What a thrill - and what a disappointment, riding right on its tailfeathers!
Potential to steal Meklar technology from every possible field, and when we select the prize of computers, we wind up with a miserably outdated Battle Computer Mark III. It reminds me of the time in early 2526 when we first miniaturized Class V shields for use aboard our starships, opening hope for still greater miniturization into personal absorption shielding ... and I'd hardly left the celebration when the Meklar ambassador appeared to tell me he was leaving and his people would hound us in war. Thus far, the war has been a quiet one, but that can't last forever ... can it? The Meklar have shown they respect our economy and its potential to build a deadly starfleet; perhaps they will leave us alone indefinitely!
2544
The years fly past as swiftly as our own Alkari wings. Has it really been thirty six since I came into power? The Meklar have made peace with us, declared war again, and again returned to peace, all with but few shots being fired: The Hyper-V missiles they launched at my occasional scanner ships, and the Heavy Fusion Beams a Meklar Annihilator used to finally destroy one before my retreat orders could go through.
In the meantime, technology has been flooding in. In the past dozen years alone, we've developed atmospheric terraforming and implemented it on all our hostile worlds, improved our industrial technology to rapidly bring the resulting new population on those worlds up to full factory employment, and developed Ion Drives to radically improve our starships' effective speed and a Neutron Blaster to give them talons. Some of our current projects - a Bio Toxin Antidote in case the Meklar develop bioweapons and Stinger Missiles in case they ever attack at all - are far from the state of the art, but should be accomplished quickly, and may be necessary to survive an attack if it comes. Others, like a High Energy Focus device and especially Improved Robotic Controls V - a leap that's only possible because of the scanners for which I traded years ago - will carry our people far into the future: RC5 is - for now - the Meklar state of the art in computer technology, and while our new Andrium Armor project is old news for the construction-happy machines, our Ion Drives mean that in propulsion, we've already achieved parity! Meanwhile, thanks to these latest techs, we've assembled a robust economy.
Check out those production numbers, with RC4 factories maxed out all over the place! Only Galos and Escalon - our front worlds and, for now, according to our spies, the only ones the Meklar fleets can reach - have more than one missile base apiece, but every star is shielded and has at least a single defensive base from which to start ... because you never know when they'll go to war again and come up with advanced range technology!
2553
The longer the Meklar delay their attack, the better prepared we'll be. For years now, we've had an antidote that should reduce the impact of any bioweapons they may bring - such as the Doom Virus we're reluctantly researching as the only way to advance our knowledge of planetology. It's been almost as long since we learned to protect our troops with personal absorption shields and Andrium Armor - which should also strengthen our defensive bases and fleets - but that's only the beginning. Our engineers just came through with High Energy Focus technology, which leads us into the unknown future of propulsion technology (it might also be useful in its own right if the enemy were fielding slower starships, but as things stand, it's pretty much junk technology) ... and with Stinger Missiles, a damage upgrade of more than 100% over our Merculites against the shielding on the enemy star fleets! Oh. And this just happened too. I've been trying to forget it.
The second espionage hit of my reign is a deep penetration, with all fields available and the potential to get something amazing! And instead of something like a Mark V battle computer, it lands their top computer technology. That should be cause for celebration ... except that their state of the art just happens to be the tech in which we had already invested tens of trillions of credits' worth of research. Scientists were already reporting a 20% chance of getting it this year without our spies doing anything. Our secret agents really know how to disappoint me.
I guess I should look on the bright side: At least our spies haven't made relations any worse than they were already! At least ... they haven't unless the Meklar developed time machine technology. I did wonder what M5-35 could possibly mean last year...
...by "insufferable acts of terrorism." We haven't done anything to him since we've been at peace! It would be just like that erratic loony to declare war for something we hadn't done yet - an act of war commited after he'd declared war on me!
For now, we'll just have to do our best with our current research projects, like Tritanium armor (waste reduction would have been a better option instead of either this or Andrium, but I can't make the right decision every time) and the potentially deadly combination of Anti-Matter Torpedoes and a Cloaking Device. (Not normally great for us Alkari, but if the Meklar keep using Warp Dissipator ships, I may show off just how deadly they can be!) And of course propulsion research keeps steadily on. As long as the Meks don't attack us, we'll catch them eventually - and so far they haven't so much as sent a fleet our way! We'll just wait them out and tech away! What could possibly go wrong?
