StarCraft

by Timothy Zahn

  “Hey—Abathur!” Dizz called, trying one more time to get in on the conversation. “We’re on Overqueen Zagara’s side here. How about explaining it so that the rest of us can understand?”

  Abathur looked past Zagara, and it seemed to Tanya that his multiple eyes were measuring Dizz. Terrans owed no explanation, he said. But Abathur will give.

  “Good,” Dizz said. “Let’s hear it.”

  Swarm supreme, Abathur said. Swarm unique. Meant from very beginning. Will be again.

  “Yes, we got that part,” Dizz said. “So what, you can’t be unique without wiping out everything else?”

  Inferior species cannot understand Swarm, Abathur said, his mental voice heavy with contempt. Swarm supreme. Swarm meant to fill universe. Swarm meant to assimilate all. Discard what not needed.

  He says that the Swarm was meant to assimilate all, Mukav said.

  Tanya glanced over, noting with surprise that the queen was considerably closer than she’d been when the conversation started. Apparently, she’d been moving toward the group while she acted as self-appointed translator.

  Should they be letting her get that close?

  Tanya looked at Dizz and Whist, but both were focused on the drama taking place across the chamber. Maybe they hadn’t even noticed Mukav’s approach.

  “Thanks, but I’d like to hear this from Evolution Master Abathur himself,” Dizz said to Mukav. “So you say the Swarm is supreme, Abathur?”

  Swarm must grow. Change, Abathur said. Without war, can do neither.

  “So are the psyolisks the zerg’s next step toward starting another war?” Dizz called.

  Chitha not zerg, Abathur said, his psionic voice a growl. Swarm essence must dominate. Swarm essence not dominant in chitha. Swarm and xel’naga essence equal.

  “Ah-ha,” Dizz said, nodding. “So that’s your problem. Equal partnership isn’t what you’re used to, is it?”

  No matter. Chitha not zerg, but chitha zerg weapon. Will give Swarm victory over protoss. Abathur jabbed a claw toward Ulavu.

  “I don’t know,” Dizz said doubtfully. “Psyolisks are tricky enough to fight, but they die easier than the hydralisk that you based them on. But again, isn’t it cheating to use xel’naga essence? Doesn’t that make it a xel’naga victory, not a zerg victory?”

  Victory not important, Abathur said. Perfection important. Swarm on path to perfection.

  “Unless you’ve already left that path,” Dizz said. “Or been passed by. Maybe it’s the adostra that are perfection?”

  Adostra. Abathur uttered the word like a curse. Abomination.

  “How can they be an abomination?” Dizz asked. “You created them, didn’t you?”

  Zagara created abomination, Abathur retorted, this time jabbing his claw toward Zagara. Abathur merely tool.

  “What’s so wrong with them?” Dizz pressed. “How do the adostra take anything away from the zerg?”

  Zerg manipulate essence, Abathur said stiffly. Zerg create new life. New purpose in others. Zerg drive evolution. Mold into image of Swarm. Do not give that power to alien beings.

  The adostra deal only with plant life, Zagara said. She was clearly still furious, Tanya could tell, but at least she had calmed down enough to use intelligible words again. They do not intrude upon the Swarm.

  Do not? Abathur countered. Zagara ordered that power be given to adostra. Ordered adostra not be absorbed into Swarm.

  The power was in the xel’naga essence, Zagara insisted. That gift was not given to us to be absorbed into the Swarm.

  Zagara’s promise to Queen of Blades, Abathur said darkly. Foolish promise.

  “So you wanted the adostra destroyed,” Dizz said. “But not just destroyed. You wanted us—terrans and protoss—to destroy them. That way your own hands would be clean and Overqueen Zagara would have no one to blame but us.”

  Path of war out of Swarm’s claws, Abathur said. Zagara—Abathur does not name Overqueen—is summoned by terrans and protoss. Acceptance is further betrayal of Swarm.

  “So how does it play out from here?” Dizz pressed. “You’re going to kill us all anyway, so it can’t hurt to show how clever you’ve been.”

  Cleverness does not matter, Abathur ground out. Only Swarm matters. Leviathan has left Gystt. Leviathan will flee. Terrans and protoss will name Zagara betrayer. Terrans and protoss will attack Swarm. Swarm will respond. Swarm will again be at war.

  “Good plan,” Dizz said. “But not going to work. They won’t attack, because they’ll know that you kidnapped Overqueen Zagara.”

  How? Abathur scoffed. Cannot speak truth to terrans and protoss. Inferior species will have only evidence of eyes and prejudice of thoughts.

  “See, that’s where you’re wrong,” Dizz said. “It’s true our long-range comms won’t work with your psyolisks present. But there are other ways. Ulavu, for example, is a protoss, and protoss have a form of the same psionic communication as the zerg.”

  Protoss communication also blocked by chitha, Abathur said.

  “I don’t think so,” Dizz said. “You see, we noticed how every time a protoss force landed on Gystt, you made sure to hit their transport in the right place to knock out the psionic boosters. The protoss may be the primary target for psyolisk psi attacks, but those attacks don’t interfere with their communication. In fact, Ulavu’s been relaying this entire conversation to his people.”

  Lies, Abathur said, his green eyes focusing on Ulavu. Terran underestimates Abathur. Have studied full depth of protoss psionic communication. Know reach, distance covered. He gestured. Know size and volume of psionic booster that can reach across such distances. Protoss does not carry.

  “You’re right; he doesn’t,” Tanya spoke up. She hefted her canister rifle.

  Or rather, the psionic booster that Valerian and the protoss techs had built in the shape of a canister rifle. “But I do.”

  Abathur froze, his eyes on Tanya. “So you see, there’s really no point in maintaining this charade,” Dizz said. “Let’s go back to Gystt, and we can—”

  With a wordless cry, Ulavu dropped to his knees. Tanya took a step toward him and staggered back, a scream boiling up in her throat as a blaze of agony exploded through her brain.

  And in that second, Mukav leaped across the remaining distance between them and attacked.

  Her first slash caught Whist across the back of his helmet and cooling unit, throwing him five meters across the floor. Dizz spun around, dodged just a shade too slow, and took her second slash across his chest plate. He pinwheeled, nearly losing his balance—

  And then shot up into the air, spinning and jinking like an injured bird as he tried to get some distance. Mukav slashed again, just catching the heel of his boot and nearly bringing him down. He recovered enough to keep from crashing and twisted back toward her, firing a shot from his gauss pistol that missed completely. She took one final, useless swipe at him, then turned toward Tanya and Ulavu.

  There was nothing Tanya could do. Her brain was throbbing too hard to focus her power, her vision blurring too much, her armor too thin to block the claw when it came down in the killing blow. She tried to back up—knew she’d never get out of the way in time—

  And twitched violently as a blaze of green cut across her field of view.

  Ulavu had thrown his warp disk.

  Not as accurately as he might have wanted, she realized instantly. Instead of slicing through Mukav’s body, the spinning Void energy merely chopped off the limb poised above Tanya. But it was enough. Mukav screamed in agony and rage as the limb went flying. She turned reflexively toward Ulavu, raising her remaining slashing limb to strike.

  And staggered as Whist, still lying on his back, opened up with his C-14. For a pair of heartbeats she jerked and twitched as the spikes hammered into her, trying to line up a shot at Ulavu but unable to regain her stability long enough to strike. From somewhere above Tanya came a new scream, this one in her ears instead of her mind, a long, piercing, mechanical sound, and
Tanya felt the pressure in her brain ease a little. Whist kept firing, his spikes chipping away at Mukav’s armor plating. The queen turned from Ulavu, abandoning that attack, and started toward the marine. There was a new double flash of green—

  And Mukav slumped over and collapsed to the floor. Tanya blinked away some of the blurring to see Ulavu lying beside the dead queen’s abdomen. Even dazed by the psyolisk attack, he’d retained enough focus and control to roll half beneath Mukav as she’d turned toward Whist and stab his warp blades into her underside.

  Whist sent another two bursts into the queen, just to be sure. “Tanya?” he called, his voice strained and oddly slurred.

  “We’re okay,” she called back, shaking her head and blinking against the mental interference still pressing against her mind. Turning from Mukav’s carcass, she looked across the room.

  It was as bad as she could have guessed. Worse. Zagara and Abathur were embroiled in direct personal combat, their limbs slashing at each other like ancient swordsmen in battle. Zagara was bigger and angrier, but Abathur was holding his own.

  And he had allies. Boiling out of every tunnel was wave after wave of psyolisks.

  It didn’t matter that Abathur’s scheme had been laid bare. Not to him. All that mattered was that the zerg returned to what they had once been. That they regained the power to follow their genetic imperative, to twist and mold other beings with ruthless efficiency, and then to join those beings to the Swarm. The power to grow and change and continue down the path toward perfection, even if perfection was never achieved.

  The only one who stood in the way of that return to glory was Zagara. If she died, whether or not the Dominion and protoss knew what had happened, the Swarm would eventually return to its original nature and he would have achieved his goal.

  He and Mukav had planned this well. They had Zagara, they had position, and they had overwhelming numbers.

  What they hadn’t counted on was that Zagara would have a few numbers of her own.

  So far Dizz was the only one in action, hovering above and behind Zagara and firing methodically at the lines of psyolisks streaming toward the combatants. Firing at them, and hopefully confusing them. The long scream earlier that had shaken away some of Tanya’s mental fog—a scream that had gone quieter but hadn’t faded completely—was coming from the turbo microscreen in Dizz’s jump pack, a special addition he’d asked for after Dr. Cogan’s suggestion that Abathur might communicate with his psyolisks via ultrasonics.

  It seemed to be working, too, at least to a degree. The psyolisks were moving slower than usual, slower than they had under the influence of the team’s psi blocks alone. A few of the creatures paused as they came into the chamber, as if waiting for orders that never came.

  But confusing them wouldn’t be enough. There were just too many of them, and only one Dizz, and there was really no fine-tuning Abathur needed to do anyway. The psyolisks already knew what they were supposed to do.

  Dizz would probably survive, the morbid thought drifted through the tangle that was Tanya’s mind as she watched him soar up there above the conflict. She and Whist might survive back here by the entrance; they could make a run for it if necessary and find a choke point where they could make a stand until Valerian could send a dropship.

  For Ulavu, there was no such question or distant hope. Ulavu was going to die.

  Tanya had been right earlier. Abathur hadn’t realized until now that Ulavu was a Nerazim warrior, and his response to that revelation had been to hit the protoss with as hard a psionic attack as the evolution master could manage.

  There was no defense against that assault. Ulavu couldn’t hide behind a hail of hypersonic 8mm spikes. He couldn’t escape by flying to the ceiling. The pressure on Tanya’s own mind was tearing away at her soul—how much more of Abathur’s assault was being dumped on the hated protoss?

  Maybe Ulavu’s mind was tougher than Tanya knew. But she’d seen that mind. She’d been as close to Ulavu as any terran had ever been. He was strong, certainly. But he wasn’t that strong.

  His presence here had ruined Abathur’s plan, and Abathur would have his revenge.

  Ulavu had lied to Tanya. He’d betrayed her trust and their friendship.

  But he’d also saved her life.

  And sometimes broken friendships could be healed.

  Could theirs? Tanya had no idea. The pain was still too fresh, too deep. Even if it healed, it might leave a scar that would never go away.

  But ultimately, it didn’t matter. This wasn’t for friendship. This was because Ulavu was part of her team, and she was a ghost, a soldier of the Dominion, and her job was to protect him to the fullest of her ability.

  No matter what the cost.

  Ghost implants were there for a reason. Ghosts were unstable wild cards, some with known limits to their power, some without; some with known limits to their emotional stability, some without.

  Tanya had no idea what her limits were. She had no idea what would happen without the implant.

  Time to find out.

  Stretching out with her power, aware that she was literally playing with fire, she reached inward, raising the temperature at the center of the implant just high enough to burn out its core electronics. She had the sense of nearby brain cells burning and growing dark…the sense of the implant failing…the sense of a slave whose chains had suddenly been stripped off. Through the black swirls of Abathur’s psionic attack, and the red haze of her own righteous fury, she stretched out her power.

  And the psyolisks began to die.

  Slowly at first, just one at a time. Then more quickly, with two or three falling as she stared her rage at them.

  Then, suddenly, they were falling in waves, toppling to the floor together like smoldering cordwood, their limbs flailing helplessly against the unseen attack that was destroying them from the inside. They died as they charged across the chamber; died as they emerged, ready for combat; died even while they were still inside the tunnels.

  Through it all Tanya seemed to float above them, her body stretching out to fill the chamber, her mind full of alien thoughts and chatterings and agony. Distantly, she was aware that her hands were pressed against the floor, but there was no sensation of touch or smell or hearing. All was mind; all was sight; all was alien.

  All was death.

  It was a massacre, terrible and wonderful and horrifically satisfying. Tanya swept the room with hidden fire, burning some of the enemy even past the point of death, just because she could.

  Distantly, she sensed Abathur trying desperately to call for a retreat. But his orders were unheard and unheeded through the blanketing noise from Dizz’s jump pack. The buzz in Tanya’s head began to fade, and the stutter from Whist’s gauss rifle began to slow.

  The haze faded into numbness. Vaguely, she wondered why she was staring at the arching roof of the leviathan chamber…

  And then Dizz was kneeling over her, his expression tense. “You okay?” he asked. “Tanya? Talk to me.”

  “I’m okay,” she breathed. Were her hands shaking?

  They were. So was her entire body.

  “Come on,” he said, slipping a hand under her shoulders. “We’ve reached the Hyperion, and there’s a dropship coming alongside. We need to get you to sickbay.”

  “Wait,” she said as he lifted her off the floor. “Ulavu. Where’s Ulavu?”

  “He’s fine,” Dizz said, and for the first time Tanya noticed the oddness to his voice. “Just a little shaky. Whist’s helping him down the tunnel.”

  “Okay.” Tanya eased back to her feet, clutching at Dizz’s arm as the compartment again swayed around her. Dead psyolisks were everywhere, she saw with a flicker of guilt. Creatures who had just been doing as they’d been ordered. “What about Zagara?” she asked as Dizz walked her toward the tunnel. “Did she win?”

  “Oh, she won and a half,” Dizz confirmed. “You should have seen it.”

  “I was a little distracted.”

  �
��Yeah,” Dizz said grimly. “Well. I only saw a queen fight once during the war. It was pretty vicious. This fight left that one in the dust. They were going at it like they were trying to rip each other down by molecular layers. For a while Abathur was throwing psyolisks at her, too—just literally making them leap onto her back or torso and dig in.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “Seems to be,” Dizz said. “Luckily, our little jump pack modification kept him from grabbing anyone except the psyolisks closest to him, and Whist and I were able to blast enough of them off her to keep the attack at a level she could handle. It was probably distracting as hell, though.

  “And then, suddenly…” He shook his head. “There must have been some tipping point with how many psyolisks Abathur had left to hit her with, because suddenly she was tearing into him like a mulcher on a stump.”

  “Did she kill him?”

  “I don’t think so,” Dizz said. “But she came damn close. He looked like a dishrag when she dragged him out of here.”

  “But she didn’t kill him,” Tanya said, just making sure she’d heard him right. “And you and Whist didn’t, either?”

  “Oh, we were more than ready,” Dizz said grimly. “But Zagara told us not to. She said he was one of a kind, and that the Swarm needs an evolution master to survive.”

  “Why?”

  “She didn’t say, and we didn’t ask,” Dizz said. “She was hauling him out, and Cruikshank had dropships and fighters on the way—” He waved a hand. “Anyway, that’s way above my rank level. She and Valerian and probably Artanis can hash that one out.”

  “I suppose,” Tanya said. “What happened to the rest of the psyolisks? Was Zagara able to control them?”

  Dizz hesitated. “Actually…by the time she finished knocking the stuffing out of him, they were pretty much all dead.”

  Tanya swallowed hard. “Me?”

  “Well, you had help,” Dizz said. He was trying to be his usual flippant self, she could tell. But for once, it wasn’t working. “Anyway. If you feel ready to move, we need to get you aboard the Hyperion and start fixing whatever happened to you.”