“As far as we can tell, the Japanese invasion was fast running out of steam. They had a brief surge in combat units a couple of weeks ago, followed by a lot more civilian militia, and they are still getting lots of people through their gate, but they’re mostly women and children over the last couple of days. Surprisingly, the Japs still weren’t using women in combat, at least not in any large numbers. The government was still concerned about the Indos up north choosing to invade while we were occupied fighting the Japs, and we’re keeping a large part of the regular military in the north for that reason. I don’t agree with that policy, but who listens to the troops on the ground anyway.”

“Anyway, the Japanese advances have been slowed but not entirely stopped as both sides are running short of munitions. The lasers of the Japanese cyborgs and the armored vehicles give them a combat edge as they don’t require ammunition, so as long as they remain within the slowly increasing broadcast power area. Last week they deployed a new type of tank that carries a humongous powered mortar. It’s only good within their broadcast power range but packs a wallop and can fire very accurately.”

She moved over to the mat with a stick and pointed at a red irregular line inset within the Japanese occupied area.

“That’s the broadcast power limit at the moment. We think they’re building a new repeater station in this area here and another one there, but they’re being very careful so as to not let us spot them and then blow them up. Things are becoming increasingly difficult for the us as our ammunition supplies are in short supply. We are ramping up production, but the demand is still greater than the supply at the moment. The Nuzeelanders are sending us ammunition and troops, but so far, only the ammunition has arrived and that in small amounts. Attempts to take out the power relay towers were a continuous activity, but to be honest, we are struggling to achieve significant results as we’ve used up a good deal of our combat aircraft in earlier attacks, and the production rate of new aircraft has yet to gear up. We had hoped drones would work, but their damned lasers are too effective.”

“We’ve given up trying to sneak saboteurs past their mentalists at the moment, thank goodness. It very much depended on whether their mentalists in the area were wide-awake, and after the first raid, they’ve generally had at least one mentalist awake and looking all along the front. They’ve brought down two of the last trained mentalists from up north who both have very good mental shields, and they’re being assigned to two special forces units that were going to use their magician’s mental shield to hide them from the Japanese mentalists, which will hopefully allow them to sneak into their rear areas. We have so little information on what went on behind the lines apart from the occasional aerial photo that any information would be welcome.”