My brood and I together spent another year in dread of attacks that never materialized: Again Meklar fleets swept past our worlds through hyperspace, bound for destinations far beyond, and again whenever each went by, I breathed, glad of retaining the ability. That was the year their first ART fighters saw battle - some say the name was an abbreviation, perhaps for bioelectromechanical ARTifacts, perhaps for the ARTifice needed to construct them, perhaps for the ART and science and engineering by which the Meklar built their bodies, or perhaps for something else entirely - but only ten arrived in the Poverty system to meet an Alkari cruiser, destroyer, and colony ship.
The pilots, new to their job, were sloppy too, taking losses once with a simple tactical error and once with an interface failure - but the total resulting losses were just two. The missile destroyer and scatter-sporer colony ship retreated once their payloads were exhausted, and the cruiser with its heavy phasors and stinger missiles went down under steady megabolt fire, failing even to escape. Soon thereafter, the ARTs would set out again for a new destination. The Meklar certainly had targets in plenty, and were blasting through the defenses there relentlessly. 2473 alone saw three new worlds added to their star charts by "Scout ships" which were actually bomber and dreadnought fleets gaining the rights to scout the worlds they had reached by dint of the total destruction or terrified flight of all the bases and ships that tried to stop them.
Tyr, with its Darlok colony on a lone, parched desert world, was nearly as far from Meklar space as Morrig - a fierce white star whose only inhabitable world had been an even smaller desert planet than Tyr 2 until Sakkra planetary engineers transformed it into a virtual gaia in spite of the near-absence of liquid water on its surface. Rigel, by contrast, an Alkari star whose colony was built on a world arid only in comparison with much-better-favored worlds than Tyr 2 and Morrig 5 had been, and though nearly as far from Meklon itself, was by that time right on the doorstep of Meklar space - a part of the galaxy that by then included the Alkari homeworld and all of what had been their surrounding core colonies. Impoverished though the Rigel colony might be, it was closer to Meklar worlds and could support more population than the barren planet in orbit around Tau Cygni - close enough, in fact, for Meklar transports to reach it by the following year. There may have been sentimental reasons to pursue it too: Poor tactical maneuvering in 2472 had cost the Meklar one of their old MEGA dreadnoughts in its skies as well as most of the little bomber fleet that had accompanied it, leaving Rigel with a small handful of missile bases intact until a real fleet arrived to deal with them in 2473. The Meklar were far from perfect in their execution - but their strength and their planning were terrifying in their scope, and mistakes or no, they were poised to take over the galaxy.
Farseer was aware of it. The diplomatic overtures he sent to the Meklar that year, when the Meklar cleared the skies of a colony belonging to each of the peoples with whom they were at war, nominally spoke of solidarity against the Sakkra "menace" - but might as well have just said, "Please don't kill us!
Please!"
The Meklar ships were everywhere - more dreadnoughts and bombers crossing our space, prompting my new larvae to curl around themselves in fright and many to cocoon themselves for an early pupal stage, while even my first broods, all now full imagos, huddled close to each other when the fleets passed near, or turned to me for protection though I was as helpless and as terrified as they. Always the Meklar passed us by, their transports seeming almost to surround us, but not landing, rushing past our star at their impossible warp-5 speeds, their starships tearing pathways through hyperspace so fast we hardly had time to emit fear scent before they were gone, beyond our sight, on their way - but we knew, as Farseer seemed to realize for his own people, that if we lived, it was by the suffrance of the machines.
The Sakkra and the Darloks, still committed to their wars against the Meklar people - first among us others whom they also hated - swore that when the time came for the Council to meet that they would vote for anyone, even another warlike enemy, who would correct the mistake made long ago of letting the Meklar ancestors escape their slavery. The Meklar answer was to reduce Sakkra and Darlok voting power by the swiftest, most decisive, and least forgiving means possible. The Sakkra had tried to defend their homeworld with five of their most-powerful cruisers, armed with heavy fusion beams, taken one look at the Focus dreadnought that had just arrived, and proceeded at once to try - and fail - to retreat before it destroyed them all. At their impoverished world of Xengara 3, with close to two hundred million voting lizards on a planet ideally suited to their life, some - not even all! - of the bombers that had taken Sssla's orbit the year before, supported this time by an old heavy fusion battleship they had sent from far away, destroyed all forty of the planet's bases and its hundreds of hard-built factories, together with the vast majority of its voting population. At Denubius 2, the most-distant Darlok world, equally poor in minerals though rich in jungle growth, another small division of the Meklar fleet took no chances with hidden shapeshifter assassins, and blasted the entire planetary surface into glass. They didn't bomb Sssla though; they left its surface pristine - at least as far as they could after burning its defenses away.
When the Meklar landed, their battle suits built with armor two generations more-advanced than the lizards' and shielded twice as well, wielding phasors against the ancient Sakkra projectile weaponry, they were outnumbered by the Sakkra by more than two to one. When they finished the battle for Tyranid's homeworld and started cleaning the lizard blood off their zortium carapaces, their
casualties were outnumbered by their victims' by almost
five to one, and more Meklar transports were already on their way, passing swiftly through our territory. Along the way, their fleets had chased away another Bulrathi cruiser-dreadnought pair as soon as it reached Vulcan, and their ground troops had conquered the Alkari colony there along with poor Rigel, back near what had once been the Alkari core, while at Sssla itself, their engineers were already searching eagerly for unique Sakkra technology - especially any hint of how Tyranid's people managed to convert their worlds into gaian environments.
They were disappointed. Though it was the actual lizard homeworld, with more than two hundred and fifty factories, their search yielded only enough information to reproduce three examples of Sakkra technology, none of them remotely interesting to the hyper-advanced machines. Perhaps for this reason, the Meklar were in no mood to listen when Tyranid, in response to their conquest of his own homeworld and near-destruction of another of his colonies of nearly-equal size...
...eagerly praised them for blowing up the Darloks' Denubius colony. By that time, of course, it was too late to matter: The Meklar were in the process of conquering the entire galaxy.
Already, they held twenty seven worlds, and what with the two empty star systems between Meklon and Altair, Orion by the edge of its nebula, the neutronium-rich radiated world the Meklar had just discovered that year at Cygni, the green star near us at the endge of the galaxy, which had somehow gone uncolonized all this time ... and with Denubius, lately turned to glass ... the Meklar were within reach of controlling two thirds of all the inhabited worlds in the galaxy. They were in reach ... and they were reaching, with over eleven hundred new ships completed just that year, many of them within striking distance of our space. There was one glimmer of hope for us, beyond the simple fact that they as yet had never attacked us or the distant Bulrathi - the only peoples in the galaxy who had not named them enemy:
After Farseer, for the third year in a row, praised the Meklar for their wholesale destruction of his Sakkra enemies, this time even going so far as to add that in such circumstances as those, any words of peace they might offered must be trusted as honorable and true - with the unspoken implication that while another people's peace request, like his own for instance should he make one, might be taken as the mere squalkings of fear, he knew the unstoppable Meklar would only seek peace if they intended to keep their word. And at last, as Farseer cowered on his lone remaining barren world, far off in the Tau Cygni system, instead of sending the bombers and transports his way that they already had within easy reach, they actually sent him a peace offer, to which he agreed so quickly, he was fortunate that the treaty was engraved on a ceremonial zortium sheet, because the speed with which he signed it might have caused a paper treaty to catch fire in his writing implement's wake.
This is the starfleet that Farseer had just promised not to ever fight against - nor of course the various Meklar missile bases - as long as it didn't, please, please, please, please, come to his tiny one-planet empire. Most of the bombers had already been stationed at the stars closest to ours for multiple years, as if waiting patiently for us to make one false move, or for the Meklar to decide they wanted our planets for themselves, and more than enough of the brand-new fighters had just completed in the area as well, to say nothing of the dreadnoughts they had in range. Then, as soon as they reached their staging stars, over a thousand Meklar ships set out again, including nearly all of those fighters - the only exceptions were thirty or so that turned out to be a little too far away - on a new mission of destruction and conquest for which we were completely unprepared.
To them, this is how the galaxy looked in 2474:
The only stars in the galaxy for which they had no scouting reports belonged to us - all except Gorra, which they scanned well over a century ago, before we could even colonize its barren world - or to the Bulrathi: The only two people with whom they hadn't been at war. The only exception was the universal one: Orion, with its invincible Guardian. Fewer Meklar fleets and transports were still en route in 2474 than in recent years, presumably since they expected that anything arriving after 2475 would be irrelevant, but there were still a few, all scheduled to arrive by the end of the year, and many more with the same ETA were setting out.
There were more scares in early 2475, beginning when two of my own people's Avenger cruisers - a name of ill omen! - tried to take control of the Darlok homeworld's skies, having noticed two years before that the Meklar fleet in that part of space had moved off to deal with other Darlok worlds. Of course the Meklar returned in time not only to stop them but to casually blast both Avengers into their component atoms, but thankfully they took no other retaliatory action against us. Then there were the eighteen factories destroyed at the Dusty colony, one of the most remote Meklar worlds, and one of the least-explicably attractive to their enemies, by Darlok saboteurs dressed in bear suits. I was glad they hadn't dressed up as Klackons like me instead, but feared lest these two different apparent attacks, one supposedly from each of the only two peoples with whom they hadn't been actively at war, would persuade the Meklar that there was no hope for any form of lasting peace with the other peoples of the galaxy.
If that was indeed their decision, they would have far more resources than they needed to ensure a lasting peace
without us, now including the ability to clone new armies on the cheap. No doubt if their scientists had managed the same breakthrough a little sooner, it would have saved them some money and maybe gotten a few more ships into space, but it's not as if they actually needed the boost - not even if they decided to overwhelm the Bulrathi. If the Meklar wanted to avenge themselves on those who had once enslaved their ancestors - and had each attacked them repeatedly, they would simply do so, to the extent they weren't already: They no longer feared anyone or anything in the galaxy.
As they'd proven earlier that same year, that
really went for everything, without exception. In spite of what I called it a moment ago, to our shock and horror, the ancient Guardian itself turned out to be vincible after all when faced with more than eleven hundred ART fighters. It fought doggedly against them, and if its advanced damage control systems had survived the dormant centuries in working order like so many of its weapons, the Meklar would have needed a much larger fleet. Even as it was, it managed to kill almost a third of the little fighters ... but in the end...
The Meklar conquered Orion along with the rest of the galaxy. The lone, fast-reacting colony ship that accompanied the ART fleet, retreating from the battle, stayed close enough to land the same year, before the election - around the same time another Meklar fleet was turning the desert sands of the Sakkra Morrig colony to solid glass, leaving their lizard enemies with only a single, severely underpopulated, impoverished world to their name.
That was also when their transports arrived at the Darlok homeworld, recovering the secrets of advanced robotic controls they long had coveted, meaning that if they continued to prosecute their war against the galaxy, they could increase their factory counts by 40% on any world they controlled - or send away almost 30% of the population of every colony where they
didn't on assault transports, cloning replacements to send away again, without materially affecting their productivity. At the same time, they lifted the Darloks' most advanced missile technology: The merculites, which Meklar bombers had been cheerfully flying circles around for years, would see heavy use thereafter in advanced model rocket competitions among Meklar children protected by their pulson missile bases. More important to the Meklar, no doubt, was control of the Darlok homeworld itself.
After all, if they were after more-advanced technology, there was another planet from whose ruins they still perhaps could learn a thing or two.
The recovery of gaia-building advanced soil enrichment technology no doubt assuaged some of their Ssslan disappointment of the previous year, though there would be no time to make use of it before the Council voted. And if they chose thereafter to further prosecute the wars they could already win with their own native technology, they would be doing it with deflector shields almost time and a half as powerful as even the purely-speculative ones they had been contemplating idly, an upgraded jammer to help protect their missile bases and give their spies the galaxy's most-advanced computer technology, and of course the dreaded death ray of which no race had conceived since the Ancients disappeared from the galaxy.
And with that, all of us cast our votes - completely predictably. Each of the three peoples who had made war upon the Meklar had been reduced to a single vote apiece, preserved from genocide only by conscious acts of Meklar mercy. Of the three, the Darloks and Sakkra - still insisting on their suicidal wars - voted for Grunk, against the Meklar, just as suicidally, while the Alkari, having lately been spared and agreed at last to make peace, voted to leave the galaxy's future in the servo claws of the Meklar people, in case it wasn't obvious enough that it was already. We Klackons voted with them, all my broods and I all praying to the Eternal Queen that the Meklar might accept this gesture as an overture of true peace. And Grunk, as out of touch with reality as ever, cast as many votes as all the rest of us combined in his own favor. All the rest of us apart from the Meklar, that is.
Of course none of it mattered, except as gestures in support of diplomacy. The Meklar, with more than two thirds of the galactic population, had in effect already conquered the galaxy. Their own votes, for themselves of course, brought the total in their favor to more than four times the votes cast for Grunk: A landslide of truly staggering proportions. The
vote had never been in doubt; the only question - the desperately
vital question, whose outcome we awaited, hardly daring to breath - was what the Meklar would decide to do once they'd
won, and what kind of victory it would be.
I confess that when we learned the answer, I and all my brood broke into celebratory dances, emitting joyous pheromones everywhere: The Meklar, having already established themselves on the Ancients' throne world of Orion earlier that year, chose to unite their galaxy - by now, incontrovertibly theirs - from Orion to the galactic rim in every direction, under a system of rule that would preserve the lives and rights of all people - all those, at least, who had survived the ill-advised wars against the Meklar - whether living organism, machine, or both in any combination, and where none of them would ever again be treated as a slave. Henceforth, when starships crossed our skies, they would be passenger ships bearing peaceful visitors and friends from across the galaxy, trade ships bringing the goods of distant worlds, or flying museums performing incredible tricks that once had been vital for victory in combat but now are used only to awe and entertain. We live, and all will live longer than ever before, and with greater possibilities before us. In the past, my ancestors might have called the Meklar abominations or soulless machines, fit only to serve "real people" in slavery, but they have proven the folly - not to say the self-destructive nature - of that belief long since. I myself have had three of my shoulder-hips replaced with Meklar bioelectromechanical technology, and it has saved, improved, or eased the life of many of my brood-children. If we are becoming more nearly Meklar all along, we are no less Klackon for it, nor are crazy old Grunk or Farseer or any of their people any less Bulrathi or Alkari with all their growing numbers of cybernetic parts; I've even seen Sakkra and Darloks still around, thriving as they had never been able to under Tyranid and Ssithra's rule.
If the Meklar rule over us now, at least their rule is nothing like as harsh, nor as demanding or unforgiving: We live, somehow, for as long as this lasts, in a peaceul and united galaxy.
Not often we get the perspective of the other races in the galaxy.
Nice to grab pretty much everything in the galaxy, including Orion and even the Darlok's IRC 5 tech. I had been wanting that one. 
) and other problems like illness. But we eventually reached a glorious victory.
