THE ZERG
Long before the surface of Altara came into view, Nova could sense that something was terribly wrong.
The Palatine’s computer had scanned for zerg activity and found it clustered around a particular rocky outcropping, kilometers away from the town of Oasis. That much was good, as civilian casualties, at least for the moment, appeared to be minimal. But the zerg were voracious predators, laying waste to entire planets in a matter of days through the spread of creep, an organic bio-matter that grew rapidly to cover the ground like a carpet and served as the aliens’ nourishment, among other things. Creep was disgusting stuff, purple, thick, and slimy to the touch. The only way to destroy it was to burn it, and even then, it could return. If creep spores had made it to the surface, and the zerg had established a hatchery, Altara was on borrowed time.
But that wasn’t what worried her the most. The atmosphere, normally thick with red dust, had taken on a strange, sickly greenish hue. She could see the stuff eddying like mist through the drop-pod’s monitors as she hurtled through it, although the ship’s scanners could not identify it as anything known to man: it wasn’t exactly vespene gas, although its chemical makeup was similar, and it didn’t appear to be related to the zerg either. The computer confirmed that it was flowing steadily from a rift in the planet’s surface, right at the spot where the zerg were clustered, and the same place where the wrangler had sent his distress call.
Whatever explosion had occurred on Altara had released a substance that drew zerg like moths to a flame. She could feel it too. It pushed and probed at her mind like the presence of the aliens themselves, a psionic beacon she couldn’t ignore.
Nova let the pod’s filtration systems capture some of the strange gas for a quick chemical analysis, then relayed what she had to the Palatine’s comm officer, asked him to have the ship’s tech try to identify the substance, and set the pod to land about a half click away from the area of high zerg activity. She couldn’t help but think about the missing ghost, who had probably taken a similar path to the planet’s surface. The records showed that she was an experienced agent. What had she been thinking about as the pod was about to touch down? How quickly had she been overcome, and what had happened to her?
The pod’s comm unit winked on; the vidscreen stuttered; and a moment later Hauler’s face came into view. “We’re loaded to the gills,” he said. “My men have been fully briefed and are ready for action. Our scans are showing a significant alien presence, and they are buzzing like cracked-off hornets being poked with a stick, so you get us a read on the ground. We’re coming in fast. Don’t play the hero, understand?”
“I can take care of myself.”
Hauler frowned. “You damn well better. I don’t want the ghost program coming after my ass for letting one of their prize toys get damaged.” He blinked out.
I can’t get a good read on him, Nova thought as she prepared for landing. Dominion regulations prohibited telepaths from probing terran minds without cause, and she wouldn’t think about scanning a colonel without express permission. But that didn’t stop the occasional surface thought from slipping through, even with her neural inhibitor in place. With a psi index of 10, the highest possible score, Nova was one of the most powerful ghosts in existence. She couldn’t help reading people. In Nova’s experience, most hid their real selves from the world, constantly questioning both their own decisions and those of others. Terrans were a suspicious race by nature. She hadn’t sensed anything other than surface thoughts from Colonel Hauler in the time they’d been serving together. He was a good soldier, loyal to the emperor, beloved by his men, and willing to fight to the death to protect the Dominion.
If I didn’t know better now, I might believe he was worried about me.
The pod’s computers alerted her to touchdown. A moment later she was leaping to the dusty, parched ground as the pod began to degrade behind her. Her suit’s cloaking device was activated, although she knew it wouldn’t matter much to the zerg if overlords were around to detect her. But it might give her enough of an edge to make a difference.
The wrangler’s ship was located off the right side of the rocky cliff. If it wasn’t already overcome by zerg, it would be soon, and the chances of recovering anyone alive there would vanish. Nova unholstered her C-20A canister rifle and faced the hostile landscape alone. She didn’t need her suit’s computer to know where the zerg were. She could feel them already. She shuddered. Hauler was right; they were buzzing with excitement, and the feeling was like being violated by an alien tongue bathing the folds of her brain.
Relaying what she saw directly back to the Palatine, she moved quickly forward through the swirling red dust, the wind plucking at her and sending tiny pebbles bouncing off her suit and goggles. Even this far out, she saw signs that a powerful explosion had occurred recently. Pieces of torn, twisted metal stuck up from the ground like some kind of blackened sculptures, so damaged they were impossible to identify. Scans showed the cliff face ahead had been ripped apart, creating the huge gash in the rock where the green gas drifted upward.
She slipped over jagged rock and through depressions filled with red dust, making her way through the inhospitable landscape. As she moved closer to the target the ground under her feet got even rougher, the red dust coating her from head to foot. She had to keep vibrating the suit psionically to shake it free. Finally she stopped short.
“Visual confirmation of zerg activity,” she said into her comm unit, staring at the rift ahead. “Creep not yet present out here. Are you getting this?”
Less than two hundred meters away, the zerg throng pulsed and writhed like a monstrous, many-segmented beast across the cliff face. Three overlords hovered directly overhead, their massive, swollen bodies and claws hanging like those of enormous ticks as they disgorged more zerglings and hydralisks from pockets of their carapaces. Drones swarmed over the rock, already mutating into the organic towers the zerg used as a base of operations.
“Affirmative,” the tactical officer’s voice crackled in her ears.
“No sign of the wrangler,” Nova said. “Tell Colonel Hauler to hold. It’s too hot down here. I’m going to get a better look—”
Nova leapt from her perch as the thundering sound of a grizzly armed carrier made her glance up. She deactivated her cloaking device as the ship passed directly over her before settling on a flat stretch nearby, its engines stirring up swirls of dust. The loading gates swung open and marines in full CMC-400 powered combat suits began to deploy, their heavy boots thudding against the ground, exoskeleton hydraulics whirring.
They might as well have set off a nuclear warhead to announce their presence. She looked up and saw another carrier preparing to land, then glanced back at the first ship, its doors still wide open, marines too vulnerable in the open space. Someone gave her a wave. She sensed Godard, the muscled marine who had passed her in the hallway earlier, and she knew he was grinning at her behind his glossy helmet shield. She could feel his confidence in the squadron and his own weaponry, heard the pep talk Hauler had given them all when they had prepared to deploy as Godard went over it again in his mind. He thought he had nothing to fear.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
“What are you doing?” she barked into her comm unit. “I told you to hold.”
This time Hauler’s voice crackled through her headset. “Negative. We can take it from here. You find that wrangler.”
“Sir, your men are not prepared for what they’re going to find. You promised me at least an hour on the ground. Let me look for a better way through—”
“We’ve had this conversation before. My squadron is the best in the sector, and you’re not their babysitter. There’s no hatchery yet and not enough zerg on the ground to matter. Marauders and tanks are on the way. Check in with Ward and then complete your mission.”
“Affirmative,” she said, and switched the cloaking device back on. She glanced over her shoulder at the zerg horde. Nova had no doubt that the troops were skittish. It was one thing to hear the news that a supposedly dormant species had reappeared, and quite another to see it in action. The overlords seemed indifferent to the presence of the carriers, but there were even more drones now. The carriers had flak cannons, missiles, and B2-C concussion bombs, but they were too slow and clumsy to make much of a difference against an army of mutalisks, even if they could get airborne in time, and they had no bunkers for protection.
The marines and medics from the first ship were led by Lieutenant Chet Ward, a hard-drinking, cocky veteran of many terran skirmishes. Nova had run into him a few times in the Palatine, but he usually kept his distance. She felt his distrust of ghosts, and for good reason: there was a rumor that he’d once choked a woman from Hudderstown Colony to death in a drunken rage and then fled the scene. A teenaged farmer’s son had been blamed and executed for the crime, but she sensed some truth to Ward’s involvement.
None of this mattered now, but the fact that he’d never fought the zerg did. He was likely to underestimate them. Nova slipped unseen toward the marines’ right flank and opened her comm frequency to the lieutenant’s headset. “Ward, get your men to higher ground and scan for lurkers. Then dig in and wait for the tanks to deploy for cover. I’ve got to go after the wrangler.”
“I don’t take orders from a ghost.” Ward’s voice was cold in her ears. She could see him whirling around, searching for her in vain, and she could sense his frustration.
“You’re going to get yourself killed—”
“You do your job; I’ll do mine. The element of surprise, understand? These bugs won’t know what hit them.”
Ward’s hostility was clear, but he directed two of his men to take positions on rocky slabs above them and scout for approaching alien forces. The wind whipped dust across the landscape as Ward spread the rest of his squad across the stretch of open ground, moving toward a rocky opening.
As they neared the rocks a few marines looked up as pebbles, dislodged from the slabs above, began to trickle down. They stopped and milled about restlessly, bringing their weapons up, unsure where to point them.
“Report,” Ward’s voice crackled through the comm. “Anything on the horizon?”
His scouts responded instantly, their voices strained. “There’s movement, sir, but it’s not clear. Multiple positions. Can’t see through this fekking dust!”
An alien, high-pitched sound, a cross between a moan and shriek, drifted across the barren ground. Nova felt the men’s apprehension tick up another notch as the scouts’ rifles went off and one of them screamed.
The ground began to shake. She felt enemy forces swarming toward the spot from farther away, but there was far worse news than that; she sensed some of them were already here.
Oh, no. They were burrowing. She shouted out a warning into her comm unit as the shaking grew worse, but there was no more time to react.
The marines’ thoughts turned to terror as three huge, heavily armored roaches exploded from underneath the rocky slabs one after another, almost directly under the marines’ feet. They set their legs like giant crabs and skittered forward. The lead roach let loose with a spray of acidic bile from its jagged maw, hitting a marine full in the facemask. The man started to scream as the acid began to eat through the neosteel of his suit and dissolve the flesh beneath it.
Those who were able to react opened fire, but the roaches’ armored plates were difficult to penetrate, and they seemed to regenerate themselves as quickly as the marines could inflict any damage. More terran screams split the air as a moment later a zergling pack leapt over the granite slabs in a wave of clicking alien claws. The marines mowed down the first group with their rifles, but more leapt over the dying bodies of their comrades.
Even with their protective suit armor, the marines were nearly overwhelmed by the force of the zerg attack. The zerglings were the size of large dogs, with sharp fangs and scythelike claws that could disembowel a man in seconds. Zerglings and roaches alone were formidable opponents, but together they were nearly unstoppable against marines without tank support or bunkers to provide protection. For every alien that went down in a spray of blood, another replaced it. As the rest of the troops turned to face the charging enemy, more zerglings leapt from the rocky slabs above them. One landed on the back of Private Godard, who jerked the trigger on his rifle as he stumbled, off balance, the rounds tearing into the suit of a nearby fellow marine and separating it at the elbow. Blood spurted in a wide fountain as the wounded soldier spun frantically and grabbed at his amputated arm, then slumped to the ground as the stimpacks kicked in and his combat suit automatically sealed off the stump.
Still cloaked, Nova raced forward, took quick aim at the zergling on Godard’s back, and fired, using her psionic abilities to teek the round slightly to the right as the marine stumbled again. The alien’s head exploded and the creature dropped, twitching, to the ground. Not breaking stride, she leapt over a zergling carcass and put ten rounds below the bony carapace of a roach, avoiding its steaming blood as it jerked and writhed in the dust. Before it could regenerate, she met its alien, glassy stare and sent a teek blast directly into its skull, killing it instantly.
Marine rifles barked. Medics were tending to the wounded, although several of them were already dead themselves, and those left were overwhelmed with bloody and dying soldiers. She could feel the marines’ confusion as she moved among them, could almost smell their fear. But her cloaking device kept her hidden and allowed her to move freely among the zerg. She seemed to dance alone through the dusty air, humming with her own psionic power as she teeked the massive roach carcass off the ground and hurtled it at a cluster of zerglings, crushing them beneath bony plates and spines.
But it wasn’t enough. She realized that she was the only thing standing between the remaining troops and an utter massacre. She had to act quickly. “Ward,” she said. “Take some men, climb to the high point on the left, and wait for me. Lay down a cross fire on my signal.”
Ward’s voice, high and strained, crackled through. “I don’t understand. Where the fekk are you …?”
“Just do it,” she said. A zergling’s bony jaws snapped shut centimeters from her left leg, and she sent a teek blast at it, bursting its skull like a rotten mirafruit. She took three more out the same way, creating a little breathing room. Then she darted back toward the opening in the rock, uncloaking and standing still for a moment to get the aliens’ attention. She could not fire in here again, had to get them away from the cluster of marines or risk collateral damage.
Bait.
It worked. The zerglings and remaining roaches turned to follow her. The roaches were fast, almost too fast. They nearly got to her with a stream of bile that etched the ground as she passed through the opening between the rocks, then she put on a burst of speed and teeked herself up the right-hand slab of granite like a spider on a sheer wall. She reached the top in seconds, turned, and aimed back down into the opening where the zerg had clustered.
“Now, Ward,” she said, looking across at the lieutenant, who had stationed himself opposite her along with a half dozen others. “Focus your rounds and don’t stop!”
They all opened fire, the rounds tearing into the aliens as they tried to scatter. The marines still inside the open space quickly got the hint, joining with a steady line of fire from below. In a matter of seconds, most of the zerglings were dead or dying, their blood wetting the dusty ground. The two roaches went down under the blistering attack, unable to regenerate quickly enough, wriggling and twitching until they finally burst in a spatter of alien gore, their acidic bile eating into the rock and leaving a trail of steaming cracks and holes.
Shouts from the troops echoed through her headset. The few remaining zerglings were quickly dispatched by marines as Nova leapt back down, remaining in full view this time. Any of them shocked by her sudden appearance were smart enough to remain quiet and keep their distance. She sensed their unease; most terrans felt the same about ghosts, a natural tendency when faced with someone who can read minds.
She surveyed the scene and saw dead bodies and several serious injuries, including the one with the missing arm. Medics were working hard, but she could sense that three more marines were beyond saving, the zerglings’ claws having punctured their combat suits in vulnerable spots, spilling too much blood. She felt them slipping away, their minds, already blank with shock, growing ever fainter like bulbs flickering and then going dark. She sighed.
Ward had climbed down too, and he raised a shaky hand to her as he approached. “Focused fire,” he said through her comm unit. “Pretty smart, for a ghost.”
“There’ll be a lot more of them soon, and not just zerglings and roaches,” she said. “The second marine squad will be here in a moment. I want you all to find rocky ground close to the ships, someplace solid where it’ll be harder for a roach to burrow, and form a defensive perimeter. I have to find that wrangler.”
Before he could respond again, she engaged the cloaking device, enjoying the brief moment of shock from him as she vanished into thin air, then she turned and ran back through the rocky opening.
Minutes later she had wound through the uneven ground and around the cliff face, keeping her eye on the zerg. Mutalisks now darted and swooped over the drones, their giant leathery wings beating the dust into mini-cyclones. Right now, whatever gas was coming from the rift in the planet’s surface was keeping them occupied, but she was on borrowed time. Soon they would come after her and send others after the marines.
Her computer showed the wrangler’s ship was close. She crested the top of another slab of granite and saw it nestled in a natural depression, its skids half buried in dust and canted to one side. Several zerglings darted around its battered flanks, clawing at the neosteel and trying to force their way in. There was no sign of the wrangler, but she could feel him. He was almost certainly inside.
Nova settled into position, sighted the C-20A, and took three zerglings out with quick and deadly head shots, then slipped down the rock face to the ship. She teeked the lock, and the door hissed open, revealing a cramped, functional, and familiar interior. She ducked her head and stepped inside.
It didn’t take her long to spot the wrangler. He was slumped behind the pilot seat, a large man in a tattered, old-fashioned leather duster that covered his more traditional wrangler suit. He was unconscious and dreaming of nothing at all. If she hadn’t been able to feel the faint pulse of his mind, like a heartbeat inside her own skull, she might have thought he was already dead. Dried blood flecked his craggy, handsome face; shrapnel from the explosion had sliced his right thigh but missed the femoral artery, and he’d tied it off with a rubber hose before passing out, the suit’s analgesics flooding his system. He had suffered other minor cuts and bruises and a particularly nasty bump to the head, but nothing life-threatening.
She found a medkit in a storage bin and broke an ammonia capsule under his nose. He moaned, eyelids fluttering, and she caught a flash of memory from the explosion: a wash of white light and concussive wave knocking him backward, his shock over sudden blood loss, the grim crawl back to his ship before losing consciousness. Nothing more.
But there was no time for a more complete examination. She could feel the zerg approaching. She had to get him out of there, now.
She opened a channel to Lieutenant Ward. “Requesting immediate evac,” she said. “Wrangler is alive and in need of a medivac. Bring dropship around to my location for pickup—”
Her comm unit was hit with static, and then she could hear gunfire and screaming. “… Under attack …” Ward’s voice washed in and out. “… Heavy enemy activity … airborne … need backup now: cannot hold …”
More mutalisks. Flicking hell. Nova took a deep breath and switched to the channel for the Palatine. Hauler’s voice echoed through her head. “We’re aware of the situation,” he barked without preamble. “Tell them to sit tight until the siege tanks and AA guns are in place. Nothing in this galaxy can stand up to the full firepower of the Dominion Marine Corps. I promise you that these sons of bitches will regret ever setting foot on this planet. Do you have the wrangler?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Hauler’s voice softened. “I know you helped fight off the initial zerg attack, and I appreciate the lives you saved. But that wrangler is your number one priority. Now bring him home.”
He cut the transmission. Nova glanced around the tiny cockpit. It had been a while since she had piloted a system runner, but she remembered well enough. If the thing could still fly, she could get them out.
She strapped in and booted up, the engines roaring to life as she scanned the cluttered instrument panel for any signs of damage. Everything appeared in working order. She tweaked the left engine to straighten the ship in the dust and lifted off, glancing back once to make sure the wrangler was still in the same place. He hadn’t moved.
Blips on her screens showed an approaching zerg mass of significant size, and another clustered where the carriers had been. She flew through thicker clouds of the strange, greenish gas just above the ground, trying to keep as low a profile as possible.
As she approached the spot where she had left the marines, a mutalisk flapped, screeching, from the left. She banked the ship hard right, swooped under one leathery wing, and heard the sound of a claw scraping metal. She was directly in the line of fire now. Below she could see what was left of the two marine squads, cut off from the carriers. They had dug in behind a rocky ledge, shooting wildly at a line of banelings advancing on the ground as more mutalisks disgorged glave wurms from their bony abdomens above.
Banelings were like acid-filled bombs. If they got close enough to detonate, they could take out the rest of the troops with ease. The wrangler’s ship had a gauss cannon mounted to its hull. Nova banked again and laid down a burst of fire at the banelings before two more mutalisks converged on her. She faked upward and then dove hard, the two flying zerg colliding where she’d been with a crack that echoed even over the sound of the engines. She watched them tumble together behind her to the ground, their wings broken.
The wrangler had fallen forward against her seat, and she regretted not finding a way to strap him down. To make matters worse, the zerg claw had apparently damaged the ship, and she was losing power quickly. This wasn’t exactly a rescue to brag about, but she had no choice except to set it down.
She found a clear, flat spot, managing to settle the skids without a jolt as an engine sputtered and died. Smoke drifted out from the left wing. As she unstrapped herself from her seat and came around, the wrangler’s eyes fluttered open and he moaned, then fixed his gaze on her face. She sensed his sudden shock of recognition.
“Nova,” he whispered, his voice cracked and hoarse.
“You … know me?” She crouched at his side, but his eyes rolled backward in his head as he slipped back into unconsciousness.
She tried not to think about what the wrangler knowing her name might mean. Perhaps it was a strange coincidence, or maybe he had a mild teep ability; after all, wranglers were chosen for the program at least in part because they had higher PIs than the normal terran. Or maybe he just knew her face from the ghost program files.
But then why had he used her given name and not her ghost ID? Most ghosts were aware of their old names, but the military code of addressing them by number was hammered into everyone upon leaving the academy.
The battle intensified nearby, gunfire, screams, and the screeches of the zerg growing louder. She could sense that the marines, now half their original number, had regrouped enough to make their way closer to where she had landed. The zerg force was closing in.
She had to find a way to get the wrangler evacuated to the Palatine before it was too late.
Nova opened the door and lifted him, teeking him gently until she had him on her back with his arms around her neck, a plan formulating in her head. She stepped out into the dust cloud and found Ward only a meter away with a group of the marines circled behind him, breathing hard, his suit scratched and battered. She could sense the naked fear streaming off him like a foul odor. The entire group was exhausted, a hair away from total collapse. Zerg and terran blood spattered their visors, and several were badly wounded.
“Those … things,” Ward said, his voice cracking. “They keep coming.”
“Where the fekk are the siege tanks?”
“They had to be off-loaded at a safe enough distance,” Ward said. “They haven’t arrived yet.”
I’ve got to get them out of here. “Take the wrangler,” she said, without preamble. She handed the unconscious man over to a member of the group. “I’ll open up a hole in the line so you can reach the carriers. Give me five minutes.” She ran to face the approaching enemy.
It didn’t take her long to find them. She picked her way through a mass of zerg corpses to higher ground. Hydralisks were creeping over the broken landscape a short distance away like gigantic, armored worms, their bony carapaces hunched for protection, claws like razor-sharp scythes extended as zerglings darted around and between their tails and mutalisks flapped overhead. Behind them came the banelings, grotesquely fat sacs of living fluid ready to roll and detonate.
Banelings could cause tremendous damage. Without long-range tank fire, the marines were vulnerable. She had to take the aliens out before they could reach the troops. She sighted carefully with her rifle and fired, teeking each round to its target. The banelings exploded one by one, bursting against the rocky ground and spraying acid across the backs of the nearby zerg.
It was time for a closer look. Nova leapt over a crevice in the rock and entered the fray, her C-20A laying waste to the smaller zerglings as she teeked each round to the most vulnerable parts of their anatomy.
Alien squeals and grunts filled her head as the lead hydralisk dipped its head before her, hissing and firing a volley of thirty-centimeter-long spines from the muscles packed behind its hood. The spines could travel over 300 meters at speeds faster than her C-20A rounds and could pierce even the hardest terran armor. But they could not damage what they couldn’t hit. With a brief, concentrated psionic push, Nova teeked them aside and into the rock, firing her rifle at the soft areas just above the creature’s rib cage.
The hydralisk lurched backward, blood pumping from the wound. She fired two more rounds through its eyes and into its brain as it fell.
Her gunfire had drawn the others’ attention. She turned to find another hydralisk lunging at her, jaws extended as if to rip her head from her body, one claw poised to skewer her through the middle. The creature’s teeth grazed her face, jolting her mask to one side before the hydralisk froze in midlunge; she could feel its muscles straining and its hot breath on her skin as she focused every ounce of her telekinetic abilities on holding it suspended above her. Its alien rage ate away at her brain, a nearly mindless urge to destroy. Even knowing its intent, she could not help admiring such a magnificent killing machine. Perhaps that was what had attracted the Queen of Blades to her ultimate fate, she thought: an appreciation for something so singular in its purpose.
But she would not allow Kerrigan’s fate to happen to her. She began to force its jaws apart, a dull headache beginning at the corners of her eyes. Unlike other teeks, using her ability always did this to her, and the more effort required, the worse the pain. She squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated, heard the crack of hydralisk bone and the tearing of muscle and tendon as she ripped the creature’s head in half with her mind and threw the carcass upward at an approaching mutalisk. The two heavy bodies collided in midair, glave wurms detonating and showering the landscape with shards of bone, blood, and gore.
Nova took a deep breath as the thudding pain subsided and readjusted her mask, but something was wrong. The filters had been damaged by the hydralisk’s attack. This close to the rift in the planet’s surface, she noticed the same greenish gas swirling everywhere. She smelled a coppery scent like blood on the wind, and the scent seemed to wriggle its way deep into her lungs, pulsing with her own heartbeat until she glimpsed bursts of pink color like flowers opening across her sight.
She shook her head as if to clear it, then opened the channel to Ward. There was empty space before her, an easy path to the carriers and safety. But it wouldn’t last long.
“Protect your right flank and rear,” she said. “I’ll take the left.”
The terrified marines didn’t need any more prodding. They ran forward, fanning out and laying down suppressing fire as she took up a spot guarding their passage. She could hear Ward shouting at them to move faster. Zerglings attacked in waves, but she pushed them back with her C-20A, watching the skies for more mutalisks. They circled above her but did not attack, and she wondered why. Maybe they sensed what she had done to the last hydralisk and were keeping their distance.
The smell was terrible. It kept eating away at her until she could barely think straight.
In moments the marines reached the ship, boarded, and started the engines. “Come on,” Ward’s voice crackled in her earpiece. “Your turn! Move!”
She turned to the ship. “On my way—”
The hydralisks were advancing, crawling over the rock face in front of her, their jaws open and dripping fangs exposed. Dozens of them. They had closed off her escape route. She could sense even more coming, close enough now to overwhelm the carriers. With the mutalisks in the sky they would be lucky to make it at all. Now she realized why they had been circling; they were preparing for an all-out assault on the two ships after cutting her off from any hope of rescue.
She had no choice now. There was only one way out.
Kill them all. Like on Tarsonis.
“Where are you?” Ward’s voice was strained. “We can’t hold much longer.”
“Evacuate,” Nova said. “Get the wrangler to safety. I’ll provide a distraction.”
“But how will you—”
“Just do it,” she said. “I can take care of myself. Look at it this way: if I don’t make it back, there’s one less person who knows about what you did at Hudderstown Colony.”
There was a brief moment of silence before Ward cleared his throat, and she knew immediately that she had been right about him. “Affirmative,” he said. “We’re gone. Watch your ass.”
I always do. Nova switched the comm unit off and took a moment to prepare. Her entire body was on fire with the need to lash out at something, anything. The first step was to draw them all to her. But how?
The answer came from the very ground under her feet. More of the green gas was seeping up from a hair-thin crack directly in front of her, and she sensed a much larger crevasse just below. The zerg had been drawn to the planet by this gas in the first place; maybe they would respond to it now. She gave a hard mental push, sending out a beacon of psionic power. The rock groaned and split, releasing a thick cloud of gas like a geyser. Almost immediately she sensed the zerg turn their attention toward her, as the mutalisks in the sky whirled and dove and the others on the ground increased their pace, leaping at her with renewed excitement.
For a moment she thought they would be too fast for her. She heard the roar of the grizzlies as they took to the air and the thunder of their cannons, but the distraction had worked; they were clear. That was a good thing for what she was planning to do. It was a very difficult trick, and the chance of collateral damage was high.
She took out three zerglings with her C-20A and was looking for high ground when the rock began to tremble under her feet. Something was coming.
She turned to face the sound as the dust erupted in front of her and an infestor burst forth, spewing a volatile plague. Nova dove to the side to avoid the plague, catching just a glimpse of something larger that had come from the creature’s throat, something vaguely human. She rolled and then scrambled to her feet, but the infestor had burrowed back into the ground again and was moving rapidly away.
She might have gone after it, except for what was standing in her way.
What remained of Private Godard had planted its feet and held its rifle in both hands, staring mindlessly through a cracked and dusty visor. Godard’s marine suit dripped with the remains of the infestor’s bile, and spikes of zerg carapace had grown up over the shoulder plates and the back of his helmet, along with two spiny, insectlike arms with clacking claws. She felt the throb of the zerg mind within his own, and she didn’t know whether his voice was still there and lost among the din, or whether he had been extinguished entirely and what remained was nothing more than a zerginfested shell.
Then he turned his head to stare at her, and she stumbled backward, shocked by a sudden image of herself through his eyes: a female form he had admired just a few hours ago, but now regarded as alien and beneath contempt. Along with it came a vivid memory of a drug dealer called Fagin from her early days in the Gutter on Tarsonis, the way he had looked at her so much like how Godard did now, and her rage at being held like a prisoner and forced to do his dirty work, torture and murders and worse, before a wrangler came to her rescue.
Finally she remembered another zerg battle on a distant planet called Shi, when she had been just a trainee, a place they should never have landed on and certainly a place where neither the zerg nor terrans should have been …
Nova gasped as the images came in disjointed flashes like terrible hallucinations, images she had fought so hard to wipe from her memory forever, and this coppery, foreign thing kept worming its way through her body and burning through her bloodstream until she felt she might burst from the inside out.
Visions of her father, mother, and brother lying in pools of blood, and three hundred people dead around them by her own savage act of revenge.
An act she would play out again now.
As Godard raised his rifle in her direction and the massive host of zerg grew close, she closed her eyes, spread her arms, and crouched in the dust, her rage coupling with her psionic energy and coiling within her belly like a snake ready to strike. As it began to course outward from somewhere deep within her, she felt both a thrill and a terror as she had never known before, along with the urge to crack the very planet upon which she stood in half. She raised her head, opened her eyes, and let out a primal scream.
Nova Terra unleashed hell.