STARCRAFT™: LIBERTY’S CRUSADE Page 14

  As they rose from the surface, Mike watched the screens. All the ship’s cameras were directed toward the surface. The emitter was already having an effect on the Zergs below. They were boiling out of their nests like angry ants, moving randomly, even attacking each other in psionic-inspired madness. But soon they started descending on the tower where Mike and Kerrigan had left the emitter. A hurricane of living creatures circled the beacon like moths around a flame.

  As the ship rose higher, its sensors picked up other nests, other reactions as the ever-sounding chord that came from Kerrigan’s mind echoed and reverberated, growing stronger by the second. There were radioed cries from Confederate ground troops as they were overwhelmed, and the night side of Antiga Prime was now dotted with small explosions. The rebels had more warning, but those who were too slow to get off the ground were swallowed in the waves of zerglings and hydralisks.

  The dropship continued to rise, and Mike could see the curve of the horizon. There was a right flash along it, and a few seconds later the electromagnetic pulse swept over the ship. The screens went momentarily lank before countermeasures kicked in. One of the great Behemoth-class cruisers, sister ship to the Norad II, had gone down beneath the growing assault.

  Above them the Confederate blockade was already disintegrating. Available ships with landing capability were being rerouted, while others were trying to strafe the now ever-present Zerg.

  There was a triad of glowing triangles that streaked near them, and Mike blinked as they left hot patterns on his retinas. The Protoss were already present—not in force, but still in the atmosphere.

  Then came reports from the ships farthest out. Warps were opening in space, and through the warps were coming hordes of Zerg. The lobster-brain-jellyfish, the queens, the mutalisks, and the strange flying crabs were all erupting from space and descending on Antiga, summoned forth and trapped by its siren call.

  The dropship docked with the larger Hyperion, and the entire crew evacuated the smaller ship. The dropship itself was abandoned, jettisoned from the lock, and left to go spinning down toward the surface. Its presence would only slow the Hyperion from its escape, and there was no time to secure it.

  Mengsk’s ship rose like a bubble among the panicked Confederates and descending Zerg. The Zerg fought only when there was something in their way, and the Confederates did not disappoint, putting their best ships in the path of the assault. There were several more flashes, but the Hyperion showed the explosions as only slightest flickers, each brief dimming representing the deaths of five hundred more Confederate humans in a nuclear fireball.

  Kerrigan was worn and white-faced. Mike was sure she could still hear the psionic call, even at this altitude. It worked on some level that he could not be sure of, and pulled across the depths of space to ring in the enemy. He helped her out of the landing bay.

  Raynor came across them in a gangway. “Congratulations, you two,” he said warmly. “You really lit a fire under the Zerg’s backsides. I don’t know what you said, Lieutenant, but it sure rought them running.”

  Kerrigan’s head came up, her eyes lazing with fury, and even Raynor could see the rage and frustration behind them. Then, as suddenly as it appeared, it was gone, expended, leaving only exhaustion in its wake.

  Raynor reached up to touch Kerrigan’s shoulder. His voice softened, and his forehead creased in concern. “Lieutenant, are you all right?” He separated the words with slight pauses, Mike noted.

  Kerrigan looked up again into Raynor’s eyes, and there was no anger there. Mike thought of the feedback loop—fear reeding fear, concern breeding concern. “I’m fine,” she said, pushing a stray strand of red hair out of her face. “It’s just been very tiring.”

  Mike said, “Mengsk?”

  “Up in his observation dome,” said Raynor. “I think he wants to watch the battle. I left him to it. Nothing I really want to see.”

  “I can report to him, if you want to rest,” Mike said to Kerrigan.

  She paused for a moment, and almost physically wavered. “If you would, Michael,” she said. She was still looking at Raynor.

  “You look really beat,” said Raynor to the lieutenant, his concern so obvious that even Mike could read it. “You want to grab a cuppa joe in the galley? Maybe talk?”

  “Coffee would be nice,” said Kerrigan, and a small smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “Talk too. Yes. Talk would be good.”

  Mike held up a hand and headed for the lift, leaving the pair in the hallway. As he hit the lift doors, he put one thought at the top of his mind, where Kerrigan could easily find it.

  Remember to let him finish his damned sentences, he thought, and then rose to find the architect of Antiga Prime’s destruction.

  Mengsk was alone on the observation deck, his hands behind his back, facing the main screen. The chess set had been set up for a new game, and a fresh pack of cigarettes sat next to the ashtray. Two brandy snifters and a still-corked bottle of cognac rested on the bar.

  All the screens but the main one had been turned off, and the last screen showed a real-time display of Antiga Prime, hovering at the center. Small yellow triangles represented Confederate forces, red triangles the ever-multiplying Zerg. A few blue-white pips that Mike had never seen before were on the surface. There were also a few circles planetside: rebel forces that had been unfortunate not to have escaped in time. As Mike watched, they were subsumed in a wave of red triangles.

  It was a similar story in orbit. More red triangles, each representing tens or hundreds of Zerg fliers, all converging on Antiga Prime. The ships that bolted were untouched. Enough stood and fought to form clustering points as the Zerg swarmed over them, ripping them apart in space.

  Mike remembered the image of the Norad II going down. This was a hundred times worse.

  “We’re pulling away at top speed,” Mengsk said reassuringly. “I have the ship’s computer compensating to keep the scale the same.”

  Mike crossed to the bar, pulled the cork, and poured himself an inch of cognac. He did not pour any for Mengsk.

  “We calculate that, based on the strength of the emissions, we are calling every possible Zerg from twenty-five light-years out to us,” continued Mengsk. “Maybe more. Lieutenant Kerrigan is quite the siren, luring these sailors to their doom.”

  “It took a lot out of her,” Mike said, taking a long pull on his snifter.

  “But not more than she could handle. I am glad you were there for her. She might not have made it, otherwise.”

  Mike felt his face flush, and for a moment thought it only the brandy. “You didn’t leave me much choice, did you?”

  “Not really.” Mengsk shrugged sheepishly and turned toward Mike. Behind him, the red triangles multiplied. There was almost nothing left of the Confederate forces on the ground. “But I’m still glad you were there for her.”

  Mike snorted and took another drink. Mengsk poured himself one. Blue-white triangles were appearing now at the edge of the screen. The Protoss had arrived in force.

  Mengsk looked at the screen and said, “Interesting report while you were gone.” Mike said nothing, and Mengsk continued, “Protoss ground forces pitched in to engage the Zerg we encountered. Their leader’s name is Tassadar. He calls himself the High Templar and Executor of the Protoss Fleet. His flagship’s name is the Gantrithor.”

  “Maybe they were impressed with your work and decided to lend a hand. You must have a good press agent.”

  Mengsk gave Mike a withering look. “Come now, Michael. I expect better from you. Work out what I just said.”

  Mike was silent for a moment, then said, “Ground forces?”

  Mengsk brightened. “Exactly. Individual warriors in very ductile power suits. Strange bug-like vehicles. Spell-casters that I can only assume are psionicists of some type. Tougher than the Zerg, man for man, though the Zerg have it all over them in raw numbers. Very intriguing, watching them battle. You might want to review the tapes later.”

  “Hang on,�
�� said Mike.

  Mengsk’s smile roadened. “I’ll wait. You’ll get it. I believe in you.”

  “If the Protoss have ground forces . . .”

  “Quite good ones, I think I just said.”

  “That means they’ve fought the Zerg on the ground before. And more important, they’ve won those battles.”

  “Or why maintain a ground force in the first place? Yes! Take it to the last step.”

  Mike’s eyes opened wide. “Which means the Zerg can be destroyed without blowing up the planet they’re on!”

  “Full marks!” Mengsk took a sip from his snifter. “It may be a difficult task, and I think that the Protoss are overmatched in this case, but yes, the Zerg can be beaten on the ground.” He chuckled. “I had to explain it to Raynor three times, you know.”

  “But,” said Mike. “But then all we’ve done is to just set the Protoss up to blow up Antiga Prime!”

  “And a large piece of the Zerg forces with it. It should rock them back on their heels for a while. Long enough to let us get the upper hand against the Confederacy.”

  “They’ll blow up Antiga Prime, and with it any surviving humans!”

  “No humans would survive that many Zerg. We will do whatever it takes to save the greater humanity,” Mengsk said solemnly.

  “Even if we have to kill all the humans in order to do it,” Mike snapped. Mengsk said nothing, and Mike just let the silence expand to fill the dome. On the main screen, Antiga was nearly covered with red triangles, and a perimeter of blue triangles was in orbit around it. There were no yellow triangles left.

  After a moment, Mengsk said, “I know what you’re thinking.”

  Mike set his glass down. “You’re a telepath, too, now?”

  “I’m a politician, as you’re wont to tell me. And that means that I’m sensitive to other people. Their needs, their desires, their motivations.”

  “So what am I thinking?” Mike suddenly felt like a bug under a microscope.

  “You’re asking yourself if I would sacrifice you for the good of all humanity. The answer is yes, in a heartbeat and without remorse, but I really don’t want to. Good help is, as they say, hard to find. And you’re very good, at more than just being a reporter.”

  Mike shook his head. “How do you do it?”

  “Do it?” Mengsk canted his head.

  “Find everybody’s button and press it. You play people like they were pianos. Kerrigan would leap into a hydralisk’s mouth for you, Raynor will jump through hoops for you, hell, you’ve even gotten that old pin-headed gorilla Duke eating out of your hand. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “No. It’s a gift. I find that others tend to be scattered in their thinking. I try to provide a strong center for them. Raynor is in many ways consumed by anger for the Confederates: I am but a means by which he can vent that anger. Duke looks for nothing more than political cover to let him settle old scores and create new atrocities: I provide that. Sarah? Well, Lieutenant Kerrigan has always sought approval, despite her own gifts. I provide that as well.”

  Mike thought of Sarah Kerrigan, down in the galley, talking with Jim Raynor over coffee. He asked, “And me?”

  Mengsk gave a great smile and shook his head. “You want to save souls, dear boy. You want to make a difference. Whether you’re covering some traffic tie-up or rooting out some alderman’s corruption, you’re trying to make things better. It’s practically in your genetic code. And you believe in it. That makes you very valuable. It makes you an incredible resource. You keep Raynor from being too impulsive, Kerrigan from being too inhuman. They both respect you, you know. You wrote off General Duke as hopeless, I think, soon after you met him, but I do believe you still hold out hope for me. That’s why you’ve hung around, in hopes that I will find my own redemption.”

  Mike frowned. “And what keeps me from leaving now, knowing that this hope for your salvation is probably misplaced?”

  “Ah,” said Mengsk, watching the screen. The Protoss encirclement was almost complete. “Part of it is your concern for others. But I can be honest with you, now, because the Confederacy, through its puppet the UNN, has betrayed you. It has used your face and words against you. Now you’ve got your own personal reason to fight them. Your own reason to commit. They have made it personal. You can go on your own . . .” Mengsk let his voice trail off..

  “But where would I go,” Mike said in a flat tone. A statement, not a question.

  “Exactly. You’re in for the long haul. Until victory or defeat. Ah, it begins. Will you watch with me?”

  Mike looked at the screen, at the ring of blue-white triangles surrounding the doomed world. Already spearheads of red were rising from the surface, but they were repelled as the Protoss built up their weapons charge to burn the world, to sterilize it to the deepest tunnels.

  “I’ll pass,” said Mike, his mouth like ashes. He turned and walked toward the lift, not turning back to watch.

  Mengsk did not seem to notice Mike’s departure. He stood, snifter in hand, and watched as the Protoss rained poisonous flame onto Antiga Prime.

  CHAPTER 14

  GROUND ZERO

  The use of the psi emitter on Antiga Prime was a watershed event, a Rubicon, a point of no return. It was like the first appearance of ghosts in the Confederacy ranks, or the indiscriminate use of the Apocalypse bombs that leveled Korhal IV. It changed everything.

  It also changed nothing. For the average citizen caught between the rebels and the Confederates, and the Confederates caught between the Zerg and the Protoss, the war was still as deadly as ever. More planets would vaporize under the Protoss’s weapons, and more humans would be swallowed by the Zerg hives. Yet after the swarming of Antiga Prime, there was renewed hope among the rebels. Now, at least, we had a weapon.

  And like the damn-fool humans we were, we could not resist using it.

  —THE LIBERTY MANIFESTO

  TEN DAYS LATER, THEY WERE ON TARSONIS ITSELF, blockbusting through the densest of the downtown districts.

  The city had taken the assault hard. The western precincts were still in flames caused by a battlecruiser that had gone down in their midst, and a fountain of hot dust, laden with phosphoric heavy metals, plumed southward in the strong wind. The upper windows of most of the major buildings were shattered, and in some cases entire facades had slid from the metal skeletons beneath, leaving hills of roken glass at the titanic tower’s feet.

  The elegant spires of Tarsonis were nothing more than jagged, twisted remains, their fractured edges scratching the bleeding sky. The atmosphere itself was torn by the shrieks and booms of battling craft, and streaked with the smoke of downed fighters.

  Most of the streets were jammed with the amorphous, burned wreckage of ground cars. Their shining paint jobs had been baked by fire and heat to a uniform gray, and the once-tinted windows were shattered, jagged holes. Initially Mike looked into the vehicles to see if he could identify those within, but after the first hour he just ignored the blackened corpses, with their burned-stick limbs and withered, screaming faces.

  The only things left alive on the streets were the warriors, striving hard to kill each other.

  The wreck-jammed side streets kept Raynor’s unit to the main boulevards, wide streets once dominated by park-like traffic islands in the center. The trees there were toppled and burned now, and what statuary to famous Confederates remained had been amputated to mere nubs.

  Raynor’s unit was pinned down near one of the tri-level fountains along the central plaza. A discarded, bent brass plaque identified it as a memorial placed there by the Daughters of the Guild Wars Veterans. The fountain itself was now no more than a mound of damp debris, the only hint of its previous incarnation a stone cannon jutting from the shattered stone. Mike found himself wishing the cannon were real.

  Across the plaza, past a hastily erected barricade of dead cars, an Arclite siege tank had planted itself firmly between two buildings. It sat square in their path, fully deployed, its side pont
oons firmly set in the asphalt. The shock cannon sent listering rounds overhead, and its twin 80’s raked the debris of the fountain. The siege tank had become a rallying point for the Confederate Security Forces, most of them the remains of the Delta and Omega Squadrons. Now the recombined units, safe under the heavy fire of the Arclite, laid down continual suppression fire on Raynor’s position.

  Behind the stone cannon, Mike kept his head down and desperately slammed the side of his comm unit. It burbled frustratingly at him.

  “I have got to think about a major career change,” he muttered, then ducked instinctively as another round of fire thundered through the city’s stone canyons.

  Raynor slid down the debris pile toward Mike, pushing a small avalanche ahead of his heavy boots. “Any luck?” he asked.

  Mike shook his head. “It’s probably a general jammer unit they have in operation, as opposed to an EMP pulse that would knock out the unit. That means the radio is still working, I just can’t punch through the interference. Something with more power could.”

  “Just freaking great. We’re chewed up as it is. We can’t go back, and we can’t get past the tank. We need to call for an evac, but it’s not going to happen if we can’t get in touch with the Hyperion.”

  “You boys need a hand?” Sarah Kerrigan warped into being near them. She was dressed in her environmental suit and carried the bulky canister rifle on her back. There were dark red stains on her pants cuffs, as if she had been wading through a river of blood.

  Her eyes were bright and very, very alert.

  “It’s good to see you, Lieutenant,” said Raynor. “We were just bemoaning our fate.”

  “I was in the neighborhood and heard gunfire,” said Kerrigan. “What’s the sitch?”

  “Arclite, hull down, between the buildings,” said Raynor, “supported by a full squad of marines.”

  “That all? I thought you were having trouble.”