Starcraft II: Flashpoint Page 6

  He’d given so much to find her. To save her. He’d turned on Tychus for her. He couldn’t lose her now.

  * * *

  When Raynor and Valerian entered the bridge, Matt, huddled talking with the Hyperion’s chief engineer, Rory Swann, looked relieved. “Good to see you again, sir,” he said. He nodded politely but coolly to Valerian and directed most of his attention to Raynor.

  “Fill me in,” Raynor said.

  Matt did, describing the battle quickly and concisely. Jim watched Valerian sharply as he listened. Valerian still had that familiar poised, calm expression, but he seemed subdued by all that had transpired. There was a flicker of pain across the handsome face as Matt revealed to Raynor that only two other battlecruisers besides the Bucephalus had made it. Raynor said nothing, merely nodded sober acknowledgment. Mengsk was ruthless, but he wasn’t stupid. If he needed the disabled ships and the crew aboard them, he’d spare them. If not—

  “Well, Junior,” he said to Valerian, opting for casual rather than sympathetic, “you found the artifacts, you put them together, and they worked. Sarah sure seems to be human again. Your next step was to take her to one of the Moebius Foundation installations and have your top-notch scientists take a look at her.”

  Valerian took a half second longer to respond than he should have, and Raynor saw just how rattled he really was. “Hm? Oh yes. Dr. Emil Narud will be of the utmost help to us at this juncture.”

  “We have a scientist here, you know,” Horner put in. “And a rather good one. Egon Stetmann. We may not need Narud.”

  Valerian’s golden brows drew together. “I’ve not met this Dr. Stetmann, but I assure you, there is no one in the galaxy who is more familiar with zerg physiology than Dr. Narud. We’d be foolish not to contact him as soon as possible.”

  “Let’s see what Stetmann thinks before we make a decision,” Jim said. He punched the control, and Egon’s angular, eager face appeared. “Egon, how’s the lab right now?”

  “A bit of a mess, but nothing we can’t either sweep up or fix up,” Egon replied. “What’s the plan?”

  “Well, we’re figuring that out right now,” Jim said. “You heard that the xel’naga artifacts worked.”

  Stetmann’s face brightened like a sun. “Oh yes, I did! That’s fantastic! It’s so exciting! Once we have the chance to study them further and, of course, talk with the Qu . . . uh, I mean Kerrigan, of course . . . science will have learned so much that—”

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about,” Jim said. Left unchecked, Egon would prattle on for hours. “Our original plan was to take her to Valerian’s Moebius Foundation. His father has made that considerably harder.”

  Egon frowned. “Oh, right . . . I can see how that could be an issue,” he said. “That’s bad.”

  “You don’t think you can handle it? Kerrigan’s human, but”—he grimaced, hating to admit it—“not quite all the way. She’s going to need care and monitoring and examining so we know how best to take care of her.”

  The color drained visibly from his face. “Me?” His voice, always youthfully high, was a positive squeak. “Oh, sir—I don’t think that’s a very good idea. I mean, I know something about the zerg, but—”

  “You know a hell of a lot, Egon.”

  “Well, while that’s true, this—well, this is way beyond my pay grade. Obviously if we have no other choice, I’ll do the best I can, but . . . sir, I’d hate to lose her, and not just because you’d come down on me like the zerg Swarm itself. I don’t know that I’d be able to handle any, uh, emergencies that arose.”

  Considering Egon tended to slightly exaggerate his capabilities, Jim believed him now that the young scientist was clearly so uncertain. And uncomfortable.

  And right. Jim would come down on him like the zerg Swarm if anything happened to Sarah.

  “So. Guess we’re seein’ Narud again,” he said. Not that long ago, the Raiders had saved Emil Narud and many of his team from the Queen of Blades. He hadn’t liked the man much then and disliked him even more now.

  “I know this is difficult for you, Mr. Raynor, but I assure you, Sarah will be in the best hands possible. We—”

  “Captain Horner!” cried Cade. “We’ve got incoming vessels. The Dominion has found us!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jim swore an oath that would have made Tychus Findlay do a double take. “How the hell did they track us?”

  “No idea, sir,” said Cade. He looked as flustered as the rest of them. “Captain Horner gave instructions for a calculated and encrypted coordinate jump. There’s no way Mengsk could have broken the encryption so fast!”

  Matt didn’t waste a second to excuse himself. He moved back into his role as captain and began issuing orders. “Battle stations! Shields up!”

  Jim whirled on Valerian, closing the distance between them and shoving his face to within a centimeter of the prince’s. “Something you need to tell me?”

  Valerian’s eyes narrowed. He lifted a hand, placed it on Jim’s chest, and firmly pushed Raynor back. “No,” he said. “And I resent what you are implying.”

  “We’re being followed. And the Hyperion sure as shit isn’t leading them to us.”

  “And neither am I!” Valerian shot back. “I lost several battlecruisers full of human beings, Raynor, to ally with you, and—”

  “Jim,” broke in Swann’s gruff voice. “He might be clean. Stupid, but clean.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The viewscreens filled with fire and the Hyperion rocked. Valerian snapped, “I must return to my ship!”

  “Not till I hear what Rory has to say,” Jim said. He, too, burned to get back to the Bucephalus, to be beside Kerrigan, to figure out what was going on and put a stop to it. The more they were delayed by Papa Mengsk, the more time elapsed between Sarah and treatment.

  Rory eyed Valerian but addressed his comment to Jim. “When you, uh, relieved Mengsk of the Hyperion, you will recall you had a whole mess of trackers and recording devices aboard it that had to be scoured off. From what you said, it took a bit of time to do it too. I’d bet that the Bucephalus is just as buggy, seeing as it also was once Mengsk’s flagship. We got a head start this time, in that you recorded where things were rigged on the Hyperion. I’ll wager that Arcturus simply ordered any bugs to be set up in the same pattern.”

  Jim frowned but nodded. “That’s the likeliest explanation, all right.”

  “I’ll take some of my crew over to the Bucephalus and start poking around.” He eyed Valerian from under bushy brows. “We’re a lot more used to being on the run and having to escape quick-like than you are, Prince Charming.”

  “Swann is a bit of a miracle worker when it comes to ships,” Jim said, clapping his friend on the shoulder.

  Valerian frowned slightly, no doubt disliking the idea of this gruff man poking about on his lovely vessel. “Very well,” he said. As if he really had a choice. “Considering how well you’ve done eluding my father before now, I daresay you do know a thing or two.” He smiled, and it looked—and felt—genuine. “Any help you can offer, I will gladly accept. But please, let’s go. Men and women under my command are being attacked. I’d like to stand with them.”

  “I’ll be there before you can blink,” said Rory.

  * * *

  Annabelle Thatcher had been pulling double shifts, but then so had everyone else. She had found that being one of Raynor’s Raiders consisted of hours of boredom spent either in helping her boss, Swann, repair the Hyperion or attending to its seemingly endless maintenance tasks; hours of slightly less boredom spent hanging out in the cantina with her friends, drinking some of bartender Cooper’s magnificent mai tais; and minutes of stark terror.

  Recently, those minutes had seemed even longer. Things had happened so fast that half the time the battle was raging, Annabelle and many others didn’t know exactly who was fighting whom.

  First, there had been the whole arriving-at-Char-and-dezergifying-Kerrigan part. That
decision had caused some of the crew to feel uneasy, even to the point of openly speaking out against Raynor. To those such as Milo Kachinsky, the most vocal of the dissenters, it appeared that Raynor had been siding with the Dominion. Even Annabelle had wondered.

  Tychus Findlay, who would, Annabelle thought, be scary even out of his hardskin and sound asleep, had fanned the flames. He’d taken jabs at Raynor’s drinking—something that Annabelle herself had been more than a little concerned about—and bluntly stated that given the chance, Raynor would hightail it out of danger and leave his crew behind.

  Annabelle didn’t believe that. Raynor had walked in, flicked his cigar at Tychus, and an old-fashioned bar fight had broken out. Despite the apparent advantages of being in full armor, Tychus had been soundly—and publicly—trounced. Even Milo had said of Jim, “Now that’s the commander I’ve been waiting on.”

  Once they had achieved orbit around Char, and the attempt to save Kerrigan had been made, things had happened so quickly and so violently, Annabelle was hardly sure what was what. Horner had made an announcement that the recovery of Kerrigan—in human form—had been successful, but then suddenly Arcturus Mengsk had appeared out of nowhere. No one knew what was going on, only that they were again in danger, and everyone focused on obeying orders and firing where they were told.

  Again on orders, they’d jumped and were now . . . well, Annabelle sure as hell didn’t know where. They had had what felt like six nanoseconds to catch their breaths before, somehow, Mengsk had found them, and they’d come under fire from the emperor a second time.

  “No rest for the wicked,” muttered her friend Earl. He, like Annabelle and the rest in engineering, was dirty and weary-looking.

  “You should know,” Annabelle shot back. The ship rocked, the curious gentleness of the motion belying the fury of the battle raging outside.

  “Shut up, you two, and come with me,” Rory said, stomping into engineering. Normally Swann was a bluff, genial sort of fellow, but he had a temper, and his team knew to not poke at the bear when such moods were upon him. Earl and Annabelle exchanged glances and shrugs, but obeyed, slinging tool kits over their shoulders and hurrying to keep up with their boss as they strode down the wide, carpeted corridors of what had once been Arcturus Mengsk’s flagship.

  “Sir,” Annabelle ventured, “where are we going?”

  “To the Bucephalus,” Swann replied curtly. He broke into a trot, and the other two emulated him. “You probably couldn’t tell, but in that last battle and in this one, too, Senior was fighting against Junior as well as us.”

  Annabelle’s eyes widened. “Nope, down in engineering we just concentrated on keeping the Hyperion in one piece while zerg and Dominion battlecruisers swarmed all over us.”

  “Junior and a couple of his ships came with us. But once we jumped, Mengsk found us inside of fifteen minutes. So now we’re going to go over to the golden boy’s ship to check for transmitters and other technology that Senior might have planted on it.”

  “Because if we don’t, Mengsk is going to be able to follow us anywhere we go,” Annabelle finished. “Boy, does that sound familiar.” She’d been aboard when Raynor had first acquired the Hyperion, and well remembered scouring the vessel for bugs. She was not looking forward to doing it again, but it was much preferable to being chased and attacked by the emperor. They hurried through the docking tubes and stepped out into the interior of the Bucephalus.

  “First,” said Rory, “engineering.”

  * * *

  Valerian stood on the bridge. He had not felt this angry and helpless since he and his mother had been forced into hiding, hunted by Confederate kill teams. Though he knew he did an admirable job of concealing it, he was reeling at his father’s betrayal. He still couldn’t wrap his mind around Arcturus’s decision. It was shortsighted and stupid—two things he had never believed of his father, but was forced to now.

  He was also wrestling with another unusual emotion—guilt. He had ordered his soldiers to fire upon their emperor, then asked them to do what amounted to completely severing all ties in choosing Valerian over Arcturus. True, some of those who served aboard the battlecruisers were what were called “resocs”—marines who had had their memories altered in order to render them cheerful and utterly obedient. Even so, they were people, not machines like the adjutants, the humanoid-shaped computer interfaces. And there were many under his command whose minds were still completely their own—minds that had made a conscious choice to follow the Heir Apparent, not minds that simply followed orders.

  Many of those men and women had died for choosing him. And now more were going to, because his father had been canny enough to plant trackers on the Bucephalus. He suddenly realized his hands had curled into fists and deliberately forced them to unclench.

  As he watched, lips pressed together to form a thin, harsh line, he took a grim pleasure in noticing that if the number of his ships had been reduced, so had those of his father. It wasn’t an even battle, but the odds were not as crushingly overwhelming as they could have been. Both he and his father had brought twenty-five ships to the battle, not counting the White Star, the Bucephalus, or the Hyperion. He did not dictate to his captain; Everett Vaughn knew his job well, and Valerian was wise enough to know the benefits of finding the best people possible for a position, and then standing back and letting them do their jobs.

  His fists still clenched of their own accord each time one of his ships took a hit. One in particular, the Antigone, seemed to be the preferred target, other than the Bucephalus itself. The Antigone was the most damaged of the two ships that had been able to escape the previous battle. Mengsk obviously thought to cripple it permanently and remove it as a threat, while still firing at the Bucephalus.

  Vaughn looked up at Valerian. “Sir, incoming transmission from the White Star.”

  “Ignore it. My father has nothing to say that could possibly interest me.”

  “ . . . Yes, sir.”

  There was, however, someone he did want to talk to. He strode to one of the bulkheads and punched an intercom. “Valerian to Swann. How are you progressing?”

  “I’d be going faster without having to listen to your yapping,” came the engineer’s growl. “We’re moving as fast as we can, Junior. Remember, it ain’t just you and this pretty ship that’s getting fired on.”

  “Of course.”

  “That said, we’ve found three bugs down here already. We should be up to check out the bridge shortly.”

  “I confess I hadn’t expected to have three of Raynor’s Raiders on the bridge of the Bucephalus in the middle of a battle,” said Valerian. At that moment, orange filled the viewports and the Bucephalus rocked.

  “Damage reports coming in from levels four and seven, six casualties,” said Vaughn.

  “Sooner we get up there and do our sweep, the sooner we can all jump again,” Swann chimed in.

  “Sir,” said Vaughn, turning to Valerian, “I’m getting a message from the Herakles and the Antigone. They’re taking severe damage and they both express uncertainty about the ability to make another jump without time to effect repairs.”

  Valerian grimaced. “Contact Raynor,” he said. Raynor’s face appeared on-screen.

  “How you holding up, Valerian?”

  “Your Swann appears to indeed be working miracles, but not quickly enough,” said Valerian. “My two other ships might not be able to make the jump if we wait much longer.”

  “Well, no sense in doing it if we’re just going to have to jump again right after.”

  Valerian’s gray eyes were riveted to the sight of the battle, not on Raynor. The two ships were still fighting, but it was obvious that the Antigone was in bad shape, and the Herakles wasn’t far behind.

  “We’re going to have to. It’ll buy Swann and his team time to keep working.”

  “They’re just going to find us—”

  “I don’t care!” snapped Valerian, whirling back to face Raynor’s hologram. “We’ll jum
p as many times as we have to in order to save my people, Raynor. And if you don’t understand that sentiment, then I have misjudged you terribly.”

  Raynor frowned. Valerian didn’t need to be a telepath to know what he was thinking. Raynor was no doubt wondering if this was simply noble posturing on Valerian’s part, or if perhaps Junior was indeed a better man than Senior.

  “I hear you,” Raynor said at last. He turned his head. “Matt, get us some new jump coordinates. Even if it just buys us ten or fifteen minutes, it’s worth it.”

  Valerian closed his eyes briefly in relief. “Thank you, Mr. Raynor.” He clicked off the image. “This is Prince Valerian to the Antigone and the Herakles. Jump coordinates coming in from the Hyperion shortly. Wait for Captain Horner’s mark, and then let’s do it.”

  The next several minutes lasted forever. Valerian fought the urge to pace, instead practicing rhythmic breathing, an ancient art, to calm himself. The White Star was being attacked relentlessly, and it was taking damage. But not enough, nor fast enough.

  Come on, come on . . . .

  “Receiving incoming transmission from the Hyperion, sir—they’re sending the jump coordinates and telling us to be ready to jump on his mark in less than two minutes.”

  For a brief, horrible second, Valerian wondered if their transmissions were being monitored as well. But almost instantly, he realized that they weren’t. Because if they had been, then Mengsk and his fleet would have arrived a lot sooner than fifteen minutes later. It was a small consolation.

  “Transmit to the Herakles and the Antigone,” Valerian ordered. “Both vessels to have an open channel to receive Captain Horner’s mark. We’ll—”

  And he had to close his eyes at the sudden flash on the screen. When he opened them, it was to behold horror. The Antigone had been struck a definitive, deadly blow. Flames fed by the battlecruiser’s own atmosphere still made him squint. There was a steady stream of debris and bodies pouring out from the gaping hole in the ship. As he stared, aghast, there was another strike, and the ship cracked in two.