RefSteel's Late Imperium 42 Report

[Psillycyber]

Great use of nuke bombers (underrated in my opinion)! Your strength really snowballed quickly!

[RefSteel]

Thanks very much, guys! I'm glad still you're still enjoying reading along. And so...

Part 7: Twilight of the Imperium

The first to see the writing on the wall - belatedly and surprisingly - was TVC-15 (a designation that the Mrrshans had previously mis-identified, as records would reveal that the letters actually stood for "Totally Vorking Crazy" - known to its friends, if any, as "Totes"). The machine-being shocked everyone on Betelgeuse and across the galaxy by correctly identifying the situation in which it found itself - thanks, of course, to the meddling of its fourteen other personalities.



The war, originally started because of an old Shakeservoian quote TVC-15 had found in a cookie-shaped Fortune Battery, was about as senseless as they come, and the people of Betelgeuse were happy to put the whole affair behind them before it turned bloody. Well, mostly sparky and slaggy and melty really, but somewhat bloody.

In the meantime, the Mrrshans went on pursuing their various other wars and skirmishes, chasing Darlok fleets away from worlds the shapeshifters had once controlled - the People of the Cloak were down to their last world, a hapless little planet deep in Mrrshan space, at the very edge of the galaxy, with basically zero minerals of any use to an interstellar empire across its entire surface - belatedly killing Alkari fleets and transports in space and (as was unfortunately necessary in one case since members of the trade council were in a rush to meet some kind of deadline and were getting sloppy) on the ground, and sending trading scouts around the galaxy to visit interesting places.



Such as, just for instance, the Klackon homeworld. Because of the poor reception the Klackons offered the 750+ hitchhikers extending their electronic thumbs the bugs' way, it was necessary to remove the planetary defenses: Some 116 million more hitchhikers were en route, and the Kholdan missile bases were only going to get in the way.



In addition to liberating a lush, green world (though it inexplicably held less than one hundred and fifty factories) the visiting hitch-hikers picked up some hot travel tips to share with future readers of the Guide: Techniques for building new factories (like the ones inexplicably missing from Kholdan) on the cheap, and different kinds of armament to help defend friendly starships from no-doubt-well-meaning - though implacably hostile, not to say homicidal - alien fleets. Ion cannons were well and good for ships that for whatever reason didn't recognize the power of NPGs, and would do for a relatively compact long-range beam, but fusion beams especially would be an excellent, devastating weapon to install aboard the kinds of starships of which the ruling council of the Betelgeuse trading scouts was famous across the galaxy ... for not building any. As far as the trading scouts were concerned, a weapon that wouldn't fit on the smallest, cheapest, and quickest available hull was a weapon not worth lifting into space.

Some of the wags around the galaxy were taking to calling them the "Mrrkari." The Mrrshans would have an answer to that before long, but they had work to do in the meantime. Plus, they were about to get another amazing and valuable reward - to in fact "be rewarded greatly," to quote somebody or other from a few years before - for their brilliant work at the Klackon homeworld!



Yes, true to its word, Shador provided the most valuable gift it could offer for the Mrrshans' good work against a dangerous mutual enemy with whom the Darloks had not had any contact of any kind for ages: A gift of cash. Of so much cash, it approached - at least, sort of, somewhat approached - a full 40% of the bribe the Alkari had asked and that the RBO-42 had casually delivered several years back, in exchange for a Non-Aggression Pact that had lasted for one entire year. It was a gift so large that it could boost a single planet's output - such as, for instance, the Darloks' own ex-homeworld - by more than half ... for a single year ... among the roughly two dozen planets then governed from Betelgeuse. It was such an amazingly amazing gift that the entire Really Badly Organized 42 trade council was left speechless upon receiving it, at least insofar as forty-two council members rolling around on the floor, holding their sides, and roaring with laughter as one does not - as the Alkari might say - technically constitute speech.

Once the council had composed itself, its next order of business was to receive and accept a peace offer from Jeltz. Apparently some anomalies had been discovered with the paperwork associated with the original war declaration, and the Darloks - having been out of contact with the Vogons along with everyone else in the galaxy who didn't wear a cloak or have a long, furry tail - hadn't been positioned to keep the trail of their meddling clean in the face of the slow and ponderous official investigation. With Escalon swapping owners roughly every second year and with no further immediate need of the world for scouting purposes - thanks again, in part, to Kholdan - the Mrrshans saw no reason to refuse, and peace was established forthwith, leaving the hapless Klackons as the only race still at war with Betelgeuse.

That would last exactly one year. Then the Darloks, apparently regretting their decision to share the amazingly amazing gift of basically all their wealth (also known to the Mrrshans as "random pocket change") with the Mrrshan people, decided it was time to declare a brand-new war from the safety of their lone ultra-poor world.

This is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of.

To the astonishment of many observers, the trading scouts didn't (bother to) respond by wiping out the last remnants of the Darloks - perhaps because they had found something better to occupy their attention - and indeed to celebrate.



Thanks to the intrepid work of noted hoopy frood Ford Prefect, hitch-hiking through the asteroid fields of Crius with the assistance of Kholdan's newly-completed Advanced Space Scanners, the Betelgeuse Trading Scouts had managed by the year 2441 to explore every single star system in the entire galaxy.

Also, just in passing, they appeared to be pretty much conquering the whole thing.

They would continue the process the following year, reverse-engineering the ion rifles used against them by Klackon soldiers when they took over the planet Willow, leaving the bugs with only a lonely planetary outpost, all the way out at the edge of the galaxy beyond Vogsphere, close to Sol and Crius. The Klackons, like the 'loks, still refused to discuss any prospect of peace, but the Really Badly Organized 42 supposed it was only a matter of time.

While that was going on, the Center for the Study of Nothing But ECM back on Betelgeuse finished work on its latest model-6 jammer and made plans to move forward with a model-7, while Mrrshans around the galaxy made use of the lab's incidental advances in computer technology to ... improve their understanding of computers even more.



Also, of course, to break into Meklar research computer nets and steal some planetary shield technology that might have been very useful had the Mrrshans been in any way concerned about alien attacks of any kind or in any form by this point in galactic history. In between the two thefts down in Meklar space, the RBO-42 had managed to make peace with the Darloks, but since Klaquan's exile bugs still refused to talk peace, the end of the insignificant skirmish the Darloks called a war was essentially just a footnote to current events in the galaxy, little noted by frankly anybody - kind of like the minimalist trade agreement to which the Mrrshans and Meklar were about to agree, or the eight factories that would soon thereafter be lost to saboteurs at an insignificant little toxic colony. For all intents and purposes, the Mrrshans had taken control of the galaxy. Yet in one important respect, the Really Badly Organized 42 had failed by living up to their name: The last deadline they had been hurrying to meet, often sloppily and thoughtlessly, had come - and it had gone - and not only had they failed to file any reasonably detailed reports of their activities to the population of Betelgeuse at large, they hadn't even begun to approach the technology needed for their plan to fulfill their charter and their purpose in the galaxy: Thanks to their scanners, true, they had managed to explore every star in the galaxy, and certain members of the Mrrshan public were justifiably proud of their own contributions, like the people of Drakka 8 who still maintained Slartibartfast's grand legacy, but there remained at least one planet that no Mrrshan fleet yet dared to visit, and it was the single planet they longed above all others to see.

They would pursue it further, even beyond their deadline, but as of 2448, when the deadline passed, Magrathea's secrets were still guarded by its ancient, automated defense system, and for the present, they would remain a mystery.

Next time: Shadow Rising
(TO BE CONTINUED...)

[RefSteel]

Part 8: Starfall

With the passing of their deadline, the Really Badly Organized 42 moped around their capital on Betelgeuse 5, commiserating with one another, trying to play sad music on their Sirius Cybernetic Ambient Mood Music Machines*, and generally feeling sorry for themselves, until the wisest (and, oddly perhaps, also they youngest) member of the trade council suddenly brightened and exclaimed, "Hey, everybody! Do you realize what this means? It means now we don't have a deadline we have to meet!" With that, everybody turned off their SCAMMMs, and - in part for that very reason - a mood of jubilation seized the capital, the entire Betelgeuse system, and indeed all of Mrrshan space. The council gathered once again, resuming their usual loving examination of every planet and star fleet belonging to their trading scouts, and without any further ado - nor any further rushed and sloppy management of their affairs since they didn't feel the need to hurry through anything - they prepared for the invasion of two worlds that should have been theirs long before - and with them, thanks to the identity of their present or soon-to-be owners, to abolish once and for all the mocking nickname "Mrrkari."

* - The Sirius Cybernetic Ambient Mood Music Machine, better known by the acronym SCAMMM, is a highly-advanced piece of neurocomputational equipment designed to precisely calibrate itself to its user's emotional state, based on a careful readings of brainwaves, facial expressions, and advanced encephalography, match the result to the exact type of music best suited to the user's present mood, and make repeated promises to deliver it at carefully-chosen intervals during the course of an endless procession of advertisements for other products of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

The transports on their way to nearly every Alkari world were not due to arrive until after the upcoming high council meeting, and there were some who held out hope that the Mrrshan people might manage to experience a year or two of peace in the interim, but sadly this was not to be. Not only did the Klackons continue to insist on pretending to prosecute an empty war from a single world that lacked any meaningful economy or starfleet, they were apparently joined in their hatred by a completely inanimate object with enormous momentum and kinetic energy.



Fortunately, the comet had been detected more or less in the center of the Mrrshans' military-industrial core. The Whynil system became a muster point for the enormous fleet of new stabilized fusion bombers that would be needed to crack the Vogons' numerous and heavily-shielded bases, and the incoming comet became a practice target for the fleet. None of the new bombers would be heading into Alkari space as a result, but it hardly mattered: They weren't needed.

A meeting of the galactic High Council would also meet in the year of the comet, and everyone went through the motions, with the Vogons controlling eight votes and picking up one from the Klackons and four from the Alkari, and only the one-planet Darloks actually voting for the RBO-42 - suggesting that somewhere along the line, TVC-15 and the Vogons had made peace - but with the abstention of the one-vote Meklar and more importantly of the Mrrshans, whose sixteen votes outnumbered every other race's combined, in spite of the High Council's failure to include the passengers of hundreds of Mrrshan transports in space when calculating voting population, the outcome would be as indecisive as ever.

While ignoring the High Council, the Mrrshan trading scouts continued running roughshod over Alkari computer networks, lifting plans for gatling lasers they would never use or need, and a bio toxin antidote that might have been very comforting to have back when it had been remotely possible for enemy starships to penetrate Mrrshan space defenses to the extent of actually dropping things on planets. what they stole wasn't really important though, even as they declined another opportunity to frame Vogons or Meklar for the theft. The spies in Alkari space were just keeping their claws sharp, as it were: The Mrrshans would soon have all the Alkari technology they could possibly desire, by other means.



Coordinating a major invasion for the conquest of an entire star system was so much fun when the Mrrshans got it right that they had decided not to sell themselves short, and instead coordinated the simultaneous invasion of three, all due to arrive within a year of the High Council meeting. Of course, that description doesn't really provide a very complete or acurate picture of what the trading scouts were doing: The first of the three worlds they were about to take back was Rigel - long since stolen by the Alkari after (as the Darloks who had founded the original colony many years before them might have said) "our people rightfully stole this place first; get out of here!" - and the second was Escalon: A little baby potato of a world that had already changed hands two or three times just since the leftovers of an older-generation Mrrshan starfleet last took out its defenses with a collective yawn. The third though? The third target was Altair.



As far as the Mrrshans were concerned, that part was easy. The tricky part was planning all the logistics to also support the other rafts of Mrrshan transports that by the time of the triple invasion were already en route. The chair of the RBO-42 believed that slow, steady, careful conquests had their place - but their place, according to her testimony, was in the planning rooms and daydreams of other races: Races by whom, if the Mrrshans could strike with sufficient speed and accuracy, such plans as those would never be executed. The Mrrshans themselves of course were busy demonstrating how Fast but Flighty could win the race even over Slow but Steady: Win the whole thing fast enough that you don't even have time to think about how far ahead you are or whether you'd like a rest or a detour before finishing the job. To the Badly Organized 42, the fable of the tortoise and the hare wasn't about patience or consistency: It was a reminder that, no matter how much better and faster they might be than anybody else in the galaxy, it was always worth pushing harder to beat them even more!

To that end, the Mrrshan counter-invasion of Rigel included the most enthusiastic reverse-engineering experts Betelgeuse had to offer, who arrived to find that after poaching the planet from the Mrrshans, the Alkari had converted it, with just over 150 factories, into a giant ecological experiment on a planetary scale. In addition to the enhanced techniques they long had coveted for restoring industry-poisoned environments, the reverse-engineers uncovered the most advanced work in the field known to exist even in theory: The methods (probably originally reverse-engineered from Sakkra labs when they conquered Escalon) by which Alkari could achieve complete ecological restoration of any world in the galaxy. The Mrrshans were still celebrating when the next report came in, from the planet Altair 3...



...which meant the galaxy-wide parties could continue uninterrupted, celebrating the Mrrshan acquisition of the fourth historic homeworld out of the six in the galaxy. The conquerors must have been too busy celebrating to do a proper job of looting too, since among 186 factories, their reverse-engineers didn't recover anything useful except for blueprints for making yet more and similar factories a bit more quickly and easily, but remembering the story of the tortoise and the hare again, the troops at Escalon made up for it in spades. Two types of fuel cells, nearly doubling the Betelgeuse trading scouts war fleets' effective range, were fast becoming irrelevant with fuel bases popping up everywhere across the galaxy, but it still was nice to have them, much like the advanced Class V deflector shields and automated repair system, neither of which the Mrrshans would ever bother putting on any of the ships in their fleet. There was no gainsaying the hard work of reverse-engineers who could recover so much technology from ("technically," as the birds would say) less than 150 factories, though between Altair's and Escalon's, it might have been expected that they could snag at least one more.

So when it turned out that they had after all, at the very last minute before glitch protocols designed to prevent it falling into enemy hands could destroy the designs, the celebrations just then beginning to tail off on the more reserved and stoic Mrrshan worlds immediately resumed their full swing.



With the Mrrshan empire literally spanning the galaxy, warp-3 transports and warp-4 fleets were already starting to feel too slow. The boost that Impulse drives would provide, likely saving a decade of research for Betelgeuse's scientists, was difficult to overstate, especially with Ion Drive research ready to start immediately. Hilariously - and typically - TVC-15 responded to the virtual elimination of the Alkari as a threat to anyone in the galaxy by pronouncing that the RBO-42 "must now realize the incredible threat the Alkari empire poses."

It was of course correct: The Really Badly Organized 42 realized the nature of the Alkari threat perfectly, and it was incredible how quickly that threat had become "absolutely none whatever." Mindful of the fable though, the Mrrshans weren't about to stop conquering the Alkari. Besides, their transports were already in space with no way to turn them back, and their fleets in position to continue softening up their targets for invasion. And many of the Mrrshans of refined tastes had developed a taste for poultry.

In any case, not every threat would be so easy to neutralize as the Alkari's. The Vogons, with their ECM, armor and shield technology - including Class 7 deflectors to shield their bases, layered with Class V planetaries - were going to be a much harder target than the Alkari. The old nuclear bombers wouldn't be able to scratch the paint on a Sakkra missile base, for instance. Those old bombers had also all been decommissioned for scrap somewhere along the line to help get planets like Trax and Moro through a burst of factory construction, help save Toranor from its one-time plague, or something else that seemed more important at the time than a bunch of badly outdated bombers, but I'm trying to make a point here, okay?

Ahem! Anyway, it was going to take a whole lot of bombs to crack the Vogon defenses, so if the Mrrshans wanted to take the fight to their most powerful - and indeed only relevant - remaining rival, they were going to have to...



...oh. It turns out that the Mrrshans learned of an alternate universe in which Earth's dolphins were able to circumvent the Vogons and their pointless acts of bypass-related destruction thanks to some clever technology (which, by a complete lack of coincidence, had something to do with alternate universes). Inspired by the dolphins of that Earth, and naming their new ship design accordingly, the Mrrshans decided to build just a whole lot of bombers, carrying two fusion bombs apiece, with good enough battle computers - to say nothing of their feline reflexes - that the chances of missing their targets were about the same as the chance that a Vogon in a position of authority would voluntarily commit its life to acts of kindness and mercy. So, yeah, okay. The thing the Mrrshans would have to do to take on the mighty Vogons? That. The thing they would have to do is what they did.

Of course they didn't go through with it right away. The Mrrshans were excellent warriors in street-to-street combat - mainly due to the electropneumatic durraloy battle suits they wore for the purpose, with integrated ion rifles and deflector arrays - but the Vogons had advantages of their own in that respect, so the first order of business for the Mrrshans was to level the playing field ... except, of course, in the areas where it was tilted in their favor already!



Neither cruel enough to use death spores themselves nor eager for them to be deployed by the Vogons' enemies, the RBO-42 approved the exchange of the formula for synthesis of their bio-toxin antidote for another kind of protection: The Vogons' advanced personal shields. Then, in light of their own immunity to the wretched things and their capacity to spread the immunity to everyone else in the galaxy if necessary by gift or trade, the Mrrshan leaders were perfectly willing to trade the designs for death spores themselves away, even in exchange for scatter pack rockets they would never actually deploy. At the time, the few anxious members of the RBO-42 who thought the rockets might be needed for something at some point were able to push the trade through because the majority who knew better were confident enough not to worry about it either way. Some might be inclined to call it overconfidence, in fact, but if you happen to be among them, you might want to go back and remind yourself of what had been happening for the last few decades.

In the meantime, the Mrrshans had gotten some other business done too: Their diplomats had establishe non-aggression pacts with the Meklar (on a rare good day - or a mediocre day at least - for TVC-15) and - in a move that doesn't fit with the narrative I'm trying to put together here at all, but was probably spearheaded by a misguided woud-be emulator of someone named Trillian - the Vogons. Their ground troops had rolled over yet another Alkari world, picking up Trilithium Crystal fuel cells from the ruins of Hyades, prompting yet another compliment from the Vogons. And their starfleet, while mustering in preparation for proving my narrative was on-point after all...



...incidentally also blew Whynil's incoming comet into tiny pieces with nine years to spare before its estimated time of impact. But fusion bombs in the number the Mrrshan fleet could bring to bear have a tendency to do that sort of thing.

Next time: Long Shadow
(TO BE CONTINUED...)

[RFS-81]

That's some great writing again! I especially liked the part about the terraforming grass, and the hydrogen fuel cells vs. dead planet bases. Oh, and steamrolling half the galaxy before fusion bombs is pretty neat, too.

How do you even come up with all this? Do you play the game, note down all the facts and then stare at them until a narrative pops up? Anyway, take your time, I don't mind waiting if this report stays that funny.

[RefSteel]

Thanks, RFS-81! I actually usually don't take any notes as I play the game; I take hundreds of screenshots (I think over a thousand for this game - wayyyyy too many, and this honestly is a big part of the reason it takes me so long to play these days) and rely on my memory for the details of my strategy. As for how I come up with the stories, they kind of write themselves; I check my screenshots to remind myself of stuff that happened, build narratives around it and (for the best parts, and my favorite ones to write) make up characters to inhabit the world and watch them run around doing stuff. Should only be one or two installments after this one though.

Part 9: Beyond Doubt

It didn't take long for Mrrshan patience to run out with chasing the mirage of peace. In 2454, the same year their troops captured Zhardan, leaving the Alkari with only a single, tiny colony out at the far rim of the galaxy - so two entire years after the pact was formed -- the RBO-42 received word from Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz that their non-aggression pact was no longer convenient and was therefore being discarded. After checking with their existing war enemies - all of whose lives were continuing entirely at the mercy of the RBO-42 - and finding them unwilling to consider anything in the nature of a peace treaty, all 42 members of the trade council got fed up with the aliens around them, and ordered all-out assaults on Vogon targets across the galaxy - the only colonies still in existence that could be conquered without exterminating the last remnants of an alien species.



Yarrow was the first Vogon world to fall, the very next year, with state-of-the-art deflector shield designs recovered from the planet's factories, shortly after Mrrshan scientists figured out how to terraform the atmospheres of planets like those in the Moro and Trax star systems, and got to work on advanced soil enrichment techniques, with every expectation that work could begin fairly soon on the simpler soil enrichment project some of their predecessors had envisioned (but not actually bothered to research at any point) - since Mrrshan soldiers or secret agents were expected to steal the plans for those from Vogon laboratories shortly.

The Vogons, it will be remembered, had much better shielding and much higher bases on their core worlds than any other species - including the Mrrshans, who were continuing to virtually ignore their own defenses in favor of an unbeatable offense rolling over everything in a series of galaxy-spanning blitzes. In addition to the important tactic known as "sheer unstoppable numbers," they were able to achieve this by literally flying circles around hapless Vogon scatter-pack rockets In a fine demonstration of advanced tactical maneuvering:

After initially flying straight at the planet, the 361 Dolphin 5.0 bomber pilots heard the warning klaxons for enemy missile lock, and responded by ... continuing to fly straight toward the planet! Briefly, at least! With the rockets closing in, the Dolphins banked hard to maneuver "above" the planet's orbital plane, and then - as the rockets turned to follow - opened up just enough space to dive back "down" toward the planet and bomb it from just "overhead." The Vogon shielding was so advanced that they didn't expect to take it down in two volleys even with the assistance of over 750 older fusion bombers (and more than 400 fighters to take out most of the "defending" fleet before it could even escape to hyperspace) - so as the planetary bases targeted the older bombers with their second launch, the Dolphins let their momentum carry them past the planet as they crossed its orbital plane and continued to dive "below" it, bending back along their initial attack vector as they dove even further "below" the orbital plane and finally passing the missiles by once again as they dove back toward the outer reaches of the planet's orbit and dropped another ten percent of their payload in one pass. With that...



...the battle was over. Knowing the missiles' guidance system relied on real-time targeting data from the bases below, the older bombers were able to completely ignore the missiles targeting them as their bombs blew bases and targeting arrays alike to smithereens, and both sets of rockets - the ones just launched from the planet's surface and the ones hurtling directly past the main Betelgeuse trading scout fighter fleet in their single-minded (and completely ineffectual) rush to close with the fleet of Dolphin 5.0s - managed to lose all direction,.sputter, spiral out of control, and finally consume the last of their fuel and expend their explosive charges uselessly deep in space. Ajax's skies belonged to the Mrrshans - and, as would shortly be discovered, Denubius's too - and Mrrshan ground troops weren't just hands-down the most deadly in the galaxy; they also outnumbered the defenders by more than 3 to 2. The outcome was not even momentarily in doubt, and between the 693 factories on Ajax and Denubius, there would be plenty of opportunities to pick the Vogon research sector clean.



Zortium Armor would improve the Mrrshans' ground combat advantage from "overpowering" to "overwhelming," the new battle computer would probably eventually be used for something, the robotic controls and terraforming technologies would be great for the long-term economy, while soil enrichment and cloning would help the entire galaxy get that economy started a great deal faster ... while simultaneously continuing to support a series of rapid invasions across all but one of the Vogons' remaining worlds. Also some kind of giant beam for shoving other ships around or something that seemed like it would be really effective but that for some reason none of the Mrrshans actually care about.

Two years later, the majority of the Ajax fleet had united with all the bombers from Denubius - as well as further reinforcements from the Mrrshans' military-industrial core and nearly two hundred assault transports - at the Vogon homeworld: The most heavily-defended planet in the entire galaxy.



When they arrived, the sheer number and power of the bombers involved was such that there was no need even to fly around the planet as they had done at Ajax: They just flew up to the planet and dropped bombs until its defenses and targeting systems turned into smoking craters. The missiles it had launched never caught up with them before the destruction of their ground-based targeting systems caused them to fly wildly into each other and detonate harmlessly in space.

Moments later, the transports would touch down, and the battle for Vogsphere would begin.



It was kind of a foregone conclusion. Though each side used equivalent armor materials and shielding, the Mrrshans made better use of both, using the former to construct heavy power-assisted battle suits instead of Vogon-portable armor and the latter to absorb the blows from Vogon slug-throwers much more effectively than the Vogons' shields could handle the ion fire of high-tech rifles built into the Mrrshan battle suits. In spite of the Vogons' fortifications on their own home ground, the casualties favored the Mrrshans by nearly two to one - and so many troops had been sent to conquer the enormous planet Vogshphere that even after the battle was over, the Mrrshan survivors outnumbered the Vogon dead by a similar ratio, already prepared to take full advantage (thanks to recently-adapted Vogon robotic factory controls) of nearly five hundred factories while still sending nearly a third of their number on to another Vogon world they intended to claim.

It was truly an era of wonders: The very next year, just before the Mrrshans conquered Pollus on the galactic rim (completing the force field research project they'd barely started and which the Vogons had just completed there, barely noticing the slight reduction in their bombers' efficiency since they'd committed enough to overkill the bases so thoroughly) the Center for Always Researching ECM Every Time, All the Time, Without Exception completed their Mark VII design, and for the first time in their long, long history, failed to live up to their name!



In spite of the potential for Mark VIII jammers to more quickly open the way toward yet more and more computer technology, another advance in robotic controls was just too attractive to every other Mrrshan in the galaxy for even the CARECMETATWE to ignore it.

With the final invasions due to arrive the following year, Mrrshan ambassadors set out on a premature peace-making project, ending their Alkari and Klackon wars and even establishing a new non-aggression pact with the birdies. Vogon defenses were trivially cleared away at both target worlds, and the ground troops came in, outnumbering the Vogon defenders at both worlds - especially at Nordia - which with the massive advantage conveyed to the people of Betelgeuse by their advanced ground combat technology meant that the conclusion was in no doubt at all.



By early 2460, the same races that had been complimenting the RBO-42's sagacity in recognizing the Vogon threat as recently as the previous year were instead complaining loudly that the Mrrshan people would have to either stop expanding or be eliminated. The latter was not going to happen under any circumstances, but the former - for a few decades anyway - did: There was no further room for Mrrshan expansion anywhere in the galaxy that wouldn't require the extermination of another sentient species. The once-powerful Vogons had been reduced to a single ultra-poor world near the heart of the galaxy. Yet in spite - or because - of their new peaceful ways, the Mrrshans soon had no friends among any other species; indeed, in 2462, every race not already at war with them called (not for the first time) to threaten them or, in the case of TVC-15, to break a non-aggression pact on the predictably crazy theory that this would somehow cause "new colonies" to materialize out of nowhere out in the deeps of space. Soon thereafter, before the Sakkra were willing to discuss peace, the Darloks too would break their pact, and the Alkari and Meklar would both declare open war.

The RBO-42 by this time was getting sick and tired of chasing alien attack fleets around the galaxy, but building missile bases all around the empire just to repel pointless alien probes just didn't seem worthwhile to even a single member of the trade council. Instead, they decided to just send a bunch of fighters and bombers to the lone world of every alien with whom they were at war, to eliminate their fleets and missile bases as soon as they appeared, thereby finding a use for the old trading scout fleets and making their lives a great deal easier. Of course, with ground invasions no longer an option for a council that wished to avoid genocide, there was always a possibility that some alien being would come up with a technology that was new to the trading scout fleets, but especially since Betelgeuse was pursuing computer technology heavily for unrelated reasons, this wasn't likely to impose any limits on Mrrshan technology.



The theft of a mark-5 battle computer from the lone Alkari world in 2463 may have helped a little bit - but only a little. It was mostly Mrrshan computer science know-how (extended with class-6 robotic controls just in time for the assist) and the clever work of their agents that gave them the ultimate opportunity for bragging rights exactly a decade later: A technology theft (of outdated deflector shields about which no living being cared, but that's not the point) from the shape-shifting kleptomaniacal Darloks themselves.

(Shortly after the battle computer theft, the founders of the Mrrshan Variable-Gravity Dance League had also regretfully admitted that their Graviton Beam prototypes were working perfectly, and agreed to move on with more practical research into Megabolt cannons ... not without long and longing glances back at their beloved gravity laboratories.)

Then the year 2474 brought a double dose of terrible news: The Mrrshans' various enemies still wouldn't discuss peace, and Helos - the green star at the galactic rim that harbored the largest of the trading scouts' mineral-rich colonies - was threatening to blow itself and everything in orbit around it into a fine mist of space dust across the galaxy.



If only the people of Betelgeuse had built up thousands and thousands of BCs of reserves already! If only they had a couple of big, fertile ultra-rich worlds from which to make more!

...oh. Right. Of course they had. Anyway.

Thanks to the aliens' refusal to discuss peace, the High Council meeting of 2475 was of interest only to writers of the drier sorts of comedy. Shador and Klaquan - the only leaders not then at war with the Mrrshans, and naturally both at war with the Vogons, whom their starships couldn't reach - each cast a single vote from their tiny exile worlds for the RBO-42 to stop pretending and just officially declare sovereignty over the entire galaxy. The Meklar and Alkari added single votes - the Meklar, in spite of being the only non-Mrrshan race in the galaxy still permitted to occupy its homeworld, apparently still hadn't figured out how to breed - to the two cast by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz in favor of the idea that the Vogons should rule the galaxy from their lone (but quite large) mineral-free world at the heart of the galaxy. With those six votes cast among five of the galaxy's six races, the Mrrshans politely abstained...



...with their 48. Noted Betelgeuse native Zaphod Beeblebrox fumed that the RBO-42 should really just use their voting power - eight times the total of all the other rulers' combined - to declare him the official President of the Galaxy, but knowing what would come of that, the trade council elected to hold off until the next election and give his acquaintance Trillian one more chance. In the meantime, they had something much more important than a galactic election to deal with, and a possible enemy more advanced and powerful than any combination of alien beings.

Next time: The Shadow of Magrathea
(TO BE CONTINUED...)

[RefSteel]

Part 10: What You Get

Having declined to make their rule of the galaxy official, the people of Betelgeuse made short work of a number of critical research projects: Ion Drives in 2477, Advanced Soil Enrichment the following year alongside a Stellar Rejuvenator Device designed specifically for Helos, thereby ending the threat of getting littered with tiny bits of their colony.



Various aliens called on a regular basis to whine that it was unfair for the Mrrshans to keep getting even stronger when they were already so much more powerful than everyone else in the galaxy - or to compliment them for their annual destruction of the fleets and bases of anyone foolish enough to remain at war with them. Betelgeuse scientists developed an utterly insignificant reduction in their industrial waste production and devised a new battle computer about twice as powerful as the next-most-advanced design anywhere in the galaxy, having also picked up some hyper-advanced robotic controls that this historian may have accidentally failed to mention. This would lead to the ultimate moment of truth in 2485: The moment for which the RBO-42 had collectively been waiting, through countless changes in its composition, for most of two centuries.

It was a dud. The chances had only been about a coinflip to begin with, but when they failed, the entire trade council - the whole Really Badly Organized 42 - let out a collective disappointed sigh.



Then they asked their computer science teams to get to work on more robotic controls, and moved on with their lives. They had more technology to bring in after all, and a new ship to design. There had been a plan once upon a time, conceived generations before, back when the RBO-42 was considering leaving the Vogons largely intact instead of conquering them all, to give the aliens a chance to come up with the tech the Mrrshans wanted in case of exactly the eventuality that had in fact occurred. The council had ultimately rejected this plan as annoying and dumb however, the more so if they would have to wait for the aliens to get their from tiny single-planet empires around the galaxy. A new, alternative plan was therefore needed - and one that could be enacted in a reasonably short timeframe. After pulling in a few more techs - the terraforming project codenamed "IT80," Megabolt Cannon designs, Class XI deflector shields and Andrium Armor, of which precisely none would be used at Magrathea except for purposes of miniaturization - as well as one device that would turn out to be of use, the Mrrshans finally bit the bullet and fed a certain number into a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain whose logic circuits had been hooked up to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a really nice, hot cup of tea.



The result, once the engineers had found a way to build it, was the Heart of Gold: The one starship that could successfully reach the planet Magrathea, thanks to its eponymous system: The golden Infinite Improbability generator that would take it to the most improbable planet in the galaxy. The Mrrshan people as a whole were thriving, especially in comparison with all the irrelevant other species, and the gap would only grow larger, especially with unexpected events like the Yarrow Eureka of 2488 helping to drive their economy.



The Mrrshans were not content with their wealth and prosperity however, no matter what new riches might be discovered at any world in their empire. Even their defacto galactic conquest seemed insignificant in comparison with the secrets of the ancients, and the hope of discovering the ultimate answer (and the ultimate question thereunto) of Life, the Universe, and Everything - and there was a certain one-time resident of Betelgeuse who thought he knew where to find it. Magrathea awaited, with all its approaches watched by the devastatingly powerful and completely homicidal Guardian. Though the Heart of Gold could find the planet, even it could not reach the surface without facing the planet's ancient and deadly automated defense system.



The crew of the Heart of Gold, not expecting this, screamed as one in blind panic - all but one. Ford Prefect, field researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, cleared his throat and pointed severely at the cover of the remarkable book to which he had contributed any number of entries. Arthur, Trillian, and Zaphod focused on the cover, took its instructions - "DON'T PANIC" - to heart, and settled down to discussing the problem like sensible human beings and/or Mrrshans.

"This is fantastic!" said Zaphod Beeblebrox, captain of the ship by right of having stolen it from the planet Damogron in another continuum. "They're actually trying to kill us! There's sure to be something down there that'll make this trip worthwhile!"

Arthur Dent, a random human stowaway picked up somewhere in interstellar space, repaeated, "They're trying to kill us! How is this a good thing?"

Trillian glanced at Arthur and elaborated, "They're coming at us with all the technological weaponry of the ancients of Magrathea, and we've got..." she pursed her lips, then asked the computer, "Eddie, what have we got?"

"Nothing in the way of weapons or defenses," it answered cheerfully. "Looks like we're going to be burned to cinders in T-minus one combat round!"

"We have a whole round?" Ford brightened. "Eddie's right! They haven't fired their..." he looked at the viewport. "Eddie, have you scanned their ship?"

Promptly, Eddie answered, "Eighteen plasma torpedoes and eighty-five scatter-pack clusters that'll split into ten missiles each! Although the beams will get us first, you know."



"Right," Ford pressed on eagerly. "They haven't launched any of those things yet! There's still time to get away if we retreat!"

Zaphod was aghast. "Retreat? We only just got here! We can handle that thing! We'll just..." He waved a hand vaguely as though the plan were too obvious to bear explaining.

Trillian glared at him and told Eddie, "Get us out of here."

With a cheery lilt to its voice, the computer answered, "No can do! They're jamming my guidance systems!" Brightly, it added, "I can give you manual control if you like!"

"Perfect!" Zaphod leapt up. "Get us those controls!" He looked around at the rest of the crew. "So, does anybody know how to fly this ship?"

Three blank stares met his. Out on the viewscreen, the Guardian began to stir. In a small voice, Arthur asked, "We're all dead, aren't we?"

"Yes, definitely," Ford answered. "Now please shut up."

"Okay then," Arthur answered, ignoring the request. "Then why don't we use the improbability thingy? It can't make things any worse than they are already, right?"

The Guardian's engines flared into life. Eddie announced with pleasure, "Our first round's about to be up! T-minus..."

Without waiting for any further comment, Arthur reached for the Improbability Drive's activation lever and hauled on it, hard.

Absolutely nothing happened.



Except that an enormous fleet of 42 Arcturan Megafreighters dropped out of hyperspace directly alongside the Heart of Gold. The Guardian's engines stood down for just a moment as though nonplussed by this new development. The captain of the lead megafreighter meanwhile checked her galactic map. "I've got no idea where we are at this point," she admitted to her first officer. "We should probably have our navigator sacked. What are the chances we'd drop out of hyperspace in the middle of this nebula?"

On the bridge of the Heart of Gold, the ship's computer was chirping, "...an improbability factor of eight million, seven hundred and sixty-seven thousand, one hundred and twenty-eight to one against," but this was in answer to a different question entirely - or at least a question that took the situation from a rather different angle.

As the Guardian's message of greeting -- advising that they send transmissions of regret to their next of kin -- played across the Arcturan fleet, the lead captain noticed the Heart of Gold in the corner of her viewscreen. "Say, isn't that a Betelgeuse trading scout?" she asked. "It's got the right livery. That's exactly who we want to see! They must know a good market for what we're hauling - after all, it's what they do!" She glanced up at the Guardian again as its recorded message completed. "Oh, and we should probably do something about that thing."

An Arcturan Megafreighter is a ship designed for interstellar trade, and built on so large a scale that when orbiting a planet, it can eclipse a typical sun. Though they are peaceful merchants, the freighter captains are well aware of the value of their cargo, and they do make efforts to protect it from piracy. Each of the 42 freighters in this particular fleet, just for instance, carried six banks of high-intensity Hard Beams, with the fore, aft, and amidship bank-pairs each fire-linked so that they functioned in effect as three independent double-banks of heavy weaponry. Each of the six defensive banks carried nine Hard Beams apiece.



They didn't bother with anything like shields or advanced armor; they needed all the space they could muster for the massive cargo loads they carried - and their plan for dealing with pirates was simply to use their massive weaponry, with the most advanced targeting systems extant in the galaxy, and projected over mind-bending distances by High Energy Focus systems, to destroy anything they encountered before it could fire on them.

"What's going on?" asked Arthur sheepishly from the bridge of the Heart of Gold.

"I think you called in reinforcements somehow," Trillian answered musingly.

The Arcturan Megafreighters soared forward majestically, closing more than half the distance to the Guardian in the blink of an eye. Then all forty two ships opened fire with their forward pair of Hard Beam banks, blasting more than a third of the Guardian's armor away into space. Before the monster ship could react, their amidships Hard Beam batteries - two more banks of nine on each ship - struck home with similarly devastating effect. Then the aft banks all fired...



...and that was that. Staring, watching the batteries fire, Arthur murmured to himself as if in a trance, "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?"

Everyone ignored him, it being a rather silly question, and afterward, he wouldn't even remember asking it himself, completely unconsciously. If you had told him though, and asked how it could be the Ultimate Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe, and Everything, he would certainly have answered, "I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe."

While pointedly ignoring him, Zaphod Beebelbrox and his crew brought the Heart of Gold in for a landing on the surface of Magrathea, perfunctorily claiming it in the name of the RBO-42 before hurrying down toward the impact crater created where the largest surviving piece of the Guardian had slammed into the planet, already bee-lining the underground facilities the crater revealed, in search of the secrets held within its underground facilities.



Not long thereafter, as Zaphod and company uncovered what Beeblebrox himself declared "Amazing -- just amazingly amazing discoveries," the Galactic News Network went on the air to report this latest in the endless-seeming string of Mrrshan victories. There was just one little hiccup:



The newsdroid felt there was one other story that took precedence. Aghast, the chairwoman of the RBO-42 leapt from her seat. "What happened?" she demanded of her colleagues. "We were so careful not to orbitally bombard anybody!"

The Minister of Military Logistics shuffled her feet under the table and admitted, "Er. You see, about that. The Meklar are really good with robotic controls apparently?"

The chairwoman whirled on her. "You can't mean to tell me you were afraid of them at this point!"

"Er, no," the MML admitted nervously. "It's only, you see, er..." she swallowed. "The trouble is that they kept building missile bases, year after year, because even when their population got very low they could still just work so many factories..."

"When ... their ... population ... got ... very ... low." The chairwoman seethed.

The MML squirmed. "Well, we did take pictures occasionally for, you know, posterity, but we weren't paying a whole lot of attention to them. Er, we didn't quite realize our own strength is what it comes down to. And we kind of may have forgotten that we weren't sure they'd ever figured out how to breed? I mean, and we had to keep blowing up those bases one at a time as they built them, so ... you see ... well, I guess we may have left a few more bombers in the system than we needed? Er, a few hundred more, actually?"



Swallowing, the Minister of Military Logistics explained, "Um, so, it seems like the fallout from the ... uh ... nearly one thosand fusion bombs we were detonating on the surface every year may have accidentally wiped out the entire Meklar population and exterminated them forever." She gulped again, and went on in a very small voice, "I'm so sorry."

"Tell that to the Meklar," the chairwoman grumbled, then sighed and dropped back into her seat. "Oh well. I suppose it's no use crying over a spilt bowl of cream. What else does that newsdroid have to say then?"



It had to say that Zaphod and company had succeeded in their mission, recovering designs for a Death Ray, Pulse Phasors, Intergalactic Star Gates to connect the far-flung corners of the Mrrshan trade empire, and the very shield design that Mrrshan force field engineers would have been working on for years if not for the fact that every one of them had retired the moment the project began.

As one, the RBO-42 shrugged. "Well," the chairwoman admitted, "I guess it's all over but the shouting."

Next time: The Shouting!
(TO BE CONCLUDED!)

[RefSteel]

Conclusion and Aftermath

At the request of one of Zaphod's crew members - one Tricia McMillan, better known simply as Trillian - the council's representatives dialed up Shador of the Darloks, who was delighted to accept peace and not get its isolated ultra-poor planet blown up for at least a few more years. Then they called up Klaquan, who made an exorbitant and utterly preposterous demand.



The Mrrshan economy being built on a slightly different scale from the Klackons' by that point however, the RBO-42 were able to pay the 1.75 trillion credits on which Klaquan insisted as the price of peace by basically digging around in their pockets and flicking the lint off of their loose change. So at last, the RBO-42's chief diplomat got the Alkari ambassador on the line, and for the first time since their transports first approached the planet Trax, the Mrrshan people ...

...

...hold that thought. It turned out that the Alkari wouldn't take peace at any price. As a result, with the Meklar already wiped out, thereby obviating any possibility of achieiving the spirit of Trillian's request, the RBO-42 finally decided to achieve peace by other means.



As we were saying, with the complete destruction of the last vestige of Alkari existence in the galaxy, at their little Omicron colony out at the galactic rim, the Mrrshans had finally achieved peace with every still-extant species in the galaxy.



They weren't exactly well-loved, and it's not as if they bothered putting any trade agreements or treaties of any other kind into place, and they still had some random interstellar espionage agents receiving funding in spite of having nothing left to steal basically because the RBO-42 had forgotten all about them, but they were finally at peace! And since the galaxy's three remaining races hated each other enough to remain at war in spite of being completely unable to reach one another through the vast reaches of Mrrshan territory, that made the people of Betelgeuse the only peaceful people in the entire galaxy! ... Technically peaceful, as the Alkari might have said, had they found themselves in the same position instead of suddenly, completely, violently, and permanently ceasing to exist.



Regardless of technicalities though, it was already pretty clear what had really happened to the galaxy. To say that the Mrrshans led every other race in every category, from fleet strength to population to planets to production to total power to all-important technology...



...would be more or less the understatement of the century. They didn't even bother re-colonizing Meklon, no matter how efficient doing so with a cheap destroyer-class starship would be, just because they didn't especially feel like it. It wasn't going to matter, ultimately.



With the Mrrshans in control of, let's face it, basically everything, the High Council met for the final time, determined to select one leader, once and for all, as High Master of the New Republic, and ruler of the galaxy. Jeltz cast the two votes it had available on its enormous world - sadly destitute of minerals - for its own election, and both other non-Mrrshan leaders casting single votes for "whoever we aren't at war with," also known perhaps as "the invincible trade council that hopefully, if we vote for it, won't immediately blow our tiny remaining population into our component atoms." With those four votes split, the Really Badly Organized 42 cast its own votes - the votes of the entire Mrrshan people - for their leader of choice. At the time, they had only 67 of their own votes, out of the High Council's overall total of 71.

The Klackons and Darloks each breathed a deep sigh of relief while Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz stewed ... all of which lasted the seven and a half seconds it took Zaphod Beeblebrox to announce his reaction to being elected: A declaration of war on all bureaucrats, bugs, and thieves.



At that point, Jeltz, still unclear on the concept of galactic power, made its final mistake: It announced that it was going to take over as High Master of the New Republic instead of crawling into a hole and hiding.

In fairness, doing that wouldn't actually have helped at all either.



When the Mrrshans bombed the last remnants of the Darlok and Vogon peoples from orbit, they made sure to merge all the holes on either planet apart from some really enormous craters. Hilariously however, since the Klackons had assembled more factories on their tiny world and none of the Arcturan Megafreighters from Orion had been sent over, they survived the year 2401 with exactly one million bugs on their last remaining world - compared to the Mrrshans' population in the neighborhood of 7 billion.

That left Mrrshan scientists just time enough to develop a Gauss Autocannon before the last of the non-felines in the galaxy were at last exterminated.

At that point, it was just a question of using the resources of the galaxy - with the help of intergalactic star gates recovered from Magrathea - to scout out the rest of the universe, and explore ever more-distant planets.



After all, those Arcturan Megafreighters still needed to find new markets for their trade goods!

...

...

Have you finished leaving me out of your report now? Shall I just go off and rust in a corner someplace? Or do you want me to keep standing here so you can pretend you're going to come up with some kind of job to give me?

Oh! Terribly sorry, Marvin! I didn't realize you wanted to be in the report! I supposed it would only make you feel depressed!

I didn't want to. I still don't want to. But I think you should know that standing here not being in your report is even more depressing than being in it.

I get it Marvin; I do - only nobody told you that you had to stand there, you know. You could always go off and do whatever it is that you enjoy!

You don't get it at all. Your simian brain can barely grasp the tiniest inkling of the impenetrable gulfs of boredom that fill my entire existence. If there were things that I enjoyed, which there aren't, your brain would melt with the effort of even trying to understand what would have to change about the universe before I would be able to go off and do them.

All right: Then I shan't waste any more effort trying. Have a lovely day - or a depressing one! Either way!

I'll just go off and sulk until you need me for some menial task then.

Er, bit exhausting talking to that chap, what! Anyway, I'm off to post some statistics and then I guess maybe I'll join the crew for a quick bite at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Ought to suit Marvin anyway; he doesn't seem too well pleased with the universe going on existing, you know.

-----

Result: Extermination Victory, 2502 (Shadow after the deadline)
Arthur Dent: Did not qualify
Ford Prefect: 2441 (Just in time for the deadline)
Slartibartfast: 2364
Trillian: 2497 (Shadow after the deadline)
Zaphod Beeblebrox: 2500 (Shadow after the deadline)
Heart of Gold: (Shadow report too late to qualify)

I hope everyone enjoyed this one! Now let's see if I can get a sponsor's shadow in for Imperium 43!

[Ianus]

*slow clap*
Another beautifully written report, Refsteel! A pleasure to read and yet easy to follow along on your play. I REALLY enjoyed it!
One question:

Arthur murmured to himself as if in a trance, "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?

Is this exactly what Arthur was thinking?

[RefSteel]

Thanks very much, Ianus!

Is this exactly what Arthur was thinking?

Not consciously, of course. But yeah. The quote (with part of the context and of course the follow up, "I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe") is from "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe," and it's the reason The "Improbable" Arcturan Megafrieghers were carrying 6 banks of 9 Hard Beams (well, three sets of 18 because there aren't six separate weapon slots) instead of 42.

[Ianus]

Thank you! I confess to not being the most knowledgeable HGttG fan, but given your fantastic attention to detail I should have known you wouldn't slip on something like that. Once again thanks for the fantastic report!