Free Star Force: Hamoriti (SF62) by Aer-ki Jyr

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 automatically 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