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Iranha Star Dock, 2475: Everything we have worked for has come to nothing. The Meklar are unstoppable. Already, last year, they scrapped their remaining medium Hack bomber designs and their most outdated ion fighters in favor of a new line of state-of-the-art war ships: A bomber identical to the Meltdowns, except for carrying a triple payload of anti-matter bombs; a warp 5 megabolt fighter with computer and maneuverability classes of 7, dubbed the Black Ice 5; and a heavy fusion destroyer meant specifically to obviate the Psilons' Dark Star design.
Dozens were produced this year alone, along with some 27 bombers and literally hundreds of Black Ice fighters. The Flare 5 destroyers have already proven to be every bit the Dark Star killers they were intended to be; all their targets in the Psilon fleet were killed instantly by reactive fire. Celtsi fell to almost 900 Meltdowns and almost 160 transports, all converging from other once-Psilon stars. Four of Gorra's missile bases were blown apart by obviously Meklar spies who the planetary governor is convinced were actually Bulrathi. The only thing left for RBO-23 to do was to accept its place as ruler of the galaxy.
It refused. Its abstention from the vote was as good as a declaration of war on the Bulrathi, who had canceled their non-aggression pact with it so recently - a move we encouraged and applauded. Our only consolation is that RBO-23 would probably have done the same thing anyway had we done nothing at all.
Ruins of Gorrigton, Willow, 2476: The main Bulrathi fleet was stationed here, with over eleven hundred Hunter twin-fusion-beam destroyers, over a hundred Claw bomber/missile Cruisers, and some fifteen support cruisers mounting dissipators and heavy fusion beams. We imagined it was the safest place we still could reach for that reason, and in some sense it proved true, as the Meklar fighters and bombers were all destroyed, and even the Capacitor was eventually forced to retreat ... but the cost was unspeakable. Every Bulrathi cruiser in the system was rendered into scrap, as were all 17 missile bases. Almost 350 of the Hunters went down in flames, and we're told it could actually have been worse if not for a Meklar piloting error. The planet was bombed into total submission; this town, where we landed, is a smoking ruin, as is every other town and city of the two hundred that once held factories. Only four million people survive on the surface, less than ten percent of the population before the battle began. The survivors tell us that the spored-out husk of Hyades was conquered by the Meklar this year, the first Bulrathi world to be assimilated, and it's not the only world to come under the sway of the collective. The story is coming in now from GNN.
Night has fallen for the Psilon people. We all expected it, but it seems to have hit Dy rlas harder than he anticipated. It's one thing to know your race is doomed, but it's quite another to learn, once and for all, that there is no faint hope, no future: That you are the last of your species. He holds me close to his heart, and Sasha's and Prrlan's arms surround us, but I fear we still can't truly warm him now. The Hunter fleet is moving on, and so we must as well, but it won't be long before there's nowhere to which we can go. There are still on the order of a hundred more Bulrathi cruisers of various designs crossing ursine space, and those nearly eight hundred surviving twin-fusion Hunter destroyers, but they mean nothing in the face of RBO-23's bombers, Capacitors, Flares, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Black Ice fighters, swarming everywhere.
Antares Orbital Station, 2480: The Meklar behavior completely mystifies me. They've already won, decisively. They'll never even use the ion stream projector they developed in 2477, or the neutronium bomb now in early developmental planning. They assimilated Willow in 2478 along with those of its ancient artifacts that survived their bombing spree. The mark 6 robotic controls they developed last year, along with means of building factories twice as quickly as they did eighteen decades ago, only render their industrial base more overwhelmingly powerful, and they'll never need the mark X battle computer or andrium armor they've begun to pursue. They finally ran down that fleet of over seven hundred Hunters, destroying them all at Thrax this year just before assimilating that colony and Gion, picking up a bio-toxin antidote and urridium fuel technology, and their pursuit of a universal antidote is meaningless at this stage. So what do they need with fifty-four hundred Black Ice fighters?! They built almost two thousand in the past two years alone, and they're gathering most of them near here, in the southeast! Do they imagine they actually need that kind of firepower to destroy our poor, hapless Silicoid hosts at this stage of the war? It can't be!
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Next: The Reason
