People of Altair and the Winged Colonies - all ye wise and sovereign people of our great Sovereignty - I come before ye this day, night, evening, and morning, as the orbits and habitat locations on our many worlds may decree, with a proposal for our future, and for how we may shape the future of the galaxy! It is a question now of daring: Of danger and of doubt, and of what we are prepared to risk to escape the virtual cage in which we seem to be trapped, with no hope of future colonies! I do not speak of battling the Central Stars Alliance - for although perhaps we may, they are our longest-standing trade partners, and peaceful peoples disinclined to attack us without reason: The nearest factions we have to friends in this galaxy. Mind, we can take them! Their ship designers and combat pilots are pre-fledglings in their eggs in comparison with ours, and with sufficient focus, skill, and care, we can overcome their superior production bases and technology, and thereby establish our dominance over the galaxy - with great effort and at great cost, and at their expense. But I come before ye now to say there is another way - narrower perhaps, and in some ways fraught with greater risk, but still a
way!
Until now, we have gone on quietly as before, our friendly dealings with the Central Stars Alliance ongoing, as ye may well recall.
Well may ye know already that, flying in accord with the previous Sovereign of Altair, our weapons engineers have collaborated with the Republic's, enhancing the defenses of their missile bases - especially against such ships as their enemies might field but that we never shall - while enhancing our own ability to turn
others' missile bases into expanding bursts of radiant energy. We cannot - quite - fit an anti-matter bomb onto a ship small enough to be used in our battle fleets, yet steady progress has been made on miniaturizing them, and now we have full confidence that they shall indeed be ready by the time there is a need! We have confirmed our friendship likewise with a huge increase in trade, up to 900 billion credits annually, laying the foundations for future profits that shall benefit both our peoples - as ye know and as the merchants criss-crossing our half of the galaxy can attest.
Until now, such friendly exchanges as these were exemplary of our forward planning, with most of our efforts focused on domestic details such as these:
Upon first taking office, the current administration directed the old, slow starfleets on the Fiershan front to get reports on Jasana's latest ship designs and to consolidate in case of a future need - or opportunity - but as most of ye know, the great majority of our people were working on finally populating our newest, most-hostile, and in many respects most-valuable colonies. Each wave of transports, timed to arrive the year after their future homes completed sufficient terraforming to make space, contributed to our future on each of these vital worlds, with little Tsukushi receiving ample assistance from the treasury to speed the project so it could resume its greatest strength the sooner: The development of industry.
We expected a quiet first year in office in light of all of this, with nothing to report but the consummation of our technological collaborations ... but as ye must know by now, a stroke of luck intervened.
I know not even now how many of you are aware of how vital Reajax II energy storage may be to our future in the galaxy. In one glorious swoop, as chemical engineers struck the right combination by sheer chance or by destiny earlier in the process than anyone anticipated, our primary fleet's range was extended to match what had previously been available only to our Scout ships, and our Scouts themselves, together with long-flight merchants and any other ships designed with additional fuel capacity were able to reach new stars of which our people as yet knew nothing, while our greatest propulsion laboratories began work on a future in which those stars might be brought near by the speed of Ion-powered fleets!
Much was said about the possibility of building Star Gates at our many colonies, in light of our greatest shipyards' location far from the galactic frontier - and much more could be said in light of the proposal I intend to offer all of ye who hear me today - but Ion Drives will shrink the time it takes for our fleets and, critically, transports to reach destinations outside our own space, and enable far greater maneuverability in case of battle - which we surely shall face. Yet that future was then far ahead no matter which course we chose to take, and the five stars we at last could reach carried far greater implications, as ye surely are aware - for they shine beyond the far side of Central Alliance space!
I submit that if we erred in our decisions in the wake of the present Sovereign's first full year in office, the gravest error was in accepting the Hive's offer of trade. The diplomatic corps believed, due to certain prior encounters, now decades past, that the Hive worlds would be numerous and spread across the quadrant of the galaxy opposite the region of our conflict with the Fiershans. The proposal I offer today had not as yet been conceived, and we expected that another people would soonest be within our reach. Moments later, when a representative of the Crystal Imperium requested a similar trade agreement, we supposed our expectations had been vindicated - and we refused, in further expectation of an opportunity that would later prove no more substantial than a dream.
I shall note one point in passing: How our merchants were able to begin plying their trade, since the Hive lacked the necessary range technology and we had no idea which stars belonged to them, and therefore where to send our merchant fleets, is one of the deep mysteries of the galaxy. Beyond that, I can only apologize on behalf of the entire present administration for scrapping our slow, existing warp-3 scouts right away only to order a small fleet of new warp-4 versions the following year. Had we realized the new fuel cells would be ready so soon, we could have gotten the old scouts to all five new stars just as quickly without the small extra expense of building new ones. Not an important point, but one we should have thought through more completely.
Beyond extremely minor errors and amusing mysteries however, we were about to dive and capture yet more benefits from our new fuel cell technology than we had previously thought possible, thanks to our friends from Sol 3. Eager to acquire the means of ever-farther-flung trade, the Triumvirate offered tempting secrets in exchange: Their research notes on Omega-V Bombs, though as yet too large to be used themselves, would have helped us enormously with weapons miniaturization, while an Ion Stream Projector design, in addition to doing the same thing nearly as well, would have opened the way for our weapons engineers, currently tied up in contemplation of that very form of technology, to pick up a new project of our choice in its place. When we considered and demurred and asked for time to consult our scientists however, they Triumvirate suggested a third option, and we needed no further time to decide on accepting it.
In exchange for the new fuel, with clear explanations, expansive gestures, and contageous enthusiasm for the work, a brilliant scientist taught us to use Earth's own state-of-the-art battle computer, the Mark VI that guides all their planetary defenses with the help of their battle scanners. The design would fit on any warp-4 Talon fighters we might need to build immediately, to say nothing of our own defensive bases, and the knowledge base surrounding it would make computer targeting systems of all kinds easier to fit on any other type of ship we might design - and yet all those considerations were in some respects secondary to the other result of sharing the most-advanced form of computer technology in the known galaxy.
Though not actually caught up thanks to their numerous minor projects, we were no longer far behind even the members of the Alliance in computer technology, and especially with our new contacts on the far side of the galaxy, we now have many opportunities of gaining further insight into alien technology, indirectly through our fuel cells, by less-conventional means.
Our first report from a Hive world, classified until this moment, released now only in light of the urgency of the present situation, showed off our new computer advantage the very year after it came into play. One of our most-zealous agents, so eager to uncover new technology as to stow away on a Hive trade ship on its way home and then dive straight into a secret lab as it landed without even taking time to find out which planet it was on, not only made the point for us but eschewed a long-shot gamble for inertial stabilizers and a slightly-better gamble for personal combat weaponry in favor of extending that same advantage slightly, ending up with designs for an age-old battle computer that nevertheless provides more options to our ship designers - and to agents like this one.
Our conventional reconaissance has been gathering intelligence as well, including this report from the same year, based primarily on scanner results from the year before:
Their surviving ships were mostly defensive by then, focused wisely on neutron-pellet weaponry directed by feline reflexes and preferring ineffectual electronic counter-measures over a battle scanner because of feline incompetence. Even the Leopard's fusion bombs, ECM protection and all, would easily be destroyed by even one of our up-to-date missile bases - in case we should ever feel the need to bring one up to date. Still, to actually defeat them in space - for instance to defend Fierias if we were to conquer it from them and then face the wrath of their full fleet descending upon us there before we could complete its defenses - would demand still more resources than overcoming the planetary defenses in the first place. This is in part because felines are as obsessed with chasing bombers as they are with bits of string, but in part also because we have been making steady efforts to improve our ability to fight them effectively.
In this instance, the Hive agreed to a design exchange of weapon systems: Our enormous scatter-missile installations, originally of Mentaran mint, will now be available for their bases - another instance of our still-false assumptions about where we would find their worlds and what our plans would be - but now when we are able to invade at least our soldiers will be flying in with the most-advanced personal weapons now available in the galaxy.
Thus at last ye can see the full context of the latest High Council vote.
Some, with the virtue of hindsight, may say we should have voted for Carnax, who in the event drew votes only from itself, Alexander, and the mysterious cloaks of darkness. At the time, we dared not take that risk with so many peoples unknown to us ... and with hope yet strong that we would have no need of Carnax's favor for long! Even while the meeting was happening, our agents, camera orbiter drones in tow, managed a double coup:
Hand lasers were already being superseded by Hive ion rifle techology, but provided new insights for much-needed miniaturization for our fleets, and proved our agents
could break into Mentaran labs in spite of all their daunting technology, even as the Hive was unwittingly providing our agents with yet more incremental insights into alien computer networking. It was at this time moreover that we first discovered a Hive world's actual name!
With all five of the new stars about to be reached, one - one of those much closer to Earth than we expected - finally revealed its identity as the Hive world Acanceh. And yet more of Monteverde's people set off across space toward Kuroki's extraordinary riches - for after years of work, at last...
...our planetologists had found the means of terraforming its atmosphere! Transports bound for Tsukushi, much closer, are setting out from the same source the this very year - the very next! - while frozen Satake is permitted to go its own way, lacking the riches of those worlds ... and now, at last, with its own atmosphere! Nor have we forgotten the future of our many worlds, which thanks to our planetologists' continuing hard work - and our complete lack of interest in anything called a "doom virus" - will be enriched into virtual gaian environments someday. Perhaps a backward step for cloning would have been more to the point with war on the horizon, but without rehashing all the arguments the planetologists made, we hope to win the upcoming war
before their next project is complete!
So we come to the present year and the proposal of which I speak. Just now, at the nearest to Earth of all the five new stars, the only one within nine parsecs of Fiershan space or our own, we discovered the empty asteroid fields of Adachi, uninhabitable until the end of time. And at both Ajoite and the orange star out beyond Vilmoran - the two new stars furthest from Fierias and Earth - we found not Hive worlds as at Civiltuk much closer by, but well-defended colonies of Imperial rocks. Thus the daring plan with which our Sovereign began this term in office has proven a physical impossibility - and thus a wilder alternate plan was born. We have the worlds - one more of excellent quality if we should take Fierias - to build our worlds into ever-greater eyries from which to soar. We have ever more technology and ways of getting more...
...especially with the continuing, unwitting help of the Hive, whose computer technology is now entirely known to us apart from the two-generation-old battle computer that for
them is the state of the art. But we have no way to expand beyond the worlds we already have apart from Fierias itself unless we attack our long-time friends, or unless......
Ajoite is either an ex-Hive world that was recently conquered by the Imperium, or an Imperium world that recently and
barely fended off a major invasion, bombing run, or both from the Hive. We have no scan of the world, but it has only 20 million surviving crystals to work its hundred and forty one factories. And with those limited resources or whatever the Imperium can ship over, it will have to build a full Class-X planetary shield from scratch before it can so much as start on a missile base. It would seem to have nothing to do with us; we can't send any transports so far away. And yet...
...there is a way. If we can bomb them off the world with a long-range fleet of fighters and bombers, and establish our own colony in its place with a long-range colony ship, our transports and short-range ships can be sent there as well, creating a perch to cling to almost in the center of the galaxy - and it can be the launch point for further strikes into Imperium space. They have highly-advanced weapons and shields from the derelict they found ... but not enough to stop us: Not
yet, if we can get that perch to work from on their side of the galaxy and a
little more miniaturization for our anti-matter bombs. It would be an extremely risky venture - one repulsor ship with good shields, their typical ECM, and a beam could all but nullify the ships we can build - and would need daring and effective execution, the will to burn immense quantities of resources on a one-time chance to reach across the galaxy, and perhaps some luck, but if we can get there, with our increased voting power and the near certainty that the Hive at least - having voted for us this time and in a mutual war against Carnax with us - would vote for us or at least abstain, we could be all but certain not to lose the next election even if the war is still slowly ongoing.
But I cannot do this alone. Even the present Sovereign of Altair will not be in office long enough to see the first fight. In accordance with the most-important principles of our mutual and universal Sovereignty, as all must fight together if this war is to be won, all must decide together if it is worth attempting. If not ... there is always Fierias, and we can try something very similar against the much-weaker Hive instead, taking advantage of their lack of both Class X Planetary Shields and a repulsor beam. In truth, we need not fight our High Council rival - yet - even if we do pursue a long-range glass-and-re-establish entrance strategy. But there's so much to gain ... and I think, if we're willing to risk it, that we can!
.
