The Meklar have an annoying habit of sending heavily escorted colony ships to re-establish colonies that I've just glassed out of existence. This is annoying because it makes things much more interesting if I have to engage their fleet above worlds that mean something - their key bases or mine - and I'd rather not cover every single world whose colony I raze with a separate space superiority fleet. This is what I do about it when they make a nuisance of themselves this way:
A small number of bombers (30 here, but there's no kill like overkill) show up at the world, teleport in, and drop a single volley of bombs, wiping out all 2 million Meklar residents. The bomber fleet absorbs whatever damage the enemy fleet can dole out, and any surviving bombers retreat. No need to actually fight those ships with the colony glassed again already.
Imagine if that fleet hadn't wasted its time out there, but had met me over Proxima last year, or over Gorra today! I'd have ... well, I might have had to send more Blazes to take them out than I already did.
Okay, so I guess that wouldn't have been much of a consolation for them. We should be able to wrap up this war in the next couple of years, I think. Now if ... why are there sirens blaring again? Haven't we demonstrated there's nothing we need to fear in this galaxy? Did the Meklar spies convince our computers that some extra-galactic lifeform blew up some of our factories again?
...huh. So apparently there's an extra-galactic lifeform coming in on the attack. That's hilarious, GNN, but I don't want to hear it. Seriously. If that thing's heading for Meklon, we're going to have to race it there! We want that kill, you stupid Amoeba!
2636
The Meklar ships are retreating from our forces so fast, even our teleporting Blazes can't destroy them all before the survivors limp away. Soon though, they won't have anywhere to limp to.
A new fleet out of Galos ripped up the Ursa colony at just about the same time Meklon was glassed by my main fleet. Notice the space amoeba too, with a giant green arrow pointing at it. If that slowpoke was headed for Meklon, it needed some Alkari-style engines to do it. Alkari-style everything, really. M5-35 asked for "peace" again, but he's shown us already what that means to his erratic cyberbrain. I mean, I can see where he's coming from, obviously.
It's not as if he has a hope in a million of winning the war at this point. Not against this fleet:
More Blazes are on the way, of course, but we've got over a hundred already, and that's more than enough to deal with the machines - at least in combination with 500+ Blitz Neutronium Bombers. The Dactyl is still hanging on, trying to pretend there's still some actual use for it, but if I were ever going to build another dread, it would look more like the unbuilt Phoenix design pictured here. The Skyeye 8.0 was the most recent dedicated scanner design I built before it became unnecessary, and the Shadow was a placeholder design from back when I cared about such things - so figure about ten years ago. They'd be fun to play with if one ever got built, but of course one never will; we're about to make peace - and at least from the Meklar perspective, make it the hard way!
2637
The Meklar are sending a last-ditch colony fleet to Ursa, hoping to establish a tiny colony before I wipe their final world from the galaxy. I anticipated them though; a small fleet of Blazes stands in the way. Their first mission is to take out the colony ship.
That accomplished, they then go on to also take out the rest of the fleet. Notice that the Blazes are firing on the Ajax cruiser from point-blank range, in spite of its repulsor. The main reason the Blazes are carrying heavy phasors (instead of just even more regular phasors) is that I didn't realize until I saw them in action that sub-space teleporters let you slip in right past the enemy's repulsor beams.
A similar last-ditch colony at Quayal is likewise burned away, and then the main fleet arrives at Thrax, the world at which the Meklar found Neutronium deposits early in my reign: Their richest world, defended by three cruisers and 24 missile bases ... which are still firing Hyper-V rockets, incredibly.
This time, nothing survives long enough to retreat. The Dactyl tries valiantly to matter, moving across space at what once was incredible speed, but the Blazes have teleported twice, and the enemy has been slaughtered, while it's still only come half way. The defenders, unsurprisingly, accomplish precisely nothing. This war is over now - over for eternity.
