Star Force: Hamoriti (SF62) Read online

The galaxy had been spared a fateful blow, and The Nine intended to protect the work of the Ancients indefinitely, no matter what the future costs, for they would be nil if the creature was ever to wake again.

  2

  May 3, 2723

  Haphchap System (lizard territory)

  Unnamed planet

  Four Li’vorkrachnika rushed down one of their angled tunnels, descending lower into the bedrock as the three standard variants escorted a larger ‘tech’ that had approximately the same body type but was reserved for dealing with scientific matters. It had been grown along with a few others when the highly dense corovon deposit that they’d located deep underground had been found to be housed within an artificial construct of unknown origin.

  The tech variants had been analyzing it and given the go ahead to begin cannibalizing a section of the outer hull, for while it wasn’t the source of the majority of the corovon readings it still held an unusually high concentration of the valuable element. As it was, there were three different breaches in the hull that were being expanded upon as an army of lizards were surveying the interior, learning and collecting whatever bits of technology they could get their hands on.

  Another team had been delving deeper trying to get to the source of the insanely high corovon readings, which required breaking through a secondary internal hull. A defense program had been hindering their progress for months, but finally they’d been able to shut it down via some well-placed explosives and burn their way through the inner hull to get their first look at the corovon deposit.

  It wasn’t as large as the interior, rather just a ‘small’ object laying inside the 10 kilometer-wide empty internal cavern. Whatever it was wasn’t pure corovon, that was obvious by the dirty blue coloration, but it was giving off such high readings that even a tiny piece of the mile long object would be invaluable to their operations on the planet…let alone what the entire mass would do for the lizard empire as a whole once they got to the point of sending out exports.

  But apparently there had been some sort of chemical contamination, for the workers on the collection efforts had begun reporting illnesses as they tried in vain to chip off even a small portion of what appeared to be a massive statue. The high levels of corovon were obviously responsible for that and it would take some time to break it down into transportable chunks for processing, but if there was a contaminate in or around the object the tech lizard was going to be the one to ascertain what it was.

  To that end it was carrying an array of gear strapped to its body on top of the envirosuit it wore. The three standard variants wore no protection, nor did the others still working in the massive artifact, but if this one was to leave for further analysis of any samples collected it couldn’t risk bringing the contamination out in its own body so protocol dictated that it err on the side of caution.

  When they came out of the descending tunnels they passed through the original breach point in the artifact and were met with reports of additional illness, though it had escalated to onsite incapacitation rather than the mobile and conscious patients that had been examined previously by standard variant medics. If this was a disease locked away for who knew how long then it could very well wreak havoc with the Li’vorkrachnika population on the planet.

  Before it went any further the tech relayed an order to seal the shafts at the surface. If they couldn’t contain this then they’d die here rather than risk spreading it to the others, but if they were going to die he’d need to gather information to send to the others up top so they could devise a cure or countermeasure because this corovon find was by far the largest ever recorded, and even if it meant the deaths of billions of his kin it would be worth it to the empire once harvested.

  Knowing what his duty was, the tech variant hurried forward with its assistants/escorts through the outer ring of compartments until they got to the inner breach site and found a mass of their kin waiting there. They were stopped immediately, then the tech variant was allowed to pass to the front of the crowd where he was pointed towards the sea of tiny dots ahead that were the other Li’vorkrachnika that had been affected.

  A standard variant passed him a magnifying scope and the tech placed it over his left eye, allowing him to see in more detail those who had fallen ill…except they hadn’t fallen. They were standing perfectly still, every last one of them.

  A perplexed expression crossed the tech’s face, then the others pointed out the approximate boundary of the affected region, citing that when they’d sent another team in they’d become affected almost immediately. The tech turned his attention to that location and saw the 18 Li’vorkrachnika there, all standing still like statues.

  He took a moment to think through the possibilities, in a way that only his scientifically engineered mind could, then told the standard variants to stay put while he investigated, given that he was the only one with a body suit. So he began the long, multiple kilometer trek alone and by foot, not using any of the vehicles nearby and taking atmospheric readings every step of the way…yet finding nothing out of the ordinary.

  The tech variant was pondering what could possibly be going on that would cause the ill to stand erect rather than fall as he got within 200 meters of the most recently effected, then suddenly his mind started to blur and he stumbled forward a few more steps before his momentum stopped. He moved his scanner so he could get a better view of it, but it was his eyes that were beginning to go out rather than the position of his head or the device.

  Before he realized what was going on the majority of his brain locked up into a kind of active stasis, with ‘holding’ input signals going out to every part of his body, fixing it rigidly in place and maintaining his last stance, adding the tech variant to the growing number of statues around the object.

  Three days later the ‘freezing field’ had extended out to the breach in the inner hull, with many of the bodies trapped inside it having fallen to the ground from exhaustion or death from the illness that had first afflicted them. New ones had been added to them around the edges as Li’vorkrachnika were sent in wearing biomonitors so they could try and ascertain how they were being affected and by what, but their readings were inconclusive right up until a tremor tripled through the artifact and toppled half of the remaining living statues to the ground.

  Pushed back beyond the entryway, there were no free Li’vorkrachnika to witness the twitch of movement in the object, but had they been there they wouldn’t have known what to make of it anyway. The large stone statue bent slightly, and that motion was enough to cause a chain reaction within it, clearing out more of the lingering sedative and partially awakening the beast from its artificially induced slumber.

  With the surrounding array no longer capable of keeping it sedate, the enormous hexaped pushed its left rear leg out, scraping it along the floor and gouging out a deep furrow on the pedestal that held it in the center of the array. With every movement that followed the pedestal broke and tore as if it was merely loose dirt being moved aside until the creature finally rose up on all six legs, each more than 300 meters wide, and released a roar that coincided with a telekinetic wave that hit and ripped apart everything around it.

  The pedestal crumbled further beneath its feet, sinking it down some 30 more meters, but the array above the creature didn’t fare nearly as well and was almost instantaneously disabled from the invisible impact, leaving only that part beneath the false ground to continue transmitting the restraint psionic that worked in conjunction with the chemical to keep the living mountain incapacitated.

  As the thing woke further it released more psionic energy in a series of angry tantrums, slowly breaking apart its cage as the lizards in the outer ring of the artifact ran up their tunnels towards the surface…only to be blocked by the quarantine and locked inside to their imminent deaths.

  2 months later…

  “Easy helm, let’s not get too close,” Gosfu said, watching their scout ship’s position on the system map relative to the large Li’vorkrachnika
warfleet they’d run across.

  “Easing off, though we’re well within sensor tolerance.”

  “Best to be overly cautious where stealth is concerned,” the Trinx commander said, watching the ships as they repositioned from jumppoint to jumppoint across the orbital arc of the main star. To date the Li’vorkrachnika had only assaulted his homeworld once, in pathetic fashion, but since then their scout fleet had been given orders to survey the surrounding region that the reptilian race had encroached upon.

  They were spreading out far and wide, as opposed to the Trinx who inhabited only one system and chose to keep it that way. This primitive race was no real threat to them, but their other neighbors were not so secure and succumbing rapidly as this juggernaut continued to roll forward. The Trinx were not interested in fighting other people’s wars, but they did want to keep appraised of what was going on around them.

  Ever since the territory around the Trinx homeworld had been overrun and the Li’vorkrachnika’s attempt to conquer them had failed without prompting a counterattack, their empire had been more or less quiet in this region, slowly building up their worlds and producing more ships to send off in small groups to the ever moving fronts. So when this convoy had crossed their paths it took Gosfu’s attention, in so much that he was curious about where exactly it was headed.

  He wasn’t worried about it being sent to attack them, for such a fleet, while overpowering to others, was no match for even a handful of Trinx ships. His scout ship alone could destroy more than a quarter of them, so his curiosity was based not in self-preservation but in adding to the Trinx situational awareness. As far as they knew there was no one else in the region worthy of this level of Li’vorkrachnika attention, nor were there any primary shipping lanes passing through it.

  “Stay well clear until the last one jumps, then take us with them at a discrete distance.”

  “We’re following?” the helmsman asked, his headtails flipping aside as his face spun around.

  “A hunch,” the commander explained.

  “As you will. How far do you plan on following them?”

  “Until my curiosity is sated.”

  “How discrete would you like?”

  “Calculate their jump vector and speed, then mimic out of sensor range. Their redeployment speed is pitiful. We can reacquire on the far end.”

  “What are you expecting to find?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m curious.”

  The Trinx scout ship dogged the Li’vorkrachnika through six additional jumps before they finally arrived in the Haphchap System, a location known to be under their control but otherwise uninteresting. The last intelligence data they had on it was the existence of a small startup colony like hundreds of others were being seeded throughout the region, but upon deceleration into the system they discovered a great deal more.

  The warfleet they had been following was only a small fraction of the total number of ships present in the system, all of whom were located in orbit around a single planet.

  “What’s going on here?” Gosfu wondered aloud, looking at the thousands of warships in orbit as they approached, following the last bits of the convoy as it moved in to join them…then as they got within proximity of the planet the sensor panel lit up with a preprogrammed alarm that shot a mixture of adrenaline, shock, and horror throughout the Trinx crew.

  The sensor officer literally knocked herself out of her seat as she reflexively jerked back from the screen, landing on her butt and turning to face the commander. “Hamoriti,” she whispered.

  “Recheck all systems,” he said immediately, hoping like hell this was a mistake. “Bring us out of stealth mode and give me full sensor scan…and get us closer. I don’t care about that fleet. We have to confirm this one way or another.”

  The Trinx scout ship, about the length of three Li’vorkrachnika cruisers, dropped its camouflage shields and accelerated towards the planet, bypassing the last of the convoy and flying straight down to upper low orbit. They all knew they had to keep their distance, for the stories they learned as children taught them as much, but they needed to get within better sensor range to confirm the psionic signature they were picking up from afar.

  The scout ship decelerated in the blink of an eye, with the orbital fleet moving slowly to chase it and the commander not caring. His eyes were on the holographic displays before him as they were updating and centering on a surface location that had several hundred Li’vorkrachnika cruisers surrounding a mass even larger than one of them. They were firing on it from multiple angles with weapons that were not plasma-based, which was totally foreign to their design motif, but they had to or their ships would be caught up in the paralysis field if they didn’t use long range ordinance.

  That thought barely registered to the commander as he stared at the blue, six-legged mass not believing it was really here. This planet was not one of the seven, and there were only 7 Hamoriti the Ancients had trapped. One of them sat below his homeworld, with the Trinx as its self-appointed guardian and keeper. The others in The Nine were doing likewise with four more. The remaining two were beyond their reach, sitting buried beneath planets in enemy territory where they could not presently reach.

  This planet was far from either of those locations. Furthermore, this Hamoriti didn’t match the descriptions of the others. Each was unique and this monster was something altogether new.

  “How can this be?” the helmsman asked, not even caring about the proximity reports as several Li’vorkrachnika ships were closing to weapons range.

  Gosfu ignored the question, but he was thinking the same thing as he watched one of the cruisers down on the planet get hit with a beam of pure blue fire emitting from the Hamoriti’s head. It passed through the ship like it wasn’t even there, puffing out a huge explosion when the material vaporized, leaving only bits and pieces to fall to the ground afterward.

  The other Li’vorkrachnika ships continued firing some form of physical slugs at the mass that exploded on contact, but Gosfu knew how futile that was. The Hamoriti ate corovon, with their bodies being the most potent armor the galaxy had ever known…but what he didn’t understand was why this one hadn’t killed all the enemy ships attacking it. After the single blue beam it did nothing for a long time, then seeming to summon up a great effort, it released another beam that hit a second cruiser.

  This wasn’t right, for a Hamoriti should have been capable of destroying all of them on a whim.

  “Is there an Ancient facility on the planet?” he finally asked, knowing what this meant for the galaxy if his eyes weren’t truly deceiving him.

  “There’s a subsurface structure similar to the one on Vikod, but I can’t confirm make from this distance.”

  Gosfu lowered his head, trying to quiet his nerves. “Take us into the atmosphere and do a close scan of both the creature and the cavern.”

  All the bridge crew turned from the live images being displayed and stared at him, knowing that such a thing was a death sentence.

  “There is something not right here,” he explained, wondering if this was the right course of action or not. “It is fighting the Li’vorkrachnika but only tentatively, almost as if it is weak. If it is not destroying them quickly, then we should be able to get in and out with the information we need.”

  Gosfu looked up at them, pleading in his eyes. “We have to know if there is an Ancient shell down there.”

  “We’re dead anyway,” the helmsman said, turning back to his controls with a flurry of headtails spinning about. “Might as well know the particulars.”

  “No!” one of the other crewers yelled as he stood up. “Go near that thing and we’re dead! You know we will be. This is suicide!”

  Gosfu jabbed a finger at the image of the Li’vorkrachnika ships surrounding the creature, though the vast majority of their fleet was still in orbit, some of which were even now shooting on the scout ship with their primitive plasma weapons. “They’re not dead. Not yet. And if we have a window o
f opportunity I am not going to waste it!” he yelled ever louder than the other had. “We have to give our people as much information as we can. If this one is weak, or a cousin to the others, or what I don’t care, but if there’s even the smallest chance of surviving it we need information and I’m not going to waste this. Do you understand me? We cannot waste this!”

  The other Trinx shook its head adamantly, not listening to the logic and consumed by the fear instilled in them since birth. “No, no we can’t!”

  “Helm, get us moving,” Gosfu ordered, feeling the same fear but not letting it totally consume him. “Get every bit of data we can on one pass. We’re not going to risk two,” he said, pointing at the vocal crewmember before the next scream of protest came. “And you will be silent…or removed.”

  Two others nearby walked up next to the Trinx and stared at it, not saying a word, then it finally buckled and sat down, holding its head in its hands and muttering to itself how they were all going to die.

  3

  August 24, 2723

  Paquat System

  Vikod (Trinx homeworld)

  Nesfa walked with a trio of Regents, each a longtime guardian tasked with defending and monitoring the sleeping beast hidden beneath the surface of their capitol. There were other inhabited planets in the system, but Vikod was the most densely populated and heaviest defended of them all to insure that no one could gain access to the Ancient shell. The native population knew it was there but only a handful actually had access to it and this was the first time that Nesfa had gone in person to the location.

  The artifact was buried deep within the planet, with the Trinx learning that was by design to supply it with continuous geothermal power in case its own power reserves ever failed, as well as to continually recharge them as time passed. The shell also gathered resources from the surrounding rock layers that were partially molten, which had made the facility difficult to access initially when the Trinx took possession of this planet, but their technology had advanced so far in the millennia that had passed that the conduit they’d built down to reach it was in no danger of breaching.