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

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