With the SkyEye en route back to Xengara, the last uninhabited planet in the galaxy thanks to radiation so intense that even the machine beings can't live there, we get reports that the dangerous Meklar just became more dangerous still.
A neutronium find at their back-line star of Thrax is just what they needed to churn out more deadly dreadnoughts. Perhaps we should have rejected their offer of peace - and taken them out while we could! If they develop planetary shields in the next few years, war with them will become decidedly more dangerous. Let's just hope our research teams can play catch-up for us before it's too late!
2514
Ask and ye shall receive!
We finally have a new battle computer - a critical need against those maneuverable Meklar fleets, not to mention their security systems! We've been slowly funding espionage training again - enough to send a spy into Meklar space about once every year or two - just to keep up to date on their capabilities, and this should help increase their life expectancy ... by a little bit, at least. Better still, we can develop advanced robotic controls to start - slowly - catching up with the Meklar economy! We'll start researching the project heavily right away.
2515
I should have done this as soon as my reign began.
Cygni's industrial accident (from before my time) left it so irradiated that no one from offworld - not even Meklar - can approach. It has no need for planetary defenses, and might never need them now. Scrapping all but one of its missile bases (together with the help Galos is providing with its huge annual industrial budget) will give me a little more reserve to help developing colonies like Mentar and Escalon and cut down on the costs of maintaining the things. Several other worlds can scrap most of their bases for much the same reasons: Though their environments are suitable for life, they're well beyond the reach of Meklar fuel cells, at least for now. Only rich Galos, right on the front - though its 20 bases is surely more than it needs in peace-time! - will retain more than one.
2522
Our research efforts are paying enormous dividends. True, we're nowhere close to what the Meklar have accomplished, but we're definitely taking every advantage we can in this period of peace ... in more ways than one! Since the Meklar ambassador is willing to talk to me, I've managed to arrange a trade for some key technology!
It pains me to give the Meklar access to Repulsor Beams, potentially making their fleets even more invulnerable to ours - the only ship-to-ship weapons we've ever developed that can get past those repulsors are Merculite Missiles and Heavy Lasers - neither of which is much good against existing Meklar shields! As for the Advanced Scanner I'm getting in exchange, it's of little use on its own; there's only one planet out of our current scanners' range, and their demographics and base counts can be learned easily enough when it matters just by sending a scanner ship. Even so, the trade is worth it for the boost in computing power! It's two generations ahead of anything we could boast before, just one generation behind the Meklar state of the art! We're still behind - our spies will have to live with their miser funding - but now there's at least a slim hope that we might manage to steal more important technologies!
2523
These years of peace have seen enormous leaps forward for our empire ... culminating in this moment, today:
So we claim our fourteenth world. We have been working toward this moment since even before my reign, and continue to look toward a distant brighter future - as in 2517, when Zortium armor opened a path toward a new project code-named IIT5 that will fit nicely with our robotic controls R&D, and as the following year when Reajax II fuel cells made it possible to start theoretical development of Ion Drives, which will someday increase our ships' speed substantially. By studying the survivors of the decades-old Cygni accident, we've found ways to help all our people survive even on its irradiated surface - and also here on Xengara, finally colonized today. And even as we learned to do so, we found hope that we'll one day be able to terraform their atmospheres, to restore Cygni to its former glory and render all our hostile worlds habitable across their entire surfaces instead of just within our enclosed colony bases. And moments ago, I learned our engineers had successfully developed Hard Beam technology! Perhaps the decision to step back and quickly develop Neutron Blasters was a mistake - Fusion Beams would be more effective though more difficult to research, Stinger Missiles will be desperately needed in case the Meklar attack us someday, and Anti-Matter Torpedoes are the only way to really advance the state of the art - but at least we'll soon be able to arm our fighters, and use non-laser heavy beams!
I'm hoping none of those weapons will be needed of course - but hope though I might, I'm certainly not betting on it!
