Shadow of the Xel'Naga, page 6
The throne felt right to him, as if he had always deserved it. And he felt powerful.
In the background, a holoprojection was playing, repeating the magnificent speech he had given to all human beings on the event of his self-coronation. Mengsk never got tired of hearing the words.
“Fellow Terrans, I come to you, in the wake of recent events, to issue a call to reason. Let no human deny the perils of our time. While we battle one another, divided by the petty strife of our common history, the tide of a greater conflict is turning against us, threatening to destroy all that we have accomplished.”
Very dramatic. Very compelling. Mengsk had practiced the speech many times in front of numerous advisors.
It had been months now since the overthrow of the Terran Confederacy, when Mengsk himself had arranged to lure the evil Zerg minions to the capital planet of Tarsonis. There, the voracious aliens had done Mengsk's destructive work for him. And better still, he had managed to make it appear that he was the hope of all humans, a knight in shining armor.
His image continued to speak. “It is time for us as nations and as individuals to set aside our long-standing feuds and unite. The tides of an unwinnable war are upon us, and we must seek refuge upon higher ground lest we be swept away by the flood.
“With our enemies left unchecked, who will you turn to for protection?”
Good words, he thought, a nice slogan. Worth repeating.
Much remained to be done, though. Emperor Mengsk had worlds to subdue, governments to reestablish, figureheads to put into place.
And now he had received this odd message from the forgotten colony of Bhekar Ro.
Mengsk shifted in his throne, looking at a transcript of the communiqué. He wanted to review every word of his conversation with the colony's mayor, Jacob Nikolai. Never heard of him before.
Running his well-manicured fingers down his bushy whiskers, Mengsk frowned, wondering what to do about the situation. His initial instinct had been to ignore the request for assistance. Bhekar Ro was not on the list of important worlds on which the new emperor needed to secure his grasp. Even the Confederacy had left them alone. Why should he really be concerned about a bunch of dirt farmers from a backwater world nobody had ever noticed?
Distracting sounds drifted to him from the rooms surrounding the throne chamber: loud hammering, buzzing diamond cutters, and sparking laser welders. Now that he had control of the Terran government, Mengsk had ordered construction on a vast scale to begin on the devastated worlds, such as the restoration here on Korhal, which remained scarred from previous Confederate atrocities.
Over the din, his holo speech continued. “The devastation wrought by the alien invaders is self-evident. We have seen our homes and communities destroyed by the calculated blows of the Protoss, we have seen firsthand our friends and loved ones consumed by the nightmarish Zerg. Unprecedented and unimaginable though they may be, these are the signs of our time.”
Infrastructure damaged by the Zerg invasion and the Protoss strikes on Mar Sara and Chau Sara needed to be healed and rebuilt—but those unimportant places could come later. First the emperor had to figure out how to squeeze more taxes from the populace so that he could restock his imperial treasury. Any planet that did not cheer Mengsk's presence loudly enough would find it far more difficult to receive funding and civil engineers for their construction projects.
“The time has come, my fellow Terrans, to rally to a new banner. In unity lies strength. Already many of the dissident factions have joined us. Out of the many we shall forge an indivisible whole, under the authority of a single throne. And from that throne I shall watch over you.”
He decided to make sure that this coronation speech was taught to all young students in the new Dominion. Revising history could well become a fulltime job. . . .
Mengsk poured himself a glass of rich purple klavva wine, drank it down quickly, then poured a second glass that he could savor. The decision about the strange alien object on Bhekar Ro rested squarely on his shoulders. He couldn't pass it off to anyone else—that was the disadvantage of being emperor. But Arcturus Mengsk had earned the right, earned this position, and he chided himself for complaining about the minor duties of a great ruler.
What exactly had those backwater settlers found? He had agreed to send assistance, but was it really worth his while to investigate?
One of his uniformed aides marched briskly into the opulent throne room and gave him a smart raised-fist salute that had been used by the Sons of Korhal. If Emperor Mengsk had his way, the salute would soon be accepted throughout the Terran Dominion.
The aide handed him a rolled document, which Mengsk opened and studied. Ah, the daily list of scheduled executions! The emperor ran his fingernail down the numerous names and recognized few of them. He didn't remember what their crimes were, and right now he didn't have the time to check up on everything. Too many annoying details. Most of them must have been political prisoners or mutineers who refused to give up the old reins of the Terran Confederacy.
He began to check the cases one by one, but then decided he had more pressing matters to attend to. Mengsk simply stamped the entire list “Approved” and handed it back to the aide, who raised his fist in the Dominion salute again and hurried off to present the duly signed document to the Executioners Guild.
Another job done for the day.
His holo speech wound toward its conclusion. “From this day forward let no human make war upon any other human. Let no Terran agency conspire against this New Beginning. And let no man consort with alien powers. And to all the enemies of humanity: Seek not to bar our way. For we shall win through, no matter the cost.”
Mengsk stared again at the summary of the conversation he'd had with Mayor Nikolai. What to do? he mused. There was no point in being suspicious that these settlers were lying to him or overblowing their discovery, since they were so far out of galactic politics that they hadn't known who Emperor Mengsk was, had not even heard of the Terran Dominion.
Still, who really cared if some clodhoppers dug up a big shiny rock and didn't know what to make of it?
Unless the thing had some value to it. Emperor Mengsk never reacted too spontaneously. What if this alien “thing” was actually something important, something he shouldn't ignore? It could be a new threat, something sinister left by the Zerg or the Protoss, strange races that still brought fear to his heart, even though he had used them to his own ends in order to crush his former rivals.
Did he dare dismiss this discovery without investigating it? What if the pulsing artifact were a powerful repository of knowledge? What if it contained valuable resources . . . or even a weapon? Alien artifacts were exceedingly rare. Emperor Arcturus Mengsk knew he needed all the help he could get while he cemented his hold on power.
He went into his war room and called up the glowing three-dimensional star maps that showed the Koprulu Sector. He glanced at the familiar stars and planetary systems, then had the computer add a tiny dot to mark the Bhekar Ro colony, using coordinates backtracked from the communications signal. The colonists had been quiet for so long that they had fallen off regular Confederacy records. Mengsk muttered at the incompetence of his predecessors.
He studied the surrounding area, then called up a tactical display that showed where all of his ships in the sector were currently stationed. With a smile on his bearded face he decided to dispatch General Edmund Duke and his Alpha Squadron to investigate. They needed something to do anyway.
The gruff general, who was already in the vicinity, was expendable at this point. The mission would keep the man and his Marines occupied, and Mengsk doubted the colonists would complain overmuch to the hard-as-nails officer. The emperor didn't mind giving General Duke a more interesting assignment— as long as it kept him safely away from Korhal for the time being.
Though Duke had taken an oath to the new Dominion, he had fought on the side of the Confederacy for many years. Mengsk remained uneasy about having such a forceful military leader with so much firepower at his disposal just sitting around and getting bored.
The general was a hardened military leader who had sworn to defend his new government—and such men did not take oaths lightly. Still, he didn't distrust the commander entirely. The emperor decided to give Duke and Alpha Squadron a chance to prove themselves.
The holoprojector reset itself and began to play the coronation speech again. “Fellow Terrans, I come to you, in the wake of recent events, to issue a call to reason. . . .”
He considered shutting it off, but decided to listen just one more time.
Mengsk wrote out orders and transmitted them to the communications facility, dispatching Alpha Squadron with all due haste to Bhekar Ro.
CHAPTER 10
AT DAWN OVER THE GREASY GRAY SKIES OF Bhekar Ro, thin clouds swirled and then rippled like a tainted oil stain atop stagnant water. The wastelands were quiet . . . too quiet.
With a crack of thunder in the dry air, the fabric of space tore and a warp-rift opened. A glider hawk reeled about, disrupted in its endless search for food.
As the echoes of the boom rippled across the valley, startling small rodents that eked out an existence among the hardy scrub brush, a Protoss Observer from the Qel'Ha appeared and hovered high in the sky. Observers were reconnaissance vessels sent out to gather information, but not to participate in actual combat.
Automatically following its programming, the Observer switched on a micro-cloaking field and vanished from view. The drone craft descended, activating the complex sensor array that drained most of its operational energy, leaving nothing for system defenses. Three-fold wing shields opened, guiding the single, cyclopean eye.
Then it began to search. The Observer proceeded across the uninhabited areas of Bhekar Ro, unchallenged and unnoticed. While flying headlong across the vast distance of space, it had not been able to pinpoint its coordinates precisely. But now, as the Observer homed in on the location of the artifact's transmitted signal, it planted navigational beacons so that the Qel'Ha and the rest of the Protoss expeditionary force could arrive precisely on target.
The Observer spent hours circling overhead, approaching the broken mountainside where the half-uncovered organic oddity lay exposed in the morning light. Sending regular real-time reports back to Executor Koronis, the reconnaissance drone imaged and analyzed the artifact protruding from the mountainside. After its initial transmission, the object had lain quiet. Waiting.
Once the small drone had inspected every angle and approached as closely as its programming allowed without risk of disturbing the artifact that had sent the signal, it proceeded to make a wider reconnaissance. In compiling its overall tactical survey, the drone acquired images of the mountain ranges and detected—with no hint of surprise in its robotic mind—cultivated fields and outlying settlements of prefabricated buildings.
Assessing the situation, the Observer closed in, still cloaked, until it hovered over the central colony town on Bhekar Ro. It began to collect data on the human settlers, the resident population, and their defenses. . . .
It was a morning like any other morning, but Octavia Bren had to face the day without her brother Lars.
The other colonists left her alone, even Mayor Nikolai, who was better known for talk than for practical action. She sat in the octagonal town square remembering Lars and their time together, how they had often discussed which unmarried colonists they each might consider as a mate, how hard they had worked, what they had hoped to accomplish, how the two had teased each other as young children. . . .
It had been long enough now that the scars of her parents' deaths had healed. The other colonists were so familiar with unexpected tragedy that they sympathized with Octavia, but were not paralyzed with grief. Free Haven had suffered enough before, and would continue to endure the pain. It was their lot in life. But Octavia's grandparents had been convinced that this was a better existence than living under the Terran Confederacy. Here they were free—though at the moment Octavia could not be entirely sure that she preferred the constant uncertainty and brevity of life on Bhekar Ro.
Octavia wished she and her brother had never gone out to inspect the seismographs and automated mining stations, but Lars had been so excited about the discovery. She wished he could have been like the other colonists, never curious, never striving for more, just holding on to life as long as he could manage.
But then he wouldn't have been Lars.
As the morning brightened, Octavia stayed near the ornamental old Missile Turret, constructed there over an abandoned bunker by the first colonists. It was meant to be a sentry station, an automated defense that would watch the skies and protect Bhekar Ro—though from what, she didn't know. The Missile Turret had sat there silently for more than forty years. Nobody even believed it worked anymore.
Now, instead of being seen as a defense, the turret served as a reminder and a monument to what they had left behind in the Confederacy. Occasionally some colonists proposed dismantling it for parts, power cells, and materials, but the mayor had never gotten enough ambition to gather a crew.
Now, as Octavia sat there alone, thinking of her brother and staring up into the unpleasant, featureless sky, the Missile Turret suddenly clicked, hummed, and moved. System lights winked on, sputtered, then glowed bright.
She leaped to her feet and scrambled away with a shout. A few colonists came out of their homes to look at her, then saw the activation lights on the clunky metal structure and saw the turret move.
Its hydraulics hummed as components opened, rattled, and locked into place. A brilliant light shone from its top as the turret's tracking scanner swiveled. The automatic sensors centered in and targeted something invisible in the sky. Missile Turrets were designed to automatically target and fire on incoming enemy aircraft, but they also served as sentry stations; their powerful sensors could detect even cloaked vessels.
This turret had not stirred in decades, but now it locked on, selected a missile, and loaded it into the launch rack, its mechanisms clattering and groaning. Its detector systems flickered and sparked, not working properly. But it had detected something.
With a pulse of energy, the turret fired its missile into the sky. Smoke streamed from an access hatch on the Missile Turret as its long-dormant systems began to fail.
Other colonists, rushing out in response to the strange noise, were astonished to see that the military hardware still functioned at all.
“Could've been a misfire,” the mayor said. “We should have deactivated that a long time ago.”
The projectile shot upward like an exploding javelin, cruising in a smooth, perfect arc until it struck something that looked like a ripple and a halo in the air.
But Octavia stretched her forefinger toward the sky. “No, look! It's hit something.”
With a flicker, the Observer's cloaking field broke down, and the damaged drone wavered through the sky, its hull split open, one of its three wing covers blown away. Losing altitude, the device spun and sputtered until it crashed like an unwieldy bullet into one of the roughly tilled fields outside of town.
Without even looking to see if the other settlers were following, Octavia ran out to the crash site, where she found a bowl-shaped crater gouged into the dirt. The twisted, blackened wreckage had slammed into the ground. There was very little of the Observer left to examine.
Studying what was left of the object while the colonists rushed to join her, Octavia noticed the strange alien markings on the outer covering of the drone, the broken angled panels over the sensor arrays, the large central eye.
“Either the Confederacy has changed its designs an awful lot, or that's nothing a Terran ever built,” Mayor Nik announced, stating aloud what everyone else had already realized.
Octavia felt a stab of ice inside her. First the storm and earthquake had exposed the huge buried artifact. Now, from out of the sky, an invisible alien device had been shot down—though what its purpose might be she could only guess.
The colonists began to mutter uneasily, looking down at the crashed object. Octavia turned away from the alien wreckage and bit her lower lip, wondering what could possibly be going on here. And what could possibly happen next.
CHAPTER 11
WHEN THE DISTANT ARTIFACT'S INSISTENT SIGNAL reached the Zerg swarms on Char, it sent a shockwave like a mental avalanche through the Queen of Blades. As she sat in her growing hive, the pulsing transmission hammered Sarah Kerrigan's temples with an electromagnetic shriek. Somehow this blaring call was attuned to the new resonances in her head, the genetic reception signal that had been incorporated into the Zerg from the primal foundation of their DNA.
The thrumming signal caused her hive's organic shell to shimmer, as it too received the long-forgotten awakening call. The exoskeletal material that made up the hive walls began to resonate in response.
Around her, Zerg minions reacted with frenzy as the signal triggered some instinctive memory deep inside. The monstrous Hydralisks reared up, hissing and slashing with their claws, their pointed spines extruded, ready to fire a rain of deadly darts at any creature they perceived as an enemy.
The doglike Zerglings went wild, streaming about and attacking Drones and larvae, tearing them to shreds. The alien signal pounded in Kerrigan's head, but she gritted her teeth and imposed order upon her mind. With all of her psi power, she reached out and attempted to control the instincts of her Zerglings. She needed to stop them from killing more members of her Hive.
In her earlier life, she had been trained in the Confederate Ghost program. The Terrans had given her agonizing neural processing treatments to pacify her latent psi powers. They had surgically implanted a Psychic Dampener to control her, to make her into a good espionage and intelligence agent. Sarah Kerrigan had been forced to murder countless enemies and learned to treat life itself as a fleeting, disposable commodity.
