Decemberr 31st, 2429
Dear Diary,
Lots of people are looking back on the twenties and saying things about them today. I don't remember most of them because I wasn't even born until them so I won't tell you about all those things. I'll try to just talk about this year. One year is long enough. Anyway, this year is long enough!
Most of the aliens still like us for doing such a good job of fighting the Meklar back when we were at war. The Meklar still hate everyone and I think they have forever, except now they hate us less. But it was really this year (even though it was a very long time ago this year) that Grunk didn't have as many marshmallows as he wanted in his breakfast cereal and he said we stole them and he said now it's a war. It's been most of a whole year and there hasn't been any fighting, but I guess stars are far away from each other so it takes at least a year to get from one to another and I think there are spaceships flying to Ursa now. Also we told the Darloks about the breakfast cereal thing and we reminded them that it's not a good idea to have a military alliance against your friends.
We did some trading with them too because we like trading with Darloks and meeting their scientists. Maybe the things they taught us will help Mom make better spaceships too, but they won't help very much. Mom makes the very best spaceships already.
Love,
Mir
Octoberr 19th, 2430
Dear Diary,
Dad is getting ready to grow special plants that will help make the world nicer. Mom is helping too by planning the new starship factories that we'll build on the parts of the world that we'll be able to live on when they get nicer soon. There are millions more Mrrshans who will be sent to help out with the factories when the world is all nicer too, and I would help too except I'm still just a kitten. We are doing all this because we just learned how from the Sakkra! We taught them how to make a warp dis-something thing that slows down spaceships so they would feel safer and teach us how to do the thing they call "Terra Plus Fifty" which is how we grew the special plants and everything. We want them to feel safer because right now they are scared of us because we're so strong.
There are lots and lots of Mrrshans and they're all over the galaxy so hurray! But Hissa was angry about that because he wants to have the galaxy all for himself and also Meson was angry about it because he saw a dancing monkey that sang at him, but we are not at war because they just yelled at us instead. Except we are at war with Grunk but that's from before.
I got a gold star today because I wrote a story about a spaceship for Mrrshanese class except it's a spaceship that doesn't fight anyone and everyone is friends. My teacher said it shows I have a good imagination but I remember when none of our ships had to fight anyone and you didn't need to imagine it. It lasted two whole years! Maybe it will happen again.
Love,
Mir
Febrruarry 6th, 2431
Dear Diary,
There was a big space battle at Ursa! My mom knows all about our ships. She says we used to use hairball bombers, but they're way out of date, and now all our bombers are Furballs that have stabilizers, and those are the ones that just got to Ursa. We sent a bunch of fighters too in case we had to fight a fleet, but also Bulrathi shields are super weak, so our fighters were even able to help blow up their missile bases.
The Bulrathi have better missiles than the Mrrshans but they're still slower than our ships because our ships are the best. What I can't believe is this: There are going to be lots and lots and lots of Mrrshan combat battalions flying to Ursa soon. The plan is to take over their world and overthrow their crazy leader and put him in jail. I don't think they're going to let us though. The Bulrathi say they'll kill us, and they'll arm all their people, and we'll have to kill them all and take over for ourselves if we want Ursa to be independent, even though they only have one other world anyway! So I think we should not attack them anymore, except they refuse to even talk about peace. They say they're going to come and kill us no matter what, so if we don't want to just bomb them into nothing and destroy everything they built AND everyone who's there, we have to attack them on the ground or we'll ALWAYS be at war. I wouldn't want to go ever though, so it's a good thing nobody's getting sent from here. There are plenty of troops coming from everywhere else.
Lots of people are going to die there, and it's too, too many people. I really want the wars to stop.
Love,
Mir
Marrch 23rd, 2433
Dear Diary,
Mom saw me watching my favorite spy show today, and she thought it was funny. She said all the spies on the shows try to look like Prrilla Sharl, but none of them get it right. Whatever, probably the real spies try to look like her too because she was the best spy ever, and she probably still would be if she didn't retire. Really she probably only pretended to retire and is the secret head of all our real-life spy networks now. I heard she could steal a coin out of mid-air without anybody seeing and I heard she once hacked TVC-15 - not its computers but its own internal electronics! Maybe it's just a legend, but she's obviously the best there ever was.
Now all our spies do is steal obsolete technology and blow up bases we don't care about to get us scouting reports of different worlds and sow dischord between empires that aren't even allied anyway or something. Don't get me wrong, it's still pretty cool to sneak into enemy territory and lift their tech or blow up their missiles or whatever. I love watching the trid shows, even if they're sometimes over the top. But obviously Prrilla was the best. There are legends about her and she's still alive - I mean, she's not just still alive; she's still like my parents' age!
Two hundred and sixty combat transports on their way to Ursa, by the way, and more are going to join them from closer by. They're taking the Bulrathi threats seriously anyway. I just can't believe there have been so many volunteers! I guess a lot of Mrrshans really, really want this war to end soon.
Love,
Mir
June 28th, 2436
Dear Diary,
I can only imagine what it must have been like, fighting street to street, factory to factory, lab to lab, farm to farm, on Ursa 4.
The Bulrathi never surrendered - not even when we'd taken the palace; not even when we'd wrecked their military infrastructure and demonstrated that they could not win. They kept fighting, taking nearly two shielded, duralloy-armored Mrrshans for every Bulrathi soldier that went down, ignoring the odds, never caring that we outnumbered them three to one when the battle began or that time only bolstered our advantage, until - with a hundred and twelve of our batallions still intact on the planet's surface, the surviving Bulrathi strapped explosives to their bodies and came forward en masse in a suicide charge.
Our troops searched long and hard for survivors whose lives could still be saved. None were found. I wonder if we would fight that way if we were overwhelmed - even if the alternative were bowing to Hissa. Is that the way they see us? Or even the way we saw the Meklar invasions? They persist in calling our diplomats and representative bodies by the same title as their own tyrants - is it possible the root of all our fighting, even the root of so many alien leaders' seeming madness, is simply a failure of translation?
There must be something we can do to stop these bloodbaths, no matter on whose worlds. I'll ask Lrriya tomorrow - she always seems to know what to do, and it'll be an excuse to talk to her. I hope she can think of something. I hope she likes the idea.
I hope she likes me.
Love,
Mir
Novemberr 8th, 2436
Dear Diary,
I almost hope Lrriya and I are wrong now. Even if we're right at this point, by the time we can do anything about it, it may be too late!
Never mind the rest of what the ground forces reverse-engineered: Hyper X Rockets and Inferno colony bases may help Mom miniaturize our ships a little more, sort of like the ion cannons that one of the wannabe-Prrillas stole from a lab down on Psilon Rotan and the class-4 ECM jammer that came through from our research labs earlier this year. None of that stuff really matters once you've seen the really big thing: The troops just picked up Omega-V bomb designs from Ursa's weapon laboratories, and that means the beginning of the end for anyone our people have to fight. If we wanted to conquer the galaxy, nothing could stop us anymore. I hope the other races can see we don't want to.
I ... I hope I'm right that, as a race, we don't.
Love,
Mir
November 29th, 2436
Dear Diary,
I hugged my mom today as if I was still a little boy. She came home all proud and happy about the starship plans she made for the colonial admiralty. At first I didn't even want to look, but I had to remember she is my mom, even if she does help design our war fleets.
I'm glad I did! The Hamstring 4 is wonderful! It doesn't have much firepower - it's not really meant for attacking! It's mainly a defensive weapon designed to freeze enemy ships in place with its warp dissipator and prevent them from bombing our worlds! It might help us hold new acquisitions, sure, but just seeing a new ship rolling off the lines that's only meant to hold things is great news on its own. Here's to never seeing Omega bombs deployed! Between this and the new Non-Aggression Pact with the Meklar, I'm starting to hope even the Mrrshans in power are seeing reason!
Love,
Mir
Marrch 21st, 2439 Dear Diary,
There are days when I fear that we'll never succeed - that there is no way we can ever bring the races of the galaxy to peace.
Meson was in fine form today, mixing three different metaphors as he declared war on all Mrrshans everywhere. I can't say even I was surprised after he tore up our non-aggression pact last year. Yet mightn't he just be interpretting some peaceful act as one of war? Mightn't he think, deceived by a language barrier, our proposal to let every world elect representatives to an RBO like ours was one to let our "emperor" RBO-37 enslave his people? Mightn't his crazy-sounding language represent merely our failure to understand or translate some of his cultural metaphors? Can't we at least hope it's so?
Lrriya says no - not in Meson's case. She's spoken with some of the Psilon merchants who used to visit us each year and now perhaps will never return. They spoke sense, had no trouble with translation, and showed all the signs of unease and fear whenever the subject approached their emperor. Still, still, there must be some way....
Lrriya won't give up, but she isn't optimistic. We've gotten a lot of people thinking about our ideas, and certainly no one I know wants to fight a war, but we're only dealing with what Lrriya calls the "educated elite," much as, from among all the Psilons, she's only met educated merchants who travel beyond Psilon space and visit with other peoples. I wondered how we could muster so many volunteers for the invasion of Ursa when no one I knew would have wanted to fight and die there. The hard truth is that, much as I want to believe I represent the Mrrshan people, much as I believe I would if all our people only understood the full reality we face in the galaxy, I only represent the small fraction who have been as fortunate as I - and not so fortunate and proud as to become blind to what makes them so. Perhaps the same is true for the Psilons, the few million remaining Bulrathi ... even the Meklar....
For now. I dread it may not be much longer before none of those races are left, and perhaps no more of even the Darloks and Sakkra.
Mom showed me the specs for a ship that's been ready to roll out for quite some time: One that's about to hit the shipyards thanks to Meson's declaration of war. The Tail-End bomber-destroyers, with their deadly accuracy and Omega bombs, will no doubt hit Mentar with numbers enough to crack its defenses like eggshells. Maybe it's hubris to think I can change anything beyond the huge-seeming group of students I've assembled - they really amount after all to just a tiny, tiny fraction of the Mrrshan population of the galaxy. But looking ahead, if nothing does change, I just see so much carnage....
There has to be something we can do.
Love,
Mir
P.S. This is odd. I went to close my diary and found a note under the cover. Just two words, a question mark, and a blank postscript, and I don't recognize the writing - it isn't Lrriya's, and certainly not mine. No one's even been in here - or no one I know of at least! And ... "Guerrilla Educating?" ... I ... what does that even mean?
And why write "P.S." so gracefully beneath it and then not even add anything?
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NEXT: Conclusion!
