by Jeff Grubb
“Yeah, that’s a shortcut Handy Anderson would take.”
“I just wanted you to know that your own network has turned its back on you. I didn’t want you to find out at a bad time. Like on the battlefield, for example.” Mengsk refilled Mike’s snifter.
“But why this?”
“Propaganda is a weapon that the Confederacy wields best, and wields heaviest. It is their hammer. And when all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.”
“You’d think they’d have better weapons than a reporter to throw at you,” Mike muttered. He shook his head at the screen. “What happened to all their Zerg research, the material we got out of that installation?”
“Ah.” Mengsk hit another series of buttons. “The Jacobs disk. I’m glad you remembered that—it shows that my mind-control drugs have not had a complete effect on you. Don’t look at me that way, it was meant as a joke.”
“I’m a little sensitive about that right now. It’ll pass.”
“I expected weapons data—something to keep them ahead of the technological curve. Instead I found something much more interesting. Here we go. You know about ghosts, of course.”
Mike thought of Kerrigan, the merciless fighter who felt the death of each of her victims. “Telepathic warriors. A specialty of the Confederates, and an example of your technological curve.”
“An interesting example, if I may digress. The original inhabitants of the colony ships were Earth people, but the long voyage apparently put a twist in their genetic code, enough to ring out more psionic abilities than were common in the original Terran populace. An interesting happenstance.”
“I think we’ve both gotten to the point where we don’t believe in happenstance.” Mike took a pull on his brandy.
Mengsk gave a good-natured shrug. “By design or accident, the humans of what would become the Confederacy tended toward psychic abilities. Again, through design or accident, we found this out and created the ghosts—superior assassins with mind-reading powers. It’s a horrible process—only a few children make it out of the process in any usable state. And, until recently, the Confederate’s control over them seemed unbreakable.”
“Lieutenant Sarah Kerrigan. How did you break their control over her?”
“That’s a case where one side gets better armor, and the other side gets a bigger gun,” Mengsk said with a smile. “Suffice it to say that the control over her was broken, and broken in such a way that she was left amazingly intact and generally useful.”
“And grateful.”
“And grateful,” Mengsk admitted. “And she has appeared often enough that the Confederates are in a tizzy about it.”
“Which suits you just fine,” said Mike. “But you were busy digressing?”
“Yes. Now we get to the Jacobs disk. It turns out that our pestilent friends the Zerg are attuned to psychic emanations. Apparently the wavelengths that the ghosts function on are similar to those that the higher-level Zerg use to control the lesser ones. So they can zero in on them at close range.”
“How close?” Mike asked, thinking suddenly of Kerrigan’s activities in the Sara and Antiga systems.
“For a normal telepath, very, very close. Tens of yards at best. By that time a hydralisk can smell them anyway. But that’s part of the technology the Confederates have used in their tower defenses and other anti-ghost detectors.”
“Guns and armor. Can the ghosts read Zerg minds like they do humans’?”
“It’s much more painful. And yes, the Confederates tried. They came away with the idea that the Zerg are an ultimate evolutionary success stories: everything is either genetic material for their creations or meat to be fed to their children. They operate off a hierarchy of hive minds, each greater than the ones below it, growing up to near-planetary consciousnesses.”
“Sounds appealing.” Mike took another long sip of his brandy. It burned the back of his throat and reminded him he was human.
“Nasty. The Protoss are as bad,” said Mengsk. “Mind you, this is all from the Zerg viewpoint that’s recorded on the disks, but the Protoss are the ultimate genetic purists. They see themselves as the judges of the universe, eradicating any life that gets out of hand and does not meet their standard of perfection.”
“Genetic Survivors versus Genetic Xenophobes. A match made in hell.”
“Very much so. So the Confederates discover the Zerg and discover the telepathic attraction. They want more Zerg available.”
“More? Why in the name of God would they want more?”
“The nonlinear nature of war, son. They were looking for a weapon with all the advantages of nukes and none of the downside, like radiation or bad press. The Zergs were perfect—they were ugly-buggy aliens that the Confederates could unleash on anyone, and then come in afterwards and eliminate. A pocket plague of monsters.”
“You said you thought they were breeding them.”
“And I was wrong about that,” Mengsk said smoothly, “Breeding them is much more complex than just capturing a bunch of zerglings and putting them in the same cage. So they needed to lure more into their traps, and that’s where the telepaths came in.”
“But the telepaths have limited range.”
“Yes,” Mengsk agreed. “So they worked on improving that range. What you pulled out of the Jacobs Installation was the plans for a Transplanar Psionic Waveform Emitter. Nice name, and fairly self-descriptive. With it they could boost the power of a telepath and make it an interplanetary beacon for the Zerg, drawing them in like moths to a lantern.”
Mike was silent for a moment, then said, “The Sara system.”
“Exactly. That’s what I mean when I say they were using those planets as a testing ground for their weapons. They brought the Zerg to Sara, and the Protoss came after them. But they brought more than just a couple zerglings—they brought the whole Zerg ecosystem and power structure into play, which they didn’t expect. And now the Zerg are moving from system to system at will, directed by their own intelligence, intent on either transforming humanity or consuming it.”
“So you know how to defeat them?” Mike asked.
“Other than blasting each and every one of them into its and burning their nests, no.” Mengsk leaned forward. “But I do know how to send them in the directions I want them to go.”
“How does that help?” Mike shook his head. Had the brandy made him suddenly stupid?
Mengsk leaned back. “There was one piece of truth in that news report your doppelgänger delivered. There is a serious lockade forming around Antiga. The Confederates are hoping to keep us penned up until either the Zerg or the Protoss destroy us.”
“And we’re just sitting here?”
“No. I’m already doing something. We built an emitter, based on the plans you liberated. We’re going to take it into the heart of Confederate territory and set it off. Every Zerg from as far away as ten light-years is going to come here. They’re going to fall among the blockaders like falcons on doves. The crash of the Norad II will be a simple fender bender in comparison.”
“But the emitter will only amplify. You need a telepath to . . .” The final circuit closed in Mike’s brain. “Kerrigan. You’re going to use Kerrigan to bring in the Zerg.”
“Very good.”
“You can’t do that!” Mike objected. “You want her to break into a Confederate camp? They’ll have detectors. She’ll never make it!”
“I have a high degree of confidence in the lieutenant.”
”You can’t do that!” Mike repeated.
“You have your tense wrong. I gave the orders for the operation before we sat down for our first game. The good lieutenant should be picking up the emitter in the shops below right about now. If you hurry, you can catch up with her.”
Mike cursed and launched himself from his seat.
“And wish her luck from me!” Mengsk shouted at Mike’s back as the reporter bolted out of the terrorist leader’s quarters. Then Mengsk leaned back, lifted h
is own brandy snifter, and offered a silent toast to the frozen figure of the false Michael Liberty on the screen.
CHAPTER 12
BELLY OF THE BEAST
Aliens were pressing in on human space, and the humans reacted by turning on one another. I can only imagine what the Zerg and the Protoss thought as they landed on planets that consisted of nothing but rebels and Confederates whaling the tar out of each other. They probably thought it was the normal behavior pattern for our race. And I suppose they would be right.
Mengsk’s successes, spread in part by bootleg copies of my own reports, sparked dozens of brushfire wars. Every crank with a gripe took up arms against the ancient Confederate regime. The Confederacy in turn reacted as it always had to armed dissent—with harsher and harsher oppression that in turn spawned other revolts.
And through it all, the Zerg were infiltrating more planets, and the Protoss were turning them to dead lumps. The humans didn’t have so many worlds that they could afford to lose them at this clip. If the two sides had been thinking, they would have joined forces to fight the true menace.
I think everybody was so busy planning and fighting that no one really had time to think.
—THE LIBERTY MANIFESTO
“KERRIGAN!” MIKE SHOUTED IN THE LANDING Bay. The lieutenant was just putting on her helmet. He had no time for armor, but he did grab his duster.
“Liberty,” she said grimly. Mike saw a large device mounted to the side of her Vulture bike. “I’m just heading out.”
“Ride shotgun?”
“Look, normally I’d . . .” she began, then looked at Mike with her deep jade-green eyes. The hairs on the back of Mike’s neck stood up, and he knew that she knew.
Her too-wide lips twitched for a moment. Then she shook her head and said, “It’s your funeral. I’ll need someone to lug the gear anyway. Come on.”
The pair roared out of the hangar, making for the rendezvous point.
Antiga Prime had suffered under the relentless assault. The sky was darker now from the smoke of continuous pyres, and the great loated figure of the world’s gas giant primary hung like a sorrowful god behind a shroud of mourning. In the distance there was the thunder of Arclite artillery, though who was firing, and who they were firing at, was unknown.
They passed abandoned bunkers, cracked open like eggshells, surrounded by the partially buried detritus of war: broken weapons and shattered men. The thunder grew louder, and Liberty realized they were heading into the heart of the storm.
“We’ve got siege tanks and Goliaths,” Kerrigan said over the comm link, “trying to punch a hole in their lines. We slip through and into Confederate territory. Regret coming now?”
“Maybe a little.” Mike knew that the ghost knew his answer even before he spoke.
“So Mengsk gave you the whole song and dance,” she continued. Mike frowned, concerned that the telepath was rummaging through his thoughts so easily. “Got you to come along.”
“Check my mental replay again, Lieutenant,” said Mike. “Mengsk never asked me to go.”
“He didn’t have to. He knows the buttons to press on people. Probably he felt that if he ordered you to come help, you’d probably just dump him then and there.”
“He’s probably right.”
“He usually is. That’s why it’s probably a good idea you’re along.”
Up ahead, a pile of boulders vaporized in a massive explosion. Kerrigan brought the cycle up short.
“That shouldn’t happen,” she said. “Our siege tanks know we’re coming this way. Did Duke screw up his artillery spotting on purpose, or . . .”
Mike heard the whistling of another set of incoming rounds. “It’s their tanks!” he shouted. “They’ve broken through our lines!”
Kerrigan gunned the engine the moment he said it, tearing the Vulture at a sharp angle to its original course of travel. The road ahead vanished in a crescendo of flying earth and rock as another round tracked closer. The shattered earth was too much for the limited grav units, and the entire bike shook.
“It’s a bit—” Mike began.
“Sorry for the rough ride,” Kerrigan snapped over the comm link. “Just hang on!”
Next time let me finish my sentence, thought Mike, and felt Kerrigan shrug on the bike.
The Confederates must have had a spotter. The missile fire tracked them mercilessly, staying about a hundred yards behind them. Kerrigan took them into a ravine that had long since lost anything that looked like water.
“Let’s see them follow in here,” she said.
Mike heard the high-pitched whine of metal slicing through air, “Wraiths!” he yelled into the comm link.
The fighter spacecraft came in low and hard, lasting both sides of the ravine with their 25-millimeter burst-lasers. The scrub was incinerated at a touch, and the fighters pulled up, unable to see their prey through the smoke they had generated.
“They’re herding us,” Kerrigan’s voice crackled over the comm link. “But to where?”
The ground beneath the hover-cycle suddenly changed in texture, from red clays and brownish slates to a mottled clumping of gray-black moss.
“Creep!” said Mike, as soon as he had recognized it. “They’re herding us into Zerg territory!”
Kerrigan cursed and threw on the brakes, but the creep beneath the grav-fields provided no traction for the bike’s transducer coils. The thin bike started to fishtail, then skewed horribly to one side, plowing up a thick crust of the creep like foam on a wave.
Mike shouted, and Kerrigan yelled something. The reporter clutched the container of the psi emitter, half hoping that it would provide some protection. He was sure that if anyone could get them through this, it would be the ghost lieutenant.
Then the ground opened up beneath them, and they both tumbled into the darkness.
Sometime later, Mike heard Kerrigan’s voice, as if from a distance, “Liberty?”
“Urg,” was the best Mike could reply. Hell, she can read my mind, let her read this.
“Is the psi emitter all right?” she asked.
“Oh yeah. I cushioned its fall with my body.”
He opened his eyes and discovered he was lying in soft, recently churned earth. That must have been what broke their fall as they pitched down the rabbit hole.
He looked up. There was a jagged hole in the ceiling, probably where they tore through the creep matting. Already the thick webbing was reknitting across the opening.
Mike spat out some blood. He had bitten the inside of his mouth in the fall. The rest of his body seemed battered but generally unharmed. His duster was caked with soft earth. He would feel the bruises tomorrow.
If I’m lucky, he thought.
“If we’re both lucky,” said Kerrigan. She was already on her feet, sweeping the area with a wrist-mounted light. She had slung her canister rifle over her shoulder.
Mike stood up, and found himself wobbling but unhurt. “Y’all right?” he managed.
“Not bad,” said the ghost. “I landed on my pride, which is, I’m afraid, a lost cause. Had to shoot it, put it out of its misery. We’re patsies. Fools. Mooks. Rubes.”
“No one expected the Confederates—” Mike began.
“To use the terrain and situation to their advantage? Exactly. Which is why we’re patsies. They came out to meet our attack, and then flushed us into the one place we don’t want to be.”
“You know, this would be easier if you—”
“Let you finish your sentences. Sorry. Nervous habit right now. You’re practically broadcasting your fear, and that’s irritating me.”
Like anybody wouldn’t be afraid in this situation, Mike thought, walking over to the remains of the Vulture bike.
“The bike is shot,” Kerrigan said, without looking, and of course she was right. The frame was bent in three places, so that the long, lean vehicle had been turned into a twisted corkscrew. Something important had been punctured and was leaking into the ground. The bike, in spite
of all its metal and shaped ceramic, had taken the fall worse than he had.
“This way,” said Kerrigan, pointing sharply one way along the corridor.
“Any clue why?”
“No, but something large and foul-thinking is in the other direction. You get to carry the emitter.”
Mike hoisted the emitter in its container and followed. He thought about the lieutenant’s mood. After a few minutes Kerrigan said, “It’s a feedback loop.”
“Stop doing that.”
“But it is. Your fear is sent to me, and I’m in turn taking it out on you. Which increases your anger.” She paused for a moment. “Something’s real strange here. Wrong. I can handle this kind of thing normally. Most of the time.”
Mike thought of the Zerg’s supposed connection with telepaths, then wished he hadn’t.
Kerrigan’s too-wide lips twisted in a grim smile. “Yeah, I know. Raynor already gave me grief about it at the briefing with Arcturus, thank you very much. It does explain the Confederacy’s interest in telepaths. And also there have been a lot of MIAs among the Confederate telepaths. Even outside the ghost units, I hear things.”
“Think the Zerg are collecting their own telepath subjects?” Mike asked, then realized that Kerrigan had let him finish his sentence.
“Uh-huh. Hang on, something’s up ahead.” She pulled out her side arm and edged forward, her other hand, the one with the wristlight, pointing ahead.
The something was hanging across the passageway like a great spider. Her light flashed against it, and it shrank away from the beam. It was a great eye, human in appearance, its pupil contracting under the harshness of the wristlight’s beam.
Mike felt a wave of revulsion and nausea sweep over him. Apparently Kerrigan felt it as well, and her emotions were compounded through Mike’s mind. She let out a loud curse and fired a short burst into the twitching orb.
The eye-thing let out a screech that sounded like glass and blew apart, the muscular strands of its web peeling back toward the wall like broken rubber bands.
“What was—?” Mike began.
