STARCRAFT™: LIBERTY’S CRUSADE

by Jeff Grubb

  “Anything you can do to help would be appreciated, ma’am,” Raynor said, grinning.

  “Piece of cake,” said Kerrigan, reaching up over her shoulder and pulling the canister rifle like a sword from its sheath. “Lay down some suppression for me while I sneak up on them, will you?”

  “Left or right flank?” asked Raynor.

  “Left, I think,” said Kerrigan, and smiled again. The smile just accented the wildness in her eyes. “That’s your left, Jimmy.”

  “You got it, Sarah,” said Raynor.

  Kerrigan touched a device at her belt. Her cloaking device activated and she faded from view as Raynor bellowed orders at the remainder of the squad. The gauss rifles coughed as they laid down their own devastating layer of spikes in response to the Confederate fire. Their sudden assault silenced the marines, but the Arclite’s shock cannon continued to boom heavy shots over the rebels’ heads.

  “So you think she can do it, ‘Jimmy’?” Mike asked.

  James Raynor flushed and shrugged beneath his armor. “Probably. But it won’t mean a damn unless we can flag a lift out of this dump.”

  A curtain of dueling impaler spikes flew between the two camps, and Mike wondered how Kerrigan could dance across such a battlefield. One stray shot could take out her cloak, and she would bleed under the gauss rifle’s spikes like any other soldier.

  Then the far flank of the Confederate flank started to collapse, accompanied by the high-pitched whine of the canister rifle. One after another the Confederate Marines twitched and fell under an unseen sniper. The flank was vulnerable, as marines started firing randomly at their suspected assailant.

  There was a flicker, and Sarah Kerrigan appeared, briefly, atop the barricade of wrecked cars. She flickered out again, and the air around her was filled with spikes.

  Raynor bellowed for a charge, and the remnants of the squad rose from their hiding places and ran across the plaza, their heavy boots shattering the faux granite of the walkways.

  The siege tank’s protective screen of Confederate marines was thrown into disarray, though the Arclite they were protecting continued to hammer the rebels’ position. The 80-millimeter cannons quickly found the range of the charging rebels, while the main shock cannon brought itself around smartly, firing heavy 120-millimeter shells as it did.

  Kerrigan appeared again, this time on the main deck of the siege tank, right beneath the cannon. She shoved the barrel of her canister rifle into the turret ring, then somersaulted away as the Confederate rifle fire closed in on her.

  Mike imagined he could hear the rising charge of the canister rifle set to overload, and shouted out a warning. Raynor and his men needed no warning, and they dropped in place.

  A red flare lossomed at the base of the tank’s turret, and the blast scattered the remaining Confederates. The lesser guns were silenced, but the large shock cannon continued its traverse, firing round after round as it swung around, its programming jammed.

  The shock cannon took a bite out of the corner of one of the two flanking buildings, and the ground rumbled beneath them. The cannon kept going, its barrel now glowing a dull red as it tried to swivel around, but was trapped by the structure. It continued to fire, and the great structure shook from the continued assault. The top of the tank popped open, and the crew within tried to scramble out, like clowns spilling from an overstuffed car in a circus act.

  They never made it. There was a tremor that ripped through the entire plaza, and the pummeled building collapsed on the tank at its feet, tons of steel and masonry falling in on itself, raising a hot cloud of dust. Only in the quake of the building’s collapse did the Arclite finally stop firing.

  Raynor picked himself up off the shattered pavement, along with the remains of the squad. Mike pulled himself up as well and shouted, “Kerrigan? Lieutenant?” His voice sounded small and lost in the wake of the explosion.

  Kerrigan wafted up alongside them, gray as the ghost she was supposed to be. Mike realized it was dust adhering to the cloaking field itself, forming a shell surrounding the telepath. She hit another control on her belt and turned tangible again. The lines of wear and exhaustion were now tight around her face, but her eyes were still bright. The cloak took something out of her, but she didn’t want to admit it.

  “Target neutralized, Captain,” said Kerrigan. “But I’m afraid we can’t go that way now.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Raynor. “The Confederates have to be regrouping by now. They should be mounting a counteroffensive soon enough. We just can’t hold this area. What we need is a way to punch through the jammer.”

  “Jim,” said Mike. “Three blocks west of here is the UNN broadcast building. Its circuits have been shielded, and it has generators in the basement. They may still have enough juice to overcome the interference.”

  Raynor nodded. “It might just be wreckage now, but it’s worth a shot.” He motioned the patrol forward. Kerrigan fell in line alongside Mike.

  “So you were just in the neighborhood,” Mike said to the telepath. “You just happened to be around?”

  “I go where Arcturus Mengsk thinks I am needed most,” said Sarah Kerrigan, barely hiding her amusement at Mike’s thoughts.

  “And what’s our fabled leader up to this time?” Mike asked. “Jim’s right. I’m getting fragmentary reports of reinforcements rolling in from the suburbs. Walkers, tanks, and bikes. It’s going to get real hot here real soon. Has he got a plan for this?”

  “He’s told me he has.”

  The Universe News Network Building had fared pretty badly but was still intact. The windows along the east side were nothing more than empty holes, and one of the great letters had fallen hundreds of feet to impale itself in the twisted wreckage of the concrete beneath.

  Raynor looked up at the building. “I hope the equipment you’re thinking of isn’t in the penthouse.”

  “Upper levels are for management,” said Mike. “The worker bees toil on the fourth floor. And the broadcast booth and generators are in the basement.”

  Though his tone was glib, his heart sank. This had been his base of operations for years, his home away from home. He had grabbed a dog and soda where the huge “N” now rested, arguing planetary politics and local ordinances with the copywriters and stringers. There had been a pretzel stand next to the honor boxes. Now there were just twisted reinforcement bars jutting out of the concrete, and no sign of survivors.

  The patrol moved inside. Mike didn’t expect any inhabitants, but the ghostly stillness covered the lobby like a shroud. Even on weekends there was a continual hubbub here. Now there were only scattered paper and asbestos dust shaken loose from the ceiling tiles.

  It was quiet, save for the crunch of their own boots. Mike glanced up the broad stairs to the mezzanine and arcade levels (quicker than the elevators even when the lifts were running), and thought about finding his old desk. Wondered if his stuff was still there.

  He wondered if there was anything there he really needed.

  Raynor caught him looking up. “I thought you said the equipment was downstairs.”

  “Yeah, just dealing with my own ghosts,” said Mike, a grim tenor in his voice. He led the squad through the debris, downward, into the building’s primary basement.

  Whatever else Mike thought of management, they were green-tag former military, and that meant they thought in terms of triple redundancy. The main power had been cut, but the broadcast studio was packing its own batteries, and if need be, old gasoline generators for power. The link to the tower was still solid, despite all the fighting, and UNN kept underground lines to various outposts through the globe-girdling metropolis. Many of these had been cut, and their red telltales winked evilly on the primary board.

  Even the air conditioning was still working, and their visors frosted at the sudden temperature change.

  Raynor looked around uncomfortably. It was too easy for a stray shot from the outside chaos to bring the building down on top of them, to make this their tom
b. To Mike he said, “This going to take long?”

  Mike shook his head as he ran leads from the field comm unit into the main board. “Just need to boost the signal. Piece of cake. Here we go.” He flipped a toggle and said, “Raynor’s Rangers to Mother Ship. Do you read? Rangers to Mother Ship. Hyperion, you there?”

  The speakers crackled and spat, and a balding female face appeared on the miniscreen. “Mother Ship. Crap, Liberty, you almost blew out my eardrums. What are you broadcasting on?” The voice was vaguely familiar.

  “Old UNN surplus. Power of the press,” said Mike. “We’re at the Network offices. Unit’s pretty shot up, and the uglies are regrouping. Need an evac.”

  “Working,” said the voice on the other end, and Mike placed it. The tech from the bridge of the Norad II. One of Duke’s people. “There’s a park four locks south of you. Can you pull back that far?”

  Mike looked at Raynor and Kerrigan. Both nodded. “Affirmative,” he said. “See you there, thirty minutes ETA.”

  “Roger that,” said the tech. “Hold on. Patching you through to headquarters.”

  Mike’s brow furrowed at the delay, then Mengsk’s graying face materialized on the screen. “Michael,” he said, his voice grim, and Mike noticed lines of concern at the corners of his eyes. “Are Kerrigan and Raynor there?”

  “Still with you,” said Raynor. “The lieutenant’s here as well.”

  “Excellent, report when you get back.” Something beeped to the terrorist’s right and he reached over. General Duke appeared on another screen.

  “This is Duke.” He looked more than ever like a foul-tempered gorilla. “The emitters are secured and on-line. Returning to the command ship.”

  “Emitters?” Mike asked. “Psi emitters?”

  Kerrigan leaned on the console over Mike’s shoulder, her face close to the screen. “Who authorized the use of psi emitters?”

  Mengsk’s face grew stony. “I did, Lieutenant.”

  “You going to bring the Zerg here? Siccing them on the Confederates on Antiga was bad enough. This is insane!”

  Raynor broke in as well. “She’s right, man. Think this through.”

  Mengsk let out an angry exhalation. “I have thought it through, believe me.” He paused and watched the three of them through the network feed cameras. On another screen, General Duke looked like the cat that swallowed the canary. “You all have your orders. Carry them out.”

  Then the screen went dead.

  “He’s lost it,” said Raynor. “He’s gone over the edge.”

  Kerrigan shook her head. “No. He has to have a plan.”

  Raynor said firmly, “Yeah, he has a plan. He plans to let the Protoss and the Zerg burn up the Confederacy one planet at a time, and take over what’s left.”

  Kerrigan shook her head again. “He’s always had a way to take care of things. He’s not afraid to sacrifice, but he’s no fool.”

  “He’s not afraid to sacrifice,” said Raynor grimly. “Confederates. Zerg. Protoss. When is it going to be our turn?”

  “I’ll talk to him when we get back,” said Kerrigan.

  Mike sat there, staring at the now-dead screen. “He’s a politician,” he said. “He weighs every decision on how far it advances him on his personal path to power. Never forget that.”

  Raynor opened his mouth to say something, but there was the sound of rifle fire above.

  “Visitors,” said Kerrigan.

  “We’ve been rumbled,” said Raynor. “Probably they caught some of the signal we pushed out. Let’s go.”

  “Right. One more thing,” said Mike, pushing himself away from the console and heading deeper into the basement.

  “Liberty?” said Raynor. “What the hell?”

  “He’s after something else,” said Kerrigan. “I’ll go after him. You take care of the visitors. I read only a handful of marines. You can handle it. Watch out, one’s a firebat.” And she was gone as well.

  She tracked Mike to another staircase, this one spiraling into the dimly lit darkness below. Pumping her canister rifle, she carefully climbed down after him.

  Mike was in front of a steel door, bashing at the padlock with the butt of his gun.

  “We should go,” said Kerrigan.

  “In a moment. This is Handy Anderson’s secret stash. His secrets. I hadn’t thought about it until just now. No one was usually allowed down here. It’s supposed to be the records backup, the records morgue, but it’s also where Anderson kept his dirt on everybody in the city.”

  “It’s data you can use,” said Kerrigan calmly, picking up Mike’s surface thoughts. “You can look through it and see if there were any warnings, anything that was kept hidden, about the Zerg and the Protoss. Stuff that might have made a difference, if only people had known about it.”

  “Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” said Mike.

  “Stand aside,” said the ghost. The canister rifle whined under a charge, and she fired a bolt into the lock. Fragments of metal flew in all directions.

  The cache, no bigger than a broom closet, was lined with thin shelves. There were boxes of disks on all the shelves.

  “We can’t take it all,” said Kerrigan.

  “Take as much as you can.” Mike opened his own pack and pulled out supplies and spare ammo, replacing them with the disks. “If Mengsk is really going to kill this planet, I want some of our reports to survive. And maybe we can figure out what really happened here.”

  Kerrigan opened her own pack and started shoving disks in as well. They would still have to leave the bulk of it behind.

  “Don’t sweat the earlier stuff,” said Mike.

  “You think Mengsk is really serious about the psi emitters?” Kerrigan asked, getting Mike’s answer as soon as she asked.

  Mike spoke anyway. “Like I said, he’s a politician. If he can force the Confederates to back down with a threat of the emitters, he’ll do it. If he doesn’t, well, Tarsonis is one more casualty in his war. He can justify it. Someone on Tarsonis gave the order to kill his homeworld.”

  “But this is the heart of the human worlds. The biggest and the brightest. The center of humanity.”

  “This is Mengsk. With the psi emitters, he’s bigger than worlds.”

  “I can’t believe he’d do this. I’ve read his thoughts, like yours and Jim’s. He wouldn’t do this.”

  “You said yourself that when you’re with him, he believes in every word he says, deep in his heart.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then, next time you’re with him, look deeper. There. That’s as much as we can take. What’s the story topside?”

  Kerrigan said nothing, and Mike wondered if she was thinking about his question or his earlier suggestion. Finally she said, “They’re fine. More Confederates on the way. Let’s go.”

  Mike pulled up his pack and started out of the room. “Think about what I said, okay?”

  “Thinking,” said Kerrigan with a grim smile, “is the one thing a telepath can’t avoid.”

  CHAPTER 15

  THINGS FALL APART (IT’S SCIENTIFIC)

  Everyone hates surprises. In the final days of Tarsonis, surprises were the nature of the campaign. Units appeared where none had been reported, secret transmissions threaded between allies, battle plans were activated that we had no idea were in place. We found out how many moves out those plans had been laid. In a word, we had been foxed.

  But even those in charge got their own surprises. As any operation gets larger and larger, more pieces slip between the fingers, more pieces are ignored, until things start happening that you have no idea were about to occur. That’s what happened to Mengsk at the end, when suddenly some of his loyal soldiers had second thoughts and the chess pieces weren’t moving around the board the way he wanted them to.

  And that’s probably why he kicked the board over. Heckuvan end-game strategy, but it works.

  Supposedly if you are in control of everything, you hate surprises. But I’ll tell you, when you are not in control
, you hate them even more.

  —THE LIBERTY MANIFESTO

  THE DROPSHIP MET THEM IN ATKIN’S SQUARE. AS the remains of Raynor’s team boarded, a group of techs in lightweight armor disembarked. With them was one of Duke’s ghosts, the telepath’s face hidden behind an opaque visor.

  “This ain’t no place for soft targets,” said Raynor. “You boys don’t even have decent armor.”

  “Yeah, but we got orders,” snarled the captain in charge, and they pushed through Raynor’s men and out into the city, heading in the direction from which the rangers had come.

  Mike supposed that Mengsk had figured out there were things to loot from the UNN building. He suddenly felt very good about the backpack full of stolen secrets he had brought with him. Something he could use as leverage with the rebel leader.

  Then he looked at Kerrigan. Kerrigan was looking at Duke’s ghost. The blood had drained from her face.

  “What’s wrong?” Mike asked.

  Kerrigan just shook her head and said, “We’d better get back to the command ship.”

  As soon as they returned to the Hyperion, Raynor was summoned into General Duke’s wardroom to discuss strategy, “at his soonest convenience,” as the message said. Muttering a string of obscenities, the former marshal lumbered forward, not even shucking his battle armor. Mike popped his own visor and seals and climbed out of the suit. Kerrigan, stripping her lighter armor with practiced ease, was already heading for the exit.

  “Hang on,” said the reporter. “The Uber-Mengsk wanted both of us to report in when we got back. I’ll go with you.”

  Kerrigan said, “Let me talk to Arcturus on my own. He’ll be more forthcoming with me.” She strode down the halls of the Hyperion toward the lift to his observation post.

  Mike considered going after Kerrigan, but she was right. The rebel leader and the ghost had a history, and Mengsk would be more willing to open up to her.

  And maybe, Mike thought, she’d be able to pull something useful out the terrorist’s mind. Like what he was thinking in planting more psi emitters.

  Mike looked around. Most of the rest of the unit had stripped and were heading for the showers. Raynor himself would be with the general in the wardroom. Not that the general would be the best company right now, but talking to him beat cooling his heels until Mengsk rang him up.