Picking this up again in between turns in the "real" (B) game....
I played 20 turns past the posted save, wrote most of a report, then put this aside for 39B, and ended up rewriting the report completely so the story would better reflect the way haphazard introduced that game! So here's the start of the new report, which I'll post in installments as time permits, as though they were turnsets in an SG ... even though I'm just passing the save on to myself at the end of each set!
First Report from Beyond: 2348-2360
(To be continued....)
I played 20 turns past the posted save, wrote most of a report, then put this aside for 39B, and ended up rewriting the report completely so the story would better reflect the way haphazard introduced that game! So here's the start of the new report, which I'll post in installments as time permits, as though they were turnsets in an SG ... even though I'm just passing the save on to myself at the end of each set!
First Report from Beyond: 2348-2360
Always the same dream: Meklon, but with wildly different industry, and strange worlds with numbered names - a sense, if I'm remembering, trying and failing to grasp the substance of the dream, that everything was changing, Meklon itself and a jungle colony called Humidity 090, plus another world that I remember only as Endoria, deep in a nebula, but almost the twin of Meklon itself, each transforming with dream-like fluidity into a gigantic spaceyard, each building the parts for superships, larger than any true ship I've ever seen. Dreaming, I seemed to pass through space, from world to world, coming last to the cold steppes of Primodius45, with cruisers looming too-large in its skies, clawing at the planet from overhead: Four Hydra heavy beamers escorting an equal number of Sakkra colony ships.
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Down below, on the blasted surface, dwindling numbers of factories had started stamping out new Meklar as though they were toy soldiers, each assembled by other Meklar to rise from the factory bed and going to work assembling more - though still too few, never, ever enough to face the threat from overhead. I vaguely remember a starfleet, tiny to insignificance, far off at Endoria, dividing into four: One fighter setting out toward embattled P45, one toward the red star of Moro with its threatening, hostile world, a single scout returning to Meklon, seeming to cry as it fled home, while eight remained oblivious, circling Endoria, circling.
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Again the dream, a day apart, or a year? Four Hydra heads spit fire down upon the people of Primodius45, heavy laser beams carving factories into abstract art, reminding me uncomfortably of something I can't put a name to, perhaps from my childhood or a collective memory absorbed through the interstellar feed. The art crumbles, and five factories are gone amid metallic screams, a million Meklar people melting under the fiery beams while the survivors keep stamping out more from the factories - more Meklar to rise and to die. I see the transports looming nearer, weirdly distorted, rising up out of Maalor, my dream-eyes piercing the lightyears as though they were mere kilometers away - and then closer, more clearly still: I could see them as if through windows in their transport craft, thirty-five million Sakkra lizards swarming, crawling over each other in their eagerness to get to the front, to kill and conquer. Our ships leaving Endoria by contrast barely seem to move, as though the nebula were a monster with a thousand purple hands, holding them back, holding them in. Unable to move, unable to scream, I escaped only by waking, shivering.
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The first thing I see is the new Sakkra fleet: Two more Hydra cruisers, oppressive, impossible to fight, bearing down from a new angle - and then in the nature of dreaming, they are there already above our world ... but vaguely, I remember: There were four! Then the dream comes into focus and I realize they've split, the two I saw at first flying not toward us but away, off on some other grim business, while we struggle against the threat that remains. At least the fiery laser breath they burn down upon us from the sky melts fewer factories like spun sugar in rain - at least this year a million Meklar aren't melting with them - but apart from that, nothing seems to have changed. The Sakkra transports still loom closer with each breath; the insignificant Meklar relief ships still crawl through the nebula, seeming not to move at all; the rest of the Endoria fleet sets out to follow - to follow them toward us - and the super ship Endoria built is with them now, obeying relocation orders, except it's smaller, divided into a few more helpless little fighters, equally slow and far off, while the Endorians instead of even bolstering their numbers, seem to forget about us and turn back to factory building and pointless token experiments into weapons technology. It doesn't matter: There's no use no matter what they do. Nothing new can reach us in time, and neither can the old: The ships that are coming to die in our cause crawl forward as if they're flying through purple gelatin.
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I dream for once of a cheerful robot student studying lensing effects and oscillations, its diodes blinking happily. A cyllinder rolls by with a nose-cone and rocket fuel spilling out of its insides, but the student doesn't seem to see, and swings a testbed laser down from the ceiling of its lab and watches merrily as it lases, igniting the trail of fuel, making sudden flames. I vaguely see the robot closing a vise over the laser, hauling hard on the lever to squeeze it down to something smaller it can hold - but only vaguely: The laser beam becomes the vast and terrible beam I know, cutting through our factories, the flames the burning of its foundations and energy cells against the sky. I can see Meklon and Endoria as though they're close - so close - and see them working on more lasers that perhaps Primodians like me could use to defend ourselves when the Sakkra come at last, but working on them slowly, casually, as if there's no urgency, as if the little chance of success is unimportant, so much less important than it feels to me! Instead our oblivious friends seem fascinated by an old computer project from so long ago I've half-forgotten what it is, more than half of them concentrating on that while none work any longer on factories or even building another supership like the steamy, humid planet is still trying to make ... and we keep turning out new Meklar bodies, waking, standing, ready to face the Sakkra, ready to die.
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Another dream, and the screaming is everywhere - first as factories burn around me, the fiery heavy laser beams doing as much damage in a breath as they destroyed combined across both of the past two ... nights? Dreams? Years? I can't tell for all the screaming, because the Sakkra have arrived, and their cries blend with the scraping screech of metal upon metal as our bodies fail us and fall apart, blasted to pieces by mortar shells and rocket fire, shorting out as lightning strikes among us from above, snapping under pelting hailstones, as though the very world we inhabit hates us as much as the Sakkra themselves. We fight, struggling onward, wading through the storm that only harms us, never the onrushing enemy, the thunderbolts and hail receding from them as they come so as to kill and hinder us alone, and the Sakkra lick sharp teeth with long, pink protruding tongues, and slaughter us as we move in slow motion, caught by the cold that touches only us or the nature of the dream. When all is over, Sakkra corpses litter the ground, far outnumbered by our own shattered mechanical bodies, and we who, half-broken, sparking, joints misaligned, every chassis pitted and battered and charred, stumble alive - for now - out of the wreckage are outnumbered by those of our people who if not for the storm or the dream would never have died. We few survive for now, but Sakkra Hydra and Colony Ship cruisers still loom across the sky, calling to their worlds for more killers to come in - and all the while, the rest of our people, oblivious, seem to do nothing.
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Still the people of Endoria continue to flit, as if distracted, after wild new possibilities. While a few keep squeezing down lasers ever-so-slightly closer to portable size and slightly more press on with the old computer designs, many more hurry after some new, untested force field idea as though intoxicated by erratic data inputs to their feeds - with Meklon again and Humidity still in the shape of gigantic spaceyards for building impossible ships, doing nothing else, as if with no other purpose, in between. I can even see the scout that just arrived at home making a turn around Meklon and rushing right back out again, on down to Moro, where the single laser fighter that left Endoria with the Scout for Meklon also entered orbit simultaneously. And the Scout that's stood on Moro in every dream where in my awareness turns and leaves - bound nowhere, for no reason: Centauri, a world I half-remember as one we found and longed for and see within the dream as belonging to walking rocks, is known to us, long-scouted, so there's nothing for a scout to do but look at it again, stretching to do so with no better logic than a dream's.
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My nightmare is recurring: Sakkra swarming in their transports, bound to slay us all with tooth and claw, rifle and blade, shell and grenade. They are barely fewer this time, and we are so few that all Primoidus45 seems an empty wasteland. Nor are we even building any more as it feels we did before or in another reality: The world is a shipyard now like Meklon and Humidity, and has been for what seems a year already - except the ships we're building seem to me before my eyes to melt and change: Meklon's and Humidity's are clouds of laser fighters and transports, already setting out our way, as though that is what they always have been; our own work all the while is on something else, not quite so small and so as impossible for us ever to finish building as superships for other worlds would be.
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I spin from neighbor to neighbor, trying to warn them of the danger, the transports growing ever-larger in the sky, but I can't speak, or they don't hear me, all of them oblivious, their optical sensors oriented only on their work as they uselessly build engines or laser components or tritanium bulkheads and hull plating. Deep, chortling laughter rumbles through the cold air, and I shudder and bulky, furry traders wander through, huge bears shouldering aside Meklar who seem not to notice and just go on building. The Bulrathi merchants go on laughing, "Let's celebrate! Our trade is making profits finally!" I try to warn them too, to beg them to use their might to hold off the overwhelming Sakkra numbers, but no sound emerges; like my fellow Meklar, they don't hear me. I try to reach for them, for anyone, to get someone's attention and point it at the sky, and struggling, I wake again, still haunted by visions of the Sakkra soldiers in their scaly hordes swarming forward in their transports, coming for our lives, and I need a long time in the interstellar feed to remind myself of my peaceful, waking reality.
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I dream again of ships that swarm the stars: The same dream of Sakkra transports coming on relentlessly, now with endlessly more to lose as more and more ships seem to converge across the skies. Nearly a hundred new fighters from the dream-Meklon and the world I somehow know as Humidity are rushing in to reach us and die under the fire of Hydra breath at the same time that the killing assault transports arrive to massacre us on the ground. And all the while, the same scenes, the same nightmare on the ground of oblivious Meklar building a ship that will never be finished and will help no one - while on other worlds, Meklar turn their energies to still-more-fruitless studies of force field and computer dynamics, discussing the possibilities of personal laser weapons only casually, almost incidentally. A lone fighter sent from Endoria - was it in this dream or another, the very first I knew? - flees in terror as well it might from the Hydra pair, but the Primodians around me work on at their pointless tasks - while another single fighter rockets out of Moro orbit and hurries toward us, as if eager not to miss the excitement when everyone else gets here. What is there here for them, for anyone, but death?
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A strange and fitful dream this time: I hurry back and forth from ship to ship - the ship, one, never to be finished, is five now, small and bearing a laser cannon each - with the Hydra cruisers lurking overhead, too close, not firing, just there, and more than a hundred and sixty ships and transports of different kinds all closing in. I have to finish them - all of them! - all in a hurry, in a race, so they'll be in time to die like all the rest, and the Meklar on all the other worlds are musing happily over the comms, right in my ears, about the possibility of learning some kind of waste reduction technology, still working on their force field and computer wastes of time, and chirpily suggesting that we might have little laser guns to fight with, maybe, maybe, with less than half of half of half a chance. We build and build in a frenzy, shouting across the stars to other Meklar who can't hear and couldn't help if they did but need to defend themselves before it's too late - unless as I fear it's too late already! - and the five little laser fighters rise, lifting up off of the ground, taking slowly and then quickly to the skies, flying straight at the killer Hydra ships as over a hundred more helplessly-weak little fighters arrive, just ahead of all the transports from both sides. I see the sunlight glinting off their little hulls, harsh and bright, and gasp for breath, and wake to the true world and the true sunrise.
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The same dream again - always the same dream - and yet...
The Hydra cruisers close in as I remember from too many dreams before, opening their heavy laser maws to spit fire down upon us, but only once: They scorch dry, open steppeland but not factories, and no one is killed, while all the fighters wait silent, hidden on the far side of our world - and then each Hydra closes in on them, racing closer to our colony, but firing from long range on the fighter fleet instead, and I see for the first time, for sure, that they have no short-range weapons, for if they had, they would have fired those on us again. Our fighters close in, swift and sure, and suddenly I realize: Where a little group of laser fighters, smaller after taking long-range fire, could do no lasting damage to a Hydra, the huge group we've gathered in a single fleet can tear away armored Hydra scales far more quickly - especially with half the enemy gone away! Incredibly, the Hydra pair draws back away from them as though afraid, firing at long range again, destroying a few more of our little shining fighters - but we have so many! Our ships close in again and a Hydra bursts into flames, its fiery breath consuming it from within! The other Hydra, damaged, limps away, not even firing, and our pilots make their one mistake: They gamble on the slim chance of destroying it too in time, and it fires back as they move in - but from close range this time - destroying nearly as many with one lucky burst of fire as both ships combined had killed before. Almost - almost! - they win their gamble all the same, but fall barely short before the nearly-disintegrating remnant of the Hydra jumps away and is gone. Almost, I want to cheer - but it still is the same dream, and those terrible assault transports, Sakkra clawing each other out of the way, licking their teeth, to be first to come out and slaughter us, are dropping out of the sky now, racing in to land and kill us all.
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And yet ... and yet it is not so! As I watch breathless, fresh from killing a Hydra and falling painfully short of making it two, our fighters wheel across the sky and bear down on the transports and the killers swarming within, and open fire with their little laser batteries, each assault transport flickering bright and blazing, then flaring out like a meteor in the sky! Our own transports arrive, bolstering our numbers, strengthening us, crowding our once-populous world with our people once again, as the Sakkra invaders burn and perish before they can reach the ground - all of them, to the very last! I want to celebrate, to cheer, to join the other Primodians, old and new, in a wild dance - but dreamlike, we are turning back with nearly all the other Meklar to build factories again: Only at Meklon, and only some, continue doing research enough to keep their labs going strong. Returning to our factories like all the rest - or almost all the rest - I wonder, and I look back to the skies ... where to my horror, a huge chunk of our protecting fighters are turning away, racing out toward the nebula and some other distant star. They're escorting a single lonely transport for reasons that could make no sense outside the context of a dream, bound as it seems for Romulas, so far away through the purple haze that there's no telling when they will arrive, and never to return - for if they did, no matter for what, it would unquestionably be too late.
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Another dream - or is it the same? - with someone looming huge above me, a mass of muscle, teeth, and claws, but somehow now it has fur and I know its name, his name, Durpp. It roars at me, something about money - it wants me to give more and more away, claiming I'll get more later somehow, off in a future far away. He towers over me, and I feel so small, and I run and hide from his demands and false promises, and find myself amid a sea of purple, out in a place I somehow know is called Endoria, with a line a million Meklar long waiting to board a transport - a single transport, for no reason I understand - bound for Romulas, echoing something inside my mind. Did I have this dream before? But wasn't it on a cold steppe world? Nothing like the purple-shrouded temperate landscape here. A little scout ship sits alongside the transport, its last pieces just assembled, refueled and ready, its pilot lounging in the seat, and then I'm the pilot, looking out at the purple sky, rising as the transport rises beside me, flying to known, defended enemy territory, and I know it's a dream - and knowing it, I wake.
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I dream of a Scout ship - I remember this - from another dream? But this is not the same: This ship is older, old and rickety; it's flown a long, long way, all the way to Silicoid Centauri from Moro, a meaningless name. I'm vaguely aware of fighters and transports and that other scout all on their way ... elsewhere ... but here, there are more Scouts, Silicoid ones hovering in orbit, turning from me, running away as I know I must run, soon - surely soon - but so far, somehow, no one is coming for me. There are many Silicoids on this world now, slowly, slowly, while building factories, as though their workers' rocky bodies are truly made of stone. I try to land my balky little ship, and I'm almost caught in a billow of toxic, corrosive smoke belched forth by one of their few factories, spewing waste unchecked all over the world, slowly eroding all hope of its habitability. I can't land; I can only return to space, orbiting alone, defenseless, searching everywhere inside my little cockpit for something I can use as a weapon when the Silicoids inevitably try to kill me - searching...
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...and I find another Meklar instead, popping up from under the seat, demonstrating laser weapons designed especially for me, showing how the only path to the future is with lightning guns: Ionic weaponry. Vaguely remembering, maybe from the waking world, maybe from the dream, I try to ask about rockets we knew we could learn about before, a way of fighting Sakkra and Silicoids with shields, but no sound comes out, and the cheerfully-flashing diodes of my one friend are receding with the rest of it, off into the distance, and I can't follow, stuck here until someone comes to me...
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...and ... I guess they are? I want to scream at them now too - at all the Meklar filing onto transports at Primodius and Humidity, and most of all at the Primodian fighter fleet: Don't come here! At least not all of you! You're leaving our world defenseless! I want to, but it does no good: They just come on and on and on, not even coordinated, falling toward us stumblingly and slowly - so, so slowly....
I force my voice into a shout with all my strength, and hear it echoing from the walls of my rest chamber as I jolt from sleep, crying out to the empty room for them to stop!
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Again, again, moving like blind things, as though their cameras and photocells all have been shut off, dream-Meklar move oblivious across their worlds, some building factories, some studying computer technology, hopeful that their work will soon be complete, but without any preparations to build anything that will make good use of it, nor yet the shields that field mechanics engineers are interested in. I see construction specialists debating the best means to cut down on factory waste products as though it will make a difference to our survival as a people - while others still blithely make crude beginnings in the cripplingly-difficult field of planetology. And all the while, no one is even starting to look into our real needs: Defenses, if not for our planets then at least for our ships, and weapons capable of overcoming Sakkra shielding ... or the Silicoids', since it seems we're heating up our war with them whether they trouble us - and whether I like it - or not.
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Meklon itself - can it be Meklon, so close to a nebula, so far from the rim? - is joining in the frenzy of transport launches, racing them off at some unknown range: There's no way to tell for sure how soon - or if - they'll arrive, and all of them, maybe a third of the homeworld's population, are going all the same, with nothing I can do or say to stop them, in spite of everything! I hurry back and forth between them, my fellow Meklar, climbing one by one into their transports, heading one by one for their doom, and I try to head them off and might as well be running in circles chanting hymns: Nothing I say seems to make it through to them!
I can see our defensive fleet and the people whose labors we need to build more, falling, falling away, with no way to retrieve them, no way to rescue them if the Silicoids meet them with ships of war, no way to rescue us if the Sakkra do again. I stretch to reach them, but I can't move, can't even follow them; they just keep receding, endlessly.
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Down below, on the blasted surface, dwindling numbers of factories had started stamping out new Meklar as though they were toy soldiers, each assembled by other Meklar to rise from the factory bed and going to work assembling more - though still too few, never, ever enough to face the threat from overhead. I vaguely remember a starfleet, tiny to insignificance, far off at Endoria, dividing into four: One fighter setting out toward embattled P45, one toward the red star of Moro with its threatening, hostile world, a single scout returning to Meklon, seeming to cry as it fled home, while eight remained oblivious, circling Endoria, circling.
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Again the dream, a day apart, or a year? Four Hydra heads spit fire down upon the people of Primodius45, heavy laser beams carving factories into abstract art, reminding me uncomfortably of something I can't put a name to, perhaps from my childhood or a collective memory absorbed through the interstellar feed. The art crumbles, and five factories are gone amid metallic screams, a million Meklar people melting under the fiery beams while the survivors keep stamping out more from the factories - more Meklar to rise and to die. I see the transports looming nearer, weirdly distorted, rising up out of Maalor, my dream-eyes piercing the lightyears as though they were mere kilometers away - and then closer, more clearly still: I could see them as if through windows in their transport craft, thirty-five million Sakkra lizards swarming, crawling over each other in their eagerness to get to the front, to kill and conquer. Our ships leaving Endoria by contrast barely seem to move, as though the nebula were a monster with a thousand purple hands, holding them back, holding them in. Unable to move, unable to scream, I escaped only by waking, shivering.
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The first thing I see is the new Sakkra fleet: Two more Hydra cruisers, oppressive, impossible to fight, bearing down from a new angle - and then in the nature of dreaming, they are there already above our world ... but vaguely, I remember: There were four! Then the dream comes into focus and I realize they've split, the two I saw at first flying not toward us but away, off on some other grim business, while we struggle against the threat that remains. At least the fiery laser breath they burn down upon us from the sky melts fewer factories like spun sugar in rain - at least this year a million Meklar aren't melting with them - but apart from that, nothing seems to have changed. The Sakkra transports still loom closer with each breath; the insignificant Meklar relief ships still crawl through the nebula, seeming not to move at all; the rest of the Endoria fleet sets out to follow - to follow them toward us - and the super ship Endoria built is with them now, obeying relocation orders, except it's smaller, divided into a few more helpless little fighters, equally slow and far off, while the Endorians instead of even bolstering their numbers, seem to forget about us and turn back to factory building and pointless token experiments into weapons technology. It doesn't matter: There's no use no matter what they do. Nothing new can reach us in time, and neither can the old: The ships that are coming to die in our cause crawl forward as if they're flying through purple gelatin.
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I dream for once of a cheerful robot student studying lensing effects and oscillations, its diodes blinking happily. A cyllinder rolls by with a nose-cone and rocket fuel spilling out of its insides, but the student doesn't seem to see, and swings a testbed laser down from the ceiling of its lab and watches merrily as it lases, igniting the trail of fuel, making sudden flames. I vaguely see the robot closing a vise over the laser, hauling hard on the lever to squeeze it down to something smaller it can hold - but only vaguely: The laser beam becomes the vast and terrible beam I know, cutting through our factories, the flames the burning of its foundations and energy cells against the sky. I can see Meklon and Endoria as though they're close - so close - and see them working on more lasers that perhaps Primodians like me could use to defend ourselves when the Sakkra come at last, but working on them slowly, casually, as if there's no urgency, as if the little chance of success is unimportant, so much less important than it feels to me! Instead our oblivious friends seem fascinated by an old computer project from so long ago I've half-forgotten what it is, more than half of them concentrating on that while none work any longer on factories or even building another supership like the steamy, humid planet is still trying to make ... and we keep turning out new Meklar bodies, waking, standing, ready to face the Sakkra, ready to die.
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Another dream, and the screaming is everywhere - first as factories burn around me, the fiery heavy laser beams doing as much damage in a breath as they destroyed combined across both of the past two ... nights? Dreams? Years? I can't tell for all the screaming, because the Sakkra have arrived, and their cries blend with the scraping screech of metal upon metal as our bodies fail us and fall apart, blasted to pieces by mortar shells and rocket fire, shorting out as lightning strikes among us from above, snapping under pelting hailstones, as though the very world we inhabit hates us as much as the Sakkra themselves. We fight, struggling onward, wading through the storm that only harms us, never the onrushing enemy, the thunderbolts and hail receding from them as they come so as to kill and hinder us alone, and the Sakkra lick sharp teeth with long, pink protruding tongues, and slaughter us as we move in slow motion, caught by the cold that touches only us or the nature of the dream. When all is over, Sakkra corpses litter the ground, far outnumbered by our own shattered mechanical bodies, and we who, half-broken, sparking, joints misaligned, every chassis pitted and battered and charred, stumble alive - for now - out of the wreckage are outnumbered by those of our people who if not for the storm or the dream would never have died. We few survive for now, but Sakkra Hydra and Colony Ship cruisers still loom across the sky, calling to their worlds for more killers to come in - and all the while, the rest of our people, oblivious, seem to do nothing.
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Still the people of Endoria continue to flit, as if distracted, after wild new possibilities. While a few keep squeezing down lasers ever-so-slightly closer to portable size and slightly more press on with the old computer designs, many more hurry after some new, untested force field idea as though intoxicated by erratic data inputs to their feeds - with Meklon again and Humidity still in the shape of gigantic spaceyards for building impossible ships, doing nothing else, as if with no other purpose, in between. I can even see the scout that just arrived at home making a turn around Meklon and rushing right back out again, on down to Moro, where the single laser fighter that left Endoria with the Scout for Meklon also entered orbit simultaneously. And the Scout that's stood on Moro in every dream where in my awareness turns and leaves - bound nowhere, for no reason: Centauri, a world I half-remember as one we found and longed for and see within the dream as belonging to walking rocks, is known to us, long-scouted, so there's nothing for a scout to do but look at it again, stretching to do so with no better logic than a dream's.
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My nightmare is recurring: Sakkra swarming in their transports, bound to slay us all with tooth and claw, rifle and blade, shell and grenade. They are barely fewer this time, and we are so few that all Primoidus45 seems an empty wasteland. Nor are we even building any more as it feels we did before or in another reality: The world is a shipyard now like Meklon and Humidity, and has been for what seems a year already - except the ships we're building seem to me before my eyes to melt and change: Meklon's and Humidity's are clouds of laser fighters and transports, already setting out our way, as though that is what they always have been; our own work all the while is on something else, not quite so small and so as impossible for us ever to finish building as superships for other worlds would be.
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I spin from neighbor to neighbor, trying to warn them of the danger, the transports growing ever-larger in the sky, but I can't speak, or they don't hear me, all of them oblivious, their optical sensors oriented only on their work as they uselessly build engines or laser components or tritanium bulkheads and hull plating. Deep, chortling laughter rumbles through the cold air, and I shudder and bulky, furry traders wander through, huge bears shouldering aside Meklar who seem not to notice and just go on building. The Bulrathi merchants go on laughing, "Let's celebrate! Our trade is making profits finally!" I try to warn them too, to beg them to use their might to hold off the overwhelming Sakkra numbers, but no sound emerges; like my fellow Meklar, they don't hear me. I try to reach for them, for anyone, to get someone's attention and point it at the sky, and struggling, I wake again, still haunted by visions of the Sakkra soldiers in their scaly hordes swarming forward in their transports, coming for our lives, and I need a long time in the interstellar feed to remind myself of my peaceful, waking reality.
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I dream again of ships that swarm the stars: The same dream of Sakkra transports coming on relentlessly, now with endlessly more to lose as more and more ships seem to converge across the skies. Nearly a hundred new fighters from the dream-Meklon and the world I somehow know as Humidity are rushing in to reach us and die under the fire of Hydra breath at the same time that the killing assault transports arrive to massacre us on the ground. And all the while, the same scenes, the same nightmare on the ground of oblivious Meklar building a ship that will never be finished and will help no one - while on other worlds, Meklar turn their energies to still-more-fruitless studies of force field and computer dynamics, discussing the possibilities of personal laser weapons only casually, almost incidentally. A lone fighter sent from Endoria - was it in this dream or another, the very first I knew? - flees in terror as well it might from the Hydra pair, but the Primodians around me work on at their pointless tasks - while another single fighter rockets out of Moro orbit and hurries toward us, as if eager not to miss the excitement when everyone else gets here. What is there here for them, for anyone, but death?
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A strange and fitful dream this time: I hurry back and forth from ship to ship - the ship, one, never to be finished, is five now, small and bearing a laser cannon each - with the Hydra cruisers lurking overhead, too close, not firing, just there, and more than a hundred and sixty ships and transports of different kinds all closing in. I have to finish them - all of them! - all in a hurry, in a race, so they'll be in time to die like all the rest, and the Meklar on all the other worlds are musing happily over the comms, right in my ears, about the possibility of learning some kind of waste reduction technology, still working on their force field and computer wastes of time, and chirpily suggesting that we might have little laser guns to fight with, maybe, maybe, with less than half of half of half a chance. We build and build in a frenzy, shouting across the stars to other Meklar who can't hear and couldn't help if they did but need to defend themselves before it's too late - unless as I fear it's too late already! - and the five little laser fighters rise, lifting up off of the ground, taking slowly and then quickly to the skies, flying straight at the killer Hydra ships as over a hundred more helplessly-weak little fighters arrive, just ahead of all the transports from both sides. I see the sunlight glinting off their little hulls, harsh and bright, and gasp for breath, and wake to the true world and the true sunrise.
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The same dream again - always the same dream - and yet...
The Hydra cruisers close in as I remember from too many dreams before, opening their heavy laser maws to spit fire down upon us, but only once: They scorch dry, open steppeland but not factories, and no one is killed, while all the fighters wait silent, hidden on the far side of our world - and then each Hydra closes in on them, racing closer to our colony, but firing from long range on the fighter fleet instead, and I see for the first time, for sure, that they have no short-range weapons, for if they had, they would have fired those on us again. Our fighters close in, swift and sure, and suddenly I realize: Where a little group of laser fighters, smaller after taking long-range fire, could do no lasting damage to a Hydra, the huge group we've gathered in a single fleet can tear away armored Hydra scales far more quickly - especially with half the enemy gone away! Incredibly, the Hydra pair draws back away from them as though afraid, firing at long range again, destroying a few more of our little shining fighters - but we have so many! Our ships close in again and a Hydra bursts into flames, its fiery breath consuming it from within! The other Hydra, damaged, limps away, not even firing, and our pilots make their one mistake: They gamble on the slim chance of destroying it too in time, and it fires back as they move in - but from close range this time - destroying nearly as many with one lucky burst of fire as both ships combined had killed before. Almost - almost! - they win their gamble all the same, but fall barely short before the nearly-disintegrating remnant of the Hydra jumps away and is gone. Almost, I want to cheer - but it still is the same dream, and those terrible assault transports, Sakkra clawing each other out of the way, licking their teeth, to be first to come out and slaughter us, are dropping out of the sky now, racing in to land and kill us all.
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And yet ... and yet it is not so! As I watch breathless, fresh from killing a Hydra and falling painfully short of making it two, our fighters wheel across the sky and bear down on the transports and the killers swarming within, and open fire with their little laser batteries, each assault transport flickering bright and blazing, then flaring out like a meteor in the sky! Our own transports arrive, bolstering our numbers, strengthening us, crowding our once-populous world with our people once again, as the Sakkra invaders burn and perish before they can reach the ground - all of them, to the very last! I want to celebrate, to cheer, to join the other Primodians, old and new, in a wild dance - but dreamlike, we are turning back with nearly all the other Meklar to build factories again: Only at Meklon, and only some, continue doing research enough to keep their labs going strong. Returning to our factories like all the rest - or almost all the rest - I wonder, and I look back to the skies ... where to my horror, a huge chunk of our protecting fighters are turning away, racing out toward the nebula and some other distant star. They're escorting a single lonely transport for reasons that could make no sense outside the context of a dream, bound as it seems for Romulas, so far away through the purple haze that there's no telling when they will arrive, and never to return - for if they did, no matter for what, it would unquestionably be too late.
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Another dream - or is it the same? - with someone looming huge above me, a mass of muscle, teeth, and claws, but somehow now it has fur and I know its name, his name, Durpp. It roars at me, something about money - it wants me to give more and more away, claiming I'll get more later somehow, off in a future far away. He towers over me, and I feel so small, and I run and hide from his demands and false promises, and find myself amid a sea of purple, out in a place I somehow know is called Endoria, with a line a million Meklar long waiting to board a transport - a single transport, for no reason I understand - bound for Romulas, echoing something inside my mind. Did I have this dream before? But wasn't it on a cold steppe world? Nothing like the purple-shrouded temperate landscape here. A little scout ship sits alongside the transport, its last pieces just assembled, refueled and ready, its pilot lounging in the seat, and then I'm the pilot, looking out at the purple sky, rising as the transport rises beside me, flying to known, defended enemy territory, and I know it's a dream - and knowing it, I wake.
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I dream of a Scout ship - I remember this - from another dream? But this is not the same: This ship is older, old and rickety; it's flown a long, long way, all the way to Silicoid Centauri from Moro, a meaningless name. I'm vaguely aware of fighters and transports and that other scout all on their way ... elsewhere ... but here, there are more Scouts, Silicoid ones hovering in orbit, turning from me, running away as I know I must run, soon - surely soon - but so far, somehow, no one is coming for me. There are many Silicoids on this world now, slowly, slowly, while building factories, as though their workers' rocky bodies are truly made of stone. I try to land my balky little ship, and I'm almost caught in a billow of toxic, corrosive smoke belched forth by one of their few factories, spewing waste unchecked all over the world, slowly eroding all hope of its habitability. I can't land; I can only return to space, orbiting alone, defenseless, searching everywhere inside my little cockpit for something I can use as a weapon when the Silicoids inevitably try to kill me - searching...
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...and I find another Meklar instead, popping up from under the seat, demonstrating laser weapons designed especially for me, showing how the only path to the future is with lightning guns: Ionic weaponry. Vaguely remembering, maybe from the waking world, maybe from the dream, I try to ask about rockets we knew we could learn about before, a way of fighting Sakkra and Silicoids with shields, but no sound comes out, and the cheerfully-flashing diodes of my one friend are receding with the rest of it, off into the distance, and I can't follow, stuck here until someone comes to me...
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...and ... I guess they are? I want to scream at them now too - at all the Meklar filing onto transports at Primodius and Humidity, and most of all at the Primodian fighter fleet: Don't come here! At least not all of you! You're leaving our world defenseless! I want to, but it does no good: They just come on and on and on, not even coordinated, falling toward us stumblingly and slowly - so, so slowly....
I force my voice into a shout with all my strength, and hear it echoing from the walls of my rest chamber as I jolt from sleep, crying out to the empty room for them to stop!
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Again, again, moving like blind things, as though their cameras and photocells all have been shut off, dream-Meklar move oblivious across their worlds, some building factories, some studying computer technology, hopeful that their work will soon be complete, but without any preparations to build anything that will make good use of it, nor yet the shields that field mechanics engineers are interested in. I see construction specialists debating the best means to cut down on factory waste products as though it will make a difference to our survival as a people - while others still blithely make crude beginnings in the cripplingly-difficult field of planetology. And all the while, no one is even starting to look into our real needs: Defenses, if not for our planets then at least for our ships, and weapons capable of overcoming Sakkra shielding ... or the Silicoids', since it seems we're heating up our war with them whether they trouble us - and whether I like it - or not.
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Meklon itself - can it be Meklon, so close to a nebula, so far from the rim? - is joining in the frenzy of transport launches, racing them off at some unknown range: There's no way to tell for sure how soon - or if - they'll arrive, and all of them, maybe a third of the homeworld's population, are going all the same, with nothing I can do or say to stop them, in spite of everything! I hurry back and forth between them, my fellow Meklar, climbing one by one into their transports, heading one by one for their doom, and I try to head them off and might as well be running in circles chanting hymns: Nothing I say seems to make it through to them!
I can see our defensive fleet and the people whose labors we need to build more, falling, falling away, with no way to retrieve them, no way to rescue them if the Silicoids meet them with ships of war, no way to rescue us if the Sakkra do again. I stretch to reach them, but I can't move, can't even follow them; they just keep receding, endlessly.
(To be continued....)