My tale begins in the year 2470, with the hatching of my first brood from my myriad cherished eggs: A time of deepest pride for me, long-awaited: Among the first of my cherished dreams as I grew to queenship, raised with care and learning all I could all through my childhood ... or rather let us say the first of my cherished hopes, for the leaders of this new republic in which we live have a curious relationship with dreams, and I would not wish them to mistake my meaning. Even then, I knew them - for we knew them then by the designation OSG-39-B - and we knew the people who followed them then as all of us do today: Not the Meklar people, for few were yet aware that they were one; to most, they were a collection of electrobiomechanical machines that had run out of control - and that seemed to be threatening to take over the galaxy. It was possible to deal with them - that much, we understood - at least to interact and share information and make transactions, as we use our own computers to do across planetary networks, except that instead of operating on behalf of another hive or Queen, their networks and transfer protocols seemed to us to act merely for the processing machines themselves. The Bulrathi knew this too, and they were another danger, for
their leader, Grunk the Mad, on any given day might give away vital military secrets in exchange for any knowledge it otherwise would lack, even in dealing with what we supposed were mindless, out-of-control machines.
Grunk himself was a connoisure of planetary ecology, and would have liked to cut his people's factory waste in half to more easily keep his worlds clean, but he didn't insist: When the Meklar proposed to share their knowledge of controlled wormhole technology, enabling near-instantaneous travel between any pair of worlds that built star gates, Grunk willingly agreed it was a fair exchange - to our dread and dismay - for the secrets of his people's personal phasor weaponry. Meklar war machines were already formidable combatants, and with Grunk's weapons built into their armored chasses, they would be all but unbeatable. Proud and joyous as I was with the hatching of my first brood, I dreaded what might happen to the galaxy in which I must raise them, not knowing if any of them would even live long enough to pupate. So in dread, I watched the skies, where Meklar transport fleets - millions of machines all armed with phasor blasters, in massive zortium-armored battle suits - were launching from nearly every world in their space, with huge gunships and bombers being produced all over, with their many existing ships - already the most powerful starfleet in the galaxy by any measure - fanning out across the stars, with some already coming our way! Ours were the nearest worlds to their best production centers, and if they dealt with us in anything like the way we dealt with them, they would certainly treat us as enemies in spite of our peaceful relations and ongoing trade because of the attacks some of our ancestors had made on their planets decades before, also in times of supposed peace.
To my great relief, the first attack fleet to arrive in 2371 was not a flight of Meklar bombers above my world, but an Alkari attempt to strike back at the mighty machines, at their distant Dusty colony. The Meklar had made no attempt to reinforce it recently - and the battle showed the reason: Its five bases were firing pulson missiles, which were more than enough to tear apart Alkari cruisers whose only useful weapons against the planet's layered shields were heavy phasors that could barely scratch the bases' zortium armor and did nothing to the civillian population before all five military cruisers were destroyed and the twenty-five stinger destroyers retreated uselessly. The Meklar never fired on the Alkari colony ship as it dropped its full payload of deathspores on their colony, apparently unaware of the Meklar antidote that rendered those horrible weapons completely harmless to them. I supposed that the Meklar preferred colony ships with known and established locations, retreating from Meklar space, when the alternative was replacement colony ships appearing as if by magic already en route to vulnerable targets: I hadn't yet learned that the Meklar didn't choose to kill unnecessarily, and preferred to let the two million civilians aboard the colony ship live rather than firing pulsons to blast them out of space. So as much as I was relieved when Dusty was the first colony attacked this year, I still was waiting with dread for the next ... until it came.
This report on the next attack that came in gives some sense of what we were experiencing that year: At least a dozen separate fleets of Meklar transports in space, not counting the multiple groups that are grouped together here as they converged on the same world simultaneously, at least nine Meklar fleets in motion, not counting the ones already arriving, all of them flying roughly or exactly in our direction, while all our own fleets scrambled back and forth across space to try to cover our worlds in case they had the slightest chance to do anything effective against a Meklar attack if one came. There was more going on though - a great deal more! When an Alkari fleet reached their Gienah colony and the Meklar ships controlling its skies made another attack run to chase them off, I saw with intense relief that even the ships that had seemed to be flying directly toward our space were so far passing
through it, bound instead for more-distant stars controlled by others who - unlike us - were actively at war with them.
The battle in Gienah's skies ended predictably with the panicked flight of the arriving Alkari, but it wasn't the last Meklar attack of the year: At Herculis, a Condor cruiser whose repulsor beam and energy pulsar might have been a threat to an ill-piloted bomber fleet protected only by an outdated gunship with only short-range beams had the Condor's captain and the Meklar fleet admiral been reversed, but the overconfident captain was so bent on getting into pulsar range to wipe out the bomber fleet, which was hanging back, dodging missiles especially to take advantage of the MEGA's own repulsor screen, that he managed to destroy his ship by flying directly into the MEGA's reactionary fire before his crew could even get their repulsor into play. After that, the bombers cleaned up the Scatter Pack bases easily, and the Meklar had another target for their relentless series of invasions. Thankfully, they seemed content for the moment to prosecute their three-front war. To judge by their success everywhere else to that date, they could have taken us on as well, and the Bulrathi just as easily - in fact, a Bulrathi fleet was already moving in to challenge them at Gienah by then - but for the moment at least, they had chosen not to, and I gave thanks to the Eternal Queen whose Holy Instars lead one into the other unto infinity for looking after me and my beloved brood.
If they were not as yet attacking our worlds, the Meklar were busy enough with other matters, mostly involving the construction of enough new bombers to render every colony in the galaxy down to delicious mulch and ecomechanical work to ensure rapid population regrowth in the face of the hundreds of transports they were launching across interstellar space each year - but a few apparently were even conducting research, somewhere in Meklar space. When my first brood hatched, new Meklar factories were calculated to have a return horizon - should any be built again, and once anyone started working them instead of just immediately launching in transports for another destination - of barely more than five years. With their latest improvement in industrial technology, the return horizon dropped again to barely more than four - and the Meklar continued cheerfully building zero new factories. Of course the reason was easy to understand: The next meeting of the High Council was due to occur in the year 2475 - still too soon for evenn newly-built Meklar factories to repay their costs - and the Meklar seemed intent on making that meeting the last. When they resumed construction research, they would be able to build tritanium armor, doubling zortium's advantages over mere
titanium, but anything they gained thereby would be far in the future; such research as they did in those years would focus entirely instead on planetology.
Their fleets and their transports were still on the move though, with more setting out our way - and by 2472, we would know exactly where the first were really going.
One of the fleets that had set all of my legs to quaking as it passed through our space arrived at the Darlok homeworld, which the shape-shifters were defending with most of the military force they hadn't sent to attack us already. If you wonder at my unconcern at those Darlok attack fleets while a comparatively tiny fraction of the Meklar war machine flying past us had me clutching protectively at the entrance to my hatching chamber, consider what thousands of Darlok fighters, a battle cruiser, and fifteen destroyers were able to do against a single Meklar battleship and barely more than a hundred of their latest Ion bombers.
The Viper cruiser was the first to die, torn to pieces by reaction fire from the Focus the moment it dared to move in. Of course most of the Darlok ships were Spider fusion bombers that couldn't hit the broad side of an ant farm at antennae-point range, so of course they had to retreat, but their Needle laser fighters - nearly a thousand - were equally helpless against the Focus and in spite of their speed, nearly half were shredded away by the battleship's beams before the rest retreated in confusion. The Meklar bomber pilots didn't fly particularly well, and lost dozens of their number unnecessarily, but they didn't seem to care; they still wiped out all the bases, and then after the Needles had fled, the Meklar crew of the Focus battleship turned its guns on the planet itself, destroying the final missile base through the Darloks' miserable shielding before the remaining bombers even had the opportunity. As for the Venom destroyers, they were hyper-V missile boats, a good century out of date by Meklar standards, and few lived long enough to escape. The Darlok ships are beyond hopeless in comparison with the Meklar juggernaut - even in the remote corner of space from which the Darloks operate.
Elsewhere, their bombers had a better opportunity to demonstrate why I was terrified of even these little expeditionary Meklar fleets. Unsupported by any other fleet, lacking even a battle scanner, aware that the only Sakkra device capable of posing a threat to them was a warp dissipator which couldn't stop them in time, a hundred and thirty eight of their bombers - again thankfully bypassing our worlds to reach another homeworld instead - took out almost fifty Sakkra missile bases and chased off the pair of impotent Valkyrie heavy-beam cruisers that had been trying and mostly failing to plink away at them, scaring them off mostly by the threat that they could, if they so wished, decimate the by-then-unprotected colony. In a sense, this was effective: Left to their own devices when the Valykyries departed, the bombers merely mapped the colony, making no further bombardment passes against it. Still, in fleeing from their own homeworld, they made their terror of the Meklar sufficiently clear - a terror in which they were not alone, even leaving my own aside.
The Bulrathi probably didn't intend to attack the Meklar over Gienah in the first place: Considering Grunk's usual tenuous grip on reality, I would not be surprised to learn he had simply noticed to his surprise that a colony belonging to his Alkari enemies suddenly had no Alkari defenses remaining, and sent a fleet to prepare it for an invasion without taking the trouble to think about what might have
caused the defenses to disappear, or whether - just for instance, and relatedly - there might a powerful
Meklar fleet in orbit to support
their assault transports coming in. If so, little harm was done by the misunderstanding: The Bulrathi ships took one look at the old MEGA dreadnought controlling the planetary orbit, and retreated immediately. Apart from silly inefficiencies like a small ECM jammer - and a stabilizer instead of just regular maneuverability - on the Grizzly battleship, the Bulrathi ships were well-designed to take on repulsor ships armed with heavy beams, but their weaponry was hopelessly outclassed by the MEGA's banks and banks of Megabolt cannons. So after herding them away, as well as a smaller Alkari fleet, the MEGA had nothing to do but watch the transports coming in - locally on its battle scanners, but also by long-range communications from elsewhere in what once was Alkari space, where another invasion arrived simultaneously.
Of the two, Herculis was the greater prize, both larger and with more-abundant mineral resources near its surface, as well as many more factories, but the story for which the battles of 2472 are best remembered today took place on Gienah, at the doors of a small field mechanics research laboratory. The Alkari are famously incompetent researchers in the field, but one of their most-brilliant luminaries had been toiling in relative anonymity - and apparently complete obliviousness - for years on that poor colony, and finally had a breakthrough, coincidentally a short time after the Bulrathi fleet arrived in the system and hastily retreated. She eagerly sent a full copy of her notes, blueprints, experimental results, and calculations to her colleagues across Alkari space, then fairly crowing with pride and joy, rushed to the doors of her lab, on the third floor of a sprawling industrial building. Throwing them open, she spread her wings, gliding out toward the ground, calling out joyously in spite of the pall of obscuring smoke through which she soared, "I've found it! I -" and pausing to cough heavily, landing, finding breath again, "I found the solution! It's a brilliant, elegant new design! What a piece of technology!"
Her crest only fell low about her shoulders when she saw the source of the approaching clanking noises: A full batallion of Meklar warriors in personal zortium battle suits equipped with phasor blasters, just arriving on the scene. "Good," one of the soldiers told her cheerfully while the others secured the street. "Let's head over there and you can show me."
As for her emperor, Farseer, he was living up to his name, taking the long view in reaction to the Meklar people conquering two of his colonies.
"What," he seemed to ask, "are a couple of heavily-populated star systems among friends? Because we
are friends, aren't we? At war? Perhaps, but I noticed that you blew up lots of Sakkra missile bases this year, and even caused collateral damage to their homeworld in the process, even if accidentally! Anyone who does
that is okay in
my book!" Having apparently learned as well by then that the Meklar didn't take kindly to anyone telling them what to do, he didn't even add
aloud, "Hint, hint. In
case you wondered if I'd be willing to talk peace...."
Unfortunately for him, the Meklar weren't really listening. They were busy with their own affairs, including consideration of a much more interesting conversation with the brilliant Gienah researcher who had accidentally alerted them to her recent discovery.
Though astonished that she was still alive, she at first would at first tell them nothing but her name, job title, and - insistently - that she lacked a serial number of any kind. Once Meklar engineers had copied and transmitted the plans she had so-recently completed for a cloaking device however, she started to open up more to them as they demonstrated their understanding of the idea. At first reluctantly, she admitted that she was the head of research on the project they'd just stolen; then, eagerly, as it became clear that they had learned all they wished or needed to about it already, and had been speculating on the subject themselves for years - though without even a sliver of funding - she fell into old habits and the pleasure of her work, eagerly discussing field mechanics theory and the concepts of Zyro shielding or of a huge leap forward in basic deflector shield technology. The Meklar had already decided both that their next force field project would be more-heavily-layered shields and that they wouldn't bother funding it until after the Council permanently ended the wars of the galaxy, but their own field mechanics engineers were as taken by the pleasure of the work as she, and they talked off and on for the next three years about what such a project might look like were it to ever get enough public support to actually begin.
Grunk, meanwhile, appropriately
not named Farseer, was equally impressed by the Meklar war machine's destruction of his various enemies' military installations and spacecraft - to say nothing of how just one of their most-elderly dreadnoughts had casually brushed aside his Gienah attack fleet - and being at peace with them,
unlike Farseer, and
failing to notice how they always reacted to outside demands, he even went so far as to propose a military alliance with them, which would potentially have the effect if they accepted of pulling them into yet more wars - for instance with
my people. Fortunately, the Meklar - either seeing at least as far as Farseer, merely continuing their long-established rule against accepting any unsolicited requests, or both - politely turned Grunk down and made their preparations for the next stage of their three-front war - for instance, to cheaply defend the colony they called Poverty against yet another swift-approaching Alkari fleet.
Among other possibilities. They already had more bombers than they would ever need to erase the non-Meklar population of the galaxy in a matter of years, and with fleets still racing out across space, some still heading toward or past us from unexpected angles, with almost-endless-seeming transports launching in their wake, the Meklar had the future in their vise-like servo-claws, and the way it would go was entirely up to them.
Play if you want to, but if it's a chore, definitely skip. OTOH, maybe rampaging wildly across the galaxy while on (legal) drugs is exactly what you need 
I have been completely flattened by whatever this is; sickest I have been in years. I have barely gotten out of bed for the past couple days.
