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

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