by Timothy Zahn
“There’s no doubt,” Matt said grimly. “I’ve put our fleet on Red Alert, and Artanis has done the same with his.”
Valerian nodded. Devourers were one of the zerg’s preeminent space-superiority weapons: a flying monstrosity that could spit globs of acid spores that would rapidly eat at a warship’s hull, with devastating results. If Zagara was sending devourers against them…
“The thing is,” Matt continued, “there seems to be only the one of them out there.”
“Just one?” Valerian asked, frowning. Usually devourers attacked in packs. “You’re sure?”
“Unless they’ve figured out how to cloak,” Matt said. “And as I said, it’s not moving anywhere near their usual attack speed.”
“So what is it doing?”
“Not a clue,” Matt said as they reached the sensor station. “Commander?”
“It’s still on intercept course, sir,” the tactical officer said. “Seems to be slowing…Wait a minute.” Abruptly, he stiffened, and his hand darted out to slap a button. “Alert!” he shouted as the flashing red lights of Red Alert went to the solid red of Imminent Attack. “Missile released—on intercept course!”
“Stand by point defenses!” Matt called.
Valerian leaned closer to the displays, his pulse thudding in his ears. The devourer had released something, all right. And that something was headed directly toward the Hyperion.
But slowly. Very slowly. In fact, not much faster than the devourer’s own leisurely pace. “That doesn’t look like an acid-spore glob,” he said.
“I agree, Emperor,” the tactical officer said, frowning at his displays. “It appears to be another zerg.”
“A zerg?” Matt echoed. “What species?”
“I don’t know, sir,” the officer said, still frowning. “It’s bigger than a broodling or a bile swarm. Certainly not glave wurms.”
Valerian exchanged looks with Matt. And devourers didn’t launch any of those types of biological weapons anyway. At least not the devourers they were accustomed to fighting. “You’re sure it’s not just a strangely shaped acid-spore glob?” Valerian asked.
“No, Emperor,” the officer said firmly. “That I’m sure of. It’s holding its shape too well. But it’s still too far out for me to tell what kind of zerg it is.”
“Admiral?” the officer at the point-defense station called. “Should we take it down, sir?”
Matt rubbed at his cheek. “Not yet,” he said. “Let’s let it get a little closer.”
“The devourer’s veering off, sir,” the tactical officer said. “Changed course to…It appears to be heading for the protoss mothership.”
“Comm, send an alert on the bogey to Hierarch Artanis,” Matt ordered. “He’s probably already on it, but let’s make sure.”
“Unidentified missile resolving, sir,” the tactical officer added. “By configuration, I’d say it’s a hydralisk. But the size doesn’t fit.”
Matt sucked in an audible breath. “I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I do believe so,” Valerian agreed, the knot that had formed in his stomach dissolving. “Commander, can we track where on the planet that devourer came from?”
“Not all the way, Emperor,” the tactical officer said, keying his board. “Here’s what we’ve got.”
The track appeared on the display, and Valerian smiled. “Admiral?”
“I see it, sir,” Matt agreed. “Point defenses? Stand down. Hangar Control, I want a tug sent out to retrieve that object. Be careful not to damage it.”
“I don’t understand, sir,” the tactical officer said. “What is it?”
“A present from Overqueen Zagara, perhaps,” Matt told him. “She evidently had her zerg sift through the debris around Point Two and dig up a dead psyolisk for us to examine.”
The officer huffed out a snort. “She might have told us.”
“I’m guessing she wanted to go to Point Two personally, or at least get close enough to supervise the operation,” Valerian said. “Maybe the transmitter she was using was permanently installed in the conference structure and couldn’t be easily moved.”
“Though she could have told Abathur to call it in,” Matt added. “Unless he was already out of the area. Would have saved us a lot of misunderstanding and potential gunfire.”
“Maybe she did tell him to contact us,” Valerian said, gazing at the display. “Maybe creating that exact effect was why he ignored her.”
He felt Matt’s eyes on him. “You’re thinking he’s the one pulling the strings here?”
“I don’t see it being anyone except him or Zagara,” Valerian said. “I also can’t see how anyone but a zerg with an Overqueen’s level of control could get a devourer to deliver the psyolisk to us—devourers aren’t usually transports, and we’re way too far out for any zerg with only local reach. If this is a goodwill gesture, it has to be coming from Zagara, which leaves Abathur as the likely candidate to be the enemy.”
“If it is a goodwill gesture,” Matt warned. “That hasn’t yet been proven. I’m also a little vague on what Abathur’s motive would be.”
“Same here,” Valerian admitted. “But I think we need to let it play out.” He pointed at the display. “Actually, I’m thinking she dug up two dead psyolisks. We should probably let Artanis know he’s about to get a delivery of his own.”
“I’ll handle it personally.” Matt tapped the tactical officer’s shoulder. “And be sure to keep a close eye on everything else, Commander. If this gift isn’t from Zagara, it could be someone’s idea of a diversion.”
“Yes, sir.”
Matt headed off toward the comm station. “And while you’re doing all that,” Valerian said to the tactical officer, “signal the med section. Tell them to wake up Dr. Talise Cogan and prep the biolab.
“Tell them they’re about to perform the most important autopsy of their lives.”
—
After what had happened to the survey team’s dropship, Cruikshank had fully expected that the protoss would have to beat off an attack or two themselves on their way through the atmosphere.
They didn’t. But it was probably simply a matter of the zerg not being sufficiently quick on the uptake. The shuttle and its twin-phoenix escort had reached the five-hundred-meter mark and were starting their final deceleration when a dozen mutalisks appeared over the craggy mountains to the north and came screaming toward them. But they were too far away, and the ships were too low, and even as the phoenix pilots rotated to bring their ion cannons to bear, the mutalisks veered away.
Which was a shame. Cruikshank had seen what protoss ion cannons could do to flying zerg, and watching this lot get shredded would have been highly entertaining.
Of course, maybe that was why they were leaving. Maybe whoever was running the show also remembered what ion-cannon fire did to pretty little zerg carapaces.
Not that retreating now meant they wouldn’t be back. They could have done a one-eighty, headed straight back over the mountains, and just kept going. But instead they’d done a ninety and headed northeast toward where the big mass of returning zerg were clawing, rolling, and lumbering toward Focal Point Three.
Clawing, rolling, and lumbering straight at him.
The phoenix pilots obviously didn’t believe the mutalisks were giving up, either. They continued to rotate their ships as the shuttle settled to the ground, keeping their weapons trained on the retreating zerg in case they had second thoughts.
Cruikshank glowered at his display with a few second thoughts of his own. Up in high orbit, this had seemed like a good idea. Now, at ground level, he wasn’t nearly so sure.
We will deploy here, Rahas ordered as the shuttle’s starboard hatch opened. The two sentries floated out, with the line of Templar and Nerazim following close behind. We will take the center of the line. You and your terrans, Colonel Abram Cruikshank, will guard our flanks.
“Understood,” Cruikshank said, clamping down
on his temper. So he and the rest of the Dominion forces were to be relegated to support positions while Rahas and the protoss took the brunt of the upcoming action?
Typical. Big egotistical glory hounds.
But Admiral Horner had told him to play nice, and he would do his best to comply. This was war, and egos didn’t enter into it.
Besides, as he’d already noted, neither force could do this alone. Rahas could push the Dominion forces to the sidelines if that soothed protoss pride, but he couldn’t win without them.
Cruikshank took another look at the outside display, running his eyes over the terrain. He’d already studied it as best he could from orbit, but there was no substitute for looking over a battlefield at ground level. If he anchored his goliaths at the ends, two at the edge of the marshland and three by the cliffs, and put the marines inside to screen them and take out anything small—
He froze, feeling his eyes widening. Across the compartment, the line of protoss heading out of the hatch suddenly staggered, two of them nearly falling over. For a fraction of a second he just gaped—
And then it clicked. Protoss—staggering—
“Alert!” he shouted into his comm, turning the Warhound toward the hatchway and kicking it to speed. And all the terrans were still inside, damn it, waiting for the protoss who’d insisted on going out first. “We’re under attack. Get the hell outside and—”
But it was already too late. He’d barely made it two steps, and was wondering if he could even get past the protoss still slumped in the hatchway without crushing any of them, when there was a sudden, violent crack like overhead thunder, and the deck canted beneath him, throwing his Warhound sideways across the compartment.
He slammed full-bore into the bulkhead, the impact shoving him painfully into the Warhound’s safety harness. A second later, as a scattering of curses filled his headset, he was thrown back again as the deck righted itself.
“What the hell?” someone bit out.
“I said outside,” Cruikshank snarled. At least whatever had thrown the shuttle around had also scattered the protoss clear of the hatchway. He got his balance back and clumped the Warhound outside.
A quick scan showed no zerg closing in on them from the east, south, or west. That was something, anyway. He took a few more steps away from the hatch, double-checking, then turned around to look at the shuttle.
It didn’t take much to rock a shuttle that way, the dumbfounded thought occurred to him as he took in the situation. All you needed was a devourer, flying in low from the exact opposite direction the pack of mutalisks had taken earlier when they retreated, ramming into the ship at full speed. Probably had timed the attack for the moment the protoss pilot and crew were all dazed and confused. The fact that the phoenixes’ ion cannons were pointed the wrong direction had probably been a factor, too.
The phoenixes.
Cursing under his breath, he hurried around the shuttle’s stern.
He expected the worst, and he got it. Both protoss fighter craft were also down, with a devourer lying across each one. Both were still uselessly facing the direction of the departing mutalisks, one of them with its nose buried halfway into the ground.
And then that final bit of Cruikshank’s assessment sank in. The moment the protoss pilot and crew were all dazed…
He cursed and kicked the Warhound into motion, continuing his run around the shuttle’s stern and past the phoenixes. Everything they’d gleaned so far about the psyolisks indicated that they had to be relatively close in order to wrest control of normal zerg away from the sector’s more powerful but far more distant broodmother.
Sure enough, there they were, slithering through the tall grass as fast as they could go. A pair of the familiar red-spot-backed mini hydralisks.
Briefly, he wondered if they’d been lurking in the grass while they guided the devourers to their crash-landings or whether they’d ridden one of the monsters in, suicide-attack style. Not that it mattered to the end result. After lining up his rail guns, he fired a round at each of them.
The Warhound’s plasma-field-charged slugs didn’t carry the same momentum as a gauss rifle’s spikes, so the impacts didn’t send the psyolisks flying across the terrain the way a C-14 burst would have. Still, blasting the psyolisks into fine mists of carapace dust and purple blood was equally satisfying. “Everyone okay?” he called, lowering the weapons. “Sound off.”
One by one, in good order, the marines, reapers, and goliaths checked in. Midway through the count a yellow light winked on in the comm section of Cruikshank’s board: the Hyperion calling.
Well, Horner would just have to wait. Cruikshank had more urgent matters on his plate right now. The Dominion force finished checking in. “Rahas, what about your people?” he called. “Rahas? Hey, protoss—somebody—talk to me. Is everyone all right?”
This is Alikka, the dark templar’s voice came in his mind. Rahas has been injured.
Cruikshank snarled a curse. The battle hadn’t even started, and already they had casualties. “What happened?”
He was partially crushed when the devourer’s attack moved the shuttle.
“How bad is it? Will he be able to direct your part of the battle line?”
He is unconscious, and cannot participate in the battle. I have ordered for him to be taken back aboard the shuttle.
The ship that currently had a dead devourer lying across the top. “You want us to get that devourer off? Between the goliaths and me, I think we can shift it.”
There is no time, Alikka said grimly. Battle will soon be upon us. There is also no point to moving any of the devourer carcasses. The hulls were breached by the impacts of the attack, and neither the shuttle nor the phoenixes will return home without repairs.
“What about warp fields?” Cruikshank asked. “Can’t you use one of those to get Rahas back?”
They are not functioning correctly, Alikka said.
“The psyolisks?”
So we have concluded, Alikka said. But do not be concerned, Colonel Abram Cruikshank. The medical pod will begin the healing process immediately. Rahas will recover.
“Got it,” Cruikshank said. Assuming any of them lived through the battle, which was starting to look less and less likely. “Are any other protoss hurt?”
The remainder of my force is unharmed. I will now take command.
“Yeah, I figured that,” Cruikshank said, eyeing the yellow light. “Better start deploying your people. Goliaths One and Two, head to the edge of the marshland—twenty-meter separation. Goliaths Three, Four, and Five, you’re by the mountains. Platoon One, you’re supporting the marshland group; Platoon Two, you’re at the mountains. Got it? Double-time it to your positions. I’ll stay here by the ships; reapers, you hang back here with me.”
He waited to make sure everyone was heading to their proper positions. Then, finally, he tapped the long-range comm switch over the yellow light. “Cruikshank.”
“Where the hell have you been?” Horner’s frustrated voice burst into his headset. “We tried to warn you about those devourers. Now it’s too late.”
“With all due respect, Admiral, it was always too late,” Cruikshank ground out. “Turns out psyolisk power is just as good at knocking out our long-range comms as those psi blocks Halkman’s tearm is carrying.”
There was a brief pause. “I see,” Horner said, sounding marginally less angry. “What’s your situation?”
“Not good,” Cruikshank conceded, shifting his gaze to the far end of the grassland. Any minute now, the zerg horde would come charging out of the forested area over there. “The shuttle and phoenixes are all down, so scratch whatever air support we were counting on. Rahas is down—not dead, but out of the fight—and Alikka has taken over the protoss contingent. Protoss warp fields are inoperable. No Dominion casualties yet, but that’s more from luck than anything else. Rahas could just as easily have sent us out first, and some of us might have been under the shuttle’s edge when the devourer knocked it up on
its side.”
“Do you want me to try to get you some air support?” Horner asked. “We could get some Wraiths to you in about forty minutes.”
“Thanks for the thought, sir, but forty minutes is way too long,” Cruikshank said. “What we’ve got is what we’ve got.”
There was a moment of silence. “There is one other option,” Horner said, lowering his voice. “You could pull back right now, and we could hit the zerg force with another nuke.”
Cruikshank stared in disbelief at the yellow comm light. Was Admiral Matt Horner, a man who’d so loudly and publicly stated his contempt for Emperor Arcturus Mengsk’s ruthlessness, actually advocating dropping a second nuke on Gystt? “I don’t think that would be a good idea, sir,” he said carefully. “It would take out the protoss ships, along with Commander Rahas, who’s currently undergoing treatment in one of the medical pods.”
“You can’t get him out?”
“Once treatment has started?” Cruikshank shook his head. “I doubt it. Not safely. He would be a sitting duck.” He peered at the protoss ships. “And from the position of the impacts, it’s probable the devourers took out the psionic boosters, too. So Alikka and his people are also on their own.”
“And you don’t think Alikka would be willing to leave Rahas behind as collateral damage without direct orders?”
Cruikshank drew himself up as much as he could while strapped into a Warhound’s safety harness. “I won’t leave him behind,” he bit out. “I don’t mind watching protoss die in battle. To tell you the truth, I kind of enjoy it. I don’t even mind killing one in combat, if it comes to that. But this particular protoss is part of my force, and he was injured in the line of duty, and I’ll be damned if I’ll abandon him. Sir.”
“At ease, Colonel,” Horner said. Cruikshank couldn’t tell from his voice whether he was angry or just surprised. Right now, he didn’t really care. “You’re the man on the ground. It’s your call.”
“Thank you, sir,” Cruikshank said stiffly. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a battle to prep for.”
He keyed off. And a battle to lose, he added silently to himself.