The spine had struck her
from the side, nearly bisecting her. The others had pinned Dax
against the lift wall. He lay in a
field of red.
"Lift's ready to go," he said, and exhaled once. He didn't inhale.
"Why didn't you move, Caston?" Hanna said, shoving him. "Why didn't you move?"
"It's my fault," Caston said dully.
Hanna stood stil , then opened her faceplate. Even with
exhaustion and grief warring across
her face, her glare was magnificent. "We're the only two left, and you're not going catatonic on
me, Gage," she said. "So listen.
"You didn't make the zerg the hungry sons of bitches they are.
You didn't even start the
war. They did. You have nothing to apologize for."
But he did. She was only partly right: he hadn't fired the first shot.
He'd just fired the next
one.
Hanna dragged him back towards the lift with her suit's remaining
hand, cursing at him and
the world in general. She was saying something about lying low,
then hunting the overlord
down when reinforcements came. He was pretty sure he
responded.
The doors closed. Caston looked at his feet. Blood rippled around
them.
The lift descended haphazardly into the depths of the academy,
coming to a sudden,
shuddering halt every few floors. While Hanna grimly outlined
their revenge, Caston watched
the floors flicker past like images on a projector, flinching each
time the doors hissed open and
slammed shut.
Crumpled skeletons in tattered Confederate uniforms, trapped
when Tarsonis fell.
sssssshChunk
At the end of a short corridor, a glass wall covered in red-veined
flesh.
sssssshChunk
A long hallway strung with hot, pale lights. The farthest one failed.
Then the next. The next.
Then the darkness rushed towards them like a landslide—
sssssshChunk
The lift freefell for several seconds before juddering to a stop with a stench of burning
plastic and metal. The open doors were only around halfway up
their waists. The flickering
display read, "Z."
"... with a flamethrower and step on them. You hear me, Caston?"
"I hear you," Caston said, reaching down to the open doors on Z
level. Together, he and
Hanna pulled the elevator down to the last level, lowered their
visors, and stepped through.
Silence ruled down here. Intermittent grime-stained lights gave
the neosteel a yellow tint. A
sign reading "Security Control" pointed down the branching hallway.
"There's gotta be a working console in there," Hanna said. "We'l call for help, then look
around for emergency stairs."
Caston let her take the lead, since she had the only rifle with
ammo left. She turned a
corner. He had a feeling that their search for stairs wasn't going to go well. Those Confederate
soldiers wouldn't have starved to death if there'd been any stai—
18
Wait.
If there were no stairs, how had the zerglings and the hydralisk
attacked them?
A sly scratching in the wall behind them was their only warning.
The zerg roach sprang onto the neosteel and skidded, spraying
sparks as its six talons fought
for purchase. It hissed triumphantly from within the spiked safety
of its thick carapace. Hanna
wheeled about, leveling the C-14 awkwardly over her suit's
handless forearm.
"Down, Caston!"
Caston had no intention of letting her face it alone. He had no
intention of surviving this
planet, come to that. He lunged at the towering roach, reaching
out with both hands to hold it
stil so that Hanna could take her shot...
With a contemptuous swipe of its bulky body, the roach knocked
him against the wall with a
bang of steel on steel. Hanna fired, and the gauss rounds skipped
and sparked off the roach's
armor...
It reeled back, maws gaping. Time slowed. Hanna threw the rifle
to Caston...
The roach unleashed a flood of acid.
Hanna stumbled backwards choking, her entire front half covered
in the bubbling green
fluid. She sat down heavily on the floor, legs splayed, then fell
backward.
Talons dancing, the roach turned to Caston. It opened its mouth
again, and the bile surged
at the back of its throat...
A missile of pure thought plunged from the sky down into the dark
hallway beneath the
ground. The roach shuddered and stared at him, slavering.
Then it bashed its head against the neosteel into a raw and
mangled pulp.
Unspeakably weary, Caston inched his back up the wall behind
him. He stumbled past the
roach's corpse to Hanna. The acid had eaten through her armor
into the ground below. Nothing
recognizably human remained.
With Hanna's rifle dangling from his hand, Caston eased his way
along the wall to the hole
the roach had ambushed them from. It was more than wide
enough for him.
His chest illuminators carved through the narrow darkness. The
shaft led at an angle away
from the academy until neosteel became soil, hardened to a
resilient crust by the roach's
secretions. The tunnel began spiraling upward, and Caston
followed it for half an hour. At some
point, the spiral branched horizontally back toward the academy,
and Caston knew that if he
followed it, he'd find Kell and Vallen's bodies lying where they fell.
He kept climbing until he was back on the surface, outside the
academy.
The overlord was waiting for him.
Unblinking, red-rimmed green eyes held him and judged him. Wild
hatred bil owed from its
scarred bulk like heat from a furnace. Behind it, the melted ruins
of the academy raked at the
sky.
With painstaking effort, and without breaking eye contact, the
overlord unfurled an
underclaw and scratched a long, wavering line in the soil at
Caston's feet.
He stared down at it. Understanding came.
One. The overlord had left him alive on purpose. They were both
alone now.
The overlord held his gaze a moment longer. Then its side
expanded, and it rose, turning
away.19
Caston raised his rifle. And faltered.
It had left him alive on purpose. It wanted him to kill it. He had
killed the other overlord,
and Green Eyes wanted to die because of it. Why would a zerg
care...?
He remembered them huddled together as if talking. Against his
will, he thought of the
unusual intelligence of the creature, and how Berry had said that
the overlords' original species
were capable of living for hundreds of years. He wondered if it
was possible that an infested
creature could regain its memories, its sentience, if separated
from the Swarm.
And how wonderful it might be to find someone you remembered
at the other end of
centuries full of horrors...
With a disgusted cry, he flung the rifle away.
* * *
Irise back towards the divided horizon. My death does not come. I
wish it did.
I do not want to remember. I do not want to be One anymore.
I do not want to be I anymore.
I do not want to mourn.
I cross the horizon
