And Part 2:
2398
I am Klackon. I am a student of Kholdan and of Ursa as well as of Empathy, Joy, Respect, and Generosity, for I am a student of planetology. For long years, I have sought to learn more: How to live on such worlds as Tao Prime, at a green star at the far edge of the galaxy. My first chance of a breakthrough was slight, but it has grown with my knowledge and studies, and according to my calculations*, the cumulative chance that I would solve the question by the time the Sakkra colony ship took control of Generosity's orbit last year was nearly 50%, though the chances have been much lower - perhaps one in five at best, since my research had to bow to other priorities - in any single year. Among those priorities were the new Stinger 3.0 NPG fighters, named to confuse my enemies, and definitely not just because any monkey person looking at a computer screen was thinking too much about bugs to remember that stinger missiles are a thing - and indeed a thing that others of me are actively though slowly researching! These new fighters have been built in just the past year with the battle computers generously provided by my Meklar friends, for duties near the galactic core, from fiery Joy and Unity, leaving their spaceyards empty of parts so that even with contributions from the interstellar treasury, I will not see the ship I most long for until the turn of the century. But at least I now know it is possible: The breakthrough has at last been achieved!
With the means of controlling radiated environments safely in pincer, I felt ecological restoration techniques held a certain attraction, as it still costs two billion credits a year just to clean up industrial waste for every five factories on every Klackon world. I will not pursue such work though - not now, at least. I have hope that this may be improved at least a little bit without my research, and in any case, pursuing it would delay my progress in true planetology. Considering the desperate need for more Klackons on the ground around the galaxy, it might well have been a better choice to learn the secrets of cloning, but I am content with the natural process of birth from hive mothers' eggs, and after all, I am a student of planets, not of new gestation techniques. So instead, I am seeking means now of terraforming - or where necessary creating - the very air I breathe, to enable more of me to live, and hive mothers to more rapidly breed, on such now-hostile worlds as Generosity and Life, Unity and Kulthos, and even the Tao Prime colony-to-be!
Soon enough, there will be more planets for me to study: The fighter fleet at Ursa has completed its vital mission of reminding the Bulrathi fleets to honor their treaty and turn away and reminding the millions of bears on transports that like all expendable members of a hive, they must die to honor and serve that same strategic choice, and to aid them in accomplishing this if needed. The new Stinger 3.0 but-actually-not-with-missiles fighter fleet from Joy has just arrived at Love via relocation orders, and another fleet is also at last complete at Unity. All three groups will converge with the fleet now stationed at Talas in two years time on the same target, within reach of each, at the same time that more than one hundred million of me arrive in transports from all over space! Other transports, now passing close to Talas, are bound for Empathy, and others still are passing a parsec or two from Sol on the way to Generosity, but the reason the fleet at Talas is about to be free to leave is the other set of transports that is not passing Talas. In fact, it is just now finished consolidating in the system from various smaller groups sent from other worlds, and arriving there to greet the monkey people there and give me a chance to study another new type of world: To learn if I can how Talas came to be mired in mineral poverty!
At least there was something to be learned from the planet's ruined defensive bases and its many factories: The Class 4 deflector shields that some of me reverse-engineered there will help protect missile bases and mean the new Soldier 3.0 is already obsolete. I had hoped for more - I might even have learned the humans' ecologica restoration techniques, which would have delighted me! - but at least the plan for Uxmai didn't foolishly rely on finding their advanced engines among the ruins here, much though that would have improved the new fighter fleets. Of course the old ones are busy too, not only at Ursa and preparing to visit Uxmai, but down at Generosity, where nearly a hundred of the oldest surviving sublight drive ships in our empire chased the Sakkra colony ship away - just a year too late to keep them from sending transports that way. They won't be joining everything at Uxmai at the turn of the century, since the Sakkra need to be repelled - but apart from them, as far as the fleet, it really will be everything!
2400
I am Klackon. I am the OSG, called 36 for my completeness: Square of the sides of every cell in a hive. I am my hive queens, mothers to all. I am my drones, my scouts, and my soldiers. I am my workers and students and every pilot in my fleet. I feel the loss of every life that is of me, the fall of every ruined factory.
Last year, when Sakkra transports came with lizard soldiers licking their sharp-edged teeth, prepared to take by force the colony of Generosity, I met them in space with 90 neutron pellet fighters and stopped them dead. Last year, when monkeys dressed in cardboard suits with flashing lights and metallic paint destroyed one of my homeworld factories, I was not deceived. Who would do such a thing but the people who are at war with me? What purpose to wreck a solitary factory among my many hundreds across space unless in an attempt to distract me, to sow the seeds of war between me and those with whom I am at peace? When another group of saboteurs destroyed five factories this year at Kindness and cleanly escaped, leaving no trace of who they were, again I was not deceived. So I fight on, but only against those who truly are not friends to me. And feeling the deaths of all who are of me, I nevertheless have more than a hundred million on their way to learn from the monkeys what they will not in friendship teach.
Here is what we are facing, guarding the skies of Uxmai above their missile bases. Against the fleets we had just a decade ago, these numbers, with their impressive maneuverability and especially the many Warships' gatling lasers would have been too much to face. Now from the factories of the humans themselves at Talas we have learned build ships that can ignore gatling lasers entirely and virtually ignore the rest of the excrement in their fleet. We have not done so yet, and our bombers are not as many as they should be to face the planet's bases - fewer still as they take hits and I feel their death-pains - but we have enough firepower now, with strong enough computers, to overcome and defeat both their bases and their fleets.
The shielded heavy laser Destroyers are next to burn as the Soldier 3.0 destroys the last of their Warships in passing, ignoring the Escort cruiser because in spite of its speed, it is basically incapable of actually doing anything, and that is all before the feeble remnants of the human starfleet retreat. Even after removing the last of their bases, at great cost to our ships, I had to suffer the deaths of several more of my pilots - but it is nothing to what the humans lost, and nothing to the suffering to come.
Two more fighter pilots lose their life in defense of Gratitude, destroying a Sakkra Juggernaut that must have been sent from far away just before I established my colony. It had only titanium armor, and was armed with what looked like neutron blasters and heavy blast cannons, plus I think another kind - maybe ion? - of heavy beam. Whatever it was, none of it was aimed with any kind of accuracy.
But that is not the suffering of which I spoke. I will spare you the tale of that suffering: More than a hundred lives lost in a battle for Uxmai's surface, exactly a third of them mine - though a few of those were peaceful deaths, cannibalizations when I found I had sent a few more than needed, since the planet would not support quite as many of me as remained after human resistance was vanquished.
In spite of everything, we still have not learned the secrets of the powerful human engines, but at least we did learn some of their secrets: A battle computer still more advanced than the gift of the Meklar, improvements at last to our ecological restoration techniques, the worthless anti-missile rockets that helped with ECM to make their Escort cruiser incapable of mounting any kind of weapon or useful system, and another form of Human shield technology: A defensive device known as a repulsor beam.
I barely have time to process the pain and loss of my millions, and to understand the spoils of my hard-won victory before the next and greatest urgency: the High Council meets again, and Saurak of the Sakkra is pitted against me.
TX-1138 opens the voting with the seven votes of its machine collective, casting them for me; then Saurak proclaims that all the near-billion Sakkra support Saurak's own bid to be High Master of the galaxy. To its ten votes - nearly a veto, but not quite - Johann III adds the Humans' one, and the Mrrshans too contribute three after Monch of the Bulrathi contributes his lone vote to me. Almost holding a veto of my own, matching Saurak with ten votes to my name, I abstain from the voting - but it doesn't bring an end to the year's diplomacy.
Perhaps I should again have rejected Johann III when he came to me with a plea for peace. Yet when he did so years ago, merely jumping on the bandwagon with the Meklar and Bulrathi, it was a cheap trick, seeking a means of destroying transports I already had in space without fear that they would be supported, and blaming the resulting fighting on me. This time, there is no such opportunity for him, reduced to his homeworld alone - for the Sakkra in the meantime have taken control of the colony beyond that he used to hold. Thanks to the engines his people use, he still may be a threat, but more than anything else, I seek friendship - so I wish to give him an opportunity at last to prove friendly. So I accept and welcome this peace.
So I close the scentgland of the 24th century, ready to open the 25th in this ever-more-crowded galaxy.
I am Klackon. I am my homeworld with all its moons, and Kholdan with all its planets. I am Klackon. I am becoming the whole of the galaxy, with all of its stars gently glinting. I am Klackon, together, alone.
Won't you be friends with me?
I am Klackon. I am a student of Kholdan and of Ursa as well as of Empathy, Joy, Respect, and Generosity, for I am a student of planetology. For long years, I have sought to learn more: How to live on such worlds as Tao Prime, at a green star at the far edge of the galaxy. My first chance of a breakthrough was slight, but it has grown with my knowledge and studies, and according to my calculations*, the cumulative chance that I would solve the question by the time the Sakkra colony ship took control of Generosity's orbit last year was nearly 50%, though the chances have been much lower - perhaps one in five at best, since my research had to bow to other priorities - in any single year. Among those priorities were the new Stinger 3.0 NPG fighters, named to confuse my enemies, and definitely not just because any monkey person looking at a computer screen was thinking too much about bugs to remember that stinger missiles are a thing - and indeed a thing that others of me are actively though slowly researching! These new fighters have been built in just the past year with the battle computers generously provided by my Meklar friends, for duties near the galactic core, from fiery Joy and Unity, leaving their spaceyards empty of parts so that even with contributions from the interstellar treasury, I will not see the ship I most long for until the turn of the century. But at least I now know it is possible: The breakthrough has at last been achieved!
With the means of controlling radiated environments safely in pincer, I felt ecological restoration techniques held a certain attraction, as it still costs two billion credits a year just to clean up industrial waste for every five factories on every Klackon world. I will not pursue such work though - not now, at least. I have hope that this may be improved at least a little bit without my research, and in any case, pursuing it would delay my progress in true planetology. Considering the desperate need for more Klackons on the ground around the galaxy, it might well have been a better choice to learn the secrets of cloning, but I am content with the natural process of birth from hive mothers' eggs, and after all, I am a student of planets, not of new gestation techniques. So instead, I am seeking means now of terraforming - or where necessary creating - the very air I breathe, to enable more of me to live, and hive mothers to more rapidly breed, on such now-hostile worlds as Generosity and Life, Unity and Kulthos, and even the Tao Prime colony-to-be!
Soon enough, there will be more planets for me to study: The fighter fleet at Ursa has completed its vital mission of reminding the Bulrathi fleets to honor their treaty and turn away and reminding the millions of bears on transports that like all expendable members of a hive, they must die to honor and serve that same strategic choice, and to aid them in accomplishing this if needed. The new Stinger 3.0 but-actually-not-with-missiles fighter fleet from Joy has just arrived at Love via relocation orders, and another fleet is also at last complete at Unity. All three groups will converge with the fleet now stationed at Talas in two years time on the same target, within reach of each, at the same time that more than one hundred million of me arrive in transports from all over space! Other transports, now passing close to Talas, are bound for Empathy, and others still are passing a parsec or two from Sol on the way to Generosity, but the reason the fleet at Talas is about to be free to leave is the other set of transports that is not passing Talas. In fact, it is just now finished consolidating in the system from various smaller groups sent from other worlds, and arriving there to greet the monkey people there and give me a chance to study another new type of world: To learn if I can how Talas came to be mired in mineral poverty!
At least there was something to be learned from the planet's ruined defensive bases and its many factories: The Class 4 deflector shields that some of me reverse-engineered there will help protect missile bases and mean the new Soldier 3.0 is already obsolete. I had hoped for more - I might even have learned the humans' ecologica restoration techniques, which would have delighted me! - but at least the plan for Uxmai didn't foolishly rely on finding their advanced engines among the ruins here, much though that would have improved the new fighter fleets. Of course the old ones are busy too, not only at Ursa and preparing to visit Uxmai, but down at Generosity, where nearly a hundred of the oldest surviving sublight drive ships in our empire chased the Sakkra colony ship away - just a year too late to keep them from sending transports that way. They won't be joining everything at Uxmai at the turn of the century, since the Sakkra need to be repelled - but apart from them, as far as the fleet, it really will be everything!
2400
I am Klackon. I am the OSG, called 36 for my completeness: Square of the sides of every cell in a hive. I am my hive queens, mothers to all. I am my drones, my scouts, and my soldiers. I am my workers and students and every pilot in my fleet. I feel the loss of every life that is of me, the fall of every ruined factory.
Last year, when Sakkra transports came with lizard soldiers licking their sharp-edged teeth, prepared to take by force the colony of Generosity, I met them in space with 90 neutron pellet fighters and stopped them dead. Last year, when monkeys dressed in cardboard suits with flashing lights and metallic paint destroyed one of my homeworld factories, I was not deceived. Who would do such a thing but the people who are at war with me? What purpose to wreck a solitary factory among my many hundreds across space unless in an attempt to distract me, to sow the seeds of war between me and those with whom I am at peace? When another group of saboteurs destroyed five factories this year at Kindness and cleanly escaped, leaving no trace of who they were, again I was not deceived. So I fight on, but only against those who truly are not friends to me. And feeling the deaths of all who are of me, I nevertheless have more than a hundred million on their way to learn from the monkeys what they will not in friendship teach.
Here is what we are facing, guarding the skies of Uxmai above their missile bases. Against the fleets we had just a decade ago, these numbers, with their impressive maneuverability and especially the many Warships' gatling lasers would have been too much to face. Now from the factories of the humans themselves at Talas we have learned build ships that can ignore gatling lasers entirely and virtually ignore the rest of the excrement in their fleet. We have not done so yet, and our bombers are not as many as they should be to face the planet's bases - fewer still as they take hits and I feel their death-pains - but we have enough firepower now, with strong enough computers, to overcome and defeat both their bases and their fleets.
The shielded heavy laser Destroyers are next to burn as the Soldier 3.0 destroys the last of their Warships in passing, ignoring the Escort cruiser because in spite of its speed, it is basically incapable of actually doing anything, and that is all before the feeble remnants of the human starfleet retreat. Even after removing the last of their bases, at great cost to our ships, I had to suffer the deaths of several more of my pilots - but it is nothing to what the humans lost, and nothing to the suffering to come.
Two more fighter pilots lose their life in defense of Gratitude, destroying a Sakkra Juggernaut that must have been sent from far away just before I established my colony. It had only titanium armor, and was armed with what looked like neutron blasters and heavy blast cannons, plus I think another kind - maybe ion? - of heavy beam. Whatever it was, none of it was aimed with any kind of accuracy.
But that is not the suffering of which I spoke. I will spare you the tale of that suffering: More than a hundred lives lost in a battle for Uxmai's surface, exactly a third of them mine - though a few of those were peaceful deaths, cannibalizations when I found I had sent a few more than needed, since the planet would not support quite as many of me as remained after human resistance was vanquished.
In spite of everything, we still have not learned the secrets of the powerful human engines, but at least we did learn some of their secrets: A battle computer still more advanced than the gift of the Meklar, improvements at last to our ecological restoration techniques, the worthless anti-missile rockets that helped with ECM to make their Escort cruiser incapable of mounting any kind of weapon or useful system, and another form of Human shield technology: A defensive device known as a repulsor beam.
I barely have time to process the pain and loss of my millions, and to understand the spoils of my hard-won victory before the next and greatest urgency: the High Council meets again, and Saurak of the Sakkra is pitted against me.
TX-1138 opens the voting with the seven votes of its machine collective, casting them for me; then Saurak proclaims that all the near-billion Sakkra support Saurak's own bid to be High Master of the galaxy. To its ten votes - nearly a veto, but not quite - Johann III adds the Humans' one, and the Mrrshans too contribute three after Monch of the Bulrathi contributes his lone vote to me. Almost holding a veto of my own, matching Saurak with ten votes to my name, I abstain from the voting - but it doesn't bring an end to the year's diplomacy.
Perhaps I should again have rejected Johann III when he came to me with a plea for peace. Yet when he did so years ago, merely jumping on the bandwagon with the Meklar and Bulrathi, it was a cheap trick, seeking a means of destroying transports I already had in space without fear that they would be supported, and blaming the resulting fighting on me. This time, there is no such opportunity for him, reduced to his homeworld alone - for the Sakkra in the meantime have taken control of the colony beyond that he used to hold. Thanks to the engines his people use, he still may be a threat, but more than anything else, I seek friendship - so I wish to give him an opportunity at last to prove friendly. So I accept and welcome this peace.
So I close the scentgland of the 24th century, ready to open the 25th in this ever-more-crowded galaxy.
I am Klackon. I am my homeworld with all its moons, and Kholdan with all its planets. I am Klackon. I am becoming the whole of the galaxy, with all of its stars gently glinting. I am Klackon, together, alone.
Won't you be friends with me?
.
