Don'T Go Beyond the Ocean, Part Iv

...“For two years we tried, but ambushes came, they hit and run, would not stand up and fight, the meadows were deadly, the forests were hell, wherever we went, we were in their sights. “Imagine one hundred million peasants as well armed as a soldier of the line… add to that an army not defeated, shelling their own cities, time after time. “Just so that they could deny them to us, leave us with no conquests but the rubble, our losses were heavy, reinforcements far, even True Man knew we were in trouble. “Some say that he was planning to retreat, but his intentions were never realized, because one day a damn peasant postal clerk put a fifty cal round right through his eye. “I was quite young, but I remember well scrambling back to our remaining ships, retreating across the cold Atlantic, most of our own men not believing it. “They were to try America twice more, and each time it just became a bloodbath. Their southern neighbors copied them quickly, you won’t find a house there where guns are lacked. “The horror of savage, armed peasantry… I hope that you never know such despair, there is a reason we keep ours helpless, a reason why we don’t go over there.” Kaahbli stopped there, he could not go one, since Sabati was not even a teen, couldn’t tell the boy that without peasants the Americans relied on machines. That with those machines, they’d took to the stars, spread to every planet around the sun, that they could carpet the Earth in fire, that it was so much worse than just their guns. For all his strength, his breeding, his brain, for everything that he’d been evolved to, Betters were trapped on just three continents, and with a flip-switch they all could be nuked. But those words were for when he was older, a young Better had to be raised just right, he’d seen young minds learn too much truth too quick, anger like that was not a pretty sight. So he just turned back to his young grandson, said, “Enough of that boy, come, listen here, you want them to work, whip them once a month, and kill at least one peasant every year. “It helps a lot to make them live in fear…”