SPECTRES
The Palatine hurtled through space, its giant engines straining as Captain Rourke pushed the battlecruiser to its limits. Korhal was close now, Nova Terra thought as she stared through the observation window into deep space. She was in full uniform, itching to strap into the dropship and get to the planet’s surface as quickly as possible. The other six ghosts were there too, talking quietly among themselves, while Spaulding and the Annihilators followed in their own ship.
She could feel the tension among everyone on the bridge, although nobody would admit it. It was one thing to attack military supply locations, and abducting and possibly murdering ghosts was even more brazen; but going directly to the heart of the Dominion’s power, the capital at Augustgrad, and infiltrating the emperor’s palace? That was sheer madness.
She had explained everything she knew to Hauler, which wasn’t much. Mengsk’s message on Mal’s fone had been garbled. From what they could decipher he was holed up in some kind of panic room, safe for now, but palace security had been compromised and communications were disabled in either direction. The private link had apparently been the only way to get a message out, and even that was now locked down. Harvey and the Palatine’s communications officer had done what they could, but they couldn’t figure out what was going on, and might not be able to do anything more until they were on planet.
So they flew blindly into a hornet’s nest.
Mal touched her arm. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
She nodded and they retreated to a quiet spot. He didn’t need to open his mouth for her to know what he wanted to say. “You’re worried about a trap,” she said.
“Damn right I am,” he said. “The way I see it, they’re attacking Augustgrad for two possible reasons: to make a statement to the Dominion that nobody is safe, or to bring us running so they can pick us off, one by one. Either way, I don’t like it.”
“I was thinking the same thing. But we don’t have a choice.”
“You’re a target.”
“They can come and get me.”
He sighed and rubbed his hands on his duster. “I’m sure the other ghosts thought they could protect themselves too. But they couldn’t, and now they’re either fighting for the other side, or they’re dead. Point is, we don’t know. We don’t know a flicking thing about what’s happening. And that’s not a good way to wade into battle.”
Know your enemy. Mal was right, of course. But she didn’t care. Ghosts were meant to do one thing, and one thing only: protect the Dominion. This was relentlessly drilled into recruits’ heads day after day, and the message was that nobody’s life was more important than the survival of the government, which had brought stability to the Koprulu sector after years of heavy fighting. Mengsk was a brilliant, charismatic leader and military strategist, and no matter what people thought about him, it was clear that his survival was essential to keeping the fragile peace. She would die to protect him, and die gladly.
And yet …
She was boarding an old battle-scarred ship with the rest of the ghost cadets, Team Blue and Team Red, now becoming one unit. It was supposed to be a simple training mission to bring them all together. But something was wrong. Something terrible was coming.
The children of the Old Families were screaming.
Nova snapped back to the present, Mal looking curiously at her as she gasped aloud. “I … I remember something from my academy days,” she said. “It keeps drifting closer but it’s not clear. Whatever it was has been wiped clean.”
“But that’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it? To forget everything and leave your past behind for good. Wipes allowed that to happen.”
“But I’m remembering it now! Going through everything again, one little glimpse at a time. I never thought I’d have to experience it once it was over.” She sighed. “And this … I have the feeling it’s something important. I just can’t grasp it—”
The doors to the bridge slid open, and Lieutenant Ward strode through in his combat suit for the final briefing, visor open, his heavy boots thudding on the metal floor. The smell of stale cigar smoke wafted in with him. He would lead the marine support on this mission, and Nova could sense his eagerness to redeem himself after the showing on Altara. After chewing him out, Hauler had given him a short leash, and this time, Ward was determined not to let his chance for glory go to waste.
She caught his eye, and along with the glance came a sense of his distrust and anger. They hadn’t spoken of her suspicion of what he’d done on Hudderstown Colony since the battle with the zerg, and he’d been living in fear ever since. As he passed by, she caught something else from him, another errant thought that made her blood run cold.
That’s a double murder charge, Ward, she thought, projecting her damning words into his head.
His eyes widened in shock.
(get out of my head you slike you don’t know anything)
I know now she was pregnant with your child, and I’m pretty damn sure you killed her. Just do your job or you won’t have to worry about anything anymore because I’ll kill you myself.
Hauler’s rough voice ended things abruptly. “Report,” he barked from his position on the raised platform above the bridge floor. “Private Hunt, what’s the status on communications?”
“Still working on that, sir,” the officer said without looking up, her fingers dancing over the control panel. “No word from Augustgrad, and I’m unable to get a message through to anyone.” She hesitated for a moment. “There seems to be some kind of bug in the system, sir. But it’s not like anything I’ve seen before. It’s almost like …”
“Spit it out, Private,” Hauler roared, slamming his hands down on the railing. “We don’t have all day.”
“It appears to know what I’m trying to do,” she said, “before I do it. Whatever I try, it moves to block me.”
“You’re playing chess with a virus,” Hauler said. “Stunning work, Hunt. Keep it up.” He turned to Ward. “Lieutenant, are our troops ready?”
“Locked and loaded, sir,” Ward said. “All squads are in dropships, ready for our mark. They’re champing at the bit.”
“Good.” Hauler nodded. “We need to be prepared for anything. But all the intel we have indicates that there is not a full enemy military presence on Korhal. This appears to be a terrorist attack with psionic assassins in limited numbers. They may well be some of ours, academy trained. If so, they will be hard to find and as tough to kill as roaches. We’ll need to counter that with our own. Ghosts go in first, followed by our marine force. Other ships will arrive momentarily. Your orders are to stay outside the city limits unless the ghost agents request your assistance.”
“But, sir,” Ward said, “I don’t—”
“This ghost is in charge of this operation,” Hauler said, pointing at Nova. “You report to her. Is that clear?”
Ward nodded. He glanced at Nova and then quickly away. “Yes, sir.”
“Coming into Korhal’s orbital path in ten minutes,” Rourke said over the ship’s comm system. “All stations, prepare to engage.”
Mal put his hand on Nova’s shoulder. Once again she felt the electric spark at his touch through her ghost suit fabric, muscle fiber twitching. Along with it came a feeling of warmth from him, a thought that was not specific, and one that confused her. It took her a few moments to understand that he cared about her.
She nodded. “Thanks. Better get to the ship.”
The other agents were waiting for her. He gave her shoulder a squeeze. His face flushed red. Then he dropped his hand and turned away, and she was left with the lingering tingle from his touch, wondering whether what she had felt was something real or simply another ghostly memory of things long past.
The dropship set them down in the outskirts of Augustgrad as the last of the day’s fading light painted the tips of the slender skyscrapers a deep, bloody red. An outpost sat like a gigantic metal beetle on a flat slab of ground, empty and dark, unmanned, while below it stretched the city, lights beginning to twinkle in the twilight.
It looked, Nova thought as she gathered her team around her, like a city on the edge of sleep, rather than one with a cancer creeping unseen through its core. Somewhere inside the palace the emperor had locked himself away while the enemy tried to fight its way in. And beyond the palace walls the people continued about their business as if nothing was happening, unaware that the entire Dominion was teetering on the edge of chaos.
The six other ghosts were restless. They knew just enough about what they were facing to imagine the worst, and Nova could sense them all thinking the same thing she’d just talked about with Mal: whether they were being lured into a spider’s web, only to disappear without a trace. They hadn’t spent enough time together to work well as a team and trust one another, and the stakes were too high now to take risks.
“Let’s go in fast,” Lethal said. She had a slender build and black hair that fell across her shoulders. “Be aggressive. We give them no time to react. They can’t know that we’re coming, not yet.”
Nova thought back to the private meeting she and Mal had had with Mengsk, and the idea that there might be a traitor within his inner circle. Due to its sensitive nature, I cannot trust my regular channels to carry it through, the emperor had said. They may have been compromised.
“Actually, I think there’s a pretty good chance they do,” Nova said. “We need to be careful here, try to explore the target and identify any enemy positions without them seeing us, if possible. I want to know absolutely everything I can about what we’re facing before we engage. The emperor’s life may depend on it.”
“You think they’ve come to kill him,” Bones said. “That’s what you’re saying.” It wasn’t a question. “If so, he may already be dead.”
“Then we’re wasting time.” Nova checked her C-20A, slung it back on her shoulder, and confirmed that her HUD was working properly. The ghosts cloaked. Six green dots glowed before her eyes, showing the current locations of the rest of them standing before her. “It’s a delicate situation, and we know very little about what’s happening down there.” She sent a map of the city to their computers and marked each of their sectors around the palace. “I’ve had some experience with this enemy. You’ve all read my report. They have an advanced cloaking device that renders them undetectable. But they seem to be able to sense us. So we have to find an advantage to exploit.”
“I’ve engaged one too,” Bones said. “The same one you did, on Altara. He—she—whatever it was knocked me on my ass and then vanished. I had no warning. How are we supposed to fight that? Fekk, how are we supposed to even find them?”
“Look for collateral damage—dead bodies, points of entry, footprints, blood. Probe the guards’ minds: find out if anyone saw anything unusual. These people like to play games, and that’s where we have an edge. If they get inside your head, if they give you any warning, you take them out. Do not hesitate. They’re flesh and blood, just like us. Be ruthless and deadly. They’ll bleed if we hit them.”
“What if they are us?” Rook said. The powerfully built young man radiated confidence. Nova recalled that his psi index was the highest of the bunch, and that he’d led his team at the academy just three short years ago. “I mean, the missing ghosts.”
“If they were ghosts once, they aren’t anymore. They’re attacking the Dominion, and that makes them traitors. We can’t afford to question that.” Nova looked at each of them in turn. “These people like psychological warfare. If you let them intimidate you, you’ve already lost. You’re all the best that the Dominion has to offer. You know what to do. Now let’s move.”
Ten minutes later they abandoned their burbling vultures inside the city walls and proceeded on foot, their cloaking devices hiding them from public view. The palace was close now, and Nova pushed them all forward quickly, afraid they were running out of time. Scans hadn’t picked up any ships leaving Korhal’s atmosphere, so she had to assume that the terrorists were still here. But all communications in and out of the palace remained jammed, and she didn’t dare alert the local law enforcement herself for fear that they would storm the walls, weapons blazing. For all she knew, they could be in on the plot. The situation was far too fragile to risk that.
The brightly lit streets were quiet at this time of the evening on a work night, most residents having dinner with their families or retiring to watch a holovid before bed. A few hovercars and blimps slid silently by overhead, while AAI units displayed colorful images of soft drinks and home decor, morphing from one thing to the other as they waited for patrons to walk by. Augustgrad was one of the few places in the galaxy where the people had little to fear, and their lives were ruled by routine. Since the war and the nuclear destruction that had rained down on Korhal IV, the rebuilt city had become a hotbed for technology research, education, and manufacturing, as well as the preferred home for military leaders and their families. Incomes were much higher than average, and it showed in the gleaming streets and new construction, sleek modern buildings and condos with small, well-kept grassy areas, and common spaces with fountains and parks.
This city was Mengsk’s shrine to his birthplace, built to show the people how things could be under his leadership once true peace and prosperity were established. And now it might serve as his deathbed.
Nova reached the broad parade way that led to the palace front gates and paused under the shadow of a municipal building for a moment, looking for any signs of trouble. She saw and felt nothing: no sense of an enemy presence, no thoughts other than the steadily increasing babble of Augustgrad’s residents that she had been hearing since they had approached the city limits. There were no calls of alarm either, nothing that would tell her the palace guard had discovered what was happening under their noses.
Maybe, she thought, they were all already dead too.
The thought brought a chill to her spine. As she studied the soaring towers of the palace walls and the Mengsk family insignia of two wolf heads built into the gates, she was suddenly wandering through another familiar sprawling home, past marble foyers with 6-meter-high ceilings, echoing ballrooms, and a chef’s kitchen filled with the smell of baked framberry bread, up the elevator to row after row of closed bedroom doors, to where a girl’s room looked out over sparkling pools and fountains and the lights of the city. Her childhood home on Tarsonis, the family skyscraper that had existed for generations until the war tore it violently down in a bloody coup.
Welcome home, Nova. Her mother stood there smiling at her, the crinkles that spread from her eyes revealing her delight. We missed you.
That memory was shattered by another, far more disturbing one: she and her fellow ghost trainees running across the barren Shi landscape, a massive zerg horde at their heels, while the last descendants of the Old Families of the Confederacy screamed for help and the feelings of overwhelming dread and hopelessness washed over her. The trainees were alone in this fight, with only a broken-down battlecruiser for support.
Why?
She didn’t have time to figure it out now. She snapped back to the present to find Bones staring at her, what might have been the ghost of a smile tugging at his lips.
She glared at him. What are you doing uncloaked? You might be seen.
He said and thought nothing, just cocked his head toward the palace gates with that same faint smile. Then he winked out of sight again. She could see him on her HUD, another glowing speck of green among the five others clustered around her.
Still distracted by the fragmented, vivid visions from her past, Nova Terra began to move toward the palace gates. It didn’t strike her until it was too late that she’d remained cloaked the entire time, but Bones had acted as if he’d been able to see her.
The safe room was proving more difficult to crack than Gabriel Tosh had anticipated.
He sat cross-legged on the floor, thinking. They were in an inner office chamber with a rosewood desk polished to a high shine, two couches, and a fine silk rug the color of dried blood over the stone tile. Behind the desk two wooden panels had been hastily slid aside, exposing a heavy, riveted neosteel door.
Of course he’d known there would be such a room; Mengsk would have required it for his own safety. He’d never really trusted ghosts after the role they had played in the assassination of his father, mother, and baby sister so many years ago. One of them, Sarah Kerrigan, had carried his father Angus’s head away with her like some kind of macabre trophy. Mengsk was nothing if not pragmatic, and he’d eventually used Kerrigan’s talents for his own ends before betraying her to the zerg, and had adopted the Confederate ghost program as his own. But Tosh knew that it was an uneasy partnership. Mengsk’s approach with ghosts was one you would use on attack dogs trained to kill; they might be useful to protect your property, but you never turned your back on them.
Still, Tosh never thought it would come to this. They were supposed to get to the emperor before he knew what was coming. Thanks to Dylanna’s reckless behavior, that hadn’t happened, and now more of Mengsk’s personal guards were lying dead in pools of blood; the alarm had apparently been raised with the coded message to the wrangler; and Mengsk was holed up tight. His panic room was psionically shielded, and there seemed to be no way in, either physically or mentally. Lio had blocked all communications in and out, and the others outside had managed to take care of anyone who stumbled upon evidence of their break-in by killing them outright or brain-panning them, but that couldn’t last forever. They were running out of time.
There was nothing for a moment on the remote console, and then, Manual locking mechanism engaged from within, spilled across the screen. The Palatine has arrived … Dominion forces closing in. Lots of them.
Fekk. Tosh balled his fists, rage swelling within him again until he needed a release. He pounded the tile once with a massive blow that cracked one in half and sent a puff of dust into the air. Then he turned and concentrated on the door, his strange white eyes narrowing as the rage poured out of him and through the air with a rush of heat.
The thick door groaned, flexed slightly, and was still.
It was too strong for him, still too strong. But not for long. A familiar hunger bit deep inside, and he took another hit of terrazine from the gas cylinder and glared at Dylanna, who was sitting on one of the couches, her leg tapping a nervous beat on the floor. She wouldn’t meet his eyes, which was a good thing for her, because he might have decided to rip hers from her skull. He knew she was still upset about the way he had treated her, but he couldn’t be bothered with that. She had deserved it.
Sloan had remained cloaked and was keeping watch just outside the office chamber, ready to act if marines appeared, while Caleb, Jara, and Karl still patrolled the grounds outside the palace walls. He decided to bring them inside and concentrate their efforts on breaking through the sixty-centimeter-thick reinforced walls of the safe room. Together they might be able to exert enough pressure to get to Mengsk.
The emperor needed to answer for his crimes.
Ghosts now in Augustgrad.
Tosh looked down at the new message. So they were here. It didn’t surprise him; in fact, he wondered why it had taken them so long. The spy they had put into place on Altara had done his job nicely and kept them informed all the way through the investigation. Now that he had been delivered right to their front door, it was time for him to rejoin the group too. And there were other recruits here now, six of them, and more likely on the way, enough to swell the ranks of the spectres into a small psionic army.
Nova Terra would be one of them.
The thought made him smile. He had been waiting a long time for this. Nova was the most powerful ghost in the program, and one of the most gifted anyone had ever seen. Having Nova join them would make the spectres a nearly unstoppable force. But it was more than that. They had been much more than friends once, before his first “death,” and bringing her into the fold would have special meaning for him, even if those feelings were in the past.
Convincing her would be a delicate process. She would resist at first; he knew that. But the fact was, she was no match for his new powers. And she could be turned if she knew the truth. After her terrazine exposure, it was only a matter of time before she remembered what happened on planet Shi to the children of the Old Families, and Mengsk’s role in the zerg attack and subsequent cover-up.
That would change her mind. He would make sure of that.
And if the other ghosts resisted and there was no other way, they would have to be put down, along with anyone else alive in the palace. It was regrettable collateral damage, but Nova was the prize.
Tosh stood up and strode to the door, leaving Dylanna to guard the safe room. Shadowblade must not be stopped, no matter what cost.
Nova would join them, or there would be hell to pay.