Star Force: Hamoriti (SF62) (8 page)

With the explosives pinned between the mauler’s and
the minion’s bodies, it detonated the pack while holding it tight to the enemy
flesh. The explosion ripped the mauler apart in a
poof
of green and tore through the underside of the minion, pushing it up a meter
into the air from the concussion wave and landing it back on its legs that
remained stiff for half a second as a waterfall of neon gray innards fell to
the ground beneath it just ahead of the collapsing corpse.

The Li’vorkrachnika had just found their own one hit
kill.

Slowly, with a mix of tactics and horrific sacrifice
the
Trinx’s
primitive ally and the vassals pushed
through the minion defenders and into the craters where their growing
infrastructure was located. Each of their buildings was also biological, so
when all of the defenders had been eliminated the vassals ordered the
Li’vorkrachnika to pull back as they moved in and started pulverizing the
buildings one at a time until there was nothing left but glowing, fleshy paste.

According to the Oracles there were certain structures
that could spawn new ones, while others could regenerate themselves so long as
key sections remained intact. With that being programmed into the vassals each
of the robotic warriors continually scanned the biological debris and targeted
those clusters, popping them like bonus points in a video game, until there
were none left to regrow from.

One crater after another the vassals visited and wiped
out, all the while the Li’vorkrachnika were spreading out searching for more
enemies and occasionally stumbling across a fixed weapons platform, whether it
be a freestanding turret or weapons mounted onto some of the structures. Those
they either took out with
det
packs or one of the
vassals would come around and eliminate the threat for them.

In the cases where no
det
packs were available or a vassal wasn’t nearby, the standard variants and
maulers would rush the defensive emplacements, nicking them to death with bits
of damage and often having to climb over their own dead to do it.

The Trinx controllers were surprised at the ferocity
of their new ally, for up until now they’d only witnessed their navy in action.
While a bit disturbing, it was also a welcome sight for how effectively they
took down their targets. Committed as they were to victory, the Trinx
appreciated having an ally that was equally so and unafraid to make necessary
sacrifices.

And when you were as primitive as the Li’vorkrachnika
were, you couldn’t make any gains without sacrifice. These bloodthirsty savages
reveled in it, with no thoughts aside from winning the battle. They could
always produce more troops to replace those that were lost, and given the
minions vulnerability to physical weapons the Li’vorkrachnika were actually
proving to be useful on their own merits even without vassal support.

That was good, for the Trinx could not stop the
Hamoriti from spreading its minions underground on its own. They didn’t have
nearly enough vassals for that, but they did have enough to augment their
ally’s forces in the areas where the Hamoriti was not located, even if they couldn’t
prevent the beast from seeding more directly around it.

Naval bombardment was highly preferred to this type of
subsurface ground warfare, but with the Li’vorkrachnika willing to do whatever
was required of them it looked like there might still be a way to halt the
Hamoriti’s advance…though the cost involved was increasing rapidly.

8

May 21, 2729

Kilma
System
(Hamoriti location)

Nesmi

Situated high above the planet were six remote probes
in orbit, each positioned so as to give the Chamra sight on the entirety of the
surface simultaneously. The probes were passive sensors, very detailed but
designed to operate in secrecy and equipped with camouflage systems to keep
their existence from the Hamoriti, though whether or not the measures would be
functional against the monster was anyone’s guess.

A Trinx and Sety fleet were both situated in various
orbits around the planet, most up high and well outside what they knew the
Hamoriti’s range to be, but the cyborgs were not so reckless. After several
years of ‘containment’ on the part of the Trinx and their Li’vorkrachnika
allies the cyborgs had decided to risk sending a single ship into the system to
allow them to monitor events as they took place. That ship now sat near the
system’s star, getting direct feeds from the probes so it wouldn’t have to risk
sitting in orbit.

Thus far the Hamoriti had spent most of its time below
ground, which had prompted the Trinx and Sety to move their fleets in closer.
So far as the cyborgs could tell, the Sety hadn’t fired a single shot since
they arrived. Their small fleet simply sat, watched, and waited for an
opportunity to strike the minions when they weren’t protected by the Hamoriti
itself. So far that hadn’t occurred, for all of the minions currently on the
planet were subsurface and the Sety weren’t about to set foot on the planet,
knowing how the Hamoriti could move around at will.

The Trinx were down there, with their vassals at
least, and were aiding the Li’vorkrachnika as they shipped in millions of
troops from other star systems to use as disposable weapons to hunt down and
destroy the minions. The cyborgs had to admit that thus far the strategy was
working, but there were at present seven different engagements taking place
beneath the planet’s surface as the Hamoriti kept spawning minions in new
locations. The strike teams had found some of them rather late, with them having
grown to significant numbers, but they’d managed to successfully beat them down
each time to date.

How long that could last no one knew, but the Trinx
were adamant that they had to fight in the here and now before things had a
chance to escalate further. The cyborgs didn’t disagree, they just saw no
endgame, and as such weren’t going to throw away their people’s lives
so
casually as the Trinx were.

Their ally’s sacrifices paled in comparison to what
the Li’vorkrachnika were doing. The primitive barbarians deserved some measure
of respect for the way they accomplished what should not have been possible
even with the minor tech upgrades the Trinx had given them. They did not fight
like most civilizations would, and in this rare case it seemed that they were
more effective for it. Every infantry unit they sent down beneath ground was
destroyed, but they kept sending them, hurting the enemy and whittling them
down until they finally made the kill. And given the size of their empire and
their reputed growth rates, they could keep supplying these suicide armies
indefinitely.

There had been a large squabble between the Trinx and
the other members of The Nine over their choice of allies and the means they
were employing, as well as the price being paid to garner their aid. The Sety
especially were adamant that they not give the Li’vorkrachnika tech upgrades,
seeing that given the size to which the primitive race had already grown, even
small additions could have a snowball effect and come back to hurt them later
on. Technically the Nexus was already at war with the Li’vorkrachnika, though
while they were a large threat in number they were still a minor one as far as
power was concerned.

But if the Trinx gave them even a piece of their own
technological capability they’d become an enemy that the Nexus would be hard
pressed to deal with even if it turned its full attention toward them.

The success of the Li’vorkrachnika in helping the
Trinx keep the Hamoriti from spreading its minions had made several members of
The Nine hesitant to complain further, but the Sety were adamant that they
could not jeopardize the future in exchange for this stalemate. Technological
superiority was not something that came easily, and the weapon upgrades the
Trinx had given them were the equivalent of more than a millennium of research.

That was small for a race that had been around in
prominence for over a million years, and in truth many races jumped the
learning curve by acquiring tech from others, either through diplomacy, trade,
or conquest, but the way the Li’vorkrachnika operated was so dangerously
aggressive that arming them was a mistake that the Sety did not want to make,
though the Trinx were beyond their control and would not alter their course of
action.

The cyborg ship had been sent to the Hamoriti location
to monitor exactly what was occurring, rather than relying on either Sety or
Trinx reports. It was breaking with their ‘stay clear of the Hamoriti’
protocols, but by using the probes it was deemed an acceptable risk, for even
if they were destroyed the ship itself would be outside the psionic range of
the beast…though exactly what the safe distance was no one knew for certain.

Tracking the Hamoriti subsurface was difficult, even
from low orbit, for scanning through solid rock was nearly impossible. The Sety
and Trinx were both bombarding the planet with active sensors of a type that
the probes could pick up the reflections from, hence they were also able to get
a point position on the beast, though nothing more. That was due to the
composition of the Hamoriti and it being somewhat
more dense
than the rock itself, for the energy beams being used were so nonreactive to
matter they could only pick up huge variations.

Ships in orbit were invisible to them, for they didn’t
produce a reflection unless they had shields up. The inner core of the planet
also gave back a small variation, due to the increasing density of the molten
material under such heavy pressure, but the Hamoriti’s bulk was so highly
concentrated with corovon that it offered enough of a ‘ping’ on the sensors for
the cyborgs to see where it was at all times.

Seeing what it was doing, however, was beyond them
unless it came up into the crust and other more detailed sensors came into
workable range.

It was those that had been failing the Trinx as of
late, for the more rock between them and the target the less effective they
were. Either the Hamoriti knew this or it was just getting lucky, for the more
recent minion spawn points were deep enough to go unnoticed until they branched
out through tunnels they dug themselves, heading closer to the surface. Events
like this suggested that the
Trinx’s
hold on the
Hamoriti’s progress was coming to an end sooner or later, but they stubbornly
kept fighting the minions back with the never ending supply of Li’vorkrachnika
available to them and, for the moment at least, seemed to be proving the Chamra
and the rest of The Nine wrong.

Monitoring the activity on and in the planet was
routine and boring, for the most part, but when the Hamoriti’s location began
to drift towards the surface again the cyborg crew began taking notice, as did
the Sety and Trinx fleets, for once it came within a few miles of the
atmosphere they began moving out of planetary orbit. The Sety fleet retreated
to another planet, with the bulk of the Trinx going with them and leaving only
a small response task force behind.

The Li’vorkrachnika ships headed out too, pacing the
main Trinx fleet that they were seemingly glued to, for they kept well away
from the Sety at all times. The two races hadn’t fought before, but the
Li’vorkrachnika knew the Sety were part of the Nexus and chose to give them
plenty of space.

On the surface there wasn’t much left of what had once
been a Li’vorkrachnika world. A few colonies had been partially rebuilt to
serve as firebases for the incoming armies to cycle through as they headed
below ground, but what had originally been on the surface had been eventually
destroyed by the Hamoriti in one form or another, with the beast literally
leaving its footprints everywhere across the planet.

When it finally reached the surface it broke through
like a volcano erupting, ramming the rock out of the way and bringing a magma
plume out behind it that shot out like a geyser and rained down on the surrounding
area. In time that would cool and harden over, but the Hamoriti didn’t stick
around for that to happen, rather, it headed straight for orbit.

That sent alarms off in all four races’ ships and they
scrambled to reposition, tracking its trajectory and seeing that it was once
against headed for the star. The cyborg ship quickly made a microjump out to
one of the other planets, not wanting to be anywhere near low stellar orbit
when it arrived. The ship dropped a probe in its wake, then sat back and
watched from afar as the Hamoriti braked against the star and began to drift
down into a low orbit, traveling around to what jumpline no one knew.

The fleets would have to reposition there again, and
the cyborg ship would go with them, but there were still minions here that had
to be eradicated, meaning that the Hamoriti had just won its first victory in
that it was making The Nine fight in two locations simultaneously…or at least
it would when it arrived at its next system.

Dropping into an extremely low orbit, the Hamoriti
angled down near to the highly volatile stellar ‘atmosphere’ and the sensor
readings began to diminish. A few moments later they lost all contact with the
Hamoriti.

It hadn’t jumped out, that much the cyborgs knew and
they reviewed recent telemetry to make sure. They conferred with the Trinx, who
had sent ships in to the star behind the Hamoriti, and they too had lost
contact with it, stating that the beast had gone too far down for them to be
able to track, into the outermost layer of the star itself.

The first thought anyone had was that the Hamoriti was
trying to hide its jumpline, circling around to a different position where it
could sneak out unnoticed, so the Trinx deployed ships all around the star in a
detection grid. They waited, but nothing came out, which had them wondering if
it had somehow beaten them around to the backside and jumped away unnoticed,
which would be a disaster. Without knowing where it had gone they couldn’t get
to the minions in time to knock them down before they multiplied to dangerous
levels.

The immediate talk was to get the rest of The Nine in
the surrounding systems to start scouting and find it as quickly as possible,
but after several hours of research on the star, for no one knew if the
Hamoriti had left for sure or not, the cyborgs picked up on a tiny anomaly that
they shared with the other two races.

There was a minor deviation in the stellar output, so
small to easily go unnoticed, but with the right computerized screening it
became reliably detectable, not so much in a solid position trace but a general
area where there was less stellar output than there should be by a fraction of
a percent. That would have been negligible, but the reduction didn’t fluctuate.

Their only conclusion could be that the Hamoriti had
gone into the star itself and was creating a dead spot beneath the surface that
‘dimmed’ the surrounding area slightly.

The Sety immediately shot that theory down, for the
Oracles had never said anything about the Hamoriti being able to travel inside
stars. Coring into a planet was one thing, but burrowing into a star was quite
another. It was certainly debatable whether or not a Hamoriti could survive it,
or how long it could survive in there, but none of the others had ever done so
as far as the Ancient records were concerned, so the Sety believed that it was
either hiding in the atmosphere where they couldn’t see or it had indeed
skirted surveillance and jumped out of the system.

The Trinx were unsure either way and suggested sending
the scout order/request out anyway, citing that there was no time to figure out
what had happened and that they had to pursue every possibility.

So the order went out, transmitted via interstellar
comms
that all three races had built into them. Those
signals would then be picked up in nearby systems and retransmitted to others
outside broadcast range, with each ship acting as a relay in regions where
there was no such existing infrastructure.

Six days went by, with the cyborg ship returning to
stellar orbit and monitoring the star’s output more closely, trying to
determine what their ghost anomaly truly was. If the Hamoriti had made a jump,
it might not even have reached its destination system yet, let alone have been
found and reported. The
comm
signals still had a
significant delay, so it could be weeks before it was found again under the
best of circumstances.

But if it had months of anonymity to work with, the
containment the Trinx had worked so hard to maintain would be all but impossible
to regain. Then again, if the Li’vorkrachnika were willing to up their contribution
the cyborgs weren’t going to write off the possibility completely. The more
minions there were the greater their defensive ability became through
overlapping cover, but it was still possible that, with enough numbers, they
could be overwhelmed.

The math wasn’t good when you let the
minions
progress into phase 3, which saw the growth of much
larger units. If it got that far the Li’vorkrachnika would be almost useless as
far as their infantry was concerned, and only a series of major upgrades to
their technology would bring them back into the fold, for their ability to
fight came from being able to damage the enemy with each suicide wave. Reduce
that damage down to a mere scratch and the primitives became virtually useless.