THE CRATER TURNED OUT TO BE THE TOP OF A long, straight chute. The sides had cooled long ago, but the lava that had erupted through it had been hot enough to melt the rock to glass, and the walls were water-slick and perfectly smooth. Raynor plummeted like a stone, bruising arms and legs whenever he bumped against the sides, careful to keep his head tucked in and his limbs wrapped around his rifle. The fall felt endless but it was probably less than a minute before he spied a glow below him, and then he was curling into a ball and striking the floor hard enough to leave him dizzy and gasping. "All right, sir?" Cavez offered him a hand, and after a minute he took it. The youngster looked unfazed, but then he'd jumped in first and so he'd had a minute to recover. Raynor did his best not to show just how wobbly he was—wouldn't do to let his men see him collapse like a little girl. "Fine, thanks," he rasped, clambering to his feet and leaning back against the wall while he waited for his vision to clear. Behind him he heard a thud and a groan that could only be Mannix, following him down. Ayers were there to help her up and move her out of the way and suddenly Raynor knew he didn't need to worry about looking weak. They'd all need a minute to recover. It was one hell of a drop. He glanced around, squinting to see better. Two glowsticks lay on the ground nearby, producing the light he'd seen, and he realized they'd been lit to provide a clue to the sudden stop at the end. It was a smart move, and he wondered which of the four troopers had thought of it.
The glow wasn't much, but as his eyes adjusted he could make out more of the space where they'd landed. It was broad and high, at least four feet above his head and wide enough for four men abreast. He'd have preferred something narrower, since that would have kept the zerg from mobbing them, but it couldn't be helped. The rough corridor extended in both directions without branches, and he noticed it had a slight incline. The lower end pointed back the way they had come. "Which way, sir?" Mannix asked, wincing slightly as she popped her neck and worked her right shoulder back into joint. Two more pairs had arrived, one fourth their crew, with the others and the full Nemesis squad still topside. "Not sure yet," he admitted, pushing off from the wall and walking a little ways down the corridor. If the zerg were in this tunnel they hadn't noticed them yet or were too far away to be detected. He had a feeling they weren't here—the chute had been long enough to get them down here but that didn't mean it ran all the way to whatever level the Swarm was using. He knew they liked it deep. But the lava had flowed up from here, which meant there had to be a way down from this point. He just had to find it. "All right, Kerrigan," he muttered. "I'm here. Now where the hell are you?" Closing his eyes, he was instantly thrust back into the nightmare version of this world. This time the monster-zerg already had him surrounded, and as he lifted his hands to shield himself he saw that his skin had darkened, but unevenly, his flesh now blotchy and gray, almost green, clearly unhealthy. Yet his body felt strong, capable, and powerful. Energy thrummed through him, invigorating him, setting his hair on end Raynor forced his eyes open again, cutting the dream off abruptly. It had been waiting there for him behind his eyelids, ready to spring the instant he fell into darkness. He was almost afraid to blink, in case it came back into that space and pulled him away. But his gamble had worked.
The dream was stronger here than it had been on the surface. Kerrigan was closer. Walking past his curious troopers, he stalked a dozen paces in the opposite direction and closed his eyes again. One of the zerg was touching him, its scythelike limbs poking into his mottled flesh, but it was not attacking. There was no force behind the thrust, no aggression—it was merely a way of making contact. And through that contact came a voice, deep and cold, a voice that resounded through his bones and sent chills up his spine. Yet for all that, it felt strangely comforting. "Welcome," it said to him. "The Swarm embraces you." The shock of that message popped his eyes back open and Raynor stood there a moment, gasping, before turning back to his crew. "This way," he told them, barely able to spit the words out. The dream had been stronger this time than before. Part of that was the urgency, he knew, some impending event that Kerrigan was desperate to avoid. Part of it was simply that the dreams were getting worse, their story playing out to an unpleasant end he desperately tried not to acknowledge. But part of it was proximity. He was sure he was right. Kerrigan felt closer this way. He was leading his men in the right direction. The corridor dead-ended a hundred paces farther down, but just before that point Cavez spotted a branching. A narrow passage split off to one side, its sharply angled walls and irregular path evidence that it was a natural fissure. The rock here was slate gray rather than black and they could see a darker patch at the far end, either volcanic rock or an opening. Either way it was their best option, and they headed toward it, creeping along single file. Ayers took the lead, with Patel right behind him."It's another passage," Ayers called back, and sounded like he was about to elaborate when he let out a wheeze and then a short gasp. Patel's rifle sounded, the report deafening in that narrow space, and Raynor cursed from his spot four men back. It had to be zerg! And here they were, unable to retreat, unable to form ranks, emerging one by one like peas popped loose from a pod. This was likely to be a slaughter. He had to do something fast to even the odds, and he did it. Grasping a heavy sphere from his belt, he primed it and lobbed it overhand. The grenade flew past him, over Mannix and Cavez and Squire, and disappeared into that darkness where Patel had ventured after Ayers. "Grenade!" Raynor shouted, dropping to a crouch, and Messner behind him and Mannix before him did the same.
He hoped Patel had heard. Then the grenade went off, sending a shock wave back through the passage. The walls shook and slivers of rock fell, slicing flesh and canvas and leather, bouncing off metal. But the ceiling held, the floor didn't crack open, and an instant later Patel called out, "All clear!" They hustled then, stealth forgotten, wading into the smoke and dust, and a minute later Raynor was out of that narrow fissure and into a much wider corridor, his back against the wall, rifle at the ready. Patel had a nasty cut along one arm and looked like he'd been worked over by a dozen large drunks, but he was still standing and still had a grip on his rifle. Ayers hadn't been so lucky. The veteran trooper lay on the ground just beyond the fissure's exit, blood pooling beneath him from the gaping hole in his chest and from the places where his arms had been. The hydralisk had stopped him from shooting by shearing both arms off at the elbow, then it had gutted him. They hadn't even heard the first blow. Fortunately the hydralisk hadn't been expecting a grenade. Judging from the body it had taken the impact full force in the chest and head, and had been squashed like a bug against the far wall. Raynor hoped it had been painful but knew it probably hadn't. "Well, they know we're here," he said, shaking his head. "Nothin' for it, then. Leastways we don't have to be quiet anymore." He clicked his rifle over to full auto, and heard many of the troopers doing the same. "Get hold of the other crews," he told Mannix. "Relay it back if you can't get a signal to them from down here. Get everyone down here. We're gonna need 'em." Mannix nodded and called Messner to her, presumably to coordinate the process of reaching the other teams. Raynor knew he could trust her to take care of it. Soon they'd have everyone down here with them, roughly three hundred troopers. He hoped it would be enough. He watched for another minute as the rest of the two teams made their way through the fissure. Squire and Cavez moved Ayers' remains off to one side. Gina Elani, one of Messner's team, bandaged Patel's arm. Everyone was ready. Then, because this tunnel ran in two directions and he could see several branches already, Raynor gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. More of the monster-zerg were touching him now, their claws and spines jabbing but not penetrating his skin, and the voices had amplified, creating a ringing echo behind his eyes and between his ears. The words were the same, though. "Welcome. The Swarm embraces you." Shuddering, Raynor opened his eyes, reassuring himself that it was just a dream. Then he walked to the other side of the fissure and let the dream take him again. It took all his willpower to come out of it, to step away from that cold, clammy, smothering greeting, but he had his answer. He gestured in that direction."This way," he told his people. As they followed him down the natural hallway, he hoped Kerrigan was worth it. And he hoped the scene in his dream was only an interpretation of her fear, not a peek at what was really going on inside her head. Because if it was accurate, they might all be doomed. And Raynor knew it would be his fault for bringing them here, to this world, to these caverns, to this mess.
The tunnels continued, one leading to another. Raynor used the dreams to find his way through each intersection, following the stronger path each time. And each time he had to force himself back to the present, back to his own flesh and blood, wrenching his mind from that stifling welcome that awaited him in the darkness. The urge to scream welled up within him and he fought it back, tightening his grip on his rifle until he was surprised the barrel and stock didn't have his fingerprints squeezed into the hardened plastic. They encountered several more zerg. Each time it was only a small group of the aliens and each time Raynor's troopers made short work of them, though not without cost. Patel had survived that first attack with a wound to one arm and made it through a second unscathed, only to have his face bitten off by a zergling that leaped from a small hole in the ceiling and tore into him on the way down. Gina Elani, the petite trooper who had bandaged Patel's first wound, was sliced in half by a hydralisk when she stopped to give one of her fallen teammates a hand up. That teammate died as well, his chest ripped open even as Messner fired a full clip into the zerg's back. Others also fell, many Raynor knew only a little and some he didn't even recognize except as names on a list. He vowed to look up every last one of them if he made it out of this alive.
They deserved that much. The small zerg groupings were probably due to the narrow passages and crooked tunnels. Once or twice they found themselves in wide corridors like the first one below the chute, but those never lasted. These caverns were natural, never altered by zerg or any other, and they started and stopped, twisted and turned, dove and rose at random, going from avenuewide to stairwell-narrow in a heartbeat and doubling around razor-edged corners or ribboning off out of sight. Cracks in the floor led to other levels, as did holes in the ceiling, but some of those gaps led to tiny pockets instead, and it was impossible to guess what lay beyond each opening. One trooper died because he dropped down through a crack and fell into a magma pool, burning to ash in an instant. Another thrust his head up through a hole above and cracked his skull against the rocky ceiling of the two-foot-high space. He might have survived if he hadn't broken his neck when he fell back to the tunnel below. Raynor's dreams—they were more like waking visions now, always threatening to overlap reality and overwhelm his sense of self—were all that kept them going. He heard several troopers muttering behind him, wondering how he could possibly know where to go in this maze, but Mannix and the other sergeants shushed them quickly. No one really wanted to believe he didn't know the way, anyway. That would only make this worse. Finally Raynor led them down a short, almost straight tunnel, high enough for him to carry another trooper upright on his shoulders and wide enough for him to fling his arms out without scraping the sides. At the other end was a wide arch, its surface stone but covered by a pulsing gray-black matter that looked less like the fungus it was than exposed brains. It was the zerg ooze, the creep that had showed their presence on several planets as it crept across the surface, matching their spread beneath. It meant that Raynor and his people had finally reached a place here on Char where the zerg had made themselves at home. "Sir!" Cavez pointed, and Raynor followed his gesture, catching his breath as he saw the shape suspended near the center of the arch. It was an eye, a human eye, or at least it would have been if humans grew twenty feet tall. A cluster of thick tendrils trailed behind it and were wrapped around what looked like massive web strands crisscrossing the arch. The eye hung from them like a horribly altered spider, wriggling as they approached its web.
"Somebody blind that ugly sucker!" Raynor shouted, and Squire took aim and fired. A single spike plunged deep into the eye, dead-center on its massive pupil, and with a grating squawk the eye burst, showering them with bits of jellied goo. The tendrils still clung to the web, twitching slightly. "Guess there's no sense knocking," Raynor muttered to Mannix beside him, and she mustered a weak smile in return. The eye had obviously been a sentry, and it had seen them approaching this whole time. The Swarm knew they were here. "Get ready!" Raynor shouted over his shoulder, knowing Mannix would relay his message to the squads too far back to hear him. "We're about to have company!" As if his words had been the trigger, a flutter of shapes appeared on the far side of the arch, casting shadows upon the web there. Then the strands burst and the Swarm was upon them. Earlier, in that fissure, Raynor had wished for more room. Now he would have killed for less. The tunnel here was broad enough for three men to stand together, and the archway filled that width. That meant the zerg had enough space to charge in a cluster, spilling through the arch and threatening to engulf his troopers by numbers alone. A narrower space would have forced the zerg to trickle through instead of flood and they could have held them off more easily. Still, the goal wasn't to hold them but to get past them. Raynor didn't need to close his eyes to know that Kerrigan must be on the other side of that arch. Getting through was going to be a problem, though. He shot a hydralisk through the head with his rifle and then drew his pistol and shot another that had been about to gut Mannix from behind. Steadying his pistol barrel atop and across his rifle, he fired one and then the other, blasting anything in his way. Zerglings were everywhere, leaping at men's heads or chewing through their arms or clamping those massive jaws around their ankles, tangling limbs and guns and leaving them vulnerable.
The hydralisks were right behind them, as were the mutalisks, both using their spikes and blades to carve through the human forces. Raynor saw Squire go down, scythes from two different hydralisks meeting in her chest, her rifle shoved down by the blows and discharging at her feet, kicking up rock shards as the spikes struck the ground. Messner fell beneath a pack of zerglings and was literally ripped apart—Mannix saw it as well and was kind enough to put a bullet through the young trooper's head before he could register the pain. Raynor's troops were good, well-armed and well-trained and wellmotivated, but they were drastically outnumbered. The tight quarters—wide enough for them to be surrounded but not wide enough for them to back away—didn't help. The zerg were all linked together, speaking to each other's minds, and that let them move as a single body. Raynor's people weren't so lucky. They stumbled against one another, blocked one another's shots, and sometimes even shot each other. That didn't help. "We need to get inside!" he shouted to Mannix. They were back-to-back, firing at anything that came too close—more than once he'd had to jerk his gun away to avoid shooting a trooper. "We don't have time for this!" "Let's go!" she shouted back. "Everyone, form up on me! Cover fire!" Not everyone heard her through the tumult, but enough did and some twenty men and women grouped around them, all facing outward. They began walking as a clump, locking step to avoid stumbling, firing in all directions at once. Every time someone emptied a clip the neighbor took over, covering that angle until they had reloaded. The zerg couldn't get to them, couldn't breach that wall of steel and plastic and powder. They made it under the arch, and then they were inside. The rest of the troopers were still in the tunnel, and they waited until Raynor and Mannix were past the arch before unleashing a rain of bullets.
The zerg were forced to turn their attention to the larger threat again and swarmed down the tunnel, leaving the handful around Raynor with a moment to breathe and look around. "What is this place?" one of them, a young man named Fedders, whispered. He was shaking slightly, and Raynor couldn't blame him. What they'd just been through, and what they were seeing now, was enough to shake anyone. This chamber was far larger than the tunnel beyond it, wide enough for a shuttle to fit within and tall enough for one to stand upright without grazing the domed ceiling. The walls were covered in creep, which shed a faint light that pulsed all around them, leaving Raynor slightly nauseous. Zerg moved here and there in the room, smaller zerglings like giant maggots writhing through mounds of creep piled at intervals upon the floor while hydralisks and others stood guard. "It's a breeding ground," Raynor told the others, remembering what Mike and Kerrigan had told him once about an encounter on Antiga Prime. "It's where the zerg are born." At the center of the room was a cluster of zerg, at least forty of them, including hydralisks, ultralisks, and even the airborne mutalisks. Off to the side he spotted two massive, sluglike creatures, their sides pulsating as if lit from within, perched on mounds of creep and festooned with streamers of similar organic material—Raynor remembered they were called cerebrates and were essentially zerg commanders. He could see several zerg eggs, pulsing green and red upon their mounds of creep. But between the zerg at the center he saw something far larger, something that glowed and gave off sparks like small lightning. He knew immediately that was his target."Everyone, on me!" he shouted, raising his rifle and slamming home a fresh clip. "We need to breach that thing!" The zerg heard him coming, or sensed him, or simply anticipated his attack. "Cerebrate!" one of the cerebrates shouted, its voice an odd rasp that cut at Raynor's ears and produced a dull throb behind his eyes. "The Chrysalis is opening! Do not allow any Terrans near it!" The second cerebrate lifted its front end toward the archway and, responding to its mental commands, the lesser zerg pulled away from the cocoon and charged toward the Terrans. The other cerebrate hunched closer to the strange pulsing oblong, like a protective mother warily circling her prize egg. Raynor and his team braced themselves for the moment of contact.
Just before the zerg reached them, however, Mannix pulled a grenade from her vest, primed it, and lobbed it at the approaching creatures. It struck just before a hydralisk and blew the creature apart as it detonated, the blast taking several others with it and battering a dozen more aside. Raynor quickly fired into those dazed zerg, killing them before they could recover. Then the rest were upon them and he was back to firing pistol over rifle and rifle under pistol, swiveling the barrels left and right to keep his front covered. "Get going, sir!" Mannix shouted at him, nodding her chin toward the cocoon. "Take care of that thing! We've got this!" Raynor hesitated only a second, then nodded. "Stay frosty!" he hollered, then fired both guns on full auto in a semicircle before him. The zerg there were blasted to bits, and before any others could fill the gap he had charged through and was past them. Behind him he heard another grenade go off, and the sound of gunfire increased. Mannix and the others were covering his charge. He knew, deep down, that it would probably mean their deaths. They knew it too. But this was the job. This was why they'd come. The creep underfoot clung to his boots and Raynor's outright run turned into a stumbling jog, but he still covered the distance to the cocoon before any other zerg could come after him. He ejected the spent clips from each gun and reloaded as he slowed to avoid crashing into the thing. He targeted the approaching cerebrate, but it paused and swiveled away, inching back until it had vanished into the haze of creep strands that hung in tatters from the ceiling.
Now it was just Raynor and the cocoon. The thing was easily twice his size, he realized as he examined it more closely. Its surface was pocked and pitted, lumpy like thick porridge, and it writhed as he watched. The thing, that shell itself, was alive! It was still giving off sparks, and his hair stood on end as he approached it. But Raynor didn't back away. "Kerrigan?" Reaching out, he set one hand upon the thing, feeling the jolt as his fingers touched it through his gloves. He could just make out a shape within, twisting, limbs flailing against the cocoon's pulpy shell. But this couldn't be Kerrigan even though he could see only a hazy outline, the figure within had too many limbs. Perhaps it was the touch of his hand against it, or the sense of his proximity. Perhaps it was simply a matter of timing. But whatever the reason, as he watched Raynor saw first one limb lash out, then another, striking the cocoon near the top—and slicing through, a wicked spike drilling its way out. The cocoon stretched as the rest of the spike tried to tear free, its sticky surface pushed to the limit. Another hard thrust came from within, a second spike appearing, the cocoon's upper edge distended farther and then it burst like a rotten melon, the skin peeling away and the interior spurting forth. Without the surface tension the rest of the skin fell away limp, pooling on the ground, and Raynor stepped back to avoid suffocating within its slick folds. Thick, oily liquid followed it down, washing across his boots and spreading a thin sheet across the chamber floor. The creep absorbed it and thickened, growing darker, and its pulse became stronger. But Raynor didn't notice that. He was too busy gaping at the figure that stood revealed as the cocoon—what he now remembered the zerg calling a Chrysalis—fell away. Kerrigan was a tall, powerfully built woman with a fine, full figure that had sparked the thoughts that had led to her calling him a pig when they first met. She had pale skin turned almost tan by her travels, piercing green eyes, a lush mouth a little too wide for her heartshaped face, and a glorious mane of fiery red hair she kept tied back when she worked. With her intelligence, her combat skills, and her telepathy, she was a fascinating, graceful, deadly woman. She was the most stunning and infuriating woman Raynor had ever met. This was not Kerrigan. This was some winged horror from his worst nightmares. It was nothing like the woman he had loved. Or, rather, it was. But it wasn't.
Raynor still stared, his weapons forgotten, the battle behind him forgotten. Nothing mattered, nothing even entered his head but the woman—the creature—before him. It had Kerrigan's stature, her build, even her face. The skin was wrong, though, a mottled green that looked slick somehow, like the flesh of a dolphin or a seal. In many places it was hard and glossy, a protective shell, though he could see no pattern to the protection's placement. The armor extended to spikes over one shoulder, at the elbows, along the back of her hands, and along her legs. The eyes were still the same shape but yellow instead of green, a bright yellow with strangely shifting pupils. The hair, that wonderful red hair, was now stalks, somewhere between tentacles and spikes, sharp and cylindrical but limp around her face and segmented like an insect's legs—or a human's bones. The part that threw him the most, however, the part that had made him think it could not be her, was what had torn through the Chrysalis, what he had seen flailing within the cocoon just before that? The wings. This figure had wings, great majestic wings, the wings of a giant bird or a bat—if that creature were armored like an insect and had no fur or feathers or skin for covering. For the wings were nothing more than pairs of elongated, segmented spikes, great hooked claws protruding from her back and reaching down to her knees. Even as he watched they flexed, their tips dripping ichor like a spider's fangs, and he somehow knew they were seeking prey. This figure was not human.
Yet its face, its features they were Kerrigan. Or at least they still bore traces of the woman she had been. It was Kerrigan if she had been twisted, remade as a parody of herself. Kerrigan, transformed. Into zerg. Now the dreams made sense. It had all been real, not just a cry but a warning and a message. She had shown him what was happening to her, bit by bit. He remembered the welcome again, and that sense of both loathing and acceptance that followed it. All of that had come from her. As if to cement his understanding he heard a voice now, both in and out of his head. It was so deep it echoed and so cold it made his teeth ache. And it was a voice he had heard twice before. Once when it welcomed him in his dreams and once when it announced the "power of that which is yet unborn!" Now that voice spoke a third time, its words slithering up and down along his spine. "Arise, my daughter," it cried, and there was no mistaking its exultation. "Arise Kerrigan," it crowed, and all the zerg in the chamber bowed their heads. All except one. "By your will, father," the figure in the Chrysalis remains said proudly, head raised high. Her voice was deeper, more resonant, and it echoed in his ears and in his head as if each word carried layers of meaning and emotion, too much for him to catch all at once. The words rolled across and through him, sending shivers down his spine.
"I live to serve." She stepped down, gracefully exiting the bits of shell and fluid, standing tall in the chamber. Kerrigan had been an imposing woman, her head up to Raynor's shoulder. This new figure could have looked him in the eye, if she had deigned to notice him. She did not, and he couldn't decide if he was relieved or disappointed by that. Despite her radical transformation, he could still see Kerrigan's strength, the vibrancy and purpose that had attracted him in the first place. In some ways he was even more drawn to her now, mesmerized by her new form and the new power he sensed within her. He knew he should be repulsed, sickened, but he was fascinated instead. A part of him wondered if that was also part of her change, if this overwhelming attraction was a chemical or mental assault, but he couldn't believe that, especially since she had not even seen him yet. What the figure did see, however, was the fight near the archway. Mannix and a few of the other troopers were still alive and still battling the zerg, and Raynor watched as the woman's brow furrowed and her eyes blazed with anger."Let all who oppose the Overmind feel the wrath of the Swarm," she announced, her wings flaring out behind her, and at her words the zerg increased their attack, biting and stabbing and slicing with renewed frenzy. Mannix fell to a vicious blow from a hydralisk, her head toppling several meters from her body, and the blow severed another trooper's arm as well. Others fell right behind her, and in a moment Raynor was the only one left alive. He zerg had not survived unscathed, but they didn't seem to notice their losses as the remaining creatures regrouped and turned back toward the center of the chamber, their cerebrate still directing them from its corner of the chamber. "Well done, Cerebrate!" that same strange cold voice boomed again. "What I have wrought this day shall be the undoing of my enemies!" Then every zerg turned toward Raynor, and he felt the wave of their hatred wash over him. "Let not a Terran survive. . . ."The voice commanded. Raynor struggled to raise his rifle. Though he knew the odds were hopeless, he planned to go down fighting. But his rifle wouldn't move. Glancing down, he saw a hand on the barrel, a speckled green hand with blade like nails effortlessly stopping him from bringing the weapon to bear. Looking back up, Raynor found himself meeting the gaze of the creature from the Chrysalis. It was a cold stare, the eyes bright but emotionless, and the pupils danced independently, leaving glittering trails in their wake. It was the look of an alien, with no trace of the woman he had known. "Mother of God," Raynor gasped, unable to stop himself. "Kerrigan, what have they done to you?"