by Aer-ki Jyr
And to stay the hell away from the Hamoriti no matter what the circumstances.
The other members of The Nine were gathering their fleets in the neighboring systems, not risking to bring them directly here and relying on the Sety to stay in contact with them. If there was a move by the Hamoriti or the minions they would respond to it, hopefully heading off any minion seed ships and getting to the destination systems ahead of them. If the Hamoriti moved, then they could come in to the present system and see what damage they could do to the minions here
But without the Sety or Trinx insystem there was no way for them to know what was occurring, for they were so twitchy about being near the beast that they wouldn’t even send a ship to drop a probe in the area.
Each race of The Nine was comprised of widely varying civilizations, but all were presently developing plans for evacuating their populations and heading off far into the galaxy, intent to stay ahead of the Hamoriti spread rather than to stay and watch their people get annihilated. That was why they were willing to fight the minion spread, to buy time for evacuation ships to be built and scouts to be sent out searching for uninhabited worlds to use as waypoints. Every year they could delay the Hamoriti, the greater the chance of preserving their populations, but sacrificing their ships as the Trinx were doing was counterproductive.
The Sety were not expecting any other fleets to arrive, so when hundreds of jumpships began braking into the system they did not know what was going on. As soon as they identified them as Li’vorkrachnika they immediately began to deploy into strike groups to go after them and kill the meddlesome idiots who’d released the Hamoriti in the first place.
Before the Sety warships, each shaped like a globe with root-like tendrils growing out from it by the dozens, could get into firing range the handful of Trinx vessels waiting near the star signaled them to fall back, heading into the enemy fleet themselves and pacing alongside them as escorts. The Sety fleet commander didn’t know what was going on, then an explanation came from the Trinx indicating that they had invited them here to help fight the Hamoriti.
A short but fiery exchange occurred between both fleet commanders, for the Li’vorkrachnika were an enemy of the Nexus and the Trinx themselves had wiped out what was left of their fleet that had awakened the Hamoriti. Furthermore the Trinx hadn’t informed The Nine of this plan of theirs, but the Sety eventually decided to just sit back and watch, as they’d been sent to do, while sending a courier ship out to get to a system within range of one of the Nexus receivers so it could transmit the news back to Qitor.
With the Sety successfully backed off, the Trinx ships escorted the fleet of jumpships to the nearby planet where their own fleet waited, then the Li’vorkrachnika began undocking their cruisers and spamming orbit with them. The jumpships then left, heading back to wherever they’d come from to pick up more cruisers and ferry them here. Those that they left behind numbered in excess of 10,000, but were all equipped with their primitive plasma weapons as no upgrade patches were available yet.
That didn’t matter, for the minion seeds had to be destroyed. The Li’vorkrachnika fleet commander conferred with the Trinx and was remarkably agreeable in terms of letting them make strategy. He knew his ships were going to be sacrificed, and seemed only to care about them being able to accomplish the task as efficiently as possible. There was no concern for his crews evident in their conversations, only a focus on accomplishing the mission…which was something the Trinx responded to well.
The first attack the Li’vorkrachnika were involved in came two days later, with the Trinx continuing to carry the burden until then. At first there was only a single Li’vorkrachnika cruiser sent down to the planet, and it was allowed to enter the atmosphere and move about. No tsunami followed, so it crept closer and closer, trying to prompt a reaction, but none came. Eventually it came to one of the minion seeds that the Hamoriti had moved on from and came under fire from the seed itself, getting hit and destroyed within 30 seconds, but not before landing some plasma blasts and one well aimed streamer onto the target.
It damaged the growing minion structure, lightly, but it was enough for the fleet commanders to analyze to determine how many ships would be needed.
Next they sent in 8 cruisers, again not drawing a tsunami from the Hamoriti that was some 200 miles off. They attacked the seed and badly damaged it before 4 of the ships were destroyed, then inexplicable the other four turned and began firing on each other. It took a while for the Li’vorkrachnika ships to kill themselves, for the minion seed stopped firing as they did so, returning its internal energy to healing and growth as the remaining enemy ships no longer were shooting at it.
That put this Hamoriti’s psionic control range at 200 miles minimum. Another data point that the Trinx hadn’t been able to collect. Committed to the mission as they were, they weren’t going to send their own ships and men to their deaths in such an experiment. They would fight and die and learn from the defeat, but the Trinx weren’t going to meekly walk up to the Hamoriti so they could be killed. However, they didn’t care what happened to the Li’vorkrachnika, and oddly neither did they, so the Trinx began using their allies in a lot more extreme experiments than they’d previously considered.
A small Trinx fleet was sent in to clean up, hitting the damaged minion seed along with three others the Hamoriti had dropped. When they started firing on them from orbit with their brilliant green energy beams the tsunami followed, knocking those beams out as the ships were disabled by the precursor wave, then the shieldless ships were torn apart in the blast that followed.
Once the atmospheric bubble resettled onto the planet, an analysis of the surface indicated that the minion seeds had been destroyed, perhaps not entirely by the Trinx, but whatever had been left undamaged had probably been incinerated by the tsunami itself. The minions were resistant to it, in a way that the Ancients had never fully understood, but they were not completely immune.
With this minion seed set destroyed, the Trinx and Li’vorkrachnika returned to planning their next test.
A month later, when the upgrade patches gave the Li’vorkrachnika ships a variety of combat options, including orbital strike range, they began almost exclusively to carry the burden of destroying the minion seeds while the Trinx kept their fleet nearby in reserve, with their commander coordinating every attack and the Li’vorkrachnika complying without complaint. On more than one occasion they actually suggested additional caveats, finding ways to probe the minions and the Hamoriti that even the Trinx had not thought of, proving their reputation for adaptability was not over exaggerated.
Eventually a few small, prototype warship vassals arrived and one was sent in as a test. When inserted individually they drew no tsunami, for it seemed the Hamoriti didn’t want the energy expenditure or it felt the minion seeds could defend themselves. That wasn’t the case, for the first one the vassal encountered it destroyed. When it traveled to the next the Hamoriti released the equivalent of biological drones that pursued it and eventually took it down, preserving the other minion seeds that the Li’vorkrachnika were then sent in to destroy.
A tsunami hit and destroyed them, prompting a second wave to clean up what was left, who were likewise destroyed, resetting the doomsday clock to 0:00 with the Hamoriti continuing its trek across the planet and dropping more minion seeds as it went.
The vassal test hadn’t been to see if it could destroy the minion seeds, but rather if the Hamoriti had a way in which to disable it. There were no crew onboard that it could affect psionically, and even though communications with the vassal were severed during the combat, ostensibly by some type of jamming field the Hamoriti threw up, the internal programming followed procedure and fought how it had been taught to, meaning that the Trinx now had a way to get up close to the Hamoriti if need be, whereas all crewed ships that came anywhere close to it ran the risk of becoming unwilling thralls.
And if they managed to get up real close to it, the freezing aura would disable them automa
tically without any directed effort on the part of the Hamoriti. The vassals being immune to both gave the Trinx a valuable option, for what they weren’t sure just yet, but if they were ever to discover a way to attack the beast itself, then getting within touching range could very well be the delivery mechanism required.
The Ancients had accomplished similar attacks, all of which ultimately failed. They’d even detonated huge explosives beneath the creatures, leaving broken continents and intact Hamoriti. However they managed it, the beasts were able to absorb energy, with some analysis from the Oracles suggesting that they even fed upon it, which was why later in the war the Ancients didn’t even bother firing on the Hamoriti and focused all of their efforts on the minions until they were wiped out, then they moved to sedate their targets rather than try to futilely damage them again.
More days passed, with most seeing at least one sacrificial attack by the Li’vorkrachnika as the Trinx fleet strength began to increase again, both in terms of manned ships and a growing fleet of vassals with progressively larger ships as the prototypes were scrutinized and the next phase of development continued. Rather than building a handful of ships to test the Trinx were building hundreds of them before moving on to newer designs, getting both scientific and tactical usefulness out of them.
The Hamoriti continued its seed laying without pause, leaving more than a third of the planet dotted with craters before it finally had enough. A year and a half after it first awoke and after yet another successful minion destruction on part of the Li’vorkrachnika, the Hamoriti sank down onto its huge legs, pulling them into its body and locking them in place while tucking its neck and head down into the nook next to the front pair, forming a rough egg-like shape. Using its biologically created anti-grav it rose up off the surface and very slowly headed out of the atmosphere.
Both the Sety and the Trinx fleets immediately began to redeploy, with the Li’vorkrachnika waiting for orders before they did so as well. All three fleets moved aside and kept well clear of the now living starship as it came up into orbit and transitioned around the planet to the stellar jumpline, where it accelerated in a slow lurch up to minimal microjump speeds and headed for the star.
At first they’d thought it was transitioning to one of the other planets in the system, but once it took off on the stellar jumpline the Sety cleared out of the star’s lowest orbits, wanting to be nowhere near the thing for fear of it unleashing some unknown weapon against them. They did drop a few probes in their wake and observed closely as the Hamoriti arrived at the star, then moved around it until it came to the jumpline that it wanted.
With a not so subtle lurch the creature executed an interstellar jump, heading out of the system at a speed far less than either the Sety or the Trinx were capable of, but still faster than the primitive Li’vorkrachnika ships.
With it passing out of monitoring range the Sety calculated its path and speed, then transmitted that information to the fleets of The Nine waiting in nearby star systems, giving them a heads up as to where it was going and where they should not be five days from now.
7
December 9, 2725
Kilma System (lizard territory)
Nesmi
A trio of maulers were packed into a kirby full of standard variants lizards, all of whom were equipped with the new vichsam rifles, but they were unarmed, so to speak. They were pure brawlers, with two long blades extending from their arms that were presently pulled back inside bone sheaths. In fact, the standard variants in the kirby with them were specifically here to escort the maulers and get them to their target, for the fleshy minions the Hamoriti produced responded well to the blades.
The kirby was flying along with 129 others across the war torn landscape of the lizard planet, with virtually every colony in the southern hemisphere having been at least damaged. Several had been obliterated completely in the first days after the Hamoriti had arrived and released its enormous cascading weapon, destroying everything within radius. Fortunately it had only detonated three such attacks before burrowing underground and digging deep into the core of the planet.
That had given the lizards and the Trinx some time without having to deal with minions, but as they monitored the movement of the creature in the molten core, or rather the Trinx did, they saw it eventually come back up into the crust in another location. There it began spawning minions below ground and out of range of the orbital bombardment that had been picking them off with regularity for the past 2 years.
Immediately the Trinx had responded by burrowing holes down into the crust at nearby locations. They lost a handful of ships initially when the Hamoriti reached out from below and took control of them, but realizing their mistake they sent vassal warships in to destroy their own kin, then had those ships continue with the coring efforts. Their smaller size meant less weaponry, which delayed the process considerably giving the Hamoriti’s minions time to grow and spread below ground as it moved around carving out tunnels and hollows in the bedrock.
Once they had access points the Trinx send down an army of vassals, ferried by some hastily modified cargo ships to remove the need for living pilots. Programming both the ships and the vassals as best they could, the Trinx sent them down to the holes in the crust they’d bored and waited. The jamming field from the Hamoriti crept up again, keeping the Trinx blind as to what was happening as the robotic soldiers deployed into the underground caverns to hunt down and destroy the minions hand to hand.
Up until recently no one had known how effective they had been, but then the Hamoriti had dropped its jamming as it decided to move down through the core and over to the opposite side of the planet where it again began burrowing into the crust. That put it outside the mental control range of the first set of subsurface minions that were still engaging the few vassals that remained, prompting the Trinx to order the lizard troops from the planet down into the tunnels to fight hand to hand along with another batch of vassals they sent down to augment their limited fighting capability.
As with every superior opponent, the lizard way to beating them was to spam them with numbers and this reinforcement group was no exception. They were headed to a small minion facility situated below ground, and even though it wasn’t a seed structure it was a factory that was growing something of importance and had to be destroyed. All the maulers knew was that there were enemy troops there that they had to engage, and they were eager to get their blades into the enemy flesh.
When the kirby eventually landed, the bay door opened up on the starboard side and the standard variants poured out into the nearly dark cavern. Daylight was not visible, for they had flown down into the crust and were well away from the coring point now. The only light available came from the kirbies and the standard bearers, which were standard variant lizards carrying light poles. That gave the others just enough to see by, in addition to the bright pink vichsam flares.
Those were visible ahead through a sea of bodies, with the trio of maulers hopping out of the kirby a few seconds before it lifted off and left the small landing area as more of the lizard transports came down and delivered additional troops in a never ending flow that would sooner or later overwhelm the minions. How much blood it would require didn’t matter, they would get the job done so long as each of them did at least a little bit of damage to the enemy.
And with their forearm blades the maulers would be doing more than a little.
The trio held together, knowing they had a better chance of taking down one of the minion soldiers in concert than solo, and followed the standard variants as they fought their way forward, blocking return fire with their bodies. That enemy weaponsfire couldn’t be seen, for it didn’t produce any light. How the other lizards were being killed the maulers didn’t know, but all they could see was the pink of the vichsam and the yellow of the light rods marking the progression of various groups forward down the nearly half mile-wide tunnel that the Hamoriti had previously carved out.
That left an enormous about of ‘l
and’ area, with varied terrain rather than a smooth cut, for it seemed the beast had melted its way through the rock and its massive footprints had made craters in the molten material before it finished solidifying. Several of those craters were where the minion structures were located, while others had been carved into the sidewalls by the minions themselves.
These three maulers and the others the kirbies were unloading were headed for one of the wall niches. They were almost there by the time they reached the front lines, with the last two standard variants proceeding them being dropped by high pierced ‘zips’ that ripped right through their armored vests and detonated inside them, blowing the two bipeds apart into a fleshy shrapnel spray.
The maulers didn’t hesitate, sprinting forward and looking for an enemy to kill. They didn’t have to go far, for there were several just ahead behind a carpet of lizard bodies. The headless, four-legged walkers were three times taller than the maulers and appeared to be living tanks, each of which had an orifice between their front legs that was shooting out something that couldn’t be seen well in the dark, but everywhere one hit a lizard would blow apart.
The minions were bleeding, that much was easy to see because the blood was bioluminescent. Each time one of the little pink energy packets hit the flesh of the creatures it would only do a pinprick of damage, but the trickle of blood showing put a glowing target on the enemy for the lizards to shoot at.
Or in the case of the maulers, to lunge for.
Already there were a few visible hacking away at two of the minions, so this trio ran over the bodies of their fellow lizards and jumped onto the legs of the closest one, extending their forearm blades in midair and sinking them into the enemy on contact. They slid in surprisingly well, but seemed to make no noticeable change to the minion’s movements, as if while they were doing damage it was inconsequential.