Crystous unsurprisingly responded by declaring war, but both sides were well aware that the war had already begun. Indeed, a Silicoid battle fleet was already en route to Rayden to intercept Mrrshan forces there. The main Mrrshan orbital fleet was still a few years away, and the feline forces already present - including virtually the entire fleet of Graaars - were forced to retreat when the rock fleet arrived, and wiped out the newly-Mrrshan colony from orbit. Millions of Mrrshans died in their transports - many under Silicoid guns, and the rest after their transport craft reached the planet, their life support systems exhuasted, and their Mrrshan cargo found no sustenance on the planet's glassy surface. In 2404, a Silicoid colony ship deglassed and rebuilt the colony, unloading two million rock people ... a little too soon. Their battle fleet managed to destroy only a little more than two thirds of the Mrrshan transports that arrived that year, and the remainder recaptured the colony with only a million losses on their side. The main Mrrshan fleet - including a dozen new Scratch gatling destroyers and a heavy-laser cruiser - would arrive in time to hold the colony - and as important as the world itself was the first fruit of its re-conquest.
The hastily-erected Silicoid space scanner on the planet's surface represented a huge step forward for Mrrshan espionage and intelligence services. No longer in the dark about the movements of enemy fleets, they could plan their own movements more precisely; between their starforce, planetary entrenchments, laser rifles, and personal deflector shielding, they were therefore able to wipe out the entire Silicoid reinforcement force as it arrived at the planet, with no losses of their own. The feline partisans had something to cheer about for the first time in many years, but it was a minor victory. Their economy was hopelessly backward, their research efforts had become almost non-existant, and in spite of Silicoid losses, the other pre-Orion races still were thriving. Even those that lacked vast empires and advanced scientific knowledge at least managed to get lucky, as when the Sakkra stumbled upon a mineral cache at one of their colonies.
The Darloks, of course, had no need of good fortune. While the Mrrshan space command fleet was tied up at Rayden, dealing with a major assault fleet with the help of a hurriedly-built missile base, and their Graaars were sent to accompany a flotilla of transports to ultra-rich Drakka, with orders to bomb the planet's bases away, the shifters were continuing their policy of industrial expansion across the galaxy, making maximum use of their superior environmental control techniques. By 2413, when they formed their twelfth and thirteenth colonies, it had become clear even to GNN's conservative reporters that they were running away with the galaxy.
The Mrrshan fleet meanwhile crawled across space at warp 1, reaching desperately for the Drakka star system around which RBO-31 had built all their hopes of military success. More than 270 Graaars arrived in the system, supported by the lone Mrrshan battle cruiser, all ten of their remaining gatling destroyers, and a small fleet of support fighters. The planet's missile bases and supporting fleet of missile boats (with too few heavy lasers mixed in to make a difference) opened fire, initially ignoring the Graaars, as RBO-31 was surprised but relieved to see. They eventually began targeting the Graaar fleet, but more than two thirds still survived to reach bombing range ... and yet failed to drop a single bomb on the planet's surface. RBO-31 shouted at the admiral of the fleet by holotransmitter, demanding an explanation. The Graaar pilots were mystified. "Must have been some mistake back at the drydock," one pilot suggested. "Don't know why we didn't notice until now."
The Mrrshans had somehow accidentally built almost three hundred bombers without a single bomb, bomb bay, or other weapon on board. Starship engineers had been clamoring about it for decades, but their complaints had been lost in the Mrrshan bureaucracy; no manager at any level had been prepared to admit the existence of such a fiasco even when the plans were in the blueprint stages, and squelched all rumors of the truth accordingly. So the Mrrshan people were left to scrap the remains of the Graaar fleet, recovering barely a sixth of the cost of construction and none of the massive maintenance that had been paid for the worthless ships for the past two decades ... to say nothing of the lives - well over a hundred million - that would perish in the now-hopeless invasion of Drakka. They died with no hope of success, to no purpose, with extensive labor left undone at home. The clerical error that left the bombs off the Graaar design and the short-sighted self-interest of middle and upper managers that failed to report it - together with RBO-31's refusal to listen to lowly engineers when management claimed all was well - had cost the Mrrshan people their last hope in the galaxy.
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Next: Conclusion
