This is Planets Magazine Action News, coming to you live with a special report: The Capricorn War — Conflict in Echo Cluster!

(This report was pre-recorded for viewers outside the sector.)

Hello, I’m Jim Chancellite. The Robotic homeworld was attacked yesterday by an overwhelming Solar Federation strike force. This fleet, composed half of standard Federation models and half of Cyborg Biocide-class cube ships, appeared not long ago via Firecloud Chunnel on the border of Robot space. It then navigated unerringly toward the Robot homeworld, making no additional stops on the way, and destroyed the starbase and the entire population of the planet. No starship casualties were reported.

Speculation is rampant on the source of the Federation/Cyborg intel for this attack. Due to the nature of the anti-Cyborg coalition that has formed, it seems apparent that several of the nearby races were aware of the location of the homeworld, and that this intelligence was not perfectly secure; however, no direct accusations have been made. A spokesman for the coalition has given us the following statement:

“The recent defection of the Evil Empire from the anti-Cyborg coalition is no reason to suspect that he has given positional intelligence to the enemy. Such data is extrapolable from basic sources, and the Cyborg have been at war with, and therefore closely observing, Robot military traffic for quite some time.”*

He went on to express the regret of the leaders of the coalition governments for their inability to prevent this attack.

In related news, the Supreme Commander for the Cyborg has been quoted as saying,

“…[L]et me make clear that [The Cyborg] blames YOU (the Coalition)… for this sort of [sick] ‘diplomacy’ [that] created this madness. [The] Borg did fight since the beginning without help here. …[I] am the only one who took down both neighbours homeworlds with my OWN ships.”**

No comments of any sort could be obtained from Admiral Ciocco of the Federation by press time; however, we did manage to corner a few of the southern Federation troops on leave in a disreputable cantina on Planet Tijuana. In between rounds of mezcal, our reporter was told that they are part of a special task force dispatched to hunt for, in their words, “notorious bandit chieftain Pancho Julio and his robot gang”. We are informed that this Pancho Julio has been engaged in ambuscade by space-mine, and has littered the southern Imperium with tens of thousands of these explosive devices.

This has been a special report from Planets Mag Action News. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, already in progress.

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NOTES:

* This is a manufactured statement designed to distil the essence of several incredibly long conversations. Good quotes, alas, were hard to get for this article.
** Edits made in this quote are for clarity only. Any quote is, by necessity, taken out of context; here, we have corrected tenses and removed non-sequiturs in an attempt to gain the essence of the statement.