Star Force: Hamoriti (SF62) (6 page)

“
I
am here
,” a strangely soft voice said, with the more rigid translation
occurring half a second delayed in
Nesfa’s
ear. A
thicker and slightly taller version of their race moved out from the crowd
towards him and the vassals, but brought no escorts with it, so long as you
didn’t count the thousands in the bay.

“
Have
you reviewed the information I gave you?
”

“
Not
completely. Your arrival was quicker than we anticipated. We have seen enough,
however, to augment our own data on the creature. We recognize the threat it
poses and our inability to counter it alone. For this purpose we are open to
negotiation
.”

“
What
I require of you is simple. In order to keep the Hamoriti from spreading its
minions we must strike at the seeds as soon as they are produced. Such a task
is a suicide mission that my people are currently undertaking, but without
assistance we cannot keep up the necessary pace indefinitely. Our ships and
population will expire in time, then the Hamoriti will be free to begin
reclaiming the region around it, and in time the galaxy
.”

“
Your
race
,” Nesfa said pointedly, “
while
technologically inferior, operates on a turnover rate of both personnel and
ships that can keep the Hamoriti’s minions suppressed indefinitely
.
We will search for a way to destroy the
creature, if such a thing is possible, but I require you to make strikes
against its minions continuously, no matter the resources required, for all of
time if necessary. The Hamoriti cannot be allowed to gain a foothold, no matter
what the cost
.”

“
Your
information indicates that these ‘minions’ are too advanced for our technology
to harm in any appreciable way. How do you suggest that we kill them?
”

“
With
numbers and some help from us. We will be producing weapon patches that we will
apply to the hulls of some of your ships to augment your firepower. These ships
will most certainly be lost in the attacks, and we cannot produce enough
patches for all of your vessels, but it will be enough to get the job done.
”

“
And
in exchange for our never ending sacrifice you will gift us with what?
”

“
Technology
upgrades. Small ones over the course of time, but beginning with a replacement
for your plasma weapons. It is known as a Vichsam, and while primitive by our
standards it will offer greater range and damage compared to your current
plasma weapons while operating off of the same power requirements.
”

“
Will
you also be producing these for us, or instructing us how to build them for
ourselves
.”

“
All
our resources will be going towards containing the Hamoriti. We will give you
the knowledge necessary to construct the technology yourself
.”

“
We
will need a demonstration of the weapon and the ability to analyze its
functionality in order to determine the level of upgrade it offers us. We will
also need a fixed timetable for future payments of technology. If we are to
continuously engage this creature we will require continuous payment
.”

“
In
principle we are in agreement
,” Nesfa said, looking into the pure black
eyes of the reptile that stood erect with its tail curled around its thick
right leg.

“
Furthermore,
if we can come to terms on payment, we will also require security guarantees
for the systems we devote to building the forces you require. We have many
enemies, and they must not be allowed to strike at these worlds and disrupt the
flow, for we may or may not be able to compensate from other locations. We will
draw what is necessary for the time being, but new worlds will have to be
acquired and constructed by us under your protection…and that protection must
never expire
.”

“
If
such systems are local, that is an acceptable addition
.”

“
How
soon would these strikes be instigated?
”

“
We
can have the first of the weapons patches available within 4 months, and we
will modify your ships on site when they arrive. Do note that until your
vessels begin carrying Vichsam more will be required to neutralize the minion
seeds utilizing plasma alone
.”

“
What
numbers do you estimate will be needed?
”

“
That
depends on the Hamoriti. Right now we estimate no less than 200 of your
warships per day and the addition of ground troops if needed.
”

“
We
can draw that number from our existing fleets for a time, but in order to
provide a steady flow of ships we will need additional raw materials in order
to construct the designated supply worlds quickly enough
.”

“
I
can offer assistance in acquiring materials from those sites, but not from
Trinx stockpiles
.”

“
We
are in principle agreement then, but must demand one additional caveat before
we begin negotiating payment terms. Your guarantee not to interfere in our
expansion. We will respect your worlds, but will be unchained from assaulting
any others, regardless of your associations with them
.”

Nesfa smiled ironically. “
If you try to assault any of our associates,
I wish you luck. You will suffer a quick death.
”

“
But
you must agree not to interfere even if we should try
.”

“
Agreed.
The threat of the Hamoriti trumps all other concerns. Proceed as you like so
long as you hold to the agreement without fail. Even a slight pause will allow the
minion seeds to gain a foothold, and that cannot be allowed to happen
.”

“
We
will supply all that are necessary without fail, so long as you continue to
deliver the technology upgrades as promised.
”

“
Let
us begin working through that timetable then
,” Nesfa said, pulling out a
palm-sized holographic generator and setting it on the floor where it created a
virtual workstation between the two of them. The Trinx tapped on one of the
solid holograms, bringing up a timeline matrix that they would begin to fill
in. He wasn’t going to give them any advanced tech, but there was plenty of
valuable improvements he could offer short of that. How much the
Li’vorkrachnika would demand was a question mark, but he intended to broker a
limited deal and not let them gouge tech out of him.

Containing the Hamoriti was worth
any amount, but he wasn’t a reckless negotiator and would haggle until they
reached an amicable agreement no matter how long it took. His fleets would buy
them enough time for that, now that they had a viable plan for which to
sacrifice and stall for.

6

March 18, 2724

Haphchap System
(Hamoriti location)

Unnamed planet

The Sety fleet was mostly stationed in middle orbit
around the star, with a handful of ships scattered elsewhere within the system
for observational reasons, but none anywhere near the surface of the planet.
The closest was in a high elliptical orbit so it could stay in position over
the Hamoriti and observe the continuing Trinx suicide runs in to eliminate the
minion seeds within a few hours of their spawning. Each time they did nearly
all their ships were lost, and the Sety were not about to contribute to such
sacrifice when all it did was buy them a few more days.

The Hamoriti didn’t seem to care about the situation
and merely continued with its seed laying attempts, further trashing the
surface with its
weaponized
tsunamis each time the
Trinx ships came down low enough to shoot the minions. They were waiting,
however, until the Hamoriti moved off from those it dropped beneath its mass,
for they couldn’t be targeted well from orbit. Some side shots were possible,
but knowing how many ships would be lost the Trinx were not making any attacks
that they weren’t fairly sure they could pull off in one strike.

The Hamoriti didn’t stay parked over a single position
to shield them. Instead it kept moving, sinking into the surface periodically
to feed on the rock beneath. The surface soil had been stripped down with multiple
tsunamis, with hillsides having been shaved off and bare rock exposed, for each
time one of the massive blasts leapt out from the creature a cascade of damage
would touch everything around the Hamoriti, but for the ground at least it
appeared to be spread out whereas anything in the atmosphere was literally
vaporized on contact.

On closer inspection of the surveillance data the Sety
were gathering from afar, it seemed the tsunamis were hemispherical rather than
truly
omni
-directional. None the less, the sheer
amount of power the Hamoriti had to be generating to affect an area with a
radius in excess of 1000 miles was beyond fathoming. What would occur on one of
the Nexus worlds from such a blast would be nothing short of utter devastation,
even if surface structures ate up and spread out the damage as the topography
here appeared to be doing.

There had to be a limit to what the Hamoriti was
capable of emitting, and while the original 7’s limitations had been explored
and documented the Oracles had no data on this one. While the Trinx were wrong
in their approach, they had been correct about the need to gather
intel
, so as long as they were making their strategically
pointless suicide runs there might as well be someone here to document it.

The Trinx fleet, hundreds of thousands strong, sat in
orbit around a nearby planet and continually fed ships over to the danger zone
as needed, but they didn’t leave them parked nearby just in case the Hamoriti
took flight. It might be slow in terms of starship standards, but two of the
other Hamoriti had pinpoint weapons that were able to reach much farther than
the tsunami. It wasn’t known yet if this one did or not, for its skin/hull
defied inspection, but there was no point in risking the majority of the fleet
by keeping them so close.

The Sety were here to take the opportunity to strike at
the minions if the Hamoriti left the planet, or to strike at the minions if
they tried to leave the planet. So far they hadn’t been allowed to develop even
close to that level, but if/when the Trinx finally failed to prevent their
growth the Sety were going to diminish their numbers as much as they could
short of sacrificing themselves. They needed to preserve their warfleet, small
as it was here, and had been ordered only to engage when they had the
advantage.

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 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 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.