Maty by Aer-ki Jyr (reading books for 6 year olds .TXT) 📕

Elloquim who were using their internal factories at maximum capacity to produce more ground units to supplement what the Maty itself was releasing from storage.

But the Craniems could not yet get it to actively produce more than low level products. The Kel’zats were still beyond their reach, though those that were in storage were now prowling the Maty on their own for the most part and hunting down Hadarak…as well as a few of the PanNari attack drones when they moved into an area of the Maty that they didn’t want them in. Kyra was in full control of hers, up until it would get damaged or destroyed, then she’d have to operate on foot until she could find another to conscript in the field or have a Craniem recall one for her if they could manage to figure out how…for not all of them were operating under the same command codes, and none could be remotely controlled from afar, only given ‘suggestions,’ and even the now relinked Elloquim could not command all of them the same way they could PanNari machinations.

Right now Kyra was between rides, for her last Kel’zat had one of its four limbs torn off completely, and eventually it decided to retreat for repairs even when Kyra told it to keep fighting. Some programming in it overrode the manual control and she couldn’t figure out where it was yet, but she did know that there were levels of ownership to a Kel’zat, and based on that level you could do more things with it. Initially all she could do was ride and point out what it needed to do, but the more she learned it…and the Craniems and Elloquim decoded the massively complex machines…the more manual operation was available, but whatever triggered the recall had been beyond her control, and in retrospect was probably the wiser action rather than lose the entire Kel’zat.

But she’d had to leave behind two other QuipNari in the process, and so far neither of them had made it back. That didn’t mean they were dead, for there was a comms blackout now in place inside the Maty that hadn’t been there before. Every wall blocked it, and she’d been told that it also blocked the telepathy the Hadarak used, which was why they were fighting less effectively than normal despite their constantly regenerating numbers.

Kyra spotted targets down the hallway and fired off her shoulder-mounted energy rockets, whipping the tiny glowing orbs down the distance towards the flying minions half as big as herself that were rounding a corner. As she did several sentries and gogorum attack drones fired off a series of beams and chipped energy blasts that looked like little bananas flying through the air if you slowed down the visual replay long enough to look.

Either way, the minions took the brunt of the mostly accurate firepower, dropping to the floor in gory pieces as more came around the corner to replace them…along with some of the zerglings and a few larger varieties that had never been seen in combat before by the PanNari or Star Force. They were half as fast, but thicker and essentially walking bombs full of acid that would go off if you got close enough in numbers…but a single target wouldn’t trigger them, because the acid would also kill the minions around them.

They were obviously tasked with hitting groups of enemies with the suicide explosion where it made mathematical sense…which was why Kyra sprinted ahead of the drones and started firing at the fat ones as she had to jump over and on some of the zerglings to get past them, kicking one in the face and having to do a somersault as her foot stuck more in its mouth than she’d wanted. She shot another at pointblank range then launched herself over another pair as she continued to evade her way through the minion flow up towards the first of the living bombs and attacked it from range…but there were too many zerglings in the way and they took all the hits.

Kyra gritted her teeth inside her helmet. Her shielding was already taking a lot of damage from the flyers, and the zerglings were getting bites at her legs every now and then with their single fang inside their mouths that worked as a shield drainer…while the rest of their teeth were meant for flesh and light armor. But the QuipNari didn’t care, for she had to get to the ‘pots’ before they got to the attack drones. Because the acid, if thrown onto a shield, would drain the shield and expose it to the rest of the minion weapons. So either way, the little pots were far more effective weapons than the rest of the minions so long as they had cover to get up to you…and this wave didn’t look to be a scouting party, but rather the head of another insertion column, coming from where Kyra didn’t know.

She couldn’t communicate with the Craniems, let alone Nevantha, to find out unless there was a line of sight link back from drone to drone, and in some cases they maintained that, but the Maty’s own communication system was in lockdown mode since it went battle active to fight the Hadarak, and the Craniems didn’t know how to undo the procedure they had accidentally triggered…though the active defense of the Maty’s guardians was far more help, but it left those QuipNari and attack drones fighting in the complex without an active map to operate off of.

Fortunately they all had downloaded ones of certain areas, but stray out of those areas into somewhere new that no PanNari had gone and you’d be navigating blind.

Up ahead Kyra’s map ended, so she didn’t know where these minions could be coming from. The QuipNari just knew they had to be stopped before they got to one of the Craniems…which had to be scattered all over the Maty in