StarCraft

by Timothy Zahn

  “The scale says the area’s about eight hundred meters wide,” Horner pointed out. “That’s a lot of territory for forty marines to cover.”

  “I’d also be taking the second Warhound and however many goliaths you can spare from shipboard defense,” Cruikshank said. “Plus Rahas says they still have ten Templar and ten Nerazim they can deploy, plus a sentry or two for close-in support. He also says they could probably bring a pair of phoenixes, which would then be available for air support.”

  “That still leaves thirteen meters for each marine or protoss warrior,” Horner persisted. “Worse, really, since protoss infantry usually don’t use ranged weapons and will probably have to bunch closer together to hold their section of the line. Either way, if you get swarmed, I don’t see how you’ll keep from being overwhelmed.”

  “We can handle it, sir,” Cruikshank insisted. “Anyway, there’s no other suitable spot for ten klicks either way. Most of the rest of that area is forested, which limits our fields of fire. And once the river bends due south, there would be too long a battle line for us to cover.”

  “What if you set up right at Point Three?” Valerian asked.

  “I’m worried that would cut things a little too close,” Cruikshank said. “If Halkman’s team gets delayed, they could find their way blocked by a battle. And we need to get them inside Point Three, because unless you want to send Dr. Cogan down with us, there’s no one except Dr. Wyland who knows how to take the samples you want.”

  He tapped the datapad screen. “This is our best bet to slow down the zerg long enough for the survey team to do that.”

  Valerian and Horner exchanged looks, and Cruikshank could sense a nonverbal conversation going on. “This protoss force,” Valerian said, turning back to Cruikshank. “Is that still you and Rahas talking theory, or has Hierarch Artanis given the green light for them to join in?”

  “Rahas is waiting for your approval before approaching the hierarch, Emperor,” Cruikshank said. “But he assures me there’s no question that he’ll authorize the action.”

  Again, Horner and Valerian looked at each other. “You make a good case, Colonel,” Valerian said. “Just one question: why?”

  Cruikshank frowned. “As I said before, Emperor. It’s our job.”

  “Not why you’re willing to risk your life for the survey team’s mission,” Valerian said. “Why you’re asking for the protoss to be in on the operation. I was under the impression you didn’t like the protoss.”

  “And that you certainly don’t trust them,” Horner added.

  Cruikshank felt his lip twitch. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

  Valerian nodded. “Go ahead.”

  “You’re right; I don’t like or trust protoss,” Cruikshank said. “But what I saw at Point Two—what the psyolisks did to them and how fast they did it—scared the hell out of me. This has to be stopped, and it has to be stopped here, or the war’s going to start all over again. We can’t afford that. I don’t have enough soldiers and mechs to do it alone. Neither do the protoss. That’s just how the battle logic works out.”

  “Very well put, Colonel,” Valerian said. “All right. Give Rahas a call and let him know we’re sending you and everyone we can spare from basic shipboard security. Then get your team together and report back when you’re ready.”

  “Yes, Emperor.” Cruikshank nodded to Horner. “Admiral.” He started to turn away—

  “One more thing, Colonel,” Valerian said. “You asked for permission to speak freely, but I didn’t hear anything that could be construed as improper or inappropriate. Why that specific request?”

  Cruikshank grimaced. “I admitted I was frightened, Emperor. Official Dominion military policy is that we’re never frightened.”

  “Ah,” Valerian said, a small smile touching his lips. “Welcome to the real world, Colonel.”

  “Thank you, Emperor,” Cruikshank said soberly. “Actually, I’ve been living here for quite a while. Excuse me, please—I have orders to carry out.”

  Erin didn’t notice the ache in her side until she tried to lift the flamethrower’s fuel tank and something seemed to go pop. She managed to lug the thing outside anyway, but from that point the pain got progressively worse.

  Eventually, Whist noticed. “Trouble?” he asked as he set a rack of gauss rifles beside the fuel tank.

  “I’m fine.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “In marine talk, I’m fine usually means like hell I am,” he said. “Come on, we don’t have time for games.”

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just some pain in my side.”

  “Where?” He touched her armor below her arm. “Here?”

  “A little lower.”

  “Yeah.” Whist looked around. “Dizz? We’ve got a cracked rib over here.”

  “How bad?” Dizz called back. “Can you travel?”

  “Yes, of course,” Erin said. “I’m okay. Really.”

  “Good to hear it.” Whist pointed to a large tree at the edge of the clearing. “Over there—sit down. We’ll get the rest of the stuff out.”

  “I can help.”

  “You can help by sitting down,” Whist said firmly. “We don’t have time for a closer look, and probably don’t have anything aboard that’ll do better than the CMC’s compression suit anyway.”

  “Yes, sir,” Erin said with a sigh. To be honest, a short break would probably do her good.

  She eased herself down by the tree he’d indicated. It was more than a little embarrassing to sit idly by while everyone else worked. Still, Whist was in charge, and he’d given her an order.

  Though the relaxation would come to a quick and violent end if some wandering zerg spotted her. Was she still inside the magic zone of sort-of invisibility from the two psi blocks?

  She hoped so. She hadn’t carried a weapon since the Point One cavern and her attempts to use Whist’s spare gauss rifle. As Tanya had said earlier, she was lucky to have come out of that alive.

  So why had she come out of it alive?

  They’d really never answered that question. Erin herself had certainly avoided thinking about it. Luckily, there’d been plenty of other things to keep her mind busy over the past hour or so.

  But all those excuses were gone now that she was just sitting here.

  Why was she still alive? Had the attacking zerg sized them up, realized she was the most harmless, and decided to concentrate on the others first?

  No—that made no sense. Not when a couple of quick swings of razor-sharp claws could have cut through her armor and killed her on the spot. Or at least, those claws could have taken off the arm that held the rifle and really made sure she was harmless. Surely one of the zerg could have spared the half second that would have taken.

  Because she was a xenobiologist? Whist had suggested that. But Tanya had promptly shot that one down. Unless there was something about the adostra in their pods that was designed to fool a trained xenobiologist and no one else…

  She snorted, the movement giving her ribs a fresh twinge. Right. No one set traps that subtle.

  Besides, she was the one who had first raised the question of how the psyolisks and the adostra were connected. If that was the big secret, it was already out of the hat, and should have been grounds for her being the first of the survey team to be targeted.

  Something caught her eye, and she looked up to see another pair of mutalisks flapping their way across the sky. She tensed, wondering if they’d been sent to finish the job the first pack had started. She watched them, ready to shout out a warning if they turned and dived.

  To her relief, they continued on without even pausing. Maybe objects on the ground weren’t of any real interest to them, at least not when they themselves were that high. It was only when intruders were in their territory that they’d taken enough interest to attack.

  Only when intruders were in their territory.

  For a long moment she thought about it, her spinning brain trying to work through the logic.
She called up the reports Cruikshank had sent and read them through again. She thought about it some more.

  Then, after levering herself carefully to her feet, she crossed the clearing to where the others were working.

  Whist looked up as she approached. “I thought I told you to sit down,” he said.

  “Yes, you did,” she confirmed. “I have a question.”

  There must have been something in her tone, because all four of them paused in their work. “Is it important?” Whist asked.

  “Very important,” Erin assured him. “You remember what Dizz said about the psyolisks being terrible bodyguards for the pods?”

  “Sure,” Whist said.

  “And Tanya pointed out that they only lost because of bad luck and unexpected circumstances?”

  “Again, sure.”

  “She was wrong,” Erin said softly. “It wasn’t bad luck. It was deliberate.”

  Explain, Ulavu said.

  Erin swallowed. “The battle at Focal Point Two. The psyolisks had taken down most of the protoss and were trying to move the pods out of the cavern. The only thing that stopped them was the arrival of Colonel Cruikshank’s team.”

  “According to Cruikshank, anyway,” Whist said. “Was he wrong?”

  “Not from his point of view,” Erin said. “But we know better. See, there were mutalisks at the battle. I checked. They attacked while the Dominion force was trying to save the protoss. Mutalisks like the ones that attacked us and knocked us out of the sky.”

  She pointed at the sky. “So why didn’t they do the same thing to the Dominion force on its way down?”

  Whist and Dizz looked at each other. “We were traveling horizontally,” Dizz said, a little uncertainly. “The Dominion ships would have been coming in vertically. That would have made them harder to hit.”

  “They hit the protoss shuttle on its way down just fine,” Tanya reminded them. “Took out its psionic boosters, remember?”

  “And they didn’t even try to stop the dropships,” Erin said. “There’s nothing in the report about any attack until the troops and mechs were already deployed.”

  “They were moving the pods,” Tanya murmured. “Disassembling them from the nutrient base structure couldn’t have been easy to do. They must have started long before Cruikshank even landed.”

  “While they were already beating the snot out of the protoss,” Whist said. “So why move them?”

  “That’s not something that makes sense?” Erin asked.

  No, Ulavu told her. The interior ramps and turns provide effective choke points. The far better strategy would have been for the psyolisks to contain and surround their attackers.

  “Especially since they were winning,” Whist said. “Wait a minute. The protoss disruptor. It was already inside, ready to go off. Could that have been why they were moving the pods?”

  The disruptor should never have been allowed into the cavern to begin with, Ulavu said. Even if the mutalisks were unable to block the terran dropships, they should certainly have been able to intercept the disruptor and keep it outside.

  “Damn,” Dizz muttered. “Are we saying what I think we’re saying?”

  “We’re saying you were right,” Whist said. “The psyolisks aren’t guarding the pods. They’re trying to get them destroyed.”

  “Not just get them destroyed,” Tanya said grimly, “but get them destroyed by us.” She nodded toward the sky. “That’s why the mutalisks didn’t come back and finish the job here. They want us to get to Point Three so that we can destroy the pods there for them.”

  “Or they want us to go to Point Three and get ourselves killed, thereby goading the Dominion into destroying the pods,” Whist said. “Probably doesn’t make much difference to them.”

  “And furthermore to destroy them without anyone getting the samples that would show adostra and psyolisks aren’t forms of the same species,” Tanya said. “That’s why they were moving the pods at Point Two, and why they let the disruptor in. They figured that they had to make it look to Cruikshank like he was going to lose containment. Otherwise, they couldn’t push him into blasting the cavern.”

  “And that’s why I’m alive,” Erin said, an unpleasant shiver running through her. She’d hoped desperately that there was a flaw in her reasoning, something the others would find. Only they hadn’t. “After they killed the rest of you in Point One, they needed someone to go running back to the Dominion and tell them how horrible the psyolisks are. That was going to be me.”

  “Because you were the most harmless,” Dizz murmured.

  “And because you’d have seen the same markings on the backs of the psyolisks and the adostra and would hopefully draw the conclusion they wanted you to draw,” Tanya said. “They probably assumed you were more observant with that sort of thing than the rest of us would be.”

  “I wonder how they managed to get the same markings on both,” Dizz said.

  He who created the psyolisks would have manipulated the genetics to bring about that precise result, Ulavu said.

  “He?” Whist asked.

  “He means Abathur,” Erin said. “He has to be the one behind this. Even Zagara credited him with creating the adostra.”

  “But she also said he was loyal to the Swarm,” Whist reminded her. “This doesn’t exactly sound like loyalty to me.”

  “Unless Zagara herself is the one behind it,” Tanya said.

  “I hope to hell not,” Dizz said. “Because if she is, she’s got the whole planet behind her.”

  “In which case, we’re totally screwed,” Whist said.

  “Or she is,” Tanya offered. “Between the Dominion and the protoss, there’s enough firepower up there to turn this place back into an orbiting cinder.”

  “Maybe that’s exactly what someone’s going for,” Erin said.

  But that makes no sense, Ulavu objected. Who stands to gain by the destruction of Gystt?

  “Who knows?” Whist said. “Some other group of zerg, some rogue protoss faction, maybe Sarah damn Kerrigan herself. And by the way, just having firepower doesn’t mean you get to deliver it. Don’t forget that Zagara’s got seven leviathans to call on, not to mention however many scourge and devourers she could send against us.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Tanya said firmly. “Not that part. Not to us, anyway. What happens up there is someone else’s problem. Our problem is to reach Point Three and get the samples that’ll hopefully prove whether we’re right or just spitting in the wind.” She looked at Ulavu, and Erin had the sense that the two of them were sharing something deep and private. “And we’re all we’ve got,” she added. “So let’s get this stuff on our backs and get moving.”

  “And by our backs, you mostly mean mine,” Whist said sourly.

  “Not our fault you and Erin are the two with the heavy-duty CMCs,” Dizz said. “Do you think we should let Cruikshank know about this?”

  “Shutting down the psi blocks isn’t a terrific idea,” Whist said reluctantly, looking around. “But yeah, this is probably the time and place to do it.”

  “Couldn’t you or Dizz go off a ways and shut down just that one?” Tanya suggested. “That way not everyone will be exposed.”

  “No point,” Whist told her. “The zerg probably have a good bead on the crash site, so they already know we’re here.”

  “That means that, for once, shutting off the blocks doesn’t tell them anything new,” Dizz added. “So the plan is to shut off both blocks, make a quick report, then turn them back on and make tracks for Point Three?”

  “Right,” Whist said. “Once we’re gone, they can pound on the dropship to their little hearts’ content.” He fiddled with something inside his armor. “Okay, mine’s off. You want to talk, or should I?”

  “I’ll do it,” Dizz said. He did something with his armor. “Halkman to Hyperion. Halkman to Hyperion.”

  “Is there trouble?” Tanya asked.

  “Not getting through,” Dizz said. “Ah. Damn.”

&
nbsp; “What?” Whist demanded.

  “The dropship’s signal booster has glitched,” Dizz said. “Probably the glave wurms again.”

  “I thought our suits had enough power by themselves,” Erin said.

  “They do,” Dizz said. “Unfortunately, some tech genius set things up so that if our comms are in range of the dropship, they automatically relay through its booster. No booster, no signal.”

  “Can’t you switch it over?”

  “I’m sure somebody can,” Dizz said sourly. “Unfortunately, they didn’t teach us the subtle tech stuff in zerg-shooting school.”

  “So we need either distance or a shredded booster,” Whist said. “And since we don’t want to wake up the neighbors with a grenade, I vote for distance.”

  “Agreed,” Dizz said reluctantly. “And at this point, we might as well just wait until we’re nearly there. That way, if we attract company, we’ll have someplace to duck in out of the rain.”

  “I don’t think Cruikshank will like being left hanging that long,” Erin warned.

  “He’ll get over it,” Dizz said. “So what are we bringing?”

  “Less than I thought,” Whist said. “A couple of spare gauss rifles, lots of extra mags. Leave the flamethrower—”

  “I’ll carry the flamethrower,” Erin interrupted. “And anything else you need me to.”

  “I thought you were hurt,” Tanya said.

  “I just need to learn to let my suit’s servos do most of the work,” Erin said.

  “But the flamethrower?”

  “You’ve proved the psyolisks don’t like heat,” Erin pointed out. “Dizz proved they burn if you get them hot enough. Besides, walls of flame can sometimes come in handy.”

  “You’re awfully soldierly all of a sudden,” Dizz said, frowning at her. “Any reason in particular?”

  “I’m just trying to be part of the team.”

  Dizz and Whist exchanged glances. “Fine,” Whist said. “Grab whatever you think you can carry, and let’s go. Tanya, her CMC has some anchor points for gear attachment—give her a hand, will you?”

  They didn’t believe her, of course. Erin knew that. But how could she tell them the truth?