Marrch 18th, 2396
We've all been hard at work getting the communications station up and working the last few days. Mom's boss is like a slavedriver sometimes, but that's okay. I know their work is really important. I'm going to hold Mom to her promise to share more of what she does with me now that I'm nearly of age. What she's told me so far has really just been a bunch of hints, and I'm ready to learn what's really going on.
Thanks to Ursa and Pollus, we should be within trading range of the Bulrathi and Psilons we've heard so much about but never had a chance to meet - unless you count their scout ships flitting by in the deeps of space, which I don't. That's not diplomacy. Mom and Dad say our trade ships can only reach them because of our Dotomite Crystal fuel cells, but seriously, we've been using Dotomite since before I knew what a fuel cell was. What do they remember using? Hydrogen?! It's like when they marvel about the new bio-friendly nanotech and how it's enhancing our ecological restoration techniques. Seriously, get with the times, guys. We've been using that stuff since before I was a teen!
Fogey stuff aside though, Mom's job is pretty cool. She gets to talk to all these alien beings, and she gets up-to-date intelligence so she'll know what to look out for, and all kinds of things! Now I just have to get her to keep her promise and tell me!
Marrch 31st, 2396
This is so sweet! Mom actually let me look at one of the special diplomatic reports the RBO-37 compiled for the corps! It's got a rough assessment of everybody's demographics across the whole galaxy!
Our fleets may be small, but our pilots are the best gunners in existence, and we've been winning our defensive war since before I was born with a fleet no bigger than this, repelling Meklar attack fleets year after year for longer than I've been alive. And thanks to their success and the hard work of colonists all across the empire, when we Mrrshans stand together, we're more than a match for any race we've met except the mighty Sakkra ... or the deadly Meklar. We keep stalking closer and closer to those machines too, but I hope it won't be necessary. After all these years, after hitting their attack fleets so hard, the Meklar have to be weary of this fighting. I think every Mrrshan in the galaxy is hoping this year's peace initiative will get a positive answer. The Meklar can't possibly sustain their war with literally every other race in the entire galaxy!
Aprril 27th, 2396
Look at this! Look at this! A detailed map of Bulrathi and Psilon space, a full report on their leaders' tendencies, wars, and alliances - and a record of the trade agreement Mom said she just finalized with Grunk today!
Okay, so 30 BC per year doesn't sound like much compared to the 400 BC of goods we're trading with the Sakkra every year, but this is our first official agreement with these people! It's a really big deal! Anyway, you can't expect much from the Bulrathi; they still live on just two star systems, and I'm not sure how they even get back and forth between Maalor and Ursa, they're so far away from each other. Kind of the same thing for the Psilons, who keep sending fleets down toward Mentar (and occasionally Rotan) from their nebula base up at Pollus. They're a bigger deal though with all their technology, and they have a hard-charging foreign ministry. Mom's supervisor is working hard to finalize a diplomatic package with them, but Mom says it'll probably take most of the year before paw prints are put to paper.
Should we be worried that Grunk and Meson's behavior has been as violently unpredictable as TVC-15's?
Septemberr 12th, 2396
Terrific news! The deal finally went through! After months of negotiations and reams of paperwork - Meson quixotically insisted on hard copies of everything even in the negotiation stages, and most of Mom's contribution was helping to sort through all the papers - we have an official deal with the Psilons! Mom even got to meet one of their scientists in person when he was explaining Psilon factory tech to one of our top engineers.
Mom fretted about the technology we're teaching them in return, but probably just because she still thinks our six-year-old ecology enhancements are all cutting edge and cool. I guess her boss thinks the Psilons are in a weak enough position that helping them with their ecology won't hurt us too badly later. We definitely need the industrial tech we learned from them, with our best computer scientists working on new advanced controls that would mean building hundreds more factories throughout Mrrshan space. Plus it'll help out a lot here on Whynil 6, where the construction crews have barely started breaking ground for our first factory.
Anyway, I'll probably get to meet a Psilon myself before too long. 80 BC isn't a lot of annual trade, but it's enough that we should see their merchants stopping by occasionally.
Decemberr 1st, 2396
I knew as soon as Mom came home today, dejected and exhausted. She wasn't even involved herself, but the whole diplomatic office has been watching the negotiations from afar, and TVC-15 was due to announce its final decision today.
We asked for peace, and the Meklar answer was that they would grant it only if we give them 850 BC - more than the total maximum value of all our annual trade agreements combined, and enough for them to produce two more of their attack cruisers - for a peace-in-name that they could break at any time. They didn't ask for trade or any kind of exchange; not even payments over the course of time to prop up their economy, already stronger than ours has ever been. They demanded the immediate payment - from some imaginary Mrrshan central government's nonexistant treasury - of resources it would still take months to raise if every Mrrshan world combined were working on nothing else. TVC-15's answer was merely no, as surely as if its demand had been that we give it the Imra nebula on a plate. In spite of all the death, in spite of our pilots' heroics, in spite of all our diplomatic efforts, we have the Meklar answer. There can be no peace.
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NEXT: Nemesis
