Maalor builds its last Hive Queen (for a little while at least) - which happens to also be the fifth it has produced in a five year span! I produce a pair of new Scouters there to continue exploring the galaxy while my Hive Queens gather in the stars I can already reach. Sadly, I had dispatched one of the others too thoughtlessly and hastily, and so in 2333...
...another Scouter confirms that the Guardian is still unfriendly. At least this suggests that it truly doesn't leave that mysterious star system ... but I won't be sending any more of my Scouters to their deaths there, believe me! This is a time to envy the lesser peoples of the galaxy, who each think as a single organism with a single brain - whose emperors have the luxury of blaming their subordinates for stupid mistakes! I have no subordinates who are not part of me, an so instead of assigning blame, I must accept responsibilty.
Oopsie.
There's plenty of good news to cheer me up though - me and all who are of me! A ludicrously simple modification to my factories - I need only adjust the output valves of the N-positive neuro-electric field receptors to resonance with the ionic plasma conduction cores while compensating for the variance in localized micropressures in our deuterium reprocessing nodes by dynamic reallignment of the associated nuclear centrifuge banks - will cut waste products by twenty percent! Needless to say, I implement the changes in all my factories immediately. This change is so simple, and so obvious, it occurs to me that I could probably cut the cost of factory construction by the same amount simply by redesigning our entire factory structure to make most efficient use of the new improvements! Perhaps there are a few details to work out first, such as how and where to even begin, but I'm convinced that Improved Industrial Tech 8 is right around the corner anyway!
At the same time, one of my Scouters reaches Arietis, a world that's toxic to carbon-based life but with a greater wealth of minerals and energy sources than nearly any other planet I've seen - "nearly" because of course it's still blown away by my homeworld of Maalor! The so-called "Silicoids" mentioned briefly in one of the few surviving records from Artemis would be able to inhabit the place without trouble, but we have seen no sign of them, nor indeed of any other living species ... and I swear now that Arietis shall be mine someday!
And even as I say that...
I encounter a Scout ship belonging to an ape-like race called the Hew-Mince or something equally violent-sounding and primitive, at the gorgeous jungle world of Kailis. You can see it here, retreating from the red star near the lower right-hand corner of the screen, in the general direction of the yellow stars surrounding my cursor - one of them is presumably its homeworld, but there's no telling if the others belong to other species. I sought to communicate with the pilot's primitive simian brain, but sadly, he fled into hyperspace before I could establish contact. Perhaps I shall have better luck next time I meet one of them. You can also see from this shot that Kholdan continues to fulfill its role as my first planet outside the homeworld: Researching while sending its Klackons off to help start up my newest colonies. It will go back to work on its infrastructure ... eventually. You can also see rich Arietis here, and the Scouter in orbit above Vox right nearby (Vox itself, like Gion, is just below the screen). In the meantime, I meet a Psilon Scout moments after that of the Hew-Mince, and it proves equally unwilling to stay and talk to me.
The neutron star from which the Psilons are departing is Ukko, a large but hostile world, and though the Psilons probably originate from one of the yellow stars on this screen, I can't tell which of the nearest two it might be. Also visible of course are desert Imra and the Guardian's star - both quite close to Artemis, which is some way past the left side of the screen. To give you some sense of where all this is happening, the circled, unexplored green star at the upper left corner of the screen is the same as the one I circled in the lower right hand corner of the Hew-Mince screen. Oh, and as you can see, Maalor is back to building Hive Queens - indeed, work on the one you can see in the queue just started this minute!
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Next: The Final Pieces?
