Chapter 6

Everyone, man, woman, child, or Klax began their assigned tasks. Deep space received the least effort. We just did not have long range or heavy lift capabilities for more than 100 or so defence platforms in near space. That is, assuming that no war would reach us for 50 years or longer...

We did not know exactly when the Klax here had been discovered, nor why now, they were to be exterminated. The Klax estimated that it would take an invasion fleet 75 to 125 of our years to reach the outer limits of our solar system. This made the 50 year estimate a rather safe goal for us. I said us, and I meant all of us. We had some good and bad news from the Klax. All the fighting on their home world had been done by those who were the models used to 'make/breed' the warriors now called 'Klax'. The bad news was, they had no idea who or what had replaced them, hopefully those fighter could not defeat any of us.

Only the Klax had any experience in deep space. Even then, they had not been awake nor had to fight ship to ship. All of us were used to a ground war. It was more than five years into our expanded training, research into lighter and stronger armour(not needed by the Klax) and improved weapons when something new came up...

One of our workers, a human girl child made a very important comment. To a Klax, she said: "I'm so tired. You Klax are like robots, work, work, work, no rest for you."

Her remarks were overheard and reported. Robots! They were small, light but could be quite powerful. Further as designs improved to make weapons technology more powerful, these new items could be deployed utilizing the same or similar transport vehicles. With some modifications, range was improved as well. They were small but powerful. They were cheap to make and when dormant would not be detected by the enemy. Our goal was to deploy 100,000 robots a year for the next 50 years with ever increasing size payloads.

It was further decided to assist making or breeding as many Klax as possible and to turn every human into Vampyre. It, by necessity, increased our strength 10 times or more. Another byproduct of this combined effort was when the modified processing to make more Klax was used by some ambitious team who applied this technique in the manufacture of weapons and then more robots. What had been a 100,000 units to be deployed a year was now to be a million or more each year, many now reaching deeper and deeper into space.

The Klax, when they had fought for their former masters had used formations utilizing only few reserves. We assumed this tactic would be continued. One bright research team came up with the idea of 'command and control' for our robot army. Special spheres were to be deployed, each having 100,000 robots with command protocols to send as few as 100 to as many as 1,000 of them on attack in waves, only minutes apart. In addition what was originally 100 space platforms with missiles and beam weapons had grown to become 100 per year equipped with plasma and 'Gamma Ray' generators. They emitted a force field and could activate nearly 10 million chemical missiles as a last line of space protection. Our thinking had changed a bit, we did not want any invaders to even land. We had come a long way. Twenty years into our new program the Klax had integrated well with the humans. One was viewing some old vids when a question we had never thought of presented itself. He asked, "What does it mean that the best defence is a strong offence?"