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In 23762, the Interstellar Community of Planetary Systems began its campaign to add a new member: a distant, isolated planet called Rth.

It would be an understatement to say that the annexation of Rth did not go well. In fact, it went so poorly, a popular phrase entered the vernacular almost immediately: Rthing it up. Meaning either, “we’re doing everything right but it’s all going wrong,” or, “we have every intention of screwing up completely,” the phrase is probably the campaign’s most enduring legacy to popular culture.

But what really happened on Rth? What made this particular annexation go so wrong, compared to all the other planets the ICPS has absorbed? Could it have been handled differently? Or are Rthlings just uncommonly difficult?

Looking for answers, I reached out to the Harrians who were there. Some are well-known names—Dondo Zay, Ala By’Anok—but most are the background staffers, the ones tasked with the small decisions that made all the difference, good and bad. They had a lot to say.

What follows is an oral history of the Rth campaign, assembled from interviews conducted across the galactic network over the past three stellar years. Did I get the answers I was looking for? Or did I uncover new questions? You be the judge.

1: “They Don’t Have Tails.”

In the fourteenth quartile of 23762, the ICPS Introduction Team traveled to Rth for the first time. Led by the legendary ambassador Dondo Zay, the Rth campaign had plenty of experience to draw upon. Yet they were surprised at every turn.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT (sociologist): I’ve been on my share of challenging campaigns. I was with Zay when we annexed Lxoy VII, and I interned under [Handic] Zzunz on Quat. Things turned out okay with Lxoy in the end, but Quat was a shitshow from start to finish. Rth was tougher than either of them, and I’ll tell you why: it looked like it wasn’t going to be hard at all. When it was, well, I guess you could say we were unprepared.

SANDLY TORM (xenobiologist): When you look at someone from a place like Quat, you know you’re in for a time. I mean, ammonia atmosphere, six legs, acidic saliva . . . It’s obviously going to be rough. Lxoyians were a challenge too, mainly because the dominant sentients on VII are massive. But Rthlings? Two arms, two legs, one head, two eyes, one mouth. Four fingers with opposable thumbs. No surprises there.

DONDO ZAY (ambassador): They don’t have tails. To the eye, that’s the biggest difference. They’re clearly an alien species, but seen from a distance, they look Harrian.

KOING (military liaison): Primitives. That was my first impression. And the lack of tail? Disgusting.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: At the outset we faced some, I’d say pretty unique challenges. Just for starters, we couldn’t figure out who was in charge.

VKA SOF (technologist): Buildings. You look for the most ridiculously large, ostentatious structures. That’s where you’ll usually find the planetary seat of power. Usually.

Take Waistric II. Kleptocracy, with a little hierarchal feudalism-slash-theocracy thrown in. The royal hall on Waistric is by far the largest structure on the planet, and it sits in the center of a city made of platinum and iron. It’s not enough to say it can be seen from space; the center spire nearly reaches space. That’s the kind of thing we look for.

Rth didn’t have any of that. Well, no, it did, only, all over the place. There were too many candidates.

DONDO ZAY: Here is how this is supposed to work: first, we identify the seat of power. Second, we land our F&T in front of it.

F&T stands for Fear and Terror. The ship’s entire design purpose is to look magnificently fearsome.

SANDLY TORM: Oh, yeah, the F&T. Don’t know if this is a secret or not, but something like half of it is a hologram. It only works on species with stereoscopic vision. Underneath, it’s just a shuttle. I don’t think there are even any weapons aboard.

DONDO ZAY: Third, we step out of the F&T. The initial landing party can vary depending on the planet, but there’s usually only five or six of us. It’s a mix of ambassador staff and military staff. I’ll occasionally include someone from linguistics, xeno, or socio if we’re dealing with a hard-to-understand species, but that wasn’t the case on Rth.

Once we’re out of the F&T, the negotiations begin! It’s always a very fluid situation, and it can get really exciting. But the important thing, and I cannot stress this enough, is that you have to land in the right place first.

SANDLY TORM: Not sure how we ended up at the Vatican.

VKA SOF: Look, I’ve gotten a lot of blowback from this, but the decision made perfect sense at the time.

We’d narrowed the list down to six: the Vatican; the Forbidden City; the Taj Mahal; a parliament building in Hungary; Burj Khalifa, for the height; and one of those huge English estates, I forget which.

A variety of factors led us to conclude that the Vatican was the pick.

Which factors? It’s complicated.

LIEAMLO QA (linguist): It was because of the big hat. Seriously, I think Vka took one look at the pope’s hat and was like, this is the place.

Don’t tell them I said that.

DONDO ZAY: Washington was not even under consideration.

VKA SOF: No, of course we didn’t consider Washington. Why would we have?

LIEAMLO QA: I know Intelligent Language Interpolation has turned linguistics into a dying art. You’re probably leveraging ILI for this article, right?

[Editor’s note: the original text for this story was written in Jono Basic, for ease of ILI conversion.]

I get it: ILI is the perfect tool for turning one language into every language. Why hire someone to interpret nuance, right? Just don’t plug poetry into it. (Laughs.)

The problem with ILI is that it sucks for new languages. That’s when you need a linguist.

Vka didn’t think it was necessary to have me involved in the site choice. Neither did Dondo Zay. But they were sure glad to have me after the Vatican screwup.

DONDO ZAY: Lieamlo said that, did they? Well. (sighs) They’re not wrong, but we don’t know how matters would have played out had we consulted them in advance. Would a linguist have called out the correct landing spot? I don’t know.

LIEAMLO QA: I absolutely would have. Look, it’s a matter of language dominance. Not just total number of speakers—using that metric alone, I’d probably have recommended landing in the Forbidden City. What I mean is, how many places is a language spoken, and by that measure it would have to be English.

That wouldn’t point us to the United States, necessarily. Not by itself. But guess what the dominant currency was, planetwide? Yep, the dollar.

I’d take those two data points over buildings and hats any day.

KOING: It’s true, each domain had their own coin. So backward.

VKA SOF: It’s easy for someone not tasked with making the decision, to claim after the fact that they would’ve made the correct one.

DONDO ZAY: I can tell you when we did need our linguist. It was when I turned to the first Rthling authority figure we encountered, and asked them to take us to their leader.

LIEAMLO QA: “We hail from the Interstellar Community of Planetary Systems. Take us to your leader.”

That’s the text Dondo pushed through the ship’s Intelligent Language Interpolation tool. The ILI converted that to Italian in real time, but since it was spoken to the proximate heads of a religious order—rather than politicians—the oh-so-helpful ILI algorithm used the wrong word for “leader.”

DONDO ZAY: “Call out your god for us.”

That’s what we said.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: An alien race landed what looked like a warship in the Vatican courtyard and threatened to kill god.

SANDLY TORM: Total panic. Running, screaming.

DONDO ZAY: Then their security force arrived with guns, and I ordered everyone back inside before somebody got hurt.

• • • •

The team returned to orbit, and after identifying the president of the United States as the de facto world leader, cobbled together a makeshift plan for dealing with Rthlings, now absent the element of surprise.

DONDO ZAY: We lost all credibility with the Vatican screwup. The entire F&T approach had to be scrapped.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: Never made sense to me anyway. I get that terrifying a planet on initial introduction has tactical advantages, but it’s a diplomatic crapshoot.

KOING: A species negotiating from a position of fear will be more prepared to accept the ICPS’s annexation terms, which is the critical first step in a long process. And the threat of violence is the only kind of diplomacy most of these races understand. Rth most definitely included.

DONDO ZAY: It meant we had to work harder to convince the Rthlings that it was in their best interest to agree to our terms, that’s all. It should not have been a difficult decision for them.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: On the White House lawn, the ground team was treated as a hostile force immediately. Dondo sure earned his title that day.

DONDO ZAY: It was roughly a dozen [Rth] hours of what I would call “shouting over soldiers,” before I managed to convince them that we actually had peaceful intent.

KOING: We were completely surrounded as soon as we landed. And then doubly surrounded. They kept adding more soldiers to the perimeter, as if volume beyond the initial wave would make a substantive difference. Keep in mind, there were only six of us, and we had no obvious weapons.

DONDO ZAY: In a situation such as this, it’s often what one does not do that makes the difference. We did not present as aggressors, but we would also not go away. They didn’t know what to do, aside from give us what we asked for, which was an audience with their president.

KOING: It seemed as though we’d finally gotten back on track.

DONDO ZAY: Their president heard our usual offer: we, the ICPS, would annex a quarter to one third of the planet in exchange for an equitable trade agreement, technology sharing, entry into the species exchange program, and so on. I prettied it up, but it was the boilerplate deal we give to all of our outposts.

I thought fusion technology alone would nail it down.

SANDLY TORM: They didn’t even have fusion, never mind [untranslatable].

I remember talking to one of their chief scientists—before the revolt—who asked how we’d gotten to Rth so quickly. They knew about relative motion, and time dilation, all that, but had no concept of the extradimensional fold. And this was a physicist.

DONDO ZAY: But their answer was a firm no.

When I pressed—when I laid out how much our technology could improve life on the planet—what I got back was, “and who would be in charge?”

And then I knew I had failed.

KOING: ICPS annexation means ICPS governing. This is not up for negotiation.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: It’s important to understand how fractured this planet already was when we arrived. It’s true, the United States president was the closest we could get to a “world leader,” but that president didn’t have the kind of power one might expect from, say, an emperor, or a global syndicate. They couldn’t sign the agreement on behalf of the planet, nor did they command enough power to order the other independent sovereignties of Rth to fall in line.

LIEAMLO QA: “Take us to your leader” is meaningless when the planet has no leader.

DONDO ZAY: It was infuriating, because from everything I’d come to understand about Rth, they desperately needed a unified governing body. The food/wealth disparity was utterly horrific, general health and wellbeing was driven by economic considerations, and the energy industry was a[n Rth] century from making the planet completely unlivable for the species actively making it that way. That’s just off the top of my head.

SANDLY TORM: They were backwards, no question. Half of their rules were predicated on the notion that a certain set of random characteristics made some of them inferior. I’m talking within their own kind. I’d understand it if they said, “hey, you dolphins, you’re inferior because you don’t have opposable thumbs.” It’s wrong; but I get it.

LIEAMLO QA: I’ve talked to several dolphins. They’re very nice, but all they do is complain about microplastics, which can get exhausting.

SANDLY TORM: And the rules were totally arbitrary. Color? Gender? What are you doing?

KOING: The continued dominance of religion as a factor in consequential decision-making was, for me, the biggest indication that we were dealing with an inferior species.

DONDO ZAY: Of course we would be running things. The wisdom of such an arrangement should have been obvious.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: I wasn’t in the meeting, but look: if your first move is, “terrifying them into compliance,” and you don’t even have a second move . . . ?

There had to be a diplomatic way to get them to see the merits of annexation; something that would get us past the part about having to relocate a few billion Rthlings from central Asia.

Dangle a change in the command structure! Or offer up a joint governance plan, for goodness sake. It’d be for show, but they didn’t have to know that. Just . . . pretend this is a negotiation.

DONDO ZAY: The president ultimately agreed to take our offer to their United Nations, for further consideration.

KOING: It was, transparently, another version of “no.” They just wanted us out of their office.

LIEAMLO QA: That was the first time we’d even heard about the United Nations. Totally my fault. In my defense, the UN doesn’t have anything we’d recognize as power, but . . . yeah. If we could erase the trip to the Vatican and the White House and start from scratch, a visit to the General Assembly would have been my recommendation.

It wouldn’t have worked. (Laughs.) But that would have been it.

DONDO ZAY: The problem was that “no” was not actually an option; the annexation was happening either way.

We did our jobs. I know history hasn’t been kind to my team, but it’s true; our role was to prepare the planet for the next phase, and we did that. It just didn’t go as well as it usually does.

2: “‘But my brood has spawned here since time immemorial.’”

While Dondo Zay’s Introduction Team continued the work of diplomacy, the Annexation Team had already been dispatched. Headed by Ala By’Anok, they arrived to find a planet that was not expecting them.

DONDO ZAY: Somehow, nothing I said to the president went beyond the walls of their office. We were closely monitoring their media communications, and there was nothing about why we were actually there.

SANDLY TORM: The headlines from that time are ridiculous. “Aliens are here, but what do they want?” Ask the fucking president.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: What we hadn’t counted on, was that the president might see political merit in being the planet’s only contact with us. They were—and this seems difficult to fathom, even now—more highly valuing their chances at reelection than a smooth and bloodless transition for the planet as a whole.

I did not expect that, and I’m a sociologist.

LIEAMLO QA: Meanwhile, something very much resembling an invading force was on its way.

DUVAP AXION (Engineering team security chief, first wave): What a monumental fuck-up. No, we get there . . . we get there, and there’s Rthlings still living in the zone. A lot of them.

I’m not talking strays here. I expect strays. Doesn’t matter where we set up, first wave’s always gonna encounter strays, which is why security’s so important. Yeah, you get a lot of, “I didn’t hear about it,” or, “but my brood has spawned here since time immemorial,” but it’s always, these are always outliers.

On Rth, it wasn’t a case of outliers. It was the entire population of the region. They had no idea we were coming. Nobody told them.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: I think it was about Annexation Day minus seven when we started reaching out to the population directly. Me, Lieamlo, and Sandly. I don’t know if we told Dondo. I didn’t.

SANDLY TORM: Dondo definitely didn’t know.

LIEAMLO QA: A xenobiologist, a sociologist, and a linguist walk into a bar . . .

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: Like two-thirds of the planet shared a common communications network. We figured if we got word out there, explained the whole thing, we could turn this around.

LIEAMLO QA: We were delivering Dondo’s introductory pitch, but to everyone. Maybe if they got an unfiltered version of it . . . ? I don’t know. Maybe something would happen, and someone would actually take steps to prepare for the first wave.

SANDLY TORM: It didn’t work. But it was the only idea we had.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: Literally nobody believed us. That’s number one. Number two, there was already an entire subsection of their internet full of Rthlings pretending to be us. We got lost in the noise.

Even if they did believe us, you know how I said two-thirds of the planet was on the network? A whole lot of the other third, which wasn’t on the internet, lived in central Asia. Which is where the first wave was landing.

PEL MOK (geographer): Picking the right location is tricky business. There are dozens of factors to consider. Does the planet spin? How fast, and is the axis off-center? Is it orbiting a sun, or another planet? How hot and how cold does it get, and does it have seasons? How geologically stable is it? Is it rocky, covered in water, some mix of the two?

You want a buildout zone that isn’t going to kill your team within days of touching down. You also want it to be nice enough to please the ICPS governor—because they’ll have to live there—but not so nice that it’s, you know, the best place, because then you’ll anger the sentient lifeforms already on the planet.

We settled on northern Kazakhstan. Mostly. A third of the settlement ring was in Russia. Tectonically speaking, the territory wasn’t a 100% match, but otherwise? We thought it was a good fit.

ELI-DANTY (engineer): After the first wave establishes a permanent foothold, construction begins on the new seat of world government, which is about three-quarters pre-fabricated; the engineering team can usually have it up and running in a few weeks. We map the city from there, carve out the necessary infrastructure and drop the prefab living quarters.

This is all planned out ahead of time based on geographic considerations specific to the site, which means we can’t just build it anywhere. We couldn’t get there and say, “oh, no, you guys are still here? We’ll try somewhere else.”

DUVAP AXION: There can’t be anybody living in the footprint. When it turns out there is, it’s my team’s responsibility to clear them out.

Yes, it can get violent. But that’s the job. I’m just following policy.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: I guarantee, the policy was written assuming most of the inhabitants of the target region had already left on their own. Which was not the case here.

DUVAP AXION: No, I don’t have an official body count.

FALGRIN FALDEK (military officer): I was one of the first on the ground that day. We got no resistance from the locals; pretty sure they weren’t expecting us.

Yeah, they were mostly unarmed. Some projectile weapons here and there, but nothing like our [untranslatable] guns. It was pretty quick work.

LIEAMLO QA: The planet’s media sources set the total dead in the neighborhood of half a million, in under ten [Rth] days. The three of us were horrified. I don’t know if anyone else was.

FALGRIN FALDEK: Do I feel bad? No; why would I?

DUVAP AXION: My understanding is that they were given every opportunity to relocate, and they did not, and so we had to act. We have a schedule to keep.

Being perfectly honest, I think too many Harrians have gotten hung up on how much Rthlings look like us. It inculcates an irrational sympathy.

ELI-DANTY: I wasn’t planet-side for any of that. I know this sounds difficult to believe, but I wasn’t even aware it was happening as it was happening. I didn’t know anything was wrong at all; just the security force, doing their job, cleaning up the main site. Just like every other campaign.

The first time I understood this annexation would be different was when the Rthlings retaliated.

FALGRIN FALDEK: I’d rotated off-planet. Pure luck I wasn’t there when it happened.

ELI-DANTY: We’d just established the first module. I’m not sure you’ve ever seen an initial prefab install yourself, but the first phase is a huge structure. It’s designed to evoke awe, and it does.

It also evokes fear, especially if you don’t know exactly what’s happening.

That is, I understand—again, I’m coming at this after the fact—what the situation was on the ground. But if you’re asking whether we should have anticipated it . . . ? I didn’t, but I’m not paid to. Someone else is; you’ll have to ask them.

DUVAP AXION: We had never gamed a scenario in which the locals opted to explode a nuclear device at the initial site. The reason we didn’t, is because that would be fucking crazy.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: “If we can’t live here anymore, neither can you.” It’s the politics of mutual destruction. It’s insane, but I get it.

FALGRIN FALDEK: Lost a lot of good Harrians that day. A couple thousand, wasn’t it?

VKA SOF: Imagine discovering nuclear energy and thinking not, “free energy” but, “this would make an excellent bomb.” It makes one wonder how the ICPS chose this planet in the first place.

DUVAP AXION: I’m not sure if the target was us or the building. Not that it ultimately matters. We have to respond to the loss of property the same as we would the loss of life.

ELI-DANTY: The bomb destroyed our first installation, and killed a handful of Harrians. To that end, it worked, because they stopped our progress. But the only time the Rthlings bought for themselves was the time it took to fabricate and ship a new starter module. Which wasn’t long.

DONDO ZAY: I don’t know if they thought a nuclear bomb would convince us to go away. If so, it was a startlingly short-sighted decision.

They’d rendered a portion of south central Asia radioactive, accelerated the negative effects of the global climate change that was already threatening to kill them, and politically destabilized an entire region of the world. All to slightly delay the annexation.

PEL MOK: The Kazakhstan site had been rendered uninhabitable. We had to select a new site immediately, because everything regarding the buildout hinged on a thorough understanding of the local terrain. And now, we had to throw in another metric: what region would they be less willing to attack with a nuclear device?

We decided on the southern half of the United States.

• • • •

In the time it took for the ICPS to design and deploy a new first-wave structure, Dondo Zay’s team and the remnants of Ala By’Anok’s first annexation team attempted to reason with the Rthlings.

DONDO ZAY: It was critical that they be made to understand how much resistance was going to imperil them. In the history of the ICPS, only three planets have offered anything like the pushback we were getting from Rth: Flaygon, Cypro Prime, and Palonith. Cypro Prime no longer exists except as a cautionary tale, and nobody lives on Palonith anymore. Only Flaygon is now a full member of the community, and only because they listened.

ALA BY’ANOK (annexation team lead): What happened on Cypro wasn’t going to happen on Rth; Rth’s natural resources and location guaranteed that. No, the ICPS fully intended to follow through on converting the planet into a hub for a major new trade route, which meant an enormous buildout in the years ahead.

Rth’s principal sentients could have benefited directly from that buildout. They went another route.

DONDO ZAY: My team skipped the president and went directly to the people, by broadcasting over their radiophonic signal devices. We notified them of our new site, and offered to assist in the relocation of the local inhabitants. We tried to make it clear that the relocation was mandatory, voluntary or otherwise.

Considering they’d dropped a nuclear bomb on us, I think this was generous on our part.

KOING: All we got back from outreach was bravado and gunfire. Every time we sent a scout drone over the region to assess the evacuation, someone would take a shot at it. Did no damage at all, but that didn’t discourage them.

We still had a dozen ships in orbit; it should have been obvious we were going nowhere.

ALA BY’ANOK: They weren’t going to comprehend anything short of overwhelming force.

DUVAP AXION: And then the new module arrived. With reinforcements, by which I mean warships. The ICPS wasn’t fucking around.

LIEAMLO QA: It was . . .

I’m sorry. I still get upset. Look, everyone’s heard the ICPS version of this: we, the upstanding, have no choice but to defend ourselves against them, the savage Rthlings. And, yes, sure, fine, they detonated a thermonuclear bomb on their own planet. But from their perspective, they were defending themselves.

SANDLY TORM: You have to wonder if there’s someone high up in the ICPS with some sort of conversion chart: how many dead Rthlings equal one dead Harrian. Like, let’s keep in mind we killed a half million of them before they did anything to us.

ALA BY’ANOK: It was a slaughter. It had to be. You understand? I’m not happy about it. Who would be? But it was necessary.

FALGRIN FALDEK: It was great! Those Rthers got schooled. It was a good time, and I was proud to be a part of it. I mean, after what those primitives did to us? Come on.

Yeah, you can quote me. Go ahead.

ALA BY’ANOK: These are lower lifeforms. It’s all right to be sad about how things turned out, but we absolutely acted appropriately.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: The word you’re looking for is “bloodbath.” I don’t know how many were killed in the second installation, but the number had to be over a million. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure I can count the number of Harrian dead on one hand.

DUVAP AXION: It was an overwhelming show of force, and if there was any good to come out of it—if there was any justification to be had—it was that once it was over, the Rthlings would finally accept out of futility what they had refused to accept when it was a peaceful overture. That was the hope.

Then came the rebellion.

LIEAMLO QA: It wasn’t a rebellion. A rebellion is when someone who lives within a system rebels against the rules of that system. But that was what the ICPS called it.

SANDLY TORM: The Rthlings weren’t members of the International Community of Planetary Systems. Yet, the regulation used to justify the ICPS’s actions was the one drawn up to counter rogue members, as a means to prevent a larger war from breaking out. Which, incidentally, the military only cited after the fact.

LIEAMLO QA: The subsection [of the interplanetary conduct bylaws] they used to make their actions legal also included rules of conduct regarding non-combatants and prisoners of war.

Which they ignored. The argument there was, “this is a primitive species.”

Okay, so which is it? Are they a rebellious member planet about to trigger an intergalactic war, or a belligerent subspecies unworthy of the rights granted other sentients? You can’t have it both ways.

ELI-DANTY: I’d say the second install went pretty smoothly, given the circumstances. Not as clean as the Kazakhstan location, but nobody tried to nuke us again, which was a definite net positive.

ALA BY’ANOK: They did try using nuclear force on us again, although we didn’t publicize the fact. Not a surprise; it was the only weapon in their arsenal that had been shown to work. But their preference for mutual annihilation, over acceptance of a vassal planet status, was known to us by then. We were prepared.

We intercepted the weapon before it was detonated. Then we retaliated as if it had gone off. Again: how else were they going to learn?

DUVAP AXION: At some point, the security force decided to expand the area of contention. Strictly speaking, only the main site footprint is supposed to be cleared for the first install. That would have meant evacuating parts of Oklahoma and Texas. But the circumference of their clear-out reached, I think, five other states.

It’s not policy, but I’m sure they had their reasons.

ALA BY’ANOK: We were mainly concerned about defending ourselves at the time. That meant concentrating our forces on the main site, which we expanded for safety reasons. We largely ignored what was happening on the rest of the planet, outside of how it directly impacted us.

In other words, we didn’t care what the locals were doing to one another. Then one of the Rthling tribes decided to bomb another Rthling tribe, and we were forced to act on a larger scale.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: (sighs) Yeah, the decision to put New Rth City where they did? That destabilized a global political climate that had been pretty close to outright chaos before we’d even gotten there.

SANDLY TORM: One half of the planet ended up focusing all its attention on driving out the ICPS, while the other half of the planet had a power vacuum that needed filling.

DONDO ZAY: I know we like to say we couldn’t have possibly anticipated the Rthlings going to war with each other during all of this, but honestly, we should have.

ELI-DANTY: I was planetside, working on the New Rth City install, when I heard the news of another bomb. I looked around and was like, well, shit; it’s not here.

LIEAMLO QA: I’m still not sure, to this day, who set off that bomb in northern China. Because I don’t know that, I couldn’t even begin to understand why they did it.

ALA BY’ANOK: Simply put, we couldn’t allow [nuclear bomb detonations] to keep happening on the planet. Even if it was just them killing each other, eventually they would commit enough damage to render the planet fully uninhabitable to everyone.

I made the decision to impose martial law. Not just in the New Rth City hemisphere, but globally.

DONDO ZAY: [It] was a difficult call. I don’t know if I would have made it, but I respect Ala’s decision.

SANDLY TORM: It’s one thing to ask a species to answer to a political appointee like Governor Skanz. It’s another to demand it by force.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: I’ve run out of superlatives to explain how awful it was. Imagine the worst possible conditions for a global population to have to endure. Now double that. Now double that.

LIEAMLO QA: I guess you could say martial law brought peace? It’s definitely the leading explanation for the current conditions on the planet, so if you call what’s happening now, “peace,” it did. It also meant about a billion dead. Let’s not forget that.

3: “They’re us.”

It’s been ten stellar years since first Governor Ventric Skanz took the stage at the opening of New Rth City, and declared the planet formally annexed—which was a full seven years after Dondo Zay’s Introduction Team first arrived, to deliver what they thought was good news.

While pockets of resistance remain, the planet is now largely conflict-free. And, thanks to Governor Skanz’s aggressive initial buildout, Rth has been transformed into a critical port-of-call for the ICPS’s expanding galactic empire. New Rth City is, in many ways, the envy of the quadrant.

The peace has come at a cost. Rthlings remain very much isolated from the rest of the interstellar community; their species has been granted access to almost none of the technological advances usually shared with the annexed, and as of this writing there are only seven Rthlings living off-world. (For comparison, ten years after the annexation of Quat, fully one third of all Quatrians had established permanent residences on other planets.)

Historically, planetary annexations have proven beneficial for both the ICPS and the annexed planet. The same cannot be said here.

As a number of Rthling-advocacy groups—most notably the Institute for Rth—have argued: perhaps we all would have been better off had the ICPS not annexed Rth in the first place.

ELI-DANTY: It’s an interesting question. On the one hand, I couldn’t be prouder of New Rth City. On the other . . . ? I do feel as if there were better ways to arrive at where we are now. I’m sure this isn’t the case, but it seemed like we defaulted to violence over diplomacy, after the diplomacy part got too hard.

I kept hearing that “mistakes were made,” like we’re talking about the weather. Whose mistakes? I don’t know. Maybe ours, maybe theirs. Maybe both. But the Rthlings are the only ones who ended up paying for them.

Could be wrong. I don’t have all the facts.

ALA BY’ANOK: If you want my opinion, there was only one real mistake, and it was ours: thinking the species we call “Rthling”—the humans—was who we should have introduced ourselves to at first contact.

More than half of Rth is water, and the most intelligent species in the water is the dolphin. They think of humankind as a nuisance at best, and a pestilence at worst. Perhaps if we’d started with them, we’d have adopted the same attitude.

I know, it’s a stretch. Dolphins never went to space, or built great structures, or used tools, and so on, and so on. We never really would have done that. But the dolphins were right.

DONDO ZAY: I truly believe that without our intervention, the Rthlings would have blown themselves up by now. Even after all they’ve gone through, I think they are better off today than they would have been otherwise.

Having said that, I don’t agree with how they’re being treated. That’s why, when Mondresonio and the others set up the Institute for Rth, I agreed to help with fundraising.

I can’t sign off on everything the institute stands for—I don’t support a path to full citizenship—but if we don’t do something to improve living conditions there, we’re just asking for more violence. ICPS’s policies are effectively a form of passive extermination, and someone needs to stand up and say that it’s wrong. Change is needed.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: Rth absolutely would have been better off if the ICPS never came here.

But the ICPS did come here, and we can’t undo it, or pretend it didn’t happen, or blame them for our fuckup. Only after we’ve owned up to what really happened, can we take the steps needed to . . . well, not fix it, but do what we can to improve Rthling lives going forward.

And when I say “we” have to own up, I’m talking about all Harrians, and the ICPS as an entity; not just me, Sandly, and Lieamlo. Let’s keep that straight.

LIEAMLO QA: In a lot of ways, we three are the worst possible voices of protest. When we resigned our commissions, we inadvertently offered ourselves up as scapegoats for the entire mess, and the ICPS didn’t miss the opportunity. That’s put a stink on everything we attach our names to.

SANDLY TORM: Out of everyone involved in the Rth annexation, from Pel Mok at the beginning, to Dondo, to Ala By’Anok . . . somehow, in the eyes of the interstellar community, it’s us who are to blame for everything that went wrong.

LIEAMLO QA: At no point were we key decision-makers in the process. Yet Dondo Zay, who was the team lead? They get to retire with accolades. Nothing against Dondo, but that’s bullshit.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: The failure was systemic. We just happened to be in the front row.

SANDLY TORM: Half of what we do [at the Institute] is lobby for the betterment of the Rthling lives. The other half is to demand that the Interstellar Community of Planetary Systems acknowledge that what happened here is everyone’s fault.

VKA SOF: I appreciate that there’s some debate now about whether the community should have reached out to Rth at all, but those arguments always struck me as retrofitted to match a fictitious, rosier outcome.

I think any time a backward civilization is provided access to new technologies, it’s a step forward, however halting. Someday, the Rthling species will understand that.

ALA BY’ANOK: I don’t think we should have gone anywhere near that planet. I don’t particularly care about whether they would have been better off or not; we would have been.

PEL MOK: New Rth City is glorious. On that alone, I’d say the annexation was absolutely worth it.

DUVAP AXION: No. Just . . . stop.

I’m going to keep saying this: they are an inferior species. They don’t deserve the same basic rights as those enjoyed by the in-good-standing members of our galactic community. They have proven this, time and again. Questions about, “would they be better off” presuppose that they had any capacity for self-improvement whatsoever.

KOING: That they look like us is the problem. It’s deceptive. They are deceptive. But we shouldn’t be fooled. And we definitely shouldn’t listen to the Rth-rights groups. That Institute for Rth is an embarrassment.

FALGRIN FALDEK: I think we should’ve wiped them all out. It would have been cleaner. But, you know, they’re so innately violent, they’ll probably kill each other off before long. Same outcome at the end of the day.

SANDLY TORM: The whole problem with the “they’re just animals” argument is that it’s bullshit.

I’m serious. I’ve studied the Rthling genome extensively, so when I tell you they’re not animals in any accepted application of that word, I mean it. In fact, I’ll go one step further: aside from the lack of a tail, they’re us. I don’t know what kind of cosmic panspermian event had to happen for this to be true, but Harrians and Rthlings are so genetically close, we could reproduce. In fact, I’m almost positive we already have.

This isn’t a secret, you understand? I’ve shared my findings. The ICPS knows. They just don’t want to talk about it.

MONDRESONIO D’ANGOT: Someday, a hybrid Rthling/Harrian is going to march up to the gates of New Rth City and demand recognition as a full citizen, and then they’ll have to admit that this “inferior species” crap is a cover for war crimes.

I have no idea what will happen after that. But I sure hope I’m around to find out.