RefSteel's Late Imperium 42 Report

[RefSteel]

I really wanted to finish this one, but my schedule really didn't want me to, and it won. I'll try to post a report (and finish the game) as soon as I can, but in the meantime my partial game only (yet) qualified for two awards:

Ford Prefect: 2441
Slartibartfasst: 2364

More later....

[RefSteel]

(My site's posting and editing function isn't cooperating with my computer today, so I'll post this here for now. More to come in the coming days if I can get more images to upload!)

Part 1: How Not to Play the Opening in Master of Orion*

* - Unless the circumstances are just right and you're good and/or lucky enough to get away with it.

This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

On this particular Thursday, something was moving quietly through the ionosphere many miles above the planet Moro Prime: It was a large, green, rounded something that Ford Prefect, were he living on the planet below, might have recognized gratefully as a kind of flying saucer in the traditional space livery of the Betelgeuse trading scouts. Sadly however, the flying saucer in question was not itself a scout: It was a full-fledged Betelgeusian colony ship in search of a good place to settle down and establish a colony of some kind - preferably one with a really nice pub. And more sadly still for everyone involved not named Ford Prefect, and for the colony ship most of all, Ford Prefect was not living on the planet below, and neither was anyone or anything else: A direct result of the massive over-abundance of Lashburnium crystals across the planet's entire surface.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about Lashburnium crystals:

Lashburnium crystals are some of the rarest and most valuable things in the galaxy that you don't want to get anywhere near without a lead body suit. Nobody has yet found a way to make a Kill-O-Zap gun with a tiny Lashburnium crystal for the power cell because every attempt has either resulted in a gun too heavy - with all the shielding - to be carried by any lifeform smaller than a Gargandian Gigasaur, or one that would kill the operator with radiation poisoning while being examined on the sales counter. Lashburnium crystals are tremendously useful for powering well-shielded engines and weapons systems aboard major space cruisers, and the smallest ones are used by Vogons when they want to preserve certain city blocks from decay by rendering them uninhabitable even for bacteria and persistent fungi for a period of several million years.



Three years before, the Betelgeuse trade council had celebrating the launch of their first colony ship by sending it out blind toward the center of the galaxy - or as nearly toward the center as they could, given its limited fuel capacity - decking it out in the festive green of their scout service since they hadn't thought to send any other ships ahead of it to actually scout the system for habitable worlds. One of the two scouts that they had built around the same time - being little more than enormous fuel tanks strapped to rocket engines - had been dispatched instead toward a distant yellow star beyond Moro and another red star called Toranor that might have seemed a more logical colony destination to an organization more interested in reasonable travel times than in the Betelgeuse trade council's combination mission statement and feverish obsession: "Expanding trade across the entire galaxy!"

That other organization would have had it right. Toranor, targeted for scouting because some lonely voice of reason had managed to opine, "Just in case, shouldn't we get some idea of what's closer to home before we actually plant a colony?" held a bright little ocean world, dotted with tiny, lush, beautiful islands consisting mostly of little stands of fruit trees and wide pebbly beaches: The only thing that kept the place from being renamed Paradise was the outcry of popular opinion against the sheer exclusivity of the place: Even including underwater plexiglass domes with spectacular views of the planet's coral reefs, there was precious little space to live on Toranor 3 in comparison with the lively worlds orbiting Betelgeuse. That - and the fact that when the planet was discovered, the lone colony ship assembled by the Betelgeuse trading scouts was well on its way to Moro. Even once it arrived and found nowhere in the entire Moro system capable of supporting a family of cockroaches for more than a minute or two, it was light-years away from Toranor, and even with the jump to hyperspace, wouldn't arrive there until a good four years later than it might have had it headed there right away from Betelgeuse.



Meanwhile, back at Betelgeuse itself, still more of the far-reaching, rickety trading scouts that would one day be famous across the galaxy had been assembled and dispatched - mostly - toward the outer reaches of their particular corner of space. Another organization might have focused on factories for a while before augmenting their initial fleet, but the cool cats of Betelgeuse were driven by nothing if not by curiosity, and couldn't wait to see what awaited them in the galaxy.

It might be supposed that the same curiosity drove them to investigate the field of planetology when they'd still only barely begun to develop their homeworld's infrastructure, but really it had more to do with their scouts' recent confirmation that there was no overwhelming and immediate need to learn how to live on barren rocks, giving them free reign to indulge their eagerness for creating wide-open spaces and for keeping their homes fastidiously clean.



The Betelgeuse scientific community, whose members regularly - and mostly accidentally - littered their labs in the debris of various Important Experiments for the Advancement of Knowledge in the Galaxy, would have loved more than anyone to develop improved measures for cleaning up those kinds of messes ... especially considering that most of the explosive experiments in question were in fields of biology! Sadly however, the plans for just such measures all were lost in a burst of paisley light and the stomach acids of someone's pet genetic mutant, in a terrible accident that was definitely probably not a practical joke at a lab partner's expense, and the plans were never recovered successfully. By a stroke of good fortune however, a seed sample from a culture of certain heavily-hybridized grasses so invasive that they could generally transform any landscape in which they established a foot-hold - be it a tropical rainforest or a sliding glacier, a hillside garden or an unimportant low-tech municipality - into a kind of savanna featuring particularly delicious grain seeds, though they functionally included only a single variety. As far as the cool cats of Betelegeuse were concerned though, this was perfectly acceptable: If the likes of sides of beefcattle, baconpigs, muttonsheep, and supperzebra were all willing to subsist on such monotonous fare, the most important dishes in the typical Betelgeuse diet - mainly rich, thick slabs of each of numerous kinds of meat, cooked nice and rare - would remain available in quite satisfactory varieties. The scientists of Betelgeuse therefore went straight to work on adapting and re-hybridizing the invasive grass strain into a version equally delicious to the tastes of herd animals, equally effective at transforming unfriendly landscapes, but - if possible - without the toxicity to all forms of animal life it imparts upon itself and everything it touches.



It was a Thursday again in 2306 when the colony ship touched down on the surface of Toranor 3, among some of the tallest and most-closely clustered islands on the surface of the world. Perhaps for that reason - few people in the long history of the galaxy have ever really gotten the hang of that particular day of the week - or perhaps because she wanted to save the decision-makers back at Betelgeuse a certain amount of embarassment - the camerawoman responsible for the new colony's publicity shots recorded the wrong Official Trade Council Year. As she did, the captain of the expedition - the second member of the crew to set foot upon the planet's surface, superceded only by the camerawoman herself - planted a flag on the rocky beach, anchored it deep among the pebbles, and declared for anyone present and listening to hear, "We come in peace!"

There was a silence. Under the ocean, without knowing why, millions of tiny animals shuddered. Nor were they wrong to do so: Two million new colonists were already pouring eagerly out of their colony ship, while preparations were made two parsecs away for the departure of some seventeen million more from Betelgeuse. The days of Toranor 3, pristine, peaceful, natural paradise, were over. The days of Toranor 3, loud, raucous, light-show-enhanced, high-tech resort world had begun.

Within a year, the trade council would all but forget that it existed.



Close by the edge of the Horsehead Nebula, somewhere near the center of the galaxy, lies a small unregarded pale-blue sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is a windswept, dune-covered desert planet whose cactus-descended life forms are so amazingly advanced that they can survive among the sun-baked sands of their desert merely by absorbing nutrients from the air and very occasional rainfall, taking their energy directly from their star - from Tyr.

It all depends on your perspective.

The cactus-descended inhabitants of Tyr 2 had never heard of digital watches, still less the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and if they were at all unhappy about either failing, they never seem to have admited it to anybody. We might all learn something from the Tyrians, if we happen to be capable of living out our lives rooted to rare patches of bedrock among shifting sands while spending every microdrop of water dear. Also if we find ourselves wanting to do so for some reason.

Still, theirs is a very successful survival strategy in the blue-hot light of Tyr, and learning to share their planet with them - probably by establishing them in agricultural fields and harvesting them for their cactusflesh and prickly pears - was soon a virtual obsession among Betelgeuse's people ... although this may have had less to do with the planet's life forms than with its sand, whose silicon dioxide grains, always resistant to weathering, were mingled with even more resistant grains of neutronium.



Tyr was a good six parsecs from Betelgeuse, and the new fuel base at Toranor, even closer to the galactic rim, hadn't helped matters any, but when an arid system - smaller, but not quite as dry as Tyr's - was discovered the following year by one of the newer curiosity-driven Betelgeuse trading scouts, plans for a relay fuel base were immediately put in motion, beginning with somebody trying to figure out some way or other to store the kind of fuel they'd need to complete either leg of the journey with an actual colony. Fortunately, some cool cats in the suddenly-heavily-funded Betelgeuse propulsion labs had a theory about hydrogen fuel that promised to be just enough to fuel each leg of the journey. Other cats, not quite as cool, piped up with something daft about deuterium eventually allowing ships with longer range: If the strags didn't understand that moving on to the planet they really wanted to get to sooner was better than maybe getting to see some extra planets someday, opined the Chair of the Trade Council, they obviously didn't know where their towels were!

It was exactly the kind of short-term thinking that had supported her meteoric rise to the top of her field - meteoric in the sense of the swift, bright streak of light, and meteoric in the sense of vaporizing so quickly, you might have missed it if you blinked. The trade council did see fit to continue his hydrogen fuel policies after she was formally sacked, but only because the policies actually made sense to anyone obsessed - as the entire council still was - with Tyr.



First contact - after a fashion - came in the cold skies of Ryoun 5, where the pilot of one of the trading scouts, holding orbit, was startled to find a little space capsule belonging to the Darlok people jumping in from hyperspace. Consulting her handy Guide, the pilot quickly made herself acquainted with the species:

The Darloks are a shifty people who love spying, cloaks, glowing energy swords, anything that makes mysterious clouds of billowing mist, and long walks on the beach. Their sign is "No Admittance," and was probably stolen on the way out of somebody's royal vault once they already had the crown jewels. Their semi-corporeal forms can assume any shape they desire, which makes them fantastic guests at costume parties as long as all your valuables are in a safe deposit box on the opposite side of the galaxy. When relaxing among friends, or as Darloks call them, "future victims," they often fall back on their natural form: A pair of glowing red eyes in the middle of just a whole lot of darkness. Their original homeworld is at a yellow star just rimward of the Horsehead Nebula, but they're really most at home inside other people's maximum-security top-secret facilities.

"Huh," the scout pilot remarked as the Darlok ship flew away, escaping back into hyperspace. "Shape-shifters. I guess that explains why that thing they're flying around in looked like somebody else's ship."

The trading scouts would spend the next five years watching for alien activity and slowly mapping out their own sector of space, while research continued - mostly on Toranor, while Betelgeuse 5 continued indulging a craze for building actual factories - and thanks to endless experimentation on various atolls and coral reefs out of sight of the better resorts, a breakthrough was finally achieved.



With the toxicity of the terraformer grass finally reduced to levels that would be harmless for Betelgeuse-based sentients, and no particular concern expressed among resort-goers for the health of Toranor's smaller native forms of life, land reclamation projects were ready to begin, and the Betelgeuse biologists were all ready with a new project idea. Asked to come up with a way for colonists to survive on frigid worlds like those in the Endoria and especially Drakka systems, where temperatures regularly approached the freezing point at midday in the summer on the inside of the scouting probes' high-powered electrochemical ovens, project lead Dellian Snooblefritz said, "Why don't they just make themselves a good, hot cup of tea? Give me an interesting challenge, like a way to live on some purely-theoretical kind of world that's so dead it's pretty much at absolute zero all the time, with nothing resembling an atmosphere and barely any microgravity."

As one, the members of the trade council groaned and muttered the likes of, "Sure, whatever, okay."

"We'll get back to you on that," one of the councilors suggested when she asked for funding. "In probably about a dozen years."

When she pleaded for some kind of interim funding - "How can I afford to raise my beautiful baby Bugblatter Beast?" - the coucil only relented so far as to approve a minimal budget for a one-year pilot project in construction engineering, and when Snooblefritz came back with nothing to show for the funding than some long-term speculation about reducing factory waste, they tabled that project too and told her to get to work in her colleagues' propulsion laboratories. "I will have my revenge!" she declared as she stormed out of the conference room - a somewhat unorthodox line to take for someone whose pet projects were still in need of funding.




Ten years later, after steadily-rising breakthrough probabilities claimed by the science teams on an annual basis, the hydrogen fuel cell prototypes assembled by Betelgeuse labs were still all going Hindenburg right off of the launchpad. Though no one could think of an enemy of the state close enough to the project to make it possible, whispers were even beginning to spread abroad about possible sabotage. With the lead scientists insisting their chances of success on the next year's test head risen above fifty percent - though only barely - the mood among members of the trade council was pensive at best.

"We really need to get this finished, so we can start concentrating our research efforts on planetology again," one councilor told another in near-despair. Happening to pass nearby, research specialist Dellian Snooblefritz overheard and froze, her jaw dropping open unheeded. She listened just long enough to hear the other councilor's morose agreement, then took off at a run for the nearest propulsion laboratory.

"Why didn't they tell me they'd restore planetology funding once their hydrogen cells started working?" she demanded of the uncaring air. "If only I'd known, I'd never have..." but she had reached the lab, and said no more, merely displaying her top-level credentials as she raced in. Within a year, the long-awaited fuel cells finally passed all their safety tests, including the one where they didn't explode immediately upon launch, with no more corners cut than were absolutely necessary for the convenience and vacation scheduling of the laboratory heads. Soon, the new cells were ready for installation across the entire trading scout fleet - including the giant green flying saucer whose crew had been waiting patiently at Betelgeuse for the past three years for a chane to depart toward the Moro system and establish a new colony.

Eventually, the ruling council would also remember to throw together a couple more trading scouts, and that their new fuel cells enabled more scouting generally. It must be admitted however that the whole thing was not their best showing.

It was about to get worse.



By the time the first of many Morrig colonists made planetfall and began assembly of their basic relay beacon and fuel base, a new colony ship for Tyr was already in space, about half-way to its waypoint just beyond the intense radiation belts of the Whynil system, with a small contingent of defensive fighters following in its wake - demonstrating that the people of Betelgeuse could occasionally do some things right, at least. The departure of some 40 million cool cats for Morrig - mostly en route to Tyr - from Betelgeuse itself was also strictly according to plan, though the minimal factory counts that left all those millions unemployed in the midst of pursuing expansion and important technologies certainly left room to question the trade council's sanity. Most observers however - particularly observers on Betelgeuse itself - would agree that the council's most questionable decisions were embodied in the tax laws they put into effect immediately following the launch of the Tyr colony ship. All throughout the Betelgeuse and Toranor systems, taxation would continue at record-setting rates for a full decade - and though the Morrig colony was immune for a while, at first due to nonexistence, and then because the costs of supporting the fuel supply runs to Whynil that would enable the colony ship to make it up to Tyr left its first two million residents nothing left to tax in any case, it too would later feel the burden for four long years while its transports were en route to Tyr. In theory, the resources gathered this way would speed the development of Tyr 2's colony-to-be, and certainly they did that, but the cost to the Betelgeuse people in the meantime was staggering, and their overall economy would unquesitonably have been better off if they'd made do without any treasury at all, in spite of the fact that it was emptied over the first several years of the new colony's existence helping Tyr 2 finally get up to speed.



What the newsdroid didn't know when it announced the population of the Betelgeuse trading scouts' merchant empire as fourth-largest among the significant factions in the galaxy - referring to them by the familiar term they sometimes used for their race in reference to the Betelgeuse national pastime of immitating motorboat noises with their lips - was the presence of some 60 million more "Mrrshans" in two waves of transports, the first and larger wave on the point of arriving at Morrig just as a big green flying saucer prepared to land among the deserts of Tyr. What the Betelgeuse "Mrrshans" didn't know at the time either was that they had made their big colonial push ... prematurely.



The colonization of Tyr was a huge step forward for the people of Betelgeuse, not only because of the desert world's riches, but because they at last could finally get over their obsession with the place and get on to the regular business of living. The by-then-traditional listing of the prior year instead of the present in the first publicity photos of the landing resulted at the very worst in a modicum of confusion, and some of the trade council's most obviously insane policies were being rescinded. The crippling taxes they had imposed would persist for four years more since Tyr's tiny new population - already stretched thin supporting the little fighter fleet in orbit above their world - was too new to be affected by the tax rates right away, but even these taxes, among the worst of the ill-advised, Tyr-driven Betelgeuse policies, were finally, finally canceled in 2339, when the first wave of transports from Morrig arrived in the Tyr system.

Next time: Going Even Further Out on a Limb
(TO BE CONTINUED...)

[RefSteel]

Part 2: The Second Obsession

It wasn't long before the costs of the somewhat daft Betelgeuse policies were forcefully driven home to their leadership: While the "Mrrshans" were overextending themselves for their fourth colony, the Darloks they had briefly encountered not far away had snuck into and stolen no less than six star systems. Whether the people of Betelgeuse could have beaten them to that benchmark remains an open question, but it is certain that failing to claim any worlds beyond Tyr in a timely fashion - having commited all their resources to speeding Tyr's development instead - would have severe consequences not far down the line.



The first hint appeared just as the first wave of transports was finally hitting Tyr: A lone Scout arriving in the Denubius system was driven away by a series of misile launches from the planet's surface, a motley collection of starships - some of which appeared to be old salvage jobs, apparently taking the place of various hulls that had been stolen right out of the shipyards by daredevil Darlok spies - and most devastaing of all, a broadcast from the planet's surface of a noise so unspeakably foul and loathesome that the scout pilot, cutting in the emergency hyperspace circuits that would take her and her starship directly home, covered both of her ears and screamed in her cockpit until the automated hyperspace jump allowed her to escape. Four more years would pass before the "Mrrshans" at large understood the true nature of the horror perpetrated against their pilot, who was still screaming after the hyperspace jump carried her safely away from the broadcast:

The governor of Denubius, reading poetry.

Two years after that horrible encounter, while the pilot was still in hyperspace - and still screaming - a Betelgeuse trading scout passing through the Horsehead nebula arrived for the first time at one of the stars in a perfect binary system: The twin suns of Soulianis and Rahm. Though it had departed at the same time, and from the same world, as a second scout bound for the other star, with the same theoretical arrival time, the vagaries of nebula travel had delayed the second ship by most of a year, so that Mynxlin Snapgriddle became the first pilot to witness the twin suns for herself - and the first to learn what lay in wait above the world there.



As it turned out, what lay in wait was a pair of Alkari scout ships, which retreated immediately, allowing Mynxlin to send home a full scouting report of the planet Trax, far out in the nebula surrounding the Rahm-Soulianis binary system. The planet's surface, barren of life, was nevertheless littered with every useful element imaginable - or at least every element more stable than lashburnium crystals - raw dotomite formations overlooking reajax seas, with clutches of neutronium and zrbite and technophilium everywhere Mynxlin turned her scanners. The planet wasn't large, but it seemed to be built from all the rarest and most valuable raw materials in the galaxy - the rawest, that is, that could be handled with anything remotely resembling safety. As word reached Betelgeuse itself, a new directive was broadcast all across local space, to all the trading scouts still in the field: Another high-priority target had been identifying, eclipsing even Tyr. Like the last one, it would require help from researchers as well as starship engineers - but at least this time, no tax would be established once a ship was en route; this time, the crippling problem would be in the design of the ship itself - and in a critical failure later on to redeploy the fleet.

Making these kinds of silly mistakes had worked so well for the trade council before - depending on what "well" is supposed to mean - that they saw no reason to change anything noticeably.

The following year, when their second scout to arrive in the Rahm-Soulianis system encountered heavier resistance above a completely different planet, well-hidden by the nebula itself, the process had become almost routine: True, the trading scout itself had to hastily retreat from the enormous automated defense ship squatting massively in orbit over what could only be the legendary planet Magrathea, but the plan for taking control of that most-important world - in broad strokes at least - was the same as it had been for Trax and earlier Tyr 2: Research the special technology needed. The one unimportant difference was the nature of the techs: Hydrogen fuel eventually allowed access to Tyr's richest world, and environmental controls would make it possible to live on the barren but incalculably rich planet Trax, and Magrathea merely required the development of numerous combat technologies several generations ahead of anything anyone on Betelgeuse - or indeed anyone still active in interplanetary travel anywhere else in the galaxy - had ever remotely conceived. The ancient Magratheans hadn't been kidding about their automated defenses, and they had been very, very advanced indeed.



By comparison, the people first encountered at Denubius were downright primitive. Of course, the same could have been said about anyone, and the Betelgeuse trading council was hardly in a position to say anything on the subject, with their relatively tiny clutch of technology. Besides, what the green things from Denubius and Vogsphere lacked in technology - those horrifying masters of militarized verse - they more than made up in sheer bloody-mindedness. For these horrible green aliens, in their horrible yellow ships - plus a few recommisioned from an old scrapyard to replace ships the Darloks had stolen - were in fact the bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious, callous Vogons themselves, and their leader Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz.

At least, his name had been Jeltz originally, back when he was merely captain of a ship in the Vogon construction fleet. Since then, he had decided to write a poem about his single most-favorite subject - himself - and partly for the sheer chaos of paperwork it would create, partly to confuse his presumably numerous enemies and rivals, and mostly in order to make it rhyme with "Oozing their phlebmigok dreebirs from their jeebleweltzn," he had officially added an n to the end of his legal name. The aggressive stances he took with other races when conducting diplomacy was hardly a surprise to anyone in or outside of the Betelgeuse trading scouts organization. In fact, few among them would have been surprised to learn that he and his people had redirected their efforts from galactic conquest to merely destroying planet after planet to make room for apocryphal hyperspace bypasses that would never actually be built, nor needed, nor even especially wanted by anybody. The Vogons therefore did win their share of surprise and horror among the people of Betelgeuse after Jeltzn sent trasmissions of his bluster across the stars aboard advanced diplomatic trade vessels that were apparently powered by refined Dotomite fuel cells: The very latest in Vogon technology. To the great relief of the trade council, he did not see fit to declare war on them right away, and even acceded to their proposal of extremely minimal trade relations - and to their much-greater relief, he refrained, for the moment at least, from sharing any poetry with them.



Nearly a decade later, the mismanaged trade empire of Betelgeuse - still losing money on their only trade partnership - finally had a breakthrough of their own. After years of lively discussions among university professors about the philosophical underpinnings of survival on an utterly dead world, enthusiastically led by Dr. Dellian Snooglefritz, a graduate student had the temerity to suggest, "Isn't space totally dead anyway already? And aren't we sending transports and colony ships on multi-year journeys through space anyway? Why don't we just build big old domes out of spaceship window plexiglass over spaceship-hull foundations and clmate-control the inside like a ship?"

Her idea was dismissed out of hand by her professors, and her lab-cleaning assignments were tripled, keeping her as far as possible away from any real work while her professors competed to be the first to write up her proposal in more flowery language, with more misleading and exaggerated titles, and padded with philosophical maunderings, as their own. Within three years, the first ship designed to build a colony exactly along those lines was ready to set out for Trax from Tyr, accompanieed by zero of the starfighters Tyr had coincidentally produced for what turned out to be unnecessary emergency defensive purposes in the same year as the breakthrough, although those fighters also did not precede the colony ship there. This was because, as the chair of the trading council explained, "Hurrrrr durrrrrrr. Duhhhhhh uhhhh duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhh durrrrrrrrrr."

While waiting for the colony ship to be produced, the Betelgeuse trading scouts continued to explore the further reaches of the galaxy - a policy that resulted in a momentous encounter in 2353.



Almost exactly opposite the edge of the Horsehead Nebula, across the galactic core, the third yellow star in a little cluster that also contained Vogsphere turned out to be the homeworld of the mighty Meklar people. Though still too distant to establish a meaningful interstellar relationship with the Betelgeuse trade council, the Meklar were poised to make a substantial impact on galactic affairs if they ever figured out how to actually breed. Their homeworld's impressive factory count - protected by defensive bases mounting some sixty missile tubes - would have allowed them to produce amazing technological wonders or devastating starfleets had there been any actual people to work there. Thanks to the advanced robotic factory interfaces built into their cybernetic bodies, each Meklar factory worker was able to operate their machinery more efficiently than any other race's workers in the entire galaxy, and on top of that, in order to keep their homeworld's factories from falling into disuse, Meklar leadership had devised a system whereby each worker visited a different factory on each day of their five-day work week. Thanks to this clever technique, nearly all of their factories were rendered fully operational for two entire days out of the week, sitting completely idle and silent only throughout the other three.

By one of those cosmic coincidences that sometimes single-handedly spawn entire new fanatical religions, Darlok scientists achieved a breakthrough on a new set of advanced fuel cells at exactly the same moment that the Betelgeuse trading scout was retreating from a barrage of missiles fired by Meklon's defensive bases. In fact it was an entirely meaningless coincidence: Thanks to ongoing work on something called "The Heart of Gold" and its infinite improbability drive, it was kind of inevitable that a lot of pretty meaningless coincidences were going to crop up here and there.



The Darlok people, led by Shador the Incredibly Dangerous (known to his buddies as Sid, although it must be admitted that he had no buddies) were monstrously powerful, desperately interested in technology, and prepared to pay any price for it, provided that the price was extremely low - such as offering the secrets of a tiny battle computer or fuel cell upgrade for those of surviving on dead worlds - or paid in the form of salaries to the various spies they deployed to acquire them for free. Their interest in trade was nonexistant, and their relations with the Betelgeuse trading scouts already rather uneasy, but that was nothing to their feelings about the underpopulated Meklar, who appeared - from limited second-hand information at least - to be at war with pretty much the entire galaxy. Certain members of the Betelgeuse trade council hoped that they could eventually convince the 'loks to enter into the spirit of trade and diplomacy, relying on the key slogan, "Look at us! We aren't machines!" but this was not to be. Thanks to the mismanagement of their small fighter fleets, the Betelgeuse trading scouts were going to end up with a very serious Darlok problem before many years more. On the other hand, as one of the saner members of the trade council asked in closed session, "Do we want to let their merchants visit our planets - or meet our merchants anywhere? Do Darloks even sell anything?"

Another member of the Council consulted a well-used copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "Let's see. Says here their main exports are spies, glass beads, spyware-infested computer programs, espionage agents, souvenirs and gifts containing well-concealed audio and video bugs, and day-laborers who are actually spies in disguise. Their main imports seem to be whatever isn't nailed down, and most of the things that are, especially if they can be readily concealed inside a cloak." Continuing to read thoughtfully, the councilor added, "Says here that if you get a good deal on a purchase from a Darlok, first make sure you still have your wallet, then that you still have your spaceship. If you do, don't bother checking on your family; just start trying to put together the ransom money."

Though wary of concluding that the grapes of Darlok trade were sour merely because they had been withheld, the Council was reluctantly forced to admit that any grapes they might have received from the Darloks would likely have been infused with some kind of debilitating psycho-active drugs.



Several years passed peacefully before the Darloks showed up at Trax with an armed colony ship. In the meantime, Vogon trade continued to struggle ever-so-slowly upward through the endless red tape of Vogsphere toward actual profitability, while the Darloks continued to scorn the very notion of Betelgeuse trade. Research had proceeded steadily - but slowly, since outside of Tyr, the trade council had been unconscionably remiss in allocating resources to the construction of factories, an error they had known better than to make but only recently begun to remedy - and a couple of new starships in green trading scout livery were crawling across the stars. The one traveling through the nebula of course flew especially slowly, and was notably not accompanied by any of the fighters whose pilots were continuing to sit on their thumbs at Tyr, perhaps because the trade council had collectively been slipped mind-altering drugs by Darlok agents even without the medium of grapes or trade goods of any variety.

Of course the fleet might not have arrived in time to stop that first colony ship anyway, but the fighters already present at Trax were - barely - sufficient for that task. Only three survived the encounter, but the Darlok ship did not - and then the Betelgeuse trade council descended into a litany of curses from all sides as they realized that the Darloks were all but certain to arrive with another armed colony ship almost immediately, and that even destroying those colony ships would do little or nothing to slow the Darloks down: They never had to actually pay for their colony ships; their colonists would just steal whatever unwary starship happened to be passing through their space and ride it out to Trax so they could shoot down more Betelgeuse trading scout fighters and steal the whole planet for themselves.

Unfortunately for the people of Betelgeuse, this cynical appraisal of the situation would turn out to be exactly right, and the fighter fleet on its way up from Tyr would arrive too late - too late from one perspective, at least. Fortunately however, their scientists were finally coming up with an answer to this very kind of problem - and one that might even bear on the immediate emergency.



Though too bulky to be cost-effective on massed population transports, nuclear engines would double the speed of every starship on which they were actually installed, allowing nimbler fighters to reach their destinations twice as quickly as before, and dodge around incoming beams like crazed wombats with their tails on fire. Even the Betelgeuse colony projects would go faster once the new ships were actually built, and although the ships already in space were moving like mollasses, the creaky old Fjord colony ships - having existed for maybe four or five years at best - were nearing their destinations already.



The first to arrive - in 2359, continuing the traditional calendar reversal - claimed the frigid iceball of Drakka 8, a planet selected for early colonization from Betelgeuse itself because the planet was a ball not so much of water ice as of neutronium oxides ideal for refinement into critical elements of all kinds of powerful machinery. Once the basic colony structure was established, millions of enthusiastic colonists set out to make the world their own, talking in excited voices all the way across the cosmos about the artistic brilliance of their hero, Slartibartfast - while their colleagues back home finally began investigating research projects that would ultimately lead to electonic countermeasure jammers, advanced shield technology, and miniaturized personal lasers that would prove especially popular with the sort of enlightened liberal cops who know all about sensitivity and everything but are nevertheless, to their loudly-expressed regret, extremely trigger happy. And closer to the galactic core, deep in the Horsehead Nebula, another Fjord was preparing for its impending arrival at the Rahm-Soulianis system, to colonize the second-most important world in the galaxy.

It would have no opportunity of doing so: Only three laser fighters had survived their battle with the previous Darlok colony ship, and the Betelgeuse trade council inexplicably had not seen fit to send any escorts for their colony ship from among the fighters already stationed at Tyr, still less to arm the Fjord 1.0 itself.



The Fjord would arrive at the same time as yet another Darlok colony ship - not produced by the Darloks of course, but stolen fair and square from random space merchants, already en route to Trax, as soon as the previous one had been destroyed - armed with a combination of missiles and lasers. The pilots of the three remaining Betelgeuse trading scout fighters fought gamely in hope of a miracle, only to perish under Darlok fire, and though the Darloks couldn't destroy the Betelgeuse colony ship itself directly, they could force it away from the planet and colonize it for themselves.

Snabcab Fizzlesnoof, the governor of Tyr for Betelgeuse, stared at the reports of the engagement for a good ten minutes before deciding what to do. She could see the rafts of colonists on rapid approach to her world, supposedly to replace those that she'd been meant to launch toward Trax once the colony base there was ready, to allow her world to be immediately repopulated in spite of doing everything in its power for the new Trax colony, as her people's closest world. She knew all about Tyr's housing problems, its sand-strewn cities crammed to capacity by galactic travelers eager to work their world's neutronium mines. She knew, critically, that the Darloks hated Betelgeuse already and had already refused at least two requests to establish even the smallest of trade relations. She could see the Fjord 1.0 retreating from the Rahm-Soulianis system, back toward her recently-rediscovered home star, but reasoned that with the way it crawled through space, especially in the nebula, the costs of maintaining its hull, and its enormous distance from any star it would be useful to colonize, the ship would be returning home in pieces as just so much scrap.

She smiled a certain feral smile - a dangerous kind of smile, were there anyone who could read it - and activated the global public broadcast suite. She cleared her throat. "I am pleased to announce," she told her planet-wide audience, "the successful formation of the Trax colony. All colonists who won the assignment lotteries should report to your waiting transports immediately."



The little detail of who had managed to colonize Trax might be of interest to a scholar of history, but for Snabcab and the fighting cats of Betelgeuse heading out on the latest transport wave, the distinction was largely irrelevant anyway.

When another armed Darlok colony ship chased a Betelgeuse trading scout from orbit above Ukko the following year, the response could not be quite so drastic, nor so decisive: Ukko, though long coveted by the trade council, was simply too far away from Betelgeuse fuel bases for transports or serious starships to actually reach - and it took another year after that before another Betelgeuse combat fleet actually reached the skies of Trax, where the tiny Darlok colony was protected not by Darlok ships, but by their Vogon allies: Yet another armed colony ship, this one backed by four destroyers. Fortunately, these were not the old pop-gun fighters that had barely managed to take down a single stolen colony ship several years before at the cost of most of their little fleet: This was a true combat wing of nearly 40 swift-flying Kill-O-Zap 2s, with more reinforcements coming. The Vogon fleet, like the Darlok colony ships, may well have mounted lasers along with their missile racks, and they may have had shields that would have rendered the Kill-O-Zaps less effective at another star, but deep in the Horsehead Nebula, once their missiles were expended to no purpose - the Kill-O-Zaps were fast enough to just dodge out of their way - they took one look at the Betelgeuse gunners, then back at whatever remained of their own armament, and elected for a hasty retreat.

The transports just kept on coming.

Next time: Open War!
(TO BE CONTINUED...)

[RefSteel]

Thanks, Thrawn! Let's see how long I can keep up a decent rate of daily reporting at least....

Part 3: The Border War

In 2364, the now-reinforced Betelgeuse fleet still controlled Trax's orbit, with transports closing in from Tyr and no sign as yet of any from Darlok space. A few last-ditch diplomatic overtures were made to Shador - who refused to break any of its alliances and offered no interesting technology for exchange - and Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz did it one better by offering no technological exchange at all, but only an opportunity to listen to some of its poetry. The Betelgeuse diplomats closed the connection hastily. They had done what they could - little good though it did them - and the die was cast. According to some, the year 2364 was the most important in all of Mrrshan history.



Of course, the attack on Trax wouldn't come until the following year. 2364 was the all-important year when Drakka finished carving its first set of fjords, terraforming the first tundra world in Betelgeuse's reach to the best of their then-current abilities in hopes of living up to the legacy of the great Slartibartfast himself.

Once 2365 rolled around though, the action began. A small Darlok war fleet - another stolen colony vessel supported by three destroyers - arrived just in time to meet the Betelgeuse colony ship trying to found a colony in the Ryoun system, and to chase the ship back to Tyr with mimimal losses. And in the Rahm-Soulianis binary system, in the dark skies of Trax, the main Betelgeuse trading scout combat fleet made one final pass over the world before the transports arrived. Three years before, when the initial fleet of almost 40 Kill-O-Zap fighters first took Trax's orbit from the Vogons, they hadn't even bothered to ask central command whether they should try for orbital bombardment: They weren't mounting enough laser cannons to make a difference anyway. When their reinforcements arrived at last, not quite doubling the size of their fleet, they had continued to hold their fire. They had enough guns to do some damage, but they were peaceful, sensitive souls who didn't want risk destroying the vulnerable habitation domes below. By 2365 though, with nothing at which to shoot, the pilots were getting bored. They noticed that the colony had expanded a little more, without completing anything resembling a factory, and the commander of the fleet said, "Aw, let 'em have their fun. Might as well shoot up some of those Darloks out on the periphery."

The pilots had their fun - a little overzealously.



"Good thing we waited for the colony to expand," the commander muttered, tugging at her collar nervously. "I'd have hated for tens of millions of our people to hit the world and die of asphyxiation because we'd burned down all the planetary life support systems. At least they should win in a walk-over now when they touch down to conquer the planet."

They did. Three million people died on the surface of Trax simply because the planet couldn't support all 27 million invaders along with the million Darloks who already inhabited the place. Twelve million more were already en route, two years behind, in anticipation of rapid terraforming and the possibility of heavy losses in the first wave's fight for the planet, but there wasn't any fighting to speak of: Just a hunt for Darloks all over the colony where they were trying to escape death at overwhelming odds by masquerading as lamp-posts, mailboxes, bureau drawers, potted plants, cases of Old Janx Spirit, and in one case, a friendly puppy (that Darlok's last mistake). Many, many Darloks were uncovered and killed over the course of the year. Many. Roughly a million. Probably a million. A millionish. Darloks did not manage to quietly replace anywhere close to 4% of the surviving population, to travel out on merchant ships and infiltrate other planets in the Betelgeuse trade confederacy. Probably not even 0.0004%! Probably. As one member of the trade council put it besides, "Let's face it. It's not like we hadn't been infiltrated by a bunch of 'loks already."

Shador, the Darlok emperor, took the opportunity to officially declare war, surprising precisely nobody, but as it had repeatedly rebuffed every effort at friendship, cooperation, or trade in the years prior, no one on Betelgeuse - not even the presumably-numerous Darlok spies, since they would have yet another excuse to ply their trade - had any regrets. There might have been some problems from the Darloks' allies, but as it turned out, the Darlok alliances had all been recently cut to shreds.

"I can't imagine why," complained one high Darlok official, casually smoothing the Sash of Office it had stolen right off the back of the Alkari ambassador the year before. It warmed its hands at the fire it had built from a portion of a seventy-volume set of poetry it had lifted for the purpose from the official Vogon embassy a few weeks before that. "We're such good, reliable allies - and so trustworthy!"

There was one diplomatic surprise that arose from the conquest of Trax however - though, diplomatic event that it was, it naturally resulted in a lot of double-speak:



Consulting their handy copies of the Guide, Betelgeuse's ambassadors found it had this to say about the Alkari:

The bird people of Altair are famed across the galaxy for the pride they take in what they call their "honor" - a word that they, like most people who use it often, apparently understand to mean "extremely underhanded dealings, combined with a propensity to take offense at anything anyone else says or does that carries the slightest whiff of dishonesty." Their regular use of "technically true" in their own defense often requires them to twist and torture language in such a way that dictionaries, grammar books, and linguistic treatises actually cry out in pain, but their trade partners are inevitably declared dishonorable liars and double-dealers for committing any of a host of crimes, from dressing up in costume to colonizing planets to - worst of all - having feline ancestry.

The best way to get a drink from an Alkari pilot is to let one cheat you at cards. The best way to irritate one is to explain your perspective on basically anything. If you happen to be Mrrshan, your only hope of a lift is to masquerade as a member of some other species, but the surest way to get spaced out an airlock on an Alkari starship is for them to uncover your fuzzy, pointed ears.

It didn't look very promising, but fortunately the Alkari lived in the absolute far corner of the galaxy, and had only achieved contact because their incredibly advanced propulsion technology enabled their merchants - just barely - to reach Trax. With the Nearly Universal Meklar War distracting them from their hatred of all things Mrrshan, they even were willing to establish a tiny trade package - unlike Shador, just for instance.



As long as the Alkari stayed in their corner of the galaxy (which they wouldn't) and the "Mrrshans" of Betelgeuse stayed in theirs (which they had no intention doing if they could help it) there was every prospect of a true and lasting peace. So it was probably safe to give it at least nine or ten minutes.

Instead, it somehow went on for years. Alkari trade fleets plied the Horsehead nebula, trying to establish profitable deals, while tranports set out in a three-pronged invasion from Betelgeuse, Morrig, and Toranor for the new Darlok colony at Ryoun. Their pilots cheerfully watched the departure of another tiny set of assault transports from Trax itself, likely thanks to the nebula to arrive late if at all, sent on their way mostly just to make room for the last of the transports sent long since from Tyr without more needless Mrrshan death. Their merchants plied their trade beneath the twin suns of Rahm and Soulianis while Betelgeuse trading scouts belatedly - very belatedly, inexplicably waiting until 2369 - colonized the desert world of Selia 4 way out at the galactic rim. They calmly nursed their tea at "outdoor" tables beneath the colony domes at Traxian restaurants, whistling quietly but appreciatively as they watched millions of Darlok soldiers arrive on assault transports of their own, streaking through the skies as Betelgeuse trading scout Kill-O-Zap fighters rose to meet them.



The fireworks were pretty, after all. None of the 'loks survived to reach the planet's surface and interrupt the Alkari merchants' tea time, so they perceived nothing actually dishonorable about the show. Which meant that somehow, in spite of maintaining contact for four whole years, with mistrustful relations improving slowly if at all, the Mrrshan and Alkari people remained at peace. Four years - and therefore time enough, thanks to the new Selia colony, for a higher Council than the Betelgeuse trading scouts' to meet.



The Galactic Council, a quasi-democratic body established for the purpose of abolishing democracy, allowed all the peoples of the galaxy to vote for a single leader to the seat of High Master - a role known in some cultures as "President for Life" or "Supreme Dictator" - over the entire galaxy. The proposed galactic government, to be known as the New Republic, would have three branches: The Executive branch would consist of the High Master, the High Master's appointed agency heads and their subordinates and staff, and any sinecures the High Master felt like inventing. The Legislative Branch would consist of Galactic Senators representing each race, and would propose legislation for the High Master's consideration. Important checks and balances were in place to ensure that the legislature never grew too powerful however: Any legislation they proposed would be subject to veto, line-item veto, rewriting, or replacement by the High Master, and any legislation they failed to propose would be subject to adoption by the High Master directly. Moreover, the legislators would be selected from among the members of their race, subject to replacement at any time by a decision of the same body, by an impartial panel consisting of the High Master and other members of the Executive Branch. Finally, the Judiciary Branch would consist of judges appointed for life by the High Master, subject to the approval of the Galactic Senate unless their decision was overridden by an Executive Order from the High Master. Checks and balances put into effect to prevent the legal system from growing too powerful likewise ensured that any member of the Judiciary would be removed from office and replaced if declared unfit for office by the High Master.

By dint of their dictatorial rule over the galaxy's largest populations, Shador and Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz were nominated for the role of High Master, each needing thirteen of the High Council's nineteen total votes to become High Master and establish their New Republic across the galaxy. For some reason however, the idea didn't catch on with the other leaders: Though the Meklar had at some point made peace with the Vogon people and added their single vote to the Vogons' four in the hope that they might thereby avoid extermination at the hands of their numerous enemies, and though the Klackon bug people threw two irrelevant votes to Jeltz as well, apparently in some onset of arthropodian humor, the Alkari and Betelgeuse "Mrrshans," with four votes and three respectively, refused to participate at all, leaving Shador with only the five votes of its own people, and the two nominees with too few votes combined to elect anyone High Master of anything.

So the galactic wars continued, much to the chagrine of the poor Meklar, and much to the delight of the Betelgeuse trading scouts. Their transports converged on Ryoun to claim the world for their own, and even their scientists were slowly getting off of their long, furry tails and joining in the spirit of discovery.



With basic waste reduction techniques in hand, another organization might have pursued defensive technology - and another small advantage for its assault troops - such as duralloy combat armor seemed to offer; the Betelgeuse trading scouts however, no matter how gleefully warlike they may have become in response to their Darlok enemies, were more interested in improving their shoddy industrial base, and since their leadership hadn't committed to doing so enough historically, they figured their best hope would lie in making the task easier in the future with some new technology. The possible future they contemplated was distant, naturally, but at the rate things were going, the "Mrrshans" seemed poised to need all the help they could get with their factories, no matter when.

The following year, the transports hit Ryoun, supported again by a Kill-O-Zap fighter fleet. With no factories on the planet's surface, the fighters were given the okay to go on another bombing run, wiping out about a quarter of the colony's still-tiny population.



It didn't seem to matter. The Darloks, outnumbered almost twenty to one, pursued the same tactics they had on Trax: Hiding in wardrobes disguised as (one of the many identical) cloaks, climbing onto rooftops and shape-changing into chimneys - with cohorts down below shapechanged in a corner of the house to make it look like it had a fireplace - or lying flat on the ground and pretending to be dirt. Millions of them were found in their hiding places, or caught trying to sneak onto transports, and executed by soldiers from Betelgeuse. Almost none of them survived to shapechange again and infiltrate Betelgeuse society like so many of their brethren. Almost none. Very few of them. Probably.

As soon as resistance - such as it was - had been disposed of, with more soldiers lost to the stresses of surviving in the suddenly-too-crowded colony domes than to actual combat, twenty-seven million of the survivors immediately boarded transports bound for the next target on their list: Ukko 3, the ocean world long coveted by Betelgeuse leadership, on which the Darloks had planted a flag just a few years before. It was certainly a good thing for Betelgeuse's soldiers that there were probably no Darloks concealed among them, disguised as "Mrrshans" or armored combat uniforms or racks of assault rifles or mess hall tables or portable hand warmers! Very few Darloks at least. Probably.

In the meantime, a small Darlok attack fleet was moving on Tyr, but the ships involved were known to be vulnerable to Kill-O-Zap fighters, so nobody was really worried. They figured they'd have plenty of time to throw a defense together - until it turned out that they didn't. The 'lok ships flew so much faster - or were actually so much closer - than the Tyrians had expected that they took Tyr orbit before the locals got around to doing anything about it. The Darloks' limited supply of missiles and lasers, launched from orbit, even managed to blow up an entire factory before defenses could be scrambled together. "Oops," said Snabcab Fizzlesnoof, Tyr's governor, eloquently. With plenty of Kill-O-Zaps already on the way, and factory repairs a trivial matter thanks to her world's mineral riches, she shrugged and moved on to the next item on her agenda: Reviewing the latest reports on the Vogons of nearby Tao.



Most of their technology was little more impressive than the products of Betelgeuse's Sirius Cybernetics Coproration: Two additional levels each of ECM and shields didn't particularly worry her as long as she didn't have to actually repel shielded Vogon fleets, and the green bug-eyed monsters had no weapons more dangerous than the Hyper-Vapoware rockets she'd already been laughing about on Darlok fleets. The Vogons had better range than their Mrrshan neighbors, certainly - but, as Snabcab muttered to herself, "Sure; them and everybody else. What of it?" No, the really interesting report came in the field of Planetology, where the terraforming technology on which her people were still struggling to make progress was not only fully known to the Vogons already but joined to some kind of soil-enriching nanotechnology.

Perhaps Governor Fizzlesnoof was a little cavalier in her dismissal of the orbiting Darlok fleet, but she knew two things the Darloks didn't: Firts, her planet was about to complete a defensive base that could not only scan Darlok fleets, but likely hold them off as well with a minimal supporting fleet. Second and more importantly, she would not have a minimal supporting fleet in place; instead, no less than 70 Kill-O-Zap fighters would be arriving shortly through hyperspace. When the battle was joined over the Tyr colony, the only thing that saved any of the Darlok ships was their pilots' decision to retreat. The following year, the local nebula fleet disposed of a Darlok attack on Trax just as easily, while the transport interdictor fleet that had been sent to Ryoun easily chased an Alkari probe away. Defending - for the moment - appeared to be trivially easy for the Betelgeuse trading scouts ... at least when they realized when and where their forces needed to be. Not everything would come so easily though: Shooting down Darlok transports in space - along with their combat ships - was one thing, but the 'loks of Ukko were already well-established on the ground, with no need to travel through space. Their population there was still laughably small by the standards of most people in the galaxy - with doomed transports still passing through space in the vain hope of reinforcing their position - and the "Mrrshan" invaders would outnumber them by more than two to one, with equivalent or better ground combat technology, but the hand laser designs for which Betelgeuse had hoped still hadn't had all the kinks worked out - such as the massive power requirements and intrinsic energy inefficiency that tended to melt their housing when they were operating - and the 'loks were dug into defensive positions on the surface, and the Betelgeuse soldiers inexplicably suffered almost impossibly numerous casualties.



On both Trax and Ryoun, the sites of the previous invasions, the Darlok resistance had cleverly faded away, costing the invaders roughly the same number of lives through sheer asphyxiation outside of the colony domes as they were likely to do through combat. At Ukko though, the Darloks fought, and the "Mrrshans" nearly couldn't. "Friendly fire" incidents among the Mrrshan ranks were rampant in the early fighting, throwing their plans and their troops' morale into chaos. Many of the soldiers died of inexplicable accidents - some reportedly strangled by tentacles that sprouted from their own body armor, others flattened by unknown forces as they tried to grab their weapons - or in at least one reported case, struck down by the assault rifle she was carrying when it somehow grew a giant fist and punched her in the face. Troops had to be rescued from being apparently eaten by their foot lockers and cots, and their reinforcements, en route to assist with the worst of the fighting, were regularly tripped up as though tables and chairs in the mess halls were sticking their legs out for the purpose, exit hatches slamming shut of their own volition, and light fixtures bursting from their anchor points and falling hard on soldiers' heads for no apparent reason.

As the battle progressed, it soon became clear that the friendly fire incidents always involved soldiers who couldn't have been present - having fallen to such accidents or ambushes as these back on their transports - and the commanders, not being idiots, soon realized that they were dealing with a fifth column of shapeshifted Darloks from back on Ryoun. Even then, with the nature of the threat identified, actually responding was a nightmare: The middle of a battle for a planet's future against entrenched forces on the ground was no time to start rooting out traitors - or rather Darloks - in their midst, and it became increasingly clear that they had no choice but to purge their Darlok infiltrators - in spite of the horrendous timing - in order to make any progress whatever. "Mrrshan" and Darlok troops would die there in their millions, and when at last the battle was - barely - won, with the last of the Darloks dealt with, both in the field and in the "fifth column," and only "Mrrshan" survivors - at least as far as anyone could tell. There certainly were few enough: Barely enough to keep the planet's four lonely factories going.



By the following year, working those factories was no longer a concern in any case. The very last - most likely the last - of Ukko's Darlok sleeper agents calmly disposed of the final useful remnants of Darlok habitation. The 'loks in question made every effort to take on Alkari appearance, leaving a trail of feathers and other hints behind them, and doing their job so effectively that in many circles, the saboteurs were called by names like "those bird-brains" or "some nasty pieces of work from Altair," or even "those filthy Alkari." Back on Betelgeuse though, at the heart of Mrrshan power, the entire trade council could tell what had actually happened. "Sure it was Alkari," one council member put it: "Shadowy Alkari in voluminous cloaks, with glowing red slits for eyes."


Next time: The Shadow War!
(TO BE CONTINUED...)

[Psillycyber]

Haha, loving the storytelling! My personal favorite so far was when the 'loks colonized Trax and your transport authorties...erm...conveniently "forgot" to tell all of the civilian passengers that it had been the Darloks who had successfully colonized Trax. Oh well, no matter. "Have a nice trip!"

Hey, this way you got to scrap the colony ship for some BCs!

[RefSteel]

Thanks, Psillycyber. Sadly, the answer to "can I keep up this rate of daily reporting?" was no - but I'll finish eventually! Also: So many pictures to go through, edit, and upload here. Dealing with the images easily takes me longer than playing the game and writing the report combined. Just the same, here goes!

Part 4: Fighting Ghosts

While the trade council was planning its next move, another meeting was being organized of a Higher Council: For the second time in a few short years, the galaxy's leaders - most of whom were dictators, naturally - would assemble to democratically elect an eternal dictator to rule over the entire galaxy. For a very loose definition of "democratically" at least. Given the personalities involved, and the brief timeframe the nomineed has had to make their case, it was hardly surprising that the vote again ended in a stalemate. The Betelgeuse "Mrrshans" and their Vogon neighbors had grown enough in population to pick up an extra vote apiece, everything else went exactly as it had six years before, and the various galactic leaders agreed to wait another quarter century before the next vote, if only to stop wasting everybody's time. The top vote-getter, Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, still fell well short of even a simple majority; it was so far from achieving the requisite two-thirds of the vote that it couldn't have made up the difference even had the Darloks inexplicably jumped their own ship and thrown all the votes that they had received over to the Vogons and their monstrous leader instead.

With their usual impeccable timing, scientists on Betelgeuse would finally work out the last problems with hand lasers the following year, leading to wildly sarcastic celebrations around the trading scouts' territory, and especially at Ukko, where those very lasers would have been incredibly useful for fending off Darlok colonists and fifth-column agents themselves ... had the technology been available about two years sooner. Hand lasers would still be of value of course, but with no immediate plans to invade anything again, nor to allow even a single Darlok transport to penetrate to any of their planets through the gauntlet of fighters in space, they wouldn't actually do a lot in the upcoming years. On the contrary, the next Betelgeuse offensive was carried out by their diplomats.



Knowing - having read the Guide - that the Vogons "wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters," Betelgeuse diplomats understood that they had to get the process started early and pre-emptively - and push it through continuously - if they were to have any hope of stopping a Vogon Constructor Fleet from trying to destroy their planets. After a full year of grueling effort, in which three brave diplomats died - one crushed under an avalanche of paperwork, and two others committing suicide in order to escape a mandatory Vogon poetry reading session - a Non-Aggression Pact was finally established, buying the "Mrrshan" worlds a critical window of safety in case of Vogon attack: The Vogons, as the Guide pointed out, were not actually evil, and any breach of the new agreement would have to grind its way through the same horrible, twisted corridors of red tape that the pact itself had finally somehow navigated successfully.

Other diplomats meanwhile faced another up-hill battle: Convincing the Alkari to trust them in pretty much any respect beyond their minimal levels of trade. The Betelgeuse diplomats despaired of ever breaking up the alliance between the Farseer and Shador, but they tried - and when rebuffed, they contented themselves in the knowledge that there was every possibility of the Darloks ending the alliance themselves by stealing the Crown Jewels of Altair or setting free the residents of some Alkari high-security prison. In the meantime, the Betelgeuse propulsion scientists were pleased to discover the Alkari were willing to offer them some useful range technology almost as ancient as what the "Mrrshans" had been using for half a century. In exchange, they required the only waste reduction technology that Betelgeuse materials engineers and planetologists alike had yet managed to devise, but this was regarded as a wholly acceptable exchange by the people of Betelgeuse.

Thanks in part perhaps to this new technology, but mostly by a concerted effort by their people, the next two years would see the "Mrrshans" making more and more of their own discoveries.



The year after a breakthrough in their basic ECM Jammer design paved the way for a research project to double its efficacy, one of the trading scouts belatedly launched from ex-Darlok holdings happened across some truly stellar news: The old red star of Paranar, in the midst of what had been assumed to be Darlok space, harbored a perfectly-habitable world - by trading scout standards at least - that had been ignored by the Darloks merely because its temperatures were low enough to freeze them into cloaksicles on sticks. Out at the great Trax shipyards, a brand-new Fjord colony ship with nuclear engines was prepared for the journey immediately, stocked with plenty of helpful Nutri-Matic machines ready at a moment's notice to warm the colonists' insides with small plastic cups containing a liquid almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

(The death of all the Darlok soldiers, burning in their transports long before they reached the safety of Tyr's surface, who had been emboldened to try an assault following their sneak-fleet's extremely temporary control of the star system's space lanes, was merely a footnote to Paranar 7's discovery.)

Around the same time, taking advantage of their new Alkari-patent deuterium fuel since their leadership hadn't been paying enough attention to build colony ships with reserve fuel tanks several years before, the cool cats of Betelgeuse finally - finally! - got around to colonizing Stalaz and Neptunus, all the way back in their own private corner of the galaxy. Asked to explain why it had taken so long, Mrrshan leadership fell back on their favorite habit of making motorboat noises with their lips.

There was also another Darlok attack on Ryoun during these years, but upwards of 50 Kill-O-Zap fighters sent them scurrying home - those that hadn't been reduced to titanium splinters, at least. By and large, with the discovery of new force field technology and plans to miniaturize it for personal use, and with trading scouts fanning out to ever-more-distant stars around the galaxy, the years after the second High Council meeting were - for the people of Betelgeuse at least - an age of discovery. And for the people of Toranor, almost next door? Well, they had to hope it would be that kind of age at least!



The plague that spread across the surface of the resort world, killing millions every year, probably wan't caused by the Darloks, who - just as an unrelated side note - possessed death spores. No one in the Toranor system was permitted to leave due to quarantine, and though another organization might have sent more people into the plague zone as test subjects for experimentation with means of fighting the disease, the Betelgeuse trade council couldn't bear to do it; instead, they merely shipped all the medical supplies, test equipment, environment clean-up devices, and anything else that could be brought to bear with al the resources of the council's treasury to help the people already in the plague zone, delivering everything with automated drones on one-way trips into Toranor 3's atmosphere - naturally making themselves available to assist in finding means to contain or erradicate the plague once they arrived.

It wasn't the only example - or rather, of course, it was totally an accident and by no means the result - of Darlok sabotage in those years. Even in the Rahm-Soulianis system itself, at Trax - the flashpoint that had ignited the Mrrshan-Darlok war - sabotage had struck just the year before.



All the surviving security footage showed Vogon agents planting their explosives, sometimes cackling maniacally. At the final plant, they even had the gall to scrawl a sample of their poetry on the smoking wreckage:

Roses are green
Violets are green
Sugar is goopy
'Cause I just sneezed.

Though Alkari merchant observers made clucking noises about the sad, sad state to which the galaxy had come when Vogons resorted to clandestine sabotage against innocents, the people of Betelgeuse weren't fooled. As the chairwoman of the trade council put it, "There's no way those were Vogons. Those lines are way too short, and not nearly bad enough to be Vogon poetry." Though it probably amused them to pretend otherwise, the saboteurs might as well have just announced their Darlok natures on the Betelgeuse communications net (to which they had surely stolen the encryption keys years before).

While the Darloks were perpetrating ill-conceived frame jobs and destroying a number of factories that the people of Trax could rebuild - thanks to their world's incredible mineral resources - in their collective sleep, their enemies from Betelgeuse were continuing to colonize half the galaxy. GNN reported on the subject in 2385 as the icy Paranar 7 became the twelfth world inhabited by Mrrshankind, outstripping every other race, with a third again as many planets to their name as even the wide-ranging Vogon constructor fleets. The "Mrrshans" weren't done yet either - still scouting out potential conquest targets among the Darlok worlds along the galactic rim, and following up their best new sub-light engines with plans to develop even faster ones built around fusion technology.



The Darloks kept attacking in every way they could: In space, where Kill-O-Zap fighters wiped out any ships that didn't flee; on the ground - or rather in space again, where their transports were all shot down on the rare occasions when they managed to sneak a fleet in past inattentive Betelgeuse sentries - and via sabotage, by which means in 2391, they managed to destroy every one of Paranar's factories. (At the time, the Paranar colony being only six years old, there had been exactly two.)

The people of Betelgeuse were getting tired of the constant Darlok attacks though, and by 2392, their trading scouts were out in Darlok space, probing the defenses of their nearest colonies - where it turned out the state of the shifters' defenses was pretty miserable, frankly. Their closest world to Betelgeuse, at the green star of Aquilae out on the galactic rim, had about the same mineral wealth as a planet-sized beach ball, and nothing to protect it but the pointlessness of capturing its impoverished surface and few, rare, and isolated factories. Similarly, Gorra - a small, unregarded yellow sun in the outermost reaches of the galaxy - was protected by only a single defensive base and still had only assembled four or five times hapless Aquilae's industry. It was only when a trading scout reached Talas, the nearest neighbor to the Darloks' home star, that anything resembling defenses could be found in the form of missile bases or a fleet.



They frankly weren't that scary anyway. Their missile bases were a little better than the variety that Betelgeuse could produce, certainly - apart from having a little more trouble hitting what they aimed at - but with defensive technology like the 'loks were sporting, much like they actually did with their own, all the worlds in "Mrrshan" space combined wouldn't have bothered building more than maybe three. The twenty stacked up at Talas weren't going to do a whole lot more for than the planet's defense than that anyway, honestly. As for the Death Wyn cruisers, they might have been of some use against an enemy that relied heavily on repulsor beams, but with no shielding whatsoever and only five total guns apiece, they were almost but not quite exactly the wrong answer to the old Kill-O-Zap laser fighter fleets. If only they'd swapped out their battle scanner, battle computer, and twin neutron blasters for a couple more heavy beams, they would have represented a perfect failure to address the threat they were actually facing.

Unfortunately for the people of Betelgeuse however, the Darloks were taking other - and more effective - measures to prosecute their war: Knowing of the Vogon love for hyperspace bypasses along which to expand their reach, masquerading as fellow Vogons, they convinced Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz to tear up the firelighters into which its agreement with Betelgeuse leadership had been recycled.



The non-aggression pact had done its job though; the Vogons and the Darloks had actually signed an alliance for mysterious reasons, the written objections and regulations that should have made such an ill-advised move impossible having all disappeared under suspicious circumstances, and had the endlessly bureaucratic Vogons not insisted upon the full, due process associated with the new sea of red tape created by the non-aggression pact, it is all but certain that instead of merely breaking such a pact, the Vogons would have declared war on the Darloks' enemies. A Vogon constructor fleet would be coming for Morrig soon enough anyway, but this was far preferable to the spread of war from one race to the next, as it might have left the Mrrshans in battle with - and facing the High Council votes of - the entire galaxy.

Instead - though they probably should have put together an invasion force for Talas, as an active war with the Darloks was no time for passivity - they just kept pursuing their research goals, like the critical one they achieved in the following year.

Since the trade council had refused to send healthy people to die in quarantine, Toranor's plague might have lasted a long, long time had the planet been fully populated - giving the pathogens a wider field in which to multiply and evolve variations and immunities - and blanketed in factories - forcing the population into densely-packed disease breeding zones. Thanks to the resort world's wide-open seas, whose largely-isolated islands - in spite of their full employment rate, with a good number of fully-staffed factories working behind the scenes - gave all their people plenty of room to spread out and breathe, the death rate from the plague and all other causes combined never quite outstripped the local birth rate, and thanks to plenty of off-world assistance in the form of equipment and pharmaceutical supplies paid for out of the trade council treasury, a vaccine was finally developed by 2393. There were a few hold-outs who convinced themselves that the vaccine caused Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and other unrelated problems, but unfortunately for the hold-outs - and fortunately for everyone else - the plague was sufficiently virulent and deadly that the hold-outs basically all died of it before it had time to evolve among their thankfully small numbers and spread into the wider population again.



Though the microbial threat to Toranor was finally disposed of, there were still some macroscopic threats that needed addressing, beginning with the Darloks' ability to make allies willy-nilly around the entire galaxy and spread the word of war. The Alkari hadn't yet fallen under their sway, but the people of Betelgeuse knew that unless they took action, it might only be a matter of time. They weren't well-loved by the Alkari - the old hatred was still seething beneath the surface of as-yet untroubled relations - and there was no hope of acquiring a non-aggression pact like the one the Vogons had just torn to pieces, but the one good thing about having shape-changing sneak-thieves for your enemy is that nobody really likes shape-changing sneak thieves.



Farseer was naturally only "allied" with the trade council in the sense of "both equally at war against the Darloks" - no promises were made about any other war that might follow, for instance with the Vogons or, at the slightest sign of crossing interests, with the "Mrrshans" themselves - and a danger remained that Darlok spies might frame the Mrrshans for acts of theft and sabotage in a way that the gullible Alkari might believe. The danger of a cat-bird war was by no means averted - but as of 2395, they had a start at least.

The following year was the first in which a Vogon Constructor Fleet attempted to attack a Mrrshan world. As it turned out, the attack wasn't especially threatening.



Their Spirit destroyers were a decent missile boat design with only a couple of totally pointless systems tacked on, but no one serious about attacking ever goes in with just eight destroyer-class missile boats - at least, no one in anything resembling their right mind. One of the fighters assigned to the system was destroyed when its pilot got lazy, but that was all, and the trade council soon was back to business as usual. Its members were therefore taken completely by surprise when the holotransmitter lit up and Farseer appeared. Several of them gaped as the Alkari leader told them calmly about the mutual benefits of trade, and proposed an upgrade to their existing package, to the tune of 75 billion credits per year. Once they had pulled their jaws back up off the floor though, the members of the trade council were happy to approve an increase in the exact thing for which their organization was devised, and by 2397, Alkari trade ships were crossing the Horsehead nebula and the 7 parsecs of distance between Jinga and Trax in greater numbers than ever before.

They were present when the Trax colony began to expand again in the following year, thanks to a new breakthrough in terraforming technology, and they may have overheard the rumors about the next project back on Betelgeuse to finally devise means of survival among the Lashburnium crystals of Moro Prime; they were present the year after that, when the new factory designs were first rolled out on Trax in preparation for immigrants already en route from Ryoun - designs that took advantage of the latest developments in industrial technology, and that set the groundwork for superior waste-reduction measures that would one day improve the factories' output efficiency. They may or may not have overheard any muttered complaints about the way neutron pellet gun researchers seemed to be dragging their feet, but Alkari merchants certainly saw the celebrations in 2399 when word from the Mrrshan diplomats came in.



The Darlok war had not exactly been a false one: Trading scouts had quietly been checking the defenses and capturable industry of Gorra and Aquilae, and Darlok fleets had been attacking "Mrrshan" worlds constantly - including earlier that very year at Ryoun - and getting their ships destroyed by the defending fleets. The celebrations witnessed by visiting Alkari merchants upon the advent of peace - politely witnessed without a hint of actual sympathy, as the Alkari themselves were still at war with the Darlok people - had nothing to do with actual battle though, and everything to do with politics. The Darloks still held a populous empire, but the people of Betelgeuse had grown more populous still, and wanted all the support they could muster against the Vogons at the High Council vote that was due at the turn of the year.

As it turned out, the celebrations were premature: Though happy to make peace while stealing all the jewelry and wallets on the negotiators' persons, the Darloks had no intention of ending their Vogon alliance. As it also turned out however, none of it really mattered.



The Vogons' bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious, and callous ways had somehow failed to win them many friends in the galaxy. After their eight votes were joined to the Darloks' six, everyone else but the "Mrrshans" themselves - who abstained as always with seven votes of their own - voted that anything would be better than Jeltz and its poetry: Even the Betelgeuse trade council with its three and a half dozen bickering councilors - the "Really Badly Organized 42." The entire Meklar people still only counted for a single vote, and the Klackons barely had two, but with five from the Alkari, they were able to ensure that Jeltz couldn't even gather two thirds of the votes actually cast, never mind the twenty votes it needed.

Next time: Going to the Birds!
(TO BE CONTINUED...)

[RefSteel]

Many thanks, Psillycyber - and sorry it took me so long to get this next part up!

Part 4: Wherein the Birds and Cloaky Guys Have Much to Contribute in Myriad Ways

The celebrations resumed on Trax, and this time even the Alkari merchants joined in: They could certainly agree that a galaxy not ruled by Jeltz was a good galaxy. Long after the confetti was swept from the streets though, and certain of the revelers dragged off to hospital, their bottles of Old Janx Spirit still in hand, the grumbling about neutron pellet guns continued. Three more years would pass with good and growing odds reported before the weapons were actually ready to accelerate all their neutrons in the same general direction, and yet another lower-priority project achieved another breakthrough first, in the Computer Science labs that would later be nicknamed "ECM Central" since they would never research any other form of technology until the distant Shadow Years to come. The Alkari merchants were smug: They knew that their scientists wouldn't drag their feet on such an important project - in fact, they would managed to design an Impulse Drive before Betelgeuse got its beloved NPGs working.

Taking note of this, the "Mrrshans" adopted a new approach: They let the Alkari do their research for them!



They started in the Year of the NPG by exchanging their sublight drive designs for an old Alkari battle computer upgrade, providing little of any value to either side except that the new computer represented a substantial leap forward in Betelgeuse's understanding of Alkari computer technology. It paid off two years later when an adventurous trading scout hitchhiked all the way to Zhardan, snuck into a secret lab, and came away with the plans for an even more advanced battle computer! The trade council hoped there would be many more thefts like it, aided in part by this initial success, but they knew they would need even greater computer expertise to succeed reliably - and they had some notion of where to get it. They were still trying to court the Darloks as friends, but that would only last one more year. Perhaps because Shador was still upset at the Really Badly Organized 42 for stealing back planets that it had rightfully stolen first, it renewed its war with them at the very first opportunity.

Needless to say, the "Mrrshans" were about as disappointed as a cat with a bowl of cream. They had been monitoring Darlok technology, and immediately sent fleets out to have a closer look at the once and present enemy's actual defenses and fleets. Soon enough, they were able to confirm that their preferred solution to the Darlok problem - and in fact to every other problem they were facing at the time simultaneously - would serve them more than adequately.



Phase one of their plan involved taking a cue from the Vogons next door, organizing the construction of new hyperspace bypasses straight through Darlok missile defenses. The key components of these Important Infrastructure Projects were swarms of little bombers with the best speed their propulsion engineers could muster and nothing else on board - not even a battle computer, which in spite of Darlok ECM was judged to not be worth the expense: They preferred to just get ever more cat-guided bombs into space!

Phase two of the plan was equally obvious, and once again relied upon the RBO-42 watchword, "Let the bird-brains do our research for us!"



The Alkari would certainly benefit from the terraforming technology the "Mrrshans" offered in trade, increasing their production base and voting power on every one of their worlds, but the trade council regarded this as a wholly acceptable trade for Alkari battle suits, which would give them a decided advantage in the ground battles to come. And there would be ground battles. Nearly seven hundred Bypass bombers, all completed in 2410, would see to that!

Phase four, getting way ahead of themselves, would be defending their new holdings after they took over Darlok planets, with the help of a new line of neutron pellet gun fighters. The first to roll off the line were already being put to use the year after the bombers set out, as six Darlok cruisers arrived at Trax to try to steal it for the 'loks. Of the three pairs of incoming cruisers, the most dangerous turned out to be the Cobras - dark brown, with a long, narrow, white stripe - and their Warp Dissipator systems that could freeze up Mrrshan engines in space.



Fortunately, once the danger was known, well over a hundred fighters were plenty to burn the Cobras down and then take on the rest, with the new NPG fighters slowed but still effective and the old warp-2 laser Kill-O-Zaps still effective thanks to the shield interference of the horsehead nebula and Mrrshan reflex targeting. Still, with more Cobras at large and combat anticipated outside the nebula, more of the neutron pellet fighters were obviously needed.

Another thing that would help would be peace on other fronts, so Betelgeuse diplomats made overtures to the Vogons again, suggesting that they break their alliance with the shape-shifting thieves, or at least agree to a non-aggression pact that would create that much more red tape for Darloks to wade through before they could provoke a war that nobody wanted but them. Unfortunately, the Vogons wouldn't see reason. Jeltz refused a treaty of any kind, "because you have broken treaties with us in the past."

The Mrrshan diplomats blinked in surprise. "Um," said the chief ambassador, "I'm pretty sure that was you!" Jeltz, predictably, ignored her. Later though, back at Betelgeuse, the council tried to figure out what Jeltz had been talking about. They didn't remember sending even an unarmed scout to a Vogon colony during the course of their previous NAP; had the Vogons taken offense at their unsuccessful spying attempts? Had the Darloks framed them for sabotage without anyone telling them? Had ... oh, wait, never mind: It was that one. Moving on, then!

The following year was the first in which the Bypass bombers saw battle. Roughly half the fleet showed up at the Darlok colony of Talas, defended by a single cruiser and some 22 missile bases, and lost some twenty percent of their number before reaching the planet, bombing its bases into oblivion, and sending the cruiser into full retreat. Another cruiser, with a different design, showed up at Trax almost simultaneously, and exploded prettily.

None of that was surprising. The most momentous news of the year came from Ajax, where a top-secret Vogon research facility suddenly went in an uproar over "sneaky moving shadows" and "obviously-tampered records" and the ten-thousand pages of paperwork they had to plough through just to complete the incident report. The head Mrrshan ambassador, hearing the news, sighed, and told her colleagues, "It's those Darloks as usual. And five to one, they're going to blame us again!"

She was probably half right, but that was more or less the very last thing on her mind when she found out what really happened.



She, like basically every other Mrrshan in the galaxy, was too busy cheering and whooping to care. A stealthy Mrrshan agent, justifiably proud, had just come away with the Vogons' most advanced computer technology: Designs for a scanner that would finally reveal - precisely and accurately - the courses and destinations of every fleet within seven parsecs. The blueprints were sent to every world that flew the trade council's green flag, and rush-built immediately.

There were reasons to hope and even expect that only a few years would pass before it was superceded by still-more advanced computer technology, but in the meantime it would be of tremendous use to other Mrrshan agents - as well, of course, as to strategic planning for their defensive bases and fleets.

One of the reasons for those hopes and expectations became clear the following year, as all the surviving Bypass bombers in the galaxy converged on the Darlok home star. Defending it were fully 40 missile bases - almost twice as many as a smaller Bypass fleet had destroyed at Talas the year before - and a pair of Viper cruisers that must have been state-of-the-art when they were first designed, presumably a long, long time ago, and maybe at a time when the Darloks possessed no construction or shield technology of any kind at all. There was nothing wrong with the battle scanner on the Viper, nor with the Mark II computer that supplemented it, nor with the its nuclear engines and maneuverability. Its single layer of shielding seemed a little low, but must have nevertheless taken up quite a lot of space when the design was made for the ship to be so generally lacking in anything actually good. Its anti-missile rockets were a waste of space, naturally, and the less said about its five-rack of nucelar missiles, the better for the Damogron Frond-Crested Eagles* whom the Darloks had apparently contracted to design the Viper for them, but there was nothing at all wrong with their heavy blast cannons ... except that they somehow only had room on board for three of the things. This is a little like designing a heavy machine gun with room for three bullets in the clip.



The Betelgeuse trading scouts knew how to bring enough bullets. By the time the Darlok homeworld fell, a quarter of the bombers ever built in Mrrshan space had been destroyed by its defenses, or those of Talas the year before. The problem for the Darloks was that it had come at the cost of four quarters of those defenses on both worlds. This left over five hundred bombers to spread around the three stars in the cluster, some watching over the bombed-out Darlok bases so they could wipe out any new ones as they were built, with space support from the NPG Kill-O-Zap fighters the Mrrshan rich worlds had been churning out, while the rest went up to Celtsi to get rid of the bases there too. That mission trivially accomplished, nearly the entire fleet would gather at Talas once again, apart from a couple of lone ships sent forward to scout other Darlok planets' defenses, to ensure they would control the planet's orbits when their transports came in.

Predictably, the Darloks reacted by running and crying to their big brothers.



One interesting result of having a culture - like the bug-eyed Vogons' - entirely steeped in massive bureaucracy is that the easiest way to get it to do anything is to ignore all the endless and ever-changing requirements they impose on everything, and skip to the part where they do what you want by manually putting the right paperwork, memos, and electronic messages into the right places without all the bother of passing through the actual bureaucracy. Sneaking anything into the hands of their rivals seemed deeply wrong to some of the more traditionalist Darloks, but they were reconciled to the idea by the recollection that they could also steal a bunch of souvenirs to take home while they were there. The Vogons' paperwork all said they were allied to the Darloks, so allied to the Darloks they were. Their paperwork said they had to declare war on Betelgeuse, so they didn't think twice - nor once, for the matter of that - before doing so.

The Really Badly Organized 42 responded with a collective shrug, and - observing that the Alkari, still at war with the cloaked menaces, appreciated all the bombing going on - took the opportunity of signing a non-aggression pact with the birds. The Alkari were diplomatically isolated, at war with basically everyone else in the galaxy, but Betelgeuse had seen aliens swing from war to alliance rapidly before, and wanted some kind of insurance against their inexplicably-most-reliable friends joining the ranks of their implacable enemies in accordance with their usual avain inclinations.

The other Mrrshan response was to launch another massive raft of transports into Darlok space - while continuing to push their research teams to assist the troops already on the way. After failing repeatedly in previous years, the force field labs were reporting better than 50% odds of getting their personal shields to successfully deflect projectiles with more kinetic energy than dust motes. It wasn't the only field where a breakthrough was expected soon, but it was the one that mattered most.



As the transports dropped out of hyperspace, moments before it became too late, the scientists came through, likely saving more than fifteen million lives. The Mrrshans overran Talas, claiming nearly two hundred factories, and initiating Phase 3 of their trade council's master plan: Reverse Engineering.

Sadly, Phase 3 didn't work out very well - not on Talas anyway. They came up with four Darlok technologies, which was just about par for a planet with that level of industrialization, but the four included neither of the big computer prizes of which they dreamed. On the contrary, the plans for anti-missile rockets - like the ones wasting space on Darlok Viper cruisers - would probably have been thrown in an incinerator if the Mrrshan military forces hadn't trusted their leadership to never use the things. Barren colony bases meanwhile - like the ones that gave the Darloks a chance to be overrun by Mrrshans for the first time, decades before - were so hopelessly out of date that superior versions of the same thing often featured in Mrrshan science fairs starting around seventh grade. The new class 3 deflector shields would go nicely with Mrrshan missile bases though - both of the Mrrshan missile bases - and with a large gunship if the Trax, Tyr, or Drakka spaceyards ever got around to building one. Also useful for that imaginary gunship would be the real find of the invasion: Neutron Blasters - or rather, the Heavy Blast Cannons to which they could be upgraded trivially - meant the Mrrshan fleets would have an answer in case the Sakkra attacked with shielded ships mounting repulsor beams. They were great for miniaturization, and a nice piece of security ... and still nothing like what Betelgeuse actually needed.

Fortunately, they weren't done with phase 3.



In spite of leaving even more of the newly-captured factories idle, half the ground troops and most of the fleet responsible for the Talas invasion proceeded directly rimward to the little desert dustball of Celtsi 5. With their cat-portable laser weapons, personal energy shields, and electro-pneumatic-assist battle suits, they figured they'd have more than enough to subdue Darlok resistance there and take over the system.

Long story short: They were right. Ten enemy cruisers opposed them, including a Dissipator Cobra: By far the most dangerous ship in the Darlok fleet, the Cobra would have been devastating if it hadn't wasted space on anti-missile rockets and a powerful ECM Jammer. Sadly, it had done both of these things, and was blown apart by NPG Kill-O-Zap fighters before it could stop a single Mrrshan ship or even slow them down.

The other nine ships were Vipers, so it should come as no surprise that half a dozen burned away before the last three fled into hyperspace.

Next came the battle on the ground, and for once the Mrrshans had luck on their side: 14 million troops survived, and from just 65 Darlok factories, they managed to reverse-engineer yet another four technologies! Better still for the invaders, apart from an ancient industrial tech - the RBO-42 was collectively kicking itself for never trading some of their own outdated junk for its equivalent just to keep it from distracting their troops - and toxic colony bases that, while technically state of the art, were about to be superceded by research on Betelgeuse itself, there was little left to steal from the Darloks that wasn't pretty high on the trade council's wish-list!



Along with the unwated stuff and designs for a situationally-useful Warp Dissipator device - with "situationally" defined as "at least in the immediate future, not-especially" - Mrrshan forces were able to reverse-engineer the advanced robotic controls by which the Darloks operated their factories. As a result, Drakka, Tyr, and Trax - the latter with the assistance of the entire trade council treasury over the next two or three years - were able to go on a factory-building spree, with twice as many as before operable by the same population. At other Mrrshan worlds of course, the same advances merely meant that half of each planet's factory workers were free to, as the trade council chairwoman put it, "pursue other interests."

In another culture, that might have been a euphemism for "rot in unemployment," but fortunately for the Mrrshans, they all had at least one other major interest to pursue. And since they generally wanted to get back to factory work again pretty soon if they could, it was lucky for them that they knew where to find more factories - and that their other major interest involved lasering the Darloks who were already working them!

Next time: Gratuitous Violence
(TO BE CONTINUED...)

[RefSteel]

Part 5: Bloodbath

The Betelgeuse trading scouts had their work cut out for them: Gorra's defenses were blown to pieces in spite of a hopelessly ill-coordinated attack, Darlok plays for Paranar were rebuffed by repeatedly destroying their lame Viper cruisers with wings of Kill-O-Zap fighters, and an Alkari fleet was shredded in the skies of Trax as their merchants watched thoughtfully from the coffee shops below. The Alkari, it should be remembered, had signed a non-aggression pact with the Mrrshans, accepting hundreds of billions of credits in infrastructure subsidies in exchange for their agreement, but true to "honorable" form, they had suddenly realized after just a single year that the pact had been made with Mrrshans, and therefore immediately declared it null and void.

Finally, and most importantly, the trading scouts had to clean up the handful of missile bases the Darloks had rebuilt at their homeworld while the cats were away, and chase off the four Cruisers that pretended to help defend the homeworld before beating the Darlok admiralty's typical cowardly retreat.



After that, it was just a matter of remembering not to damage all the lovely infrastructure on the ground.

The first wave only outnumbered the Darloks on their homeworld by about 10%, but with the massive Betelgeuse advantage in combat technology, that was way more than enough.



70 Mrrshan batallions survived to sift through even more Darlok factories than they could work immediately, and found the secrets behind some really outdated junk like Hyper-V Rockets - Mrrshan scientists were close to a breakthrough on Merculites, just in need of a little miniaturization from the "Mercuheavy" prototypes that couldn't get off the launchpad without the assistance of a space crane - and unspeakable trash like Death Spores, the less said about which the better, apart from "Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!"

That was the end of the disappointing news though; there wasn't a whole lot left that could be disappointing, really. Improved Eco Restoration meant that every Mrrshan planet would be working more efficiently; Dotomite Crystals would allow their ships to reach never-before-contemplated corners of the galaxy; and two different Darlok computer designs, including the crown jewel - their Advanced Space Scanner - meant that Phase 3 of the Mrrshan research plan was finally, finally complete. It also meant they'd be able to see enemy fleets mustering and approaching from either further off, better coordinate their invasions in advance (in theory, if they didn't goof anything up the way they usually did) - and soon get a good look at nearly - not quite, but nearly - the entire galaxy.

Best of all - according to a very, very few, all of them employed at the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's Betelgeuse computer science lab - the other new computer technology allowed Mrrshan bases to upgrade to the Darloks' state-of-the-art electronic countermeasures ... and let the Betelgeuse lab rats pursue their favorite new project of all:



Doubling the power of that jammer, having still never pursued a single computer science project other than more and more and yet still more ECM!

There was another important consequence to conquering the Darlok homeworld though: The newly-acquired Dotomite crystals allowed the RBO-42, sending diplomatic ships out from Morrig, to finally get in touch with TVC-15. As far as Mrrshan diplomats for the Really Badly Organized 42 could tell, the Meklar emperor's designation stood for, "Temperamental, Variable, and Childish," with 15 representing its documented number of distinct personalities. That still didn't stop them from making all the deals they could with it while it seemed to be in a friendly mood - so, if they were lucky, for maybe thirty seconds or so.



Delighted as the Meklar were with the Mrrshans' recent activity - mainly, bombing or conquering Darloks, but it could have been literally anything whose race name didn't start with an M, since on various days, various of TVC-15's personalities had declared war on everyone else in the galaxy - it wasn't surprising that they were willing to agree to a non-aggression pact. What would be surprising would be TVC-15 actually honoring the pact for much longer than the Alkari had honored theirs! To be sure, it would hopefully insulate the Mrrshans - at least temporarily - from a random declaration of war, but no one expected it to last for long. For that matter, even fewer people expected the Meklar - who still were isolated on the lone world where a Betelgeuse trading scout had found them decades before, and as far as anyone could tell from their High Council voting power, still hadn't learned to breed - to make any of the Mrrshans care even if they did declare war.

Just the same, the Mrrshan people found the Meklar were good for something: While they were on the line, they managed to arrange some trades.



The creaky old industrial technology the Mrrshans had looted from the Darloks of Celtsi 5 was basically thrown in as a curiosity, in exchange for Deep Space Scanners that the Mrrshan reverse-engineering experts in Darlok space had doubly superceded, but even those ancient scanners would contribute to Phase 3. And though the Mrrshans' most advanced terraforming methods may have seemed a steep price to pay for Duralloy armor they could have come up with themselves given enough time, the Mrrshans weren't interested in waiting around, weren't afraid of anything the Meklar might do with the extra space on their homeworld, and had more invasions planned for which tougher battle suits would come in handy. TVC-15 might randomly declare war within the next few years, vote against the RBO-42 in the upcoming High Council election, and actually have a second vote for once in its biomechanical lifetime ... but the Mrrshans didn't really care. There wasn't really any doubt that by 2425, they would hold a veto.



Since the Darloks had been kind enough to colonize Incedius on the Mrrshans' behalf not long after a trading scout had mapped it, many of the victorious conquerors - fresh from their capture of the Darlok homeworld - set out to accept the unintended gift. A wing of fighters would accompany them in case of interfering Darlok ships, while the rest of the fleet regrouped, awaiting the next waves of transports and an opportunity to push on against the remaining Darlok core worlds. The Darlok ships that meanwhile were wandering around now-Mrrshan space continued to frighten precisely nobody. One of their cruisers fled the Bypass bombers over Gorra; another was torn apart by Kill-O-Zaps above Talas, and various others flew around aimlessly, continuing on the hyperspace routes they'd been assigned before the Mrrshan invasions rendered all of their assignments irrelevant. There was nothing they could do until they reached their destinations, nothing they could really do even then against the Betelgeuse trading scout fleets - and nothing they could do about that fact that even those were about to go obsolete.



Like the nuclear laser fighters, of which nearly 160 still protected Trax thanks to the shield-disrupting properties of the Horsehead Nebula, the trading scouts' most-advanced sublight fighters would last a great deal longer than might have been expected, thanks to their numbers and continuing defensive efficacy. No more of them would be built though after the year 2420, as the trade council's starship engineers drew up plans for a new, exclusively Fusion-powered starfleet. Begins the trading scouts were hopelessly, madly, deliriously in love with neutron pellet guns however - and because they felt they had enough bombers already for their immediate needs - the new fleet too would begin with fighters, while work began on devising inertial stabilization engine arrays at the Betelgeuse propulsion laboratories.

In the meantime, the existing fleets went right on doing their jobs - mostly. When nine Darlok cruisers attacked at Talas, they managed to destroy almost thirty of the best sublight fighters - before being destroyed in turn, since there were more than seventy fighters in the Talas fleet. Similarly, at Trax, the Alkari apparently decided the Ultimate Question to the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything was "how many fighters does it take to conquer an Ultra-Rich Mrrshan world?" They would turn out to be sadly mistaken. Though the Mrrshan fleet was two generations old, and though the birds did manage to destroy nine of its component fighters, those who read the preceding paragraph will realize that the Alkari were outnumbered by almost four to one before combat began. (Afterward, they were outnumbered one hundred and fifty to nothing.)

It should not be imagined however that the Mrrshans were incapable of making mistakes. Their biggest of the year 2421 came at Guradas, where three of the deadly Cobras supported 33 missile bases. Due to a momentary lapse on the part of the volunteer Mrrshan admiral, their Bypass bombers insistently flew toward the planet, even into range of the Cobras' Dissipators, instead of accepting the possibility of eating an extra volley or two from the planet's bases. The supporting fighters naturally destroyed all three of the Cobras, but not before their dissipators had frozen the bombers in space, defenseless and still too far from the planet's surface to fight back against the bases. The result - the total destruction of the main Mrrshan bomber fleet, nearly 400 ships strong, and later the loss of dozens of transports sent forward in anticipation of victory - was such a major setback that it was practically the only thing in the course of the 24th and 25th centuries that the Official Photographic Archivist failed to capture for posterity. Fortunately - or, unfortunately of course! Unfortunately! - there were other, smaller, but better-documented mistakes made, including one made the same year.



The destroyer sitting in orbit at Morrig was a completely unarmed scanner ship. When the planetary governor - who had forgotten it was there - saw it hanging around to scan the incoming Vogon fleet, she demanded to know, "Why don't you go visit basically any other planet in the galaxy? We have how many planets with a missile base? Like three? Did you just forget they come with scanners, or didn't you know we had one here? What is even the point of your existence?"

The scanner pilot fled, chagrined, but not before noting that - just as the Mrrshans sometimes made mistakes - other races also sometimes did things right! The Vogon Goblin fighters, for instance, were an excellent design, identical to one the Mrrshans themselves had fielded some years before! Of course, the Mrrshan version had been guided by feline reflexes as well, and still had long since been scrapped in favor of even-better designs, as that one was some three generations out of date, and though they could scratch Morrig's bases, they couldn't do so before basically all getting blown out of the sky with only nineteen in their fleet ... but still! Great design, Jeltz! Combat speed, a battle computer, an NPG, and nothing else, at whatever level that your current tech allows, makes for a great starfighter! Impressive work!



The next important mistake of the RBO-42 discovered in the course of the same year related to the council's diplomatic planning: As it turns out, when an important galactic ruler has fifteen different personalities, each featuring its own peculiar psychoses, nothing can insulate anyone from its random declarations of war. The bomber piloting miscue would cost the Mrrshans several years in the prosecution of their war, and the failure to reassign one of their scanner ships after Morrig constructed a base would have unpredictable consequences thanks to reduced military intel, but TVC-15's irrational decision to declare war without warning ... didn't really surprise or matter to anybody really. Was this hubris speaking? Could these terrible setbacks combine and lead to a defeat in the High Council due to convene in just four years? As a great author (not the same great author who wrote about letting slip the dogs of war*) once wrote, "Stress and nervous tension are now serious social problems in all parts of the galaxy, and it is in order that this situation should not be in any way exacerbated that the following facts will now be revealed in advance."

Nope. They were way past the point where any of these mistakes were going to hurt the Mrrshans in any meaningful way.

* - William Shakeservo in The Tragedy of Julius Cybersar and Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, respectively.



This replacement for the lost bombers was just one of the reasons why. True, it was still just a nuclear bomber, and those weren't going to be useful much longer, but with improved tactical and strategic speed, defenses, and targeting computers - and most importantly, twice as many actual bombs - each Bypass 4.0 was many times as dangerous as a ship of just the previous generation. The Mrrshans would have liked to wait for stabilizers as well - but they were already behind on their timetable, and felt that building good ships right away was better than dreaming about better ships down the line.

Best of all, of course, was to do both. Even as the first fleets of Bypass 4.0s were produced - carrying more effective firepower than all the ships lost at Guradas - Mrrshan weapons engineers were hard at work improving their planetary defenses, with advances that would help to miniaturize and improve their future ships' systems - and therefore improve their ships themselves - still more. Advanced component miniaturization was of course the key to developing Mercuheavy missiles into Merculites actually capable of taking off, and would surely be even easier with the fine gravitational control they anticipated putting to use in a future graviton beam. Rumors that the weapon scientists were mostly just excited about the prospect of walking on the ceiling during advanced experiments were totally disrespectful and probably not right at all, except perhaps for a small subset of the weapons scientists: Probably less than 98%.



The Darloks - oops, no, of course I meant some unknown parties whose agent happened to be wearing a cloak with a cowled hood - did their level best to strike back at the Mrrshans, although it must be said that their level best wasn't really very good. One advisor to the RBO-42 had suggested once upon a time that it was best to build a lot of missile bases at a threatened world because enemy saboteurs could potentially blow up several in a single year. The chairwoman disagreed though: When one base was sufficient, it was best to just build that: Saboteurs can't wipe out the resources spent on a dozen missile bases when eleven of them never existed in the first place! It might have been disastrous for Morrig had its lone base been destroyed a little bit sooner - before another small Sakkra fleet arrived and was (mostly blown out of the sky before ultimately being) chased away, but fortunately there were security protocols in place to ensure that any sabotage that did occur could not occur soon enough after a base was built, when an enemy fleet's arrival was known to be imminent, to interfere with the space battle about to occur. These protocols would turn out to be completely foolproof, to the surprise of everyone who had ever done any actual work in security, probably because they were established by an executive order of the head of state of the Ancients of Orion themselves, long, long before, relating to "Methods of Operation / Emergency or Tactical Processing" - though its name was often shortened to "The MoO EoT Processing Order" due to space considerations. In any case, Morrig would rebuild its lost missile base in short order; the Darloks did much greater damage up at Incedius the next year, where the council had forgotten to send a defensive fleet, allowing the Darloks to kill a million people before a response could be prepared.

Both paled in comparison with the senseless destruction of their transports, resulting from the tactical mistake at Guradas a couple of years before - so it was a good thing for the Mrrshans that their scientists and soldiers - when their soldiers were able to actually land - were doing a much better job than their tacticians! Shortly after the sabotage of Morrig's lone missile base, Mrrshan planetologists had finally devised means of surviving in the presence of Lashburnium crystals and their lethal radiation - and arising from that newfound knowledge came a plan to one day adapt every world in the galaxy to Mrrshan needs, as their scientists sought the means of terraforming the atmospheres themselves - or generating them where necessary - on hostile planets like Trax and Moro. And several others, of course, but Trax and Moro were the ones that counted to the Mrrshan way of thinking!

Next time: The Beginning of the End
(TO BE CONTINUED...)

[RefSteel]

Part 6: Everything Comes Together And/Or Apart

With researchers trying to hog the spotlight among the Betelgeuse trading scouts, it was up to the Mrrshan soldiers arriving at Gorra to seize it again, at the very outermost rim of the galaxy.



While Mrrshan weapons technicians invented ever-more-elaborate plans for variable-gravity obstacle courses and ceiling trampolines as "necessary components" of their research into graviton beams, the RBO-42 realized their terrible mistake in allowing the technicians to have their way: Had they asked that their scientists pursue Hard Beam research, they could have moved on to something better - better at least for the vast majority of the Mrrshan population, meaning those who would not get to participate in "experimental" grav-yarnball leagues - as soon as their experts reverse-engineered it from Darlok versions of the same technology. It happened almost at once, in 2424, but they had already known it was certain to happen shortly.

Meanwhile, Darloks shape-shifted into Vogons continued to pointlessly sabotage small numbers of factories on worlds rich enough in mineral resources to rebuild them while the saboteurs were blinking, and another Mrrshan fleet arrived at Guradas, with a very different outcome from the time before. Only one Cobra had been built since all three that took part in the previous encounter had been destroyed, but more importantly, improved tactics weren't actually needed, thanks to the trading scouts' vastly-improved starships.



Some fifty-five smallcraft - less than a sixth of those involved - were lost in the course of the battle, destroying thirty-three bases and the Cobra. Soon thereafter, less than forty batallions were lost on the ground taking out over a hundred of their Darlok counterparts, thanks to better armored, heavier combat suits with integrated shields and laser blasters. The only things left to recover from nearly three hundred factories were the Darloks' outdated techniques for terraforming colonies. Almost simultaneously, another wave of Mrrshan transports hit the recently-established Darlok colony under the toxic skies of Iranha 2, conquering it with only a single batallion's worth of casualties. Either one of these events alone would have made headline news around the galaxy, but there was a third event that year even closer to the Mrrshan heart: An event the Betelgeuse trading scouts had been anticipating for more than a century.



One hundred and twenty two years after their first interstellar colony ship found that its people couldn't survive there, Moro Prime and the unthinkable wealth of its Lashburnium crystals finally supported a trading post and colony. And in accordance with a tradition nearly as venerable as that discovery, the official record of the event got the date wrong again. Transports and treasury assistance were ready to head out immediately to bring it up to speed, and the Galactic News Network finally - and belatedly - made note that the trading scouts were on the verge of taking over the galaxy. Technically - technically, as the Alkari would insist, were it they and not the newsdroid speaking - the rest of its statement was also true: The implication that there might be any way Mrrshan expansion could be contained wasn't intrinsic to its words, so they weren't exactly mistaken - technically.

The High Council met that year as well, but the voters were just going through the motions. In addition to the eight they controlled themselves, everyone knew in advance that the Vogons would draw the Darloks' remaining three and two from the insane machines. True, both races were at war with both nominees, but the Mrrshans - as the newdroid said - were clearly taking over the galaxy, and the fear and burning hatred their success inspired was far more moving than the mere depression, exasperation, and low-grade loathing that the Vogons seemed to naturally generate in everyone they met. The Alkari and Klackons, more wisely, cast four votes and three respectively in support of the inevitable winners of the galactic war the Council was intended to avert, not that it actually mattered in the slightest way. Those inevitable winners themselves controlled a full dozen votes out of thirty-three, giving the Mrrshans a veto - with an extra vote of cushion - over all High Council proceedings.

Much more important than the Council itself was ... literally anything else in the galaxy. But in particular, the tiny, toxic world of Iranha 2: Its newly-installed fuel base and scanners finally brought the Betelgeuse trading scouts in touch with every alien race in the entire galaxy. To some, the Klackons and their three-planet empire may have seemed little more than bugs about to hit the windshield of Mrrshan galactic expansion, but it turned out that there were two things about Klaquan, their xenophobic, research-loving hive queen, that would severely affect the progress of the Really Badly Organized 42:



She knew how to make fusion bombs, and she was willing to make a trade. The Klackons would in theory be able to survive on the surface of every known world with the help of Betelgeuse technology following the exchange, but the trade council didn't especially care. With fusion bombs available to them, where and whether Klackons or anyone else could survive was going to be strictly up to the Mrrshans.

The following year, designs featuring the new high-yield Fusion Bombs were completed at precisely zero Mrrshan worlds. They already had enough war material in space to win their ongoing war with the Darloks, and annoying though some of other races around the galaxy might be, the people of Betelgeuse preferred to continue the work of their trading scouts in pursuit of peaceful - or at least semi-peaceful exploration - or exploration of some kind, at least.



The discovery of the Sol system, far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of a certain spiral arm of the Galaxy, quite unregarded, and not far from the Vogons, led to a certain amount of curiosity. Normally, a small yellow sun like Sol would be likely to harbor some kind of planet - and very likely a habitable one - and there was even an entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide suggesting that there was one that was actually inhabited: An utterly insignificant little blue-green planet called Earth, about which the Guide has this to say:

Mostly harmless.

The failure of the planet Earth to appear - or indeed to exist - came as a bit of a surprise to the operators of the newest trading scout Advanced Scanner station, but upon discovering that the system's nonexistant planets also conveyed an inexplicable sense of impoverishment, the explanation became apparent: The Vogons had been in the area. They must have cleared the Earth away to make room for a completely unnecessary hyperspace bypass, and - judging from that oppressive sense of poverty - while they had been in the system, some of them must have taken out some time to read their poetry.

Barbarically though the Vogons had treated the mostly harmless planet earth, the Mrrshans did not think it their place to become an ape-descended people's instruments of vengeance. After all, they were busy conquering still more Darlok worlds - and entering a dominant position in the politics of the galaxy.



In spite of the newsdroid's assurances, the preparations being made by the galaxy's other races for a merger with the Betelgeuse trade empire were completely inadequate to to the task.

The Darloks and Vogons prepared by launching attacks over the next few years on numerous trading scout worlds, and also by fighting to the death (their deaths, naturally) against the Mrrshans who arrived to conquer their colonies at Misha and Whynil and Rigel. The Alkari prepared by taking advantage of a Mrrshan tactical mistake - the trade council had ordered too few combat transports and fighters to properly defend the last of those three worlds after its conquest - by sending transports of their own, enough of which survived the inadequate trading scout fighter defenses that they were able to take Rigel from the Mrrshans - moments after the original conquest, taking advantage of the now-depleted Mrrshan forces - for themselves.



Fortunately for the Mrrshans, the techs looted from the ruins of Rigel's colony by the victorious birdies were pretty much all a bunch of old, worthless junk. Death spores might be frightening if deployed in serious numbers, especially by nimble Alkari fleets, but the Mrrshans had known of their existence for ages, and - in spite of their failure to adequately protect Rigel in the year when they conquered the place - they had plans for how to protect their worlds from the nasty things.

Slowly though, some of the galaxy's races began to understand what preparations for merging actually meant: Shador actually offered a peace treaty in 2428, and then following the loss of Rigel the following year - the final Darlok colony apart from a lone, isolated, ultra-poor world way out on the galactic rim, deep in Mrrshan space - the trade council sent an identical offer back, and the Darloks immediately agreed. Then, not wishing to antagonize the Alkari unnecessarily, and not really afraid of the new technology they had stolen, the trade council agreed - by the narrowest of margins - to take their best shot at maintaining peace with the bird beings, rather than completely overrunning Rigel once again and following that up by rolling up the rest of Alkari space like a cheap throw rug ... made, apparently, of pinion-feathers and ill-planned metaphors. In any case, the trade council proposed a non-aggression pact with the birdies, and even when the avian diplomats made a frankly ridiculous demand as a condition of signing the agreement, the Mrrshan leadership narrowly - very narrowly - agreed.



After all, it was only money, and at 650 billion credits, not even a very serious fraction of the annual Mrrshan budget, thanks to their enormous and rapidly-growing economy.

Meanwhile, phase five of the Betelgeuse trade council's master plan was finally bearing fruit - of a sort. It had taken so long that most observers had accepted the assumption that the plan only had four phases after all and forgotten about the whole thing, and the recent trade for fusion bombs had convinced a growing minority of council members to just forget about phase five themselves and skip directly to phase six, but at least it didn't come up completely empty. The idea was that Mrrshan agents, equipped with by far the most advanced computer technology in the entire galaxy, would be able to hack the non-Darlok alien computer nets so effectively that new technological secrets from their various targets would practically rain down from the sky. The reality was starkly different: The trade council had figured without the aliens' most effective espionage-defense system: The impenetrable pRNG. At last though, a Mrrshan spy had broken through, and on obviously choosing the Vogons' impressive planetology labs to loot (there being no computer or propulsion tech known to the Vogon people that the Mrrshans didn't know already) she even had an opportunity of framing another race for the break-in.



Of course she didn't do anything of the kind - using the "Escape button" she'd built into her hacking console once she came away with her prize, she avoided leaving any tracks at all, in the hope that she wouldn't trigger a security sweep that way - but that did little to change the fact that the tech she managed to steal was pure junk technology. The Mrrshans had been able to land on tundra planets for a long time, thanks to much more advanced projects in planetology, and all the acquisition really did for them was to improve their miniaturization slightly and clear a little bit more junk away.

The following year, due in part to the miserable failure phase five had achieved even in its most-successful moment, but due most of all to the stabilizer designs just invented by Betelgeuse propulsion engineers (the design involved cradling the engines in intricate balls of flexible, resilient alloy "string") the growing trade council minority that favored skipping to phase six crossed over and became a growing majority. That was also the year when the council received a surprising message from Shador of the Darloks.



That Shador hated the Klackons - in spite of being out of contact thanks to the conquest of every Darlok colony within communications range of anyone who wasn't a cat - came as no surprise. That it would try to manipulate anyone and everyone into attacking its enemies likewise came as news to precisely nobody. The questions Shador raised among members of the trade council were twofold: First, why did it imagine that there was any hint of conflict for it to stoke between them and Klaquan's people; and second, what did it think it had at its disposal with which to reward them in case they did take on the bugs?

That first question was answered soon enough at least: Moments after Shador's holoimage faded, Klaquan's took its place, apologizing for the need, by her expressed, to destroy the RBO-42.

As one, the members of the council shrugged, looked at one another, and said, "Oooookaaaaaaaayyy...."

The next thing they did was to call up their starship engineers and order the production of a new bomber. They still weren't gullible enough to go after Klaquan's people, no matter what Shador might say - nor the Alkari, who broke their non-aggression pact the following year - but they were thinking of another target with whom they were already at war, and whose conquest would yield much better rewards than anything the Darloks could supply. Guradas and Misha were already launching their first wave of transports.



That first wave would fall just short of victory, with two million Vogon survivors, but more were coming, if not yet there then elsewhere across the galaxy.

Next time: The Bum's Rush
(TO BE CONTINUED...)

[shallow_thought]

Half the galaxy and you haven't even deployed fusion bombs yet? Nice.

Also, great reading .