observation of local gravity fluctuations around the globe can be used as a handy indicator of where potential temporal fluctuations or incoming time-shifts may occur.

Observation of the populace will be your other main way of spotting any time travellers, who may be equipped with temporally inappropriate clothing or technology. Even if they come from the future, inaccurate records may have led them to carry equipment from a slightly earlier period, or the wrong geographical context.

A fetish for telephone booths is another indicator, and, as it happens, the most disturbing one. In the event of encountering such a traveller, run. Just run.

Defending against visitors from parallel universes or alternate dimensions will be just as difficult, as they may be effectively indistinguishable from your own forces. In fact they may, from their point of view,
be
your forces. They may even be you!

Such visitors are more likely to attempt to infiltrate your own operations by stealth, replacing your own versions of you. Depending upon your society's collective psychology and motivation, this may not actually count as a counter-conquest, if you happen to share a common goal.

The most practical problem will occur if you are visited by invaders from some kind of anti-matter dimension, in which case the problem will both announce itself, and almost certainly solve itself, by explosive means.

As it stands, the Earth still has no effective defensive weapons to protect against spaceborne incursion or assault, therefore you will have to install your own that you have brought with you for the purpose, or, more sensibly, build them locally to a standard design.

The simplest and quickest form of defensive weaponry you will be able to install is the missile, of course, and there are many suitable launch sites around the globe, which you can rebuild (having destroyed them during your attack). If you have conquered or gained influence by mind control, bribery, or alliance with human military organizations, you should be able to easily negotiate use of suitable launch sites and human support crews. Humanity has a great deal of experience in the use of ballistic and orbital rocket launches, and will require little if any retraining to perform these duties for you. If you have negotiated your rule, then treason and resistance should not be a serious problem either, though it always pays to be careful. If you have conquered the Earth by hostile means, you will be better off taking sole control of the launch sites, and maintaining high security around them so that resistance fighters don't use them on your ships.

Energy weapons of whatever variety are always a good idea, if you can target them quickly and accurately enough. This is more of a problem when using them from a surface position against the sky as a whole, because you are now aiming out away from an obvious focus point, while your attackers will be able to focus on your more limited position.

On the positive side, most forms of energy beam, such as lasers, microwave beams, and so on, are not in the visible spectrum, especially in vacuum. (Humans may not realize this, as their visual depictions of such weapons use artistic licence to make them colourful.) This means that attacking spacecraft will not be alerted to your shots until they actually hit something, while you, being based in an atmosphere, will have more chance of seeing where their shots are going, as they disrupt water vapour, and so on.

As experienced planetary conquerors, you will doubtless by now be aware that the best place to defeat any attack on the planet is in orbit, or even beyond – basically, before the enemy can actually reach the surface of the planet.

Mines in high orbit are a simplistic type of defensive weapon, but far better than mines are singularities, if they can be placed safely without threatening your own operations. Singularities, or some other form of gravitational attractor, will efficiently draw enemy ships off course, and potentially cause them to crash. Setting high-velocity debris into orbit around such an attractor – or indeed into any area of space that you expect to be interrupted by unwanted visitors – will add an effective disabling tool.

As with letting gravity do the work in bombarding the Earth with meteors, you do not need to construct sophisticated and resource-intensive weapons and booby-traps to take out enemy ships when any old rubbish you don't need any more, if it's moving fast enough, will do at least as much damage.

Put simply, though, the best way for you to defend your new world is to have your ships posted in a picket formation around the system, ready to engage any interlopers who come to try to steal your prize away from you.

No planetary conquest goes without a hitch, either. The business of conducting a military campaign is incredibly complex, dangerous, and requires astronomical time and energy devoted to making sure that attacks, strategies and logistics all come together to carry a force forward to ultimate victory. The business of travelling away from your homeworld, hurling your fragile bodies into the stars with no idea of what you might find there, while handling all the formulae of mathematics and science necessary to travel to a whole other world, is immensely and insanely complex. The business of understanding and interacting with species so alien to your own, and correctly interpreting how they live is another massively difficult demand.

Invading the Earth combines all of those stupendous difficulties, and multiplies them. The complexity and difficulty increases exponentially with each requirement. It is therefore inevitable that things will go wrong at some point.

You must understand this. There is no such thing as a flawless campaign, and it is not a matter of
if
something goes wrong, but
when
and
what
will go wrong. Overconfidence in your racial or cultural superiority will be a far bigger threat to your campaign than anything that the human resistance forces will be able to throw at you. You must understand that this is a fact, because when you understand that, you will be able to accept it, and deal with it. That is when you'll be able to recover from such failures and setbacks.

There is a tale told on Earth about a warrior named Miyamoto Musashi, who lived in 16th and 17th century Japan, and was regarded as that culture's greatest warrior. One day a farmer came to him and asked his advice. The farmer had been challenged to a duel by another renowned and deadly warrior, and had accepted rather than be seen as a coward and killed anyway. The farmer was no warrior, so he asked Musashi what he should do. Musashi told him, ‘Firstly, accept that you will die tomorrow.' Then he showed the farmer to hold his sword above his head, and said, ‘When he kills you, bring your sword straight down on his head, and he will die with you.'

Not exactly reassured, the farmer went to the site of the duel and took up the position Musashi had shown him. When the fearsome challenger arrived, he drew his sword and made to kill the farmer, but then held back at the last moment. He studied the farmer's position, and paced around him. All day he paced, occasionally trying to find an angle that would result in him killing the farmer without dying himself. At sunset, he threw down his sword in disgust and walked away.

The farmer had won his duel by accepting that it could only go wrong. So you must accept that something will always go wrong. And always expect the unexpected, because that is what will happen.

Unfortunately, no matter how experienced the pilot, or how advanced and/or reliable the technology, things do sometimes go wrong, even without enemy action to cause it. Storms, solar flares, collision with other craft, and simple wear and tear are all possible reason for one of your ships to crash on Earth, killing or stranding any occupants. Whatever the circumstances of such an incident, you will have to take steps to minimize the damage it will do to your plans.

If the accident occurs before your presence is known, you must act immediately to prevent it from giving away the fact that you are taking an interest in the Earth. This is the case regardless of the size of the ship that crashed. Ideally, you should always have a search and rescue plan prepared for any expedition that visits the planet. All ships and individuals should have homing equipment that will lead a rescue mission – but not the humans – to them. Emergency life-support systems should be available for all occupants of your craft.