The war is drawing slowly to a close as we race to pursue the limits of science, and catch up with Meklar technology.
We continue to fend off attack after attack against Mentar, Xengara, and Toranor, but ever since our Toranor colony managed to put up a missile base and planetary shield - a defensive measure undertaken a few years ago shortly before completing its factories - with starship components in readiness for rapid assembly at key locations again, the danger is minimal - even though our entire starfleet now consists of our lone old Dactyl dreadnought, shuttling between threatened worlds in the Mentar sector as necessary.
True, we're still behind in technology, but we're closing the gap, increasingly rapidly. Our fleet may be small in comparison to theirs, but that just means ours is easier to maintain: At least for now, we have all the ships - well, all the ship - we need. I'll build another small fleet from time to time going forward - a small talonfull of destroyers or a squadron of maybe ten fighters - to help out around the Psilon Nebula if it seems like they'll be of use, but for all intents and purposes, for some years to come, the Dactyl is going to stay the only ship in our fleet.
2595
The gap is closing. In one grand swoop, three years ago, our weapons research teams rendered our already-mostly-scrapped Heavy Blast Cannon ships officially and completely obsolete.
Not only do we have phasors - and their heavy counterparts - ready to go into production, but we have plans to miniaturize them for use by our atmospheric air troops ... hopefully rendering them an effective fighter weapon as we do so. The very next year brought us Interphased Drives, which will allow us to virtually fly circles around even the fastest Meklar fleets - and we're now working on an inertial nullifier that could change that "virtually" to "literally" in combat. Our Toranor colony, bombed down to the bedrock some sixty-five years ago - and then twice more since! - has long since been re-established at full strength. The Meklar destroyers that arrived this year found its defenses and infrastructure complete and reinforced, forcing the enemy to retreat.
Why would they bother to fight on?
Why indeed? And with their spies still wreaking havoc with electronic warfare - we lost Sssla's missile base to sabotage this year, and though it will be replaced swiftly and easily, this gets annoying very fast - and nothing at all to gain, why would we bother maintaining the fiction of this war? The simple answer:
We wouldn't. Perhaps now, at last, with the Meklar forces humbled by our invincible pilots, the galaxy can live at peace.
We are talking about M5-35 the Erratic though. So if you're not buying the whole "hopes of peace" thing, don't worry: Neither am I.
