Forgot a few additional notes last night:
- There's another defenseless Psilon world that we've explored in the north: Volantis. Not that you need to do anything about this; just letting you know.
- There's an Alkari fleet incoming to our core world of Centauri. Yes, that Centauri. Yes, it's a core world again. The birds are coming through the nebula and are slow, so it should have time to get a shield and base up. The Alkari ships are all carrying junk weapons like Hyper-V and lasers, though they're heavily shielded and of course hard to hit.
- We have ten fighters that just arrived at the asteroid field toward the galactic center because after they fended off a couple of lesser Centauri attacks that was as close as they could get to the front by the hand-over turn.
- I believe one of the Rock'n'Rolls is going to reach Drakka next turn, so you'll be able to redeploy it too. (It was forced to retreat because of two independent mistakes I made, and I never redirect retreating ships.)
Report should be posted later today, internet permitting.
[EDIT: Excessively long report added in spoilers here to preserve chronological order in the thread!]
- There's another defenseless Psilon world that we've explored in the north: Volantis. Not that you need to do anything about this; just letting you know.
- There's an Alkari fleet incoming to our core world of Centauri. Yes, that Centauri. Yes, it's a core world again. The birds are coming through the nebula and are slow, so it should have time to get a shield and base up. The Alkari ships are all carrying junk weapons like Hyper-V and lasers, though they're heavily shielded and of course hard to hit.
- We have ten fighters that just arrived at the asteroid field toward the galactic center because after they fended off a couple of lesser Centauri attacks that was as close as they could get to the front by the hand-over turn.
- I believe one of the Rock'n'Rolls is going to reach Drakka next turn, so you'll be able to redeploy it too. (It was forced to retreat because of two independent mistakes I made, and I never redirect retreating ships.)
Report should be posted later today, internet permitting.
[EDIT: Excessively long report added in spoilers here to preserve chronological order in the thread!]
2410: There was a grumbling in the empire: The term of the great Thrawn had ended, and the successor chosen by the Mountain King - far from the young, energetic, warlike leader of Cryslon's dreams - was an old, slow Silicoid pile of gravel and skree. It started its term by grumbling about dangers that would probably never even materialize, designing bitty little ships - little more than pebbles - to meet threats that, while possible, could well turn out to be mere belches of vapor from a rumbling volcano's cone, just as the Silicoid people hoped. Its tired old comments about "safe than sorry" rolled through deaf lithoresonance organs, and the grumbling of the people continued. The gravel heap spent what felt like ages waffling between alternate plans for the empire, and when it was finally ready to make its first serious move, half the Silicoids were expecting it to be just another unimportant murmur.
Then they saw the outcome. The old gravel pile believed strongly in something called "freedom of information" - and it had been talking to the other leaders in the galaxy.
It started slowly: The Sakkra were willing to provide Ion Rifles to Silicoid marines heading into Human - and soon hopefully Psilon - space in exchange for Urridium fuel that would let them explore more of the galaxy. They doubled the effectiveness of Silicoid ECM jammers, helping to protect missile bases and espionage agents alike, for a similarly small improvement to their industrial technology, speeding the construction of their future factories. They even exchanged pointless curiosities - a way to nest outmoded lasers together in a gatling array for dotomite fuel cells already rendered obsolete by Urridium - just for the benefits in miniaturization that would arise from each. But then they mentioned their Alkari allies, and it turned out that bird-brained Alkari scientists were interested in anti-missile rockets, gladly offering their much-older Hyper-V rockets in exchange, perhaps unaware that those rockets would double the effectiveness of Silicoid defensive bases against the known Human fleets and offer hope of their missiles accomplishing anything at all against the more-advanced shielding available around the galaxy. But then the Alkari made a frustrated comment about the power of Psilon technology - and the Silicoid people were not at war with the Psilons; not yet at least.
Zygot liked the idea of repulsor beams; he imagined a day in the distant future when he would deploy them on a grand starfleet that would keep all his enemies at bay. The gravel pile wasn't worried about the distant future; the gravel pile wanted better tools for its cyber-espionage agents and more-efficient ways for its slow-growing people to operate their countless production centers. With Psilon scientists helping them to refit their robotic controls, it would be able to change its colonial policies across the entire empire, preparing for the future instead of struggling to run idle factories. And with Zygot 's longing to explore the deepest reaches of the galaxy - in spite of lacking the engine technology to do so at any significant speed - the gravel pile was able to make arrangements for Silicoid engineers to receive blueprints for Class V deflector arrays in exchange for the formula for their most advanced Reajax fuel cells, throwing in an exchange of older blueprints - outdated Psilon battle computers for suddenly-outdated Silicoid shields - for miniaturization purposes ... and to help Silicoid cyber-agents yet a little bit more with their spying.
In spite of the Psilons' status as "next enemy to be," the gravel pile felt justified, but had to think a long moment before agreeing to the Meklars' offered deal: A Mark-VI battle computer would represent an enormous advance the Silicoid state of the art of computer technology, even approaching Meklar levels of effectiveness in the field, but the only reason it was on the table was the robotic controls just acquired from the Psilons: With only four planets, INT-986 coveted the means of improving them greedily. After a long pause, the gravel pile finally agreed: "Either sharing these controls with them won't make a difference to the fate of the galaxy," it rumbled to itself, "or this will help our robot friends to actually challenge our empire somewhere down the line." Capriciously, it added, "I like it either way!"
The flood of new technology enabled a massive change in Silicoid imperial practice. The Psilon robotic controls alone meant that factory-cities throughout the empire - most notably Quayal, whose exceptionally limited resources had been committed at various times over the past century to the production of over a hundred hugely expensive factories - were fully operational again in spite of the recent outpouring of Silicoid population in the form of combat troops.
Only a few Silicoid worlds - certainly not including Quayal - would be directed to expand their factory base in light of the new technology; instead, the gravel heap took advantage of the suddenly-improved situation to fund scientists working toward further breakthroughs in propulsion and planetology, and to begin construction of its prized Lithium-ion fighter fleets. Within a few years, further secrets would come to light that would suggest that some of those efforts might have been mis-spent, but with no way of knowing the future, the gravel-heap was doing the best it could with the information at hand.
In the end, in spite of rumblings to the contrary, the gravel heap followed the great Thrawn's immediate outgoing tactical reccomendations with only three exceptions: Bootis would not send any transports to participate in the attack at Phyco; the millions departing Ukko to make room for millions more about to arrive at their world would travel to Laan instead of making an early - and, the gravel heap felt, premature - suicide assault on Phyco; and the Rock'N'Roll from Drakka would stop at Psilon Tau Cygni on the way to Mentar.
Only three unless you count the ion fighters, of course. The gravel heap seemed obsessed with its little Lithium 3.0s.
2411: At Phyco, the Human Warship and Escort retreated just as Thrawn had predicted, as the Humans had failed to build any further ships there for the planet's own defense. The gravel heap grumbled that they were only concentrating the Human fleet, but some observers reported a note of pleasure in the grumbling: A new excuse for those Lithium-ion ships! Claiming that it did so "In hopes of driving home the lessons about holding their ground and building defensive fleets," but incidentally also following a battle plan laid out by Thrawn, the gravel pile then proceeded to order Phyco bombed from orbit mercilessly.
It would be the only Silicoid victory of the year. At one of the few remaining stars in the galaxy they had yet to explore, their Seismometer and two thirds of their scouting fleet were repelled by a single Human Escort cruiser, leading the gravel heap to reluctantly order the Seismometer recycled for scrap in spite of its claim to the best starship name in Silicoid history - while at radiated Imra, where no work had even yet begun on a planetary shield, Human saboteurs destroyed the only missile base on the planet's surface. This would have been cause for greater concern were there even the slightest danger that the Humans or anyone else might attempt to invade the world in the near future, but as it happened the gravel heap could only marvel at its intelligence agents' incompetence in reporting the saboteurs as of "unknown" race when it should have been perfectly obvious to even a three-century-old child who the culprit must have been.
The old gravel heap responded by ordering a first wave of transports to Sol, the Human home system near the heart of the galaxy ... while continuing its policy off funding Impulse Drive research instead of addressing more-pressing priorities. Just one year into office, the grumpy old pile of pebbles and skree had begun to grow complacent. In fairness to it, the events of the following year seemed to justify a certain amount of complacency.
2412: While a Rock'N'Roll bomber at Tau Cygni encountered no resistance to speak of - the great Thrawn had been correct, and the gravel heap had very possibly been confused by its dreams about an ancient state of the galaxy it called "old 1.3" - another arriving at Willow met with more than two dozen missile bases and a significant little Psilon fleet.
Had the Psilons known how to build any actual space combat weapons - or even had their cruisers been armed with mass drivers, the one beam the Psilons had learned to build that at least could pretend to deserve the name - they could have posed a very real threat to one slow-moving, unsupported Rock'N'Roll, which had so little in the way of space weapons itself, it might as well not have bothered with anything but its bombs after all. Sadly for the Psilons though, this was not the case, and the planet's entire defensive fleet, incapable as their bases of so much as scratching the Rock'N'Roll's paint, went into full retreat.
The Humans meanwhile, taking a cue from the Psilon ship design teams, elected to try to defend Phyco with a brand-new fleet of anti-matter bombers. This worked about as well as could be expected, and most of the colony they were meant to protect was shortly blasted to smithereens, leaving barely more than forty million survivors trying to pick up the pieces. The Silicoid fleet meanwhile would be deployed to watch over Tau Cygni and Willow with transports dispatched toward each, while starting to move in on Mentar - the first serious mistake of the gravel heap's reign, though one for which blind luck would later ensure it didn't have to pay - and, in the case of a single cruiser just arriving at Cryslon from Artemis, to embark on a top-secret mission known only as "Project Lazarus."
At Paranar, meanwhile, starship factories were operating at full capacity to get another fleet of Lithium Ion fighters into space, with orders to relocate to Laan immediately. Laan did have a few missile bases, but the Humans were using death spores - and they had sent nearly their entire fleet!
The gravel pile observed this, and took appropriate action for the momentary situation, but failed to recognize the long-term consequences it would face - in spite of having grumbled about it endlessly just two years previously! Perhaps it was distracted by other strategic considerations, like the state of Meklar technology. The only race in the galaxy with computer networks that could rival the Silicoids' own, and the sole possessors of defensive missiles that were even remotely scary, the machine-beings had also lately devised the gravel-pile's most coveted form of propulsion technology.
Impulse drives would allow Meklar transports to move twice as fast as the rocks', and - to the extent it was fitted on their ships - allow robot fleets to move nearly twice as fast as anyone else's as well. Even a single extra point of maneuverability in combat could be of enormous value for the survivability of a fleet as well, and the Meklar were well-positioned to build by far the swiftest-fighting starships in the galaxy. It was fortunate for the rock-lords that their people and INT-986's remained at peace.
2413: None of the ships in the Humans' local war fleet were capable of penetrating Laan's shields with conventional weapons - but there was nothing conventional about the Escort's pods of death spores, and with the bases still firing mere Hyper-V rockets, they couldn't have stopped the swift-moving, heavily-armored, nimble Escort cruiser before it unloaded its deadly payload and killed millions on the surface.
Fortunately, the Lithium Ions could. A qurater of their fleet was lost to fire from the Warships before they could retreat - forcing the Humans to do the same - but not a single spore would fall upon Laan's arid surface, and all the surviving Lithium fighters would be ready to join in the next stage of the war, where they would be critically needed - and wasted utterly.
Meanwhile, up at Willow, the Psilons continued to demonstrate that nothing in their starfleet was adequate to threaten a Silicoid dreadnought.
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Three different bomber design - a fast-moving cruiser with spores and two varieties of slow destroyers - were supported only by little Comet nuclear missile boats, their weaponry more than a century old. The Psilons naturally retreated, and as for the Humans over Phyco, they hadn't even bothered to build another ship. Only one of the Lava Mixers had stayed behind to watch over its skies, but one was enough, and after it bombed away two thirds of the colony's surviving population, the arrival of Silicoid transports meant the end for the human colony on a world the Silicoids had coveted for most of a century.
Phyco's fourteen million humans managed to kill only eight batallions of the better-equipped Silicoid invaders that outnumbered them five and a half to one. The invasion was not so much a rout as a casual stop-over for most of the arrivals on the way to their next target ... and their doom.
It might of course be expected that a war this ruthless would have serious diplomatic repurcussions - particularly with the Psilons, who in spite of losing all their Willow bases the year before to Silicoid attack were still not officially in a state of war with the rocks. Indeed, the very first thing the old gravel heap saw following the conquest of Phyco was Zygot 's face on its holotransmitter...
...complimenting it on its victory. "Ooooh, good job bombing humans!" the brainy Psilon wanted to say. "Do more of that, since we're both at war with them, okay?" Perhaps he had forgotten that the whole reason for his war with Humankind - and perhaps by extension, every other non-Silicoid race in the galaxy - was the Silicoids' request many years in the past that he join in their Human war. Perhaps he imagined that supportive words would persuade the rock pile to forego its planned attacks on Psilon worlds, and wanted to encourage sending Silicoid war fleets after the Humans instead. Perhaps he had a very short memory, and had forgotten the loss of his bases in light of his gleeful opportunity of watching Humans dying. Or perhaps Zygot , like so many other biological lifeforms, was merely an absolute loon.
The gravel heap didn't waste much thought on the matter; it was too busy utterly failing to build more fighters for Laan out of Paranar, in spite of its own stated policy of building lots and lots and lots of the valuable little things, while it marveled at one of its pet projects that it was executing successfully: With the arrival of the top-secret cruiser it had commissioned, Project Lazarus was officially underway.
The great Thrawn rarely made mistakes, but had undoubtedly made one: Underestimating the bile and hatefulness of the Human leaders, he had evacuated Centauri ahead of what he took to be their conquest fleet, only to see the last remnants of the colony's population, together with its colony landing beacons, blasted to dust from space, with no invasion launched, and no new colony established in its place. This would prove a source of frustration for the Great Conqueror, who had hoped to counter-invade and recapture the world shortly. Not wishing to commit resources to long-term projects like factory reconstruction, Thrawn had left the corpse of the Centauri colony as it lay, always finding higher priorities than recolonization, never realizing that - though they could take out the minimal remnants of the post-evacuation Centauri population, leaving no one to rebuild the colony beacons from the surface, the Human fleets lacked the firepower to actually destroy many of Centauri's hardened factories. For years, those factories would remain untouched on the surface, collecting dust, awaiting workers who never came ... until a colony ship out of Artemis, by way of Cryslon, landed at last to rebuild the beacons and rebuild the colony.
The gravel heap was so pleased with this coup, it utterly failed to notice its catastrophic errors on the actual battle front.
2414: The arrival of both Rock'N'Rolls simultaneously at Mentar - when the gravel pile had originally intended to delay sending even one until it knew whether the local nebula was close enough to the system to affect the dreanaughts' shields - could have been a complete fiasco, but for the moment, the luck of the gravel pile held. Mentar wan't quite close enough to experience nebula interference; the shields held, and the planetary bases fell. The Silicoids would not bomb the planet - nor any other Psilon world - thanks to the gravel heap's orders to preserve as much Psilon infrastructure and technology as possible intact ... but the Silicoid fleet was not only above Psilon worlds.
Human infrastructure and technology were of precious little interest to the gravel heap in comparison with Silicoid lives, and the vast majority of Sol's remaining population - along with most of its surviving factories - was blown to bits by the Lithium fighters and Lava Mixer battleship in orbit before - in another fatal error, like its failure to order more Lithium fighters built from Paranar the year before - it sent the Lava Mixer on, prematurely, toward Alkari space, with the other Lava Mixer arriving behind it, to replace the ship it should have reinforced.
Perhaps it was distracted by diplomatic shenanigans: Although its policy of continuing to bomb Human worlds may still have met with Psilon approval, the destruction of all 44 of Mentar's missile bases had seriously changed Zygot 's tune.
Visibly upset by the Silicoids' willingness to tear his empire apart as well as his enemies', the Psilon emperor somehow still couldn't see the writing on the war, stopping short of declaring war or even breaking contact while the gravel heap filed his complaint in the nearest active volcanic vent. Strader would turned up immediately thereafter, begging for peace, and had his request duly filed in the same location as Zygot 's complaint.
Diplomatic non-events such as these could hardly have provided a serious distraction, but the gravel heap - who was not only capable of reading the writing on the wall, but a co-author of that very writing - elected to launch a diplomatic offensive of its own just in advance of its planned invasion at Sol. It arranged for Silicoid engineers to learn outdated shield technology from their Alkari counterparts in exchange for secret Death Spore designs to which the entire Silicoid empire would shortly be immune, and equally-outdated industrial technology from the Psilons in exchange for anti-missile rockets, gaining just a little extra miniaturization for its fleets. And then it asked after Meklar inventions, and was astonished to learn what they had available for trade!
Meklar Scatter Pack rockets, though by no means the most advanced weapon system, were by far the most powerful missiles in the galaxy, and with them, Silicoid missile bases would finally have teeth. The improvement in Meklar industrial technology that Silicoid engineers provided in exchange seemed to the gravel pile a very small price to pay. The distraction provided by all this trading though may have been a heavy price indeed.
2415: The gravel heap was aware of the danger posed by the Human fleet; it had speculated during the first year of its reign about the risk that nothing in its own starfleet could stop the ships then at Sol from taking the skies over Phyco and shooting down transports en masse. Yet with five years of easy success around the galaxy, it seemed to have forgotten its own warnings, leaving a barely-adequate force in the Sol system when that same fleet, barely diminished in the battle at Laan - two Warships and fifteen Dreadnought cruisers, supported by a colony ship - completed its retreat and returned to Sol just ahead of dozens of Silicoid transports.
Thanks to a cloud of nearly 200 Lithium-ion fighters, the battle was probably winnable anyway - but victory would require a well-executed tactical plan, and the local Silicoid admiral was sloppy. Instead of focusing on the Warships to take at least one down before the Lithium 3s could be destroyed, it concentrated mainly on the dreadnoughts which, though more dangerous to the Lithiums collectively, were much less of a threat in the battle than the Warships. Between this mistake and its subsequent failure to control the battle effectively with the Lava Mixer's autorepair and repulsor beam, the admiral failed to destroy a single Warship, taking out only about half the Dreadnought cruisers instead, and with the twin Warships' heavy ion fire easily outpacing autorepair systems that could have handled just one easily, the Lava Mixer had no time to wear down the Human fleet with its paired heavy blast cannons before its hull threatened to go critical and it was force to retreat. Though all the minor skirmishers in Psilon space were successful, that single battle's outcome for the Silicoids was devastating.
Had a second Lava Mixer still been present in the system, perhaps - especially with the small additional firepower it could bring to bear early on - the Human admiral would have been frightened into retreat. Certainly a few dozen more Lithium-ion fighters would have made a tremendous difference in the outcome of the fight. But with victory within the Humans' grasp thanks to a series of grim mistakes, their fleet held to the last, protecting their homeworld, firing on helpless Silicoid transports and killing millions upon millions of the rock people who arrived in the course of the year. The failure of the Sol invasion would cost the Silicoids trillions of credits, to say nothing of all the irreplaceable lives of their people who died in space, and would delay the effective invasion of Willow considerably - but it preserved Humankind as a species.
Temporarily.
2416: The year that followed the fiasco was a quiet one by comparison, as the Human fleet set out from Sol in a spiteful attempt to attack defenseless Mentar before they all were slain, and the Silicoids spewed comforting lava over their wounds and government propoganda focused away from the front itself and onto the development of new technology.
The long-awaited antidote to death spores was almost at hand, and the gravel heap insisted on continuing the push it had been making throughout its reign toward the swiftest engines ever discovered - thus far only by the Meklar - by anyone in the galaxy. In spite of the three-layered tactical failure at Sol, the war was progressing well for the Silicoids, and it might have gone even better had the gravel heap found something more intelligent to do with the Rock'N'Roll that had just scouted the Psilon world of Volantis than send it down to Mentar again, where the arrival of the Human fleet two years later would force it to uselessly retreat.
2417: In the same year the Lava Mixer that left Sol a year too soon dismantled the missile bases at the Alkari artifacts world of Berel, the first and questionable fruits were borne by the gravel heap's personal vanity project known as "Roughly a trillion credits wastedspent from Drakka on ships not called Lithium 3s."
It was not, one must admit, a very catchy name. Nordia had the potential to be a jewel of a world, and the gravel heap did what it could in spite of an already-visible incoming Sakkra cruiser to ensure that the place would eventually live up to the dream, but the likelihood that the colony would ever live up to the opportunity cost of building it so far from the Silicoid core was probably negligible even when the long-range colony ship needed to claim it was built. The best that could be said in its defense is unfortunately that the second prong of the same vanity project was even worse.
In the meantime, the Lava Mixer's orbital bombardment of the Berel colony helped the Alkari to see the writing on the wall far better than Zygot did.
Just the same, the Alkari war declaration merely confirmed what by then was the de-facto reality.
2418: In addition to trivial and predictable military success - and the Rock'N'Roll forced to retreat from Mentar upon arrival, in the face of the main Human fleet - the Silicoid people also managed to achieve a real victory:
The new bio-toxin antidote devised by their planetologists would render them forever immune to the horrible Death Spores they had seen aboard Human and Psilon starships ... and learned to build themselves, though they never actually did so ... and whose blueprints they traded to the Alkari for a little help with shield options and miniaturization. The new advance was not only valuable in its own right but an important gateway technology: It suggested new and improved means of crystalization that could someday amount to rock-cloning techniques. At the same time, the next and most pointless stage of the gravel heap's vanity project came to what an exceptionally generous observer might reluctantly agree to call fruition.
Collassa would probably never have any significant value to the Silicoids, and might well be destroyed by alien aggression long before it paid anything back to the empire at all, never mind the full cost of its colony ship, but at least it was another rich world that - to the gravel heap - looked pretty.
There was more important news that year though, naturally.
With the arrival of a new fleet of Silicoid transports while the Human war fleet was off on a spite mission at Mentar, Sol fell to the Silicoids once and for all, and with it...
...the Humans were no more, and the Silicoids had come to dominate the galaxy. It is true that among 70 factories, the Silicoids failed to recover the last remaining Human technology that remained unknown to them, but as Ianus would later suggest, this might merely be the result of the complete irrelevance of any technique for reducing factory waste to a race whose greatest trouble with factory waste products is that they tend to be more appetizing than really filling. In all events, the drought wouldn't continue forever.
2419: The Sol fiasco of 2415 may have delayed the invasion of Willow, but couldn't push it beyond the period of the old gravel heap's reign. A total of eighty Silicoid batallions would ultimately fight for control of the world's 271 factories, and when they ultimately emerged victorious, their spoils were unerwhelming in number, but the best the Psilons had to offer in weapon and shield technology.
It's possible that Zygot still couldn't see the writing on the wall even at this late hour, but he certainly could feel the same writing being tattooed into the flesh of his empire. As a helpless measure, too little, too late, he finally declared war.
2420: After waiting patiently over Berel for a small group of Silicoid transports to arrive, and for the Alkari population to grow back above the numbers that it had killed in its single bombing run a few years before, the Lava Mixer in Berel orbit went in for a second and lasst bombing run there.
Its captain had miscalculated badly, failing to realize that birds taking shelter in homes and bunkers and factories are not as vulnerable as birds out in the open, as all the survivors of Berel necessarily were following the irradiation or destruction by fusion bombs of all their planet's cities. The entire colony was destroyed, entirely unintentionally, resulting in yet more deaths of Silicoid transports in space ... and, of course, less importantly, some 31 million Alkari. Fortunately for the old gravel heap, its battle plan worked a lot better at the Psilon world of Tau Cygni.
The last Psilon tech about which its people particularly cared was recovered from the ruins of some 57 factory-cities, meaning that in spite of the mistakes it had made, and in spite of failing to do so as well as it hoped, or as quickly, the old gravel heap had actually accomplished its main goals for its reign ... just in time to be replaced by a livelier Silicoid leader. The map may not have told the whole story of the old gravel heap's fiascos, but as it said itself of Collassa...
...it sure looked pretty!
Then they saw the outcome. The old gravel pile believed strongly in something called "freedom of information" - and it had been talking to the other leaders in the galaxy.
It started slowly: The Sakkra were willing to provide Ion Rifles to Silicoid marines heading into Human - and soon hopefully Psilon - space in exchange for Urridium fuel that would let them explore more of the galaxy. They doubled the effectiveness of Silicoid ECM jammers, helping to protect missile bases and espionage agents alike, for a similarly small improvement to their industrial technology, speeding the construction of their future factories. They even exchanged pointless curiosities - a way to nest outmoded lasers together in a gatling array for dotomite fuel cells already rendered obsolete by Urridium - just for the benefits in miniaturization that would arise from each. But then they mentioned their Alkari allies, and it turned out that bird-brained Alkari scientists were interested in anti-missile rockets, gladly offering their much-older Hyper-V rockets in exchange, perhaps unaware that those rockets would double the effectiveness of Silicoid defensive bases against the known Human fleets and offer hope of their missiles accomplishing anything at all against the more-advanced shielding available around the galaxy. But then the Alkari made a frustrated comment about the power of Psilon technology - and the Silicoid people were not at war with the Psilons; not yet at least.
Zygot liked the idea of repulsor beams; he imagined a day in the distant future when he would deploy them on a grand starfleet that would keep all his enemies at bay. The gravel pile wasn't worried about the distant future; the gravel pile wanted better tools for its cyber-espionage agents and more-efficient ways for its slow-growing people to operate their countless production centers. With Psilon scientists helping them to refit their robotic controls, it would be able to change its colonial policies across the entire empire, preparing for the future instead of struggling to run idle factories. And with Zygot 's longing to explore the deepest reaches of the galaxy - in spite of lacking the engine technology to do so at any significant speed - the gravel pile was able to make arrangements for Silicoid engineers to receive blueprints for Class V deflector arrays in exchange for the formula for their most advanced Reajax fuel cells, throwing in an exchange of older blueprints - outdated Psilon battle computers for suddenly-outdated Silicoid shields - for miniaturization purposes ... and to help Silicoid cyber-agents yet a little bit more with their spying.
In spite of the Psilons' status as "next enemy to be," the gravel pile felt justified, but had to think a long moment before agreeing to the Meklars' offered deal: A Mark-VI battle computer would represent an enormous advance the Silicoid state of the art of computer technology, even approaching Meklar levels of effectiveness in the field, but the only reason it was on the table was the robotic controls just acquired from the Psilons: With only four planets, INT-986 coveted the means of improving them greedily. After a long pause, the gravel pile finally agreed: "Either sharing these controls with them won't make a difference to the fate of the galaxy," it rumbled to itself, "or this will help our robot friends to actually challenge our empire somewhere down the line." Capriciously, it added, "I like it either way!"
The flood of new technology enabled a massive change in Silicoid imperial practice. The Psilon robotic controls alone meant that factory-cities throughout the empire - most notably Quayal, whose exceptionally limited resources had been committed at various times over the past century to the production of over a hundred hugely expensive factories - were fully operational again in spite of the recent outpouring of Silicoid population in the form of combat troops.
Only a few Silicoid worlds - certainly not including Quayal - would be directed to expand their factory base in light of the new technology; instead, the gravel heap took advantage of the suddenly-improved situation to fund scientists working toward further breakthroughs in propulsion and planetology, and to begin construction of its prized Lithium-ion fighter fleets. Within a few years, further secrets would come to light that would suggest that some of those efforts might have been mis-spent, but with no way of knowing the future, the gravel-heap was doing the best it could with the information at hand.
In the end, in spite of rumblings to the contrary, the gravel heap followed the great Thrawn's immediate outgoing tactical reccomendations with only three exceptions: Bootis would not send any transports to participate in the attack at Phyco; the millions departing Ukko to make room for millions more about to arrive at their world would travel to Laan instead of making an early - and, the gravel heap felt, premature - suicide assault on Phyco; and the Rock'N'Roll from Drakka would stop at Psilon Tau Cygni on the way to Mentar.
Only three unless you count the ion fighters, of course. The gravel heap seemed obsessed with its little Lithium 3.0s.
2411: At Phyco, the Human Warship and Escort retreated just as Thrawn had predicted, as the Humans had failed to build any further ships there for the planet's own defense. The gravel heap grumbled that they were only concentrating the Human fleet, but some observers reported a note of pleasure in the grumbling: A new excuse for those Lithium-ion ships! Claiming that it did so "In hopes of driving home the lessons about holding their ground and building defensive fleets," but incidentally also following a battle plan laid out by Thrawn, the gravel pile then proceeded to order Phyco bombed from orbit mercilessly.
It would be the only Silicoid victory of the year. At one of the few remaining stars in the galaxy they had yet to explore, their Seismometer and two thirds of their scouting fleet were repelled by a single Human Escort cruiser, leading the gravel heap to reluctantly order the Seismometer recycled for scrap in spite of its claim to the best starship name in Silicoid history - while at radiated Imra, where no work had even yet begun on a planetary shield, Human saboteurs destroyed the only missile base on the planet's surface. This would have been cause for greater concern were there even the slightest danger that the Humans or anyone else might attempt to invade the world in the near future, but as it happened the gravel heap could only marvel at its intelligence agents' incompetence in reporting the saboteurs as of "unknown" race when it should have been perfectly obvious to even a three-century-old child who the culprit must have been.
The old gravel heap responded by ordering a first wave of transports to Sol, the Human home system near the heart of the galaxy ... while continuing its policy off funding Impulse Drive research instead of addressing more-pressing priorities. Just one year into office, the grumpy old pile of pebbles and skree had begun to grow complacent. In fairness to it, the events of the following year seemed to justify a certain amount of complacency.
2412: While a Rock'N'Roll bomber at Tau Cygni encountered no resistance to speak of - the great Thrawn had been correct, and the gravel heap had very possibly been confused by its dreams about an ancient state of the galaxy it called "old 1.3" - another arriving at Willow met with more than two dozen missile bases and a significant little Psilon fleet.
Had the Psilons known how to build any actual space combat weapons - or even had their cruisers been armed with mass drivers, the one beam the Psilons had learned to build that at least could pretend to deserve the name - they could have posed a very real threat to one slow-moving, unsupported Rock'N'Roll, which had so little in the way of space weapons itself, it might as well not have bothered with anything but its bombs after all. Sadly for the Psilons though, this was not the case, and the planet's entire defensive fleet, incapable as their bases of so much as scratching the Rock'N'Roll's paint, went into full retreat.
The Humans meanwhile, taking a cue from the Psilon ship design teams, elected to try to defend Phyco with a brand-new fleet of anti-matter bombers. This worked about as well as could be expected, and most of the colony they were meant to protect was shortly blasted to smithereens, leaving barely more than forty million survivors trying to pick up the pieces. The Silicoid fleet meanwhile would be deployed to watch over Tau Cygni and Willow with transports dispatched toward each, while starting to move in on Mentar - the first serious mistake of the gravel heap's reign, though one for which blind luck would later ensure it didn't have to pay - and, in the case of a single cruiser just arriving at Cryslon from Artemis, to embark on a top-secret mission known only as "Project Lazarus."
At Paranar, meanwhile, starship factories were operating at full capacity to get another fleet of Lithium Ion fighters into space, with orders to relocate to Laan immediately. Laan did have a few missile bases, but the Humans were using death spores - and they had sent nearly their entire fleet!
The gravel pile observed this, and took appropriate action for the momentary situation, but failed to recognize the long-term consequences it would face - in spite of having grumbled about it endlessly just two years previously! Perhaps it was distracted by other strategic considerations, like the state of Meklar technology. The only race in the galaxy with computer networks that could rival the Silicoids' own, and the sole possessors of defensive missiles that were even remotely scary, the machine-beings had also lately devised the gravel-pile's most coveted form of propulsion technology.
Impulse drives would allow Meklar transports to move twice as fast as the rocks', and - to the extent it was fitted on their ships - allow robot fleets to move nearly twice as fast as anyone else's as well. Even a single extra point of maneuverability in combat could be of enormous value for the survivability of a fleet as well, and the Meklar were well-positioned to build by far the swiftest-fighting starships in the galaxy. It was fortunate for the rock-lords that their people and INT-986's remained at peace.
2413: None of the ships in the Humans' local war fleet were capable of penetrating Laan's shields with conventional weapons - but there was nothing conventional about the Escort's pods of death spores, and with the bases still firing mere Hyper-V rockets, they couldn't have stopped the swift-moving, heavily-armored, nimble Escort cruiser before it unloaded its deadly payload and killed millions on the surface.
Fortunately, the Lithium Ions could. A qurater of their fleet was lost to fire from the Warships before they could retreat - forcing the Humans to do the same - but not a single spore would fall upon Laan's arid surface, and all the surviving Lithium fighters would be ready to join in the next stage of the war, where they would be critically needed - and wasted utterly.
Meanwhile, up at Willow, the Psilons continued to demonstrate that nothing in their starfleet was adequate to threaten a Silicoid dreadnought.
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Three different bomber design - a fast-moving cruiser with spores and two varieties of slow destroyers - were supported only by little Comet nuclear missile boats, their weaponry more than a century old. The Psilons naturally retreated, and as for the Humans over Phyco, they hadn't even bothered to build another ship. Only one of the Lava Mixers had stayed behind to watch over its skies, but one was enough, and after it bombed away two thirds of the colony's surviving population, the arrival of Silicoid transports meant the end for the human colony on a world the Silicoids had coveted for most of a century.
Phyco's fourteen million humans managed to kill only eight batallions of the better-equipped Silicoid invaders that outnumbered them five and a half to one. The invasion was not so much a rout as a casual stop-over for most of the arrivals on the way to their next target ... and their doom.
It might of course be expected that a war this ruthless would have serious diplomatic repurcussions - particularly with the Psilons, who in spite of losing all their Willow bases the year before to Silicoid attack were still not officially in a state of war with the rocks. Indeed, the very first thing the old gravel heap saw following the conquest of Phyco was Zygot 's face on its holotransmitter...
...complimenting it on its victory. "Ooooh, good job bombing humans!" the brainy Psilon wanted to say. "Do more of that, since we're both at war with them, okay?" Perhaps he had forgotten that the whole reason for his war with Humankind - and perhaps by extension, every other non-Silicoid race in the galaxy - was the Silicoids' request many years in the past that he join in their Human war. Perhaps he imagined that supportive words would persuade the rock pile to forego its planned attacks on Psilon worlds, and wanted to encourage sending Silicoid war fleets after the Humans instead. Perhaps he had a very short memory, and had forgotten the loss of his bases in light of his gleeful opportunity of watching Humans dying. Or perhaps Zygot , like so many other biological lifeforms, was merely an absolute loon.
The gravel heap didn't waste much thought on the matter; it was too busy utterly failing to build more fighters for Laan out of Paranar, in spite of its own stated policy of building lots and lots and lots of the valuable little things, while it marveled at one of its pet projects that it was executing successfully: With the arrival of the top-secret cruiser it had commissioned, Project Lazarus was officially underway.
The great Thrawn rarely made mistakes, but had undoubtedly made one: Underestimating the bile and hatefulness of the Human leaders, he had evacuated Centauri ahead of what he took to be their conquest fleet, only to see the last remnants of the colony's population, together with its colony landing beacons, blasted to dust from space, with no invasion launched, and no new colony established in its place. This would prove a source of frustration for the Great Conqueror, who had hoped to counter-invade and recapture the world shortly. Not wishing to commit resources to long-term projects like factory reconstruction, Thrawn had left the corpse of the Centauri colony as it lay, always finding higher priorities than recolonization, never realizing that - though they could take out the minimal remnants of the post-evacuation Centauri population, leaving no one to rebuild the colony beacons from the surface, the Human fleets lacked the firepower to actually destroy many of Centauri's hardened factories. For years, those factories would remain untouched on the surface, collecting dust, awaiting workers who never came ... until a colony ship out of Artemis, by way of Cryslon, landed at last to rebuild the beacons and rebuild the colony.
The gravel heap was so pleased with this coup, it utterly failed to notice its catastrophic errors on the actual battle front.
2414: The arrival of both Rock'N'Rolls simultaneously at Mentar - when the gravel pile had originally intended to delay sending even one until it knew whether the local nebula was close enough to the system to affect the dreanaughts' shields - could have been a complete fiasco, but for the moment, the luck of the gravel pile held. Mentar wan't quite close enough to experience nebula interference; the shields held, and the planetary bases fell. The Silicoids would not bomb the planet - nor any other Psilon world - thanks to the gravel heap's orders to preserve as much Psilon infrastructure and technology as possible intact ... but the Silicoid fleet was not only above Psilon worlds.
Human infrastructure and technology were of precious little interest to the gravel heap in comparison with Silicoid lives, and the vast majority of Sol's remaining population - along with most of its surviving factories - was blown to bits by the Lithium fighters and Lava Mixer battleship in orbit before - in another fatal error, like its failure to order more Lithium fighters built from Paranar the year before - it sent the Lava Mixer on, prematurely, toward Alkari space, with the other Lava Mixer arriving behind it, to replace the ship it should have reinforced.
Perhaps it was distracted by diplomatic shenanigans: Although its policy of continuing to bomb Human worlds may still have met with Psilon approval, the destruction of all 44 of Mentar's missile bases had seriously changed Zygot 's tune.
Visibly upset by the Silicoids' willingness to tear his empire apart as well as his enemies', the Psilon emperor somehow still couldn't see the writing on the war, stopping short of declaring war or even breaking contact while the gravel heap filed his complaint in the nearest active volcanic vent. Strader would turned up immediately thereafter, begging for peace, and had his request duly filed in the same location as Zygot 's complaint.
Diplomatic non-events such as these could hardly have provided a serious distraction, but the gravel heap - who was not only capable of reading the writing on the wall, but a co-author of that very writing - elected to launch a diplomatic offensive of its own just in advance of its planned invasion at Sol. It arranged for Silicoid engineers to learn outdated shield technology from their Alkari counterparts in exchange for secret Death Spore designs to which the entire Silicoid empire would shortly be immune, and equally-outdated industrial technology from the Psilons in exchange for anti-missile rockets, gaining just a little extra miniaturization for its fleets. And then it asked after Meklar inventions, and was astonished to learn what they had available for trade!
Meklar Scatter Pack rockets, though by no means the most advanced weapon system, were by far the most powerful missiles in the galaxy, and with them, Silicoid missile bases would finally have teeth. The improvement in Meklar industrial technology that Silicoid engineers provided in exchange seemed to the gravel pile a very small price to pay. The distraction provided by all this trading though may have been a heavy price indeed.
2415: The gravel heap was aware of the danger posed by the Human fleet; it had speculated during the first year of its reign about the risk that nothing in its own starfleet could stop the ships then at Sol from taking the skies over Phyco and shooting down transports en masse. Yet with five years of easy success around the galaxy, it seemed to have forgotten its own warnings, leaving a barely-adequate force in the Sol system when that same fleet, barely diminished in the battle at Laan - two Warships and fifteen Dreadnought cruisers, supported by a colony ship - completed its retreat and returned to Sol just ahead of dozens of Silicoid transports.
Thanks to a cloud of nearly 200 Lithium-ion fighters, the battle was probably winnable anyway - but victory would require a well-executed tactical plan, and the local Silicoid admiral was sloppy. Instead of focusing on the Warships to take at least one down before the Lithium 3s could be destroyed, it concentrated mainly on the dreadnoughts which, though more dangerous to the Lithiums collectively, were much less of a threat in the battle than the Warships. Between this mistake and its subsequent failure to control the battle effectively with the Lava Mixer's autorepair and repulsor beam, the admiral failed to destroy a single Warship, taking out only about half the Dreadnought cruisers instead, and with the twin Warships' heavy ion fire easily outpacing autorepair systems that could have handled just one easily, the Lava Mixer had no time to wear down the Human fleet with its paired heavy blast cannons before its hull threatened to go critical and it was force to retreat. Though all the minor skirmishers in Psilon space were successful, that single battle's outcome for the Silicoids was devastating.
Had a second Lava Mixer still been present in the system, perhaps - especially with the small additional firepower it could bring to bear early on - the Human admiral would have been frightened into retreat. Certainly a few dozen more Lithium-ion fighters would have made a tremendous difference in the outcome of the fight. But with victory within the Humans' grasp thanks to a series of grim mistakes, their fleet held to the last, protecting their homeworld, firing on helpless Silicoid transports and killing millions upon millions of the rock people who arrived in the course of the year. The failure of the Sol invasion would cost the Silicoids trillions of credits, to say nothing of all the irreplaceable lives of their people who died in space, and would delay the effective invasion of Willow considerably - but it preserved Humankind as a species.
Temporarily.
2416: The year that followed the fiasco was a quiet one by comparison, as the Human fleet set out from Sol in a spiteful attempt to attack defenseless Mentar before they all were slain, and the Silicoids spewed comforting lava over their wounds and government propoganda focused away from the front itself and onto the development of new technology.
The long-awaited antidote to death spores was almost at hand, and the gravel heap insisted on continuing the push it had been making throughout its reign toward the swiftest engines ever discovered - thus far only by the Meklar - by anyone in the galaxy. In spite of the three-layered tactical failure at Sol, the war was progressing well for the Silicoids, and it might have gone even better had the gravel heap found something more intelligent to do with the Rock'N'Roll that had just scouted the Psilon world of Volantis than send it down to Mentar again, where the arrival of the Human fleet two years later would force it to uselessly retreat.
2417: In the same year the Lava Mixer that left Sol a year too soon dismantled the missile bases at the Alkari artifacts world of Berel, the first and questionable fruits were borne by the gravel heap's personal vanity project known as "Roughly a trillion credits wastedspent from Drakka on ships not called Lithium 3s."
It was not, one must admit, a very catchy name. Nordia had the potential to be a jewel of a world, and the gravel heap did what it could in spite of an already-visible incoming Sakkra cruiser to ensure that the place would eventually live up to the dream, but the likelihood that the colony would ever live up to the opportunity cost of building it so far from the Silicoid core was probably negligible even when the long-range colony ship needed to claim it was built. The best that could be said in its defense is unfortunately that the second prong of the same vanity project was even worse.
In the meantime, the Lava Mixer's orbital bombardment of the Berel colony helped the Alkari to see the writing on the wall far better than Zygot did.
Just the same, the Alkari war declaration merely confirmed what by then was the de-facto reality.
2418: In addition to trivial and predictable military success - and the Rock'N'Roll forced to retreat from Mentar upon arrival, in the face of the main Human fleet - the Silicoid people also managed to achieve a real victory:
The new bio-toxin antidote devised by their planetologists would render them forever immune to the horrible Death Spores they had seen aboard Human and Psilon starships ... and learned to build themselves, though they never actually did so ... and whose blueprints they traded to the Alkari for a little help with shield options and miniaturization. The new advance was not only valuable in its own right but an important gateway technology: It suggested new and improved means of crystalization that could someday amount to rock-cloning techniques. At the same time, the next and most pointless stage of the gravel heap's vanity project came to what an exceptionally generous observer might reluctantly agree to call fruition.
Collassa would probably never have any significant value to the Silicoids, and might well be destroyed by alien aggression long before it paid anything back to the empire at all, never mind the full cost of its colony ship, but at least it was another rich world that - to the gravel heap - looked pretty.
There was more important news that year though, naturally.
With the arrival of a new fleet of Silicoid transports while the Human war fleet was off on a spite mission at Mentar, Sol fell to the Silicoids once and for all, and with it...
...the Humans were no more, and the Silicoids had come to dominate the galaxy. It is true that among 70 factories, the Silicoids failed to recover the last remaining Human technology that remained unknown to them, but as Ianus would later suggest, this might merely be the result of the complete irrelevance of any technique for reducing factory waste to a race whose greatest trouble with factory waste products is that they tend to be more appetizing than really filling. In all events, the drought wouldn't continue forever.
2419: The Sol fiasco of 2415 may have delayed the invasion of Willow, but couldn't push it beyond the period of the old gravel heap's reign. A total of eighty Silicoid batallions would ultimately fight for control of the world's 271 factories, and when they ultimately emerged victorious, their spoils were unerwhelming in number, but the best the Psilons had to offer in weapon and shield technology.
It's possible that Zygot still couldn't see the writing on the wall even at this late hour, but he certainly could feel the same writing being tattooed into the flesh of his empire. As a helpless measure, too little, too late, he finally declared war.
2420: After waiting patiently over Berel for a small group of Silicoid transports to arrive, and for the Alkari population to grow back above the numbers that it had killed in its single bombing run a few years before, the Lava Mixer in Berel orbit went in for a second and lasst bombing run there.
Its captain had miscalculated badly, failing to realize that birds taking shelter in homes and bunkers and factories are not as vulnerable as birds out in the open, as all the survivors of Berel necessarily were following the irradiation or destruction by fusion bombs of all their planet's cities. The entire colony was destroyed, entirely unintentionally, resulting in yet more deaths of Silicoid transports in space ... and, of course, less importantly, some 31 million Alkari. Fortunately for the old gravel heap, its battle plan worked a lot better at the Psilon world of Tau Cygni.
The last Psilon tech about which its people particularly cared was recovered from the ruins of some 57 factory-cities, meaning that in spite of the mistakes it had made, and in spite of failing to do so as well as it hoped, or as quickly, the old gravel heap had actually accomplished its main goals for its reign ... just in time to be replaced by a livelier Silicoid leader. The map may not have told the whole story of the old gravel heap's fiascos, but as it said itself of Collassa...
...it sure looked pretty!