The war with M5-35 continues. He made it official in 2608, but it's really been ongoing - depending on whether you include the brief periods of nominal peace - for either seven years or more than fifty. He's running a new cruiser design now, with the repulsor beams we traded to him decades and decades ago, and heavy weapons strong enough to penetrate our bases' shields; if he sends them down in numbers, we're going to have to go back to building defensive fleets, with heavy weapons of our own again! A few came to Escalon in the Psilon Nebula last year, in company with a large fleet of cloaked destroyers, but the Dactyl was there, covering no less than 39 bases.
117 Stinger Missile racks with effectively mark-12 targeting systems, are not impressed by the Ajax cruisers' class-2 ECM. We managed to clean up the entire enemy fleet without losses of any importance. The Meklar spies and saboteurs are doing more damage, frankly.
They have our computer security systems so befuddled, they get reported as "unknown spies." Who do they think we're going to blame? The ghosts of the Bulrathi they exterminated? Imaginary rebel factions in our own thriving empire? Mysterious forces from beyond the galaxy? They might as well have used their hand phasors to burn a sign in the ground where our factories stood saying, "MEKLAR WERE HERE!" ... but no, of course they take careful steps to be reported as unknown spies! Anyway, Maretta can rebuild fourteen factories in its sleep. Even with their espionage, these machines no longer impress me.
2623
We have to repel another attack on Maretta. This is becoming routine.
Those new Nexus cruisers would be a real threat to our bases if they showed up in large enough numbers - in fact, so would the Ajax cruisers, to an extent at least - so we'll have to be careful about how we deploy the Dactyl. Still, they're definitely beatable, and the numbers in this fleet are just a joke.
The spy wars are continuing, though not to any purpose. Occasionally, they put on a pointless pyrotechnic display, destroying a few of our factories, which we just rebuild in an eyeblink. More rarely still, we manage to steal some pointless example of Meklar technology.
Our real means of advancement remains scientific research, as always, and unsurprisingly. The Mark X Battle Computers you can see in effect at the latest battle for Maretta - rendering the enemy's maneuverability moot against our Stingers - have been in place for years, and our subsequent push for Class X ECM is nearly complete. Propulsion engineers are pursuing the dream of Hyper Drives as well, with our Inertial Nullifiers long since ready to deploy if needed. Our worlds are all fully populated and industrialized with some 80 million more Alkari apiece than their pre-terraforming surface could support, and we're working on improving them further with a project code-named IT100. And even now, Class IX deflector shield generators are ready to be installed at all our extra-nebular starbases and on any new dreadnought ships we may produce, with hopes of one day miniaturizing them into Personal Barrier Shields for our troops. Progress is swift, and we fully expect to see more of it soon.
2628
It's been a good few years, especially with the breakthrough of which I just learned in weapons technology - we're going to start working toward Scatter Pack X missiles, which would raise the attack power of our missile bases by literally an order of magnitude - and in the all-important construction tech of Industrial Waste Elimination. With factories so clean there is literally no waste to clean up anymore, we're heading back for an old project code-named IIT2, to speed factory construction with each new leap in terraforming technology. The Meklar are still attacking, sometimes at Maretta, sometimes at Mentar, but we still have their number, still with nothing but the Dactyl in our fleet. You would think it would be obvious even to the common Alkari that we can win this war on our own terms. Yet the doom-sayers still insist that with the Meklars' technological edge, in spite of all the other indicators of our impending victory...
... wait ... a ... minute!
Okay, guys, I'll be back in a bit. I need to get down to the war room. Everyone keeps insisting we can't go on the attack because the machines lead us in technology. But that so-called tech edge of the Meklar just evaporated! With our latest weapons tech, we've taken the lead! It's time to go - now really to go - to WAR!
