StarCraft: Brain Damage
Chapter 7: Over 9,000
After the explosions of the spider mines up top had died away, Asuka slowly put her rifle back down and sat back in her chair. She tried to relax and take a drink out of the foam coffee cup Tanner had handed her but found that she kept thinking about everyone up in the bunker and if they were okay. Finally, she settled on giving them a radio call.
"Jim," she said into her headset, "You guys okay up there?"
No response.
Worried, Asuka sat forward in her chair again. "Jim, are you there?"
"Yeah, we're on the lift headed your way. Sorry I couldn't respond earlier, McCabe was talking to me," Jim replied, then Asuka heard him say to Nick, "Shut up man, I'm on the radio. No, I don't. Well what the hell kind of question is that?"
"Okay Jim, Asuka out," she said and switched off the headset.
Tanner meanwhile had poured himself some coffee and was now sitting across the worktable from her, looking kind of nervous.
"Relax Doc," Asuka said, "I'm not going to kill you."
"How do I know that?" he shot back.
"Well, if I kill you, then who's going to tell me what's in the big container? And better yet, what it does and how it does it?" she asked as a way of explaining her reasons.
The ex-confederate scientist seemed to relax a bit. "So you want me to tell you what it is?" he asked.
"If you don't mind," said Asuka.
"This may be a little hard to understand, so I apologize if I get ahead of myself," Tanner warned.
Asuka smiled a bit. "Trust me, I won't mind."
"Its called the 'Relay Disrupter' and what it basically does is interrupt the Zerg command network. As you well know, every command in the Zerg collective hive mind comes down through a channel that begins with the Overmind, goes down through Overlords and into the individual units such as Zerglings, Hydralisks and Larva."
"So what's this thing do?" Asuka pressed.
Now Tanner started to get excited and stood up, gesturing broadly with his hands. "Well you take it, see, and implant it into the Overmind and it starts sending out signals to the rest of the collective that makes them evolve in a bad way."
"What do you mean 'a bad way'?" Asuka asked.
"They'll evolve into evolutionary dead-ends to the point where they can't function. It won't be a short and painless death for the collective, but rather a long and suffering death that brings it to its knees, wallowing quite literally in its own piss and blood before finally the darkness encloses on it," Tanner exclaimed rather poetically.
"That's a good plan and everything Doc, but there's just one problem."
"What's that?" Tanner asked, wondering how this could possibly be flawed.
"Have you seen the new Overmind?"
Tanner was about to ask what she meant by new Overmind when a sharp crack echoed around the chamber and his head exploded, spraying chunks of skull and brain all over the desk in front of him as he fell down onto his back, dead.
"Shit!" Asuka said as she grabbed her rifle and threw herself onto the floor behind the worktable.
She pumped the slide back and forth, chambering a 25mm round and readying herself for combat. Then nothing happened. The sound of computer terminals around the lab quietly beeping, the feeling of a slight breeze from the air conditioning, the smell of fresh blood on the tile floor, but no gunshots. She hit a button on her wrist computer and vanished into a cloaking field.
Standing up, she moved quickly across the lab while looking for any shooter. The urge to gain elevation into the rafters came natural to her, so in response to instinct she grabbed the nearest ladder rung and started pulling herself up. She placed her hand on the top rung and instantly felt a boot pressing down on her fingers.
Looking up, she saw a man wearing the same type of Ghost armor that she was. He had a canister rifle pointed at her head and wore the old style goggles that Asuka had abandoned after the Brood War in favor of nano-ocular implants. The Ghost smiled, revealing yellow pointed teeth.
"Hey Soryu," he smarted, "How's it going?"
Asuka recognized the voice immediately. "Well Traz, now that you ask, not so good."
With that, she yanked her hand out from under his boot and fell back down the ladder faster than he could pull the trigger. Landing flat on her back, she ignored the pain and fired three shots back up the ladder into the rafters. Traz ducked out of the way, the bullets harmlessly bouncing off of support beams and around the upper part of the chamber.
He ran laterally across the rafters, jumping between them with huge leaps. Asuka followed him with shots from her C10. They all missed, as he was moving just too fast for her aim to keep up. Traz stopped and pivoted around on his knee to aim at Asuka with his own C10. He fired and she rolled to the right, the round bouncing off the ground where her head had been a split second before.
Traz pulled the trigger again and realized the gun was jammed. Not having time to fix the problem, he leapt down off of the rafters and landed above Asuka. He drew his strait-blade psi knife and the blade automatically materialized. Asuka pressed her knee to her chest and with a mighty kick to Traz's chest drove him backward into a bank of computers.
The shattered monitors sparked as Traz's body weight smashed against them. Asuka stood as he did and drew her own psi knife.
"Why'd you shoot Tanner?" she asked.
"Why not?" he countered, obviously not in the mood for bad-guy good-guy knife fight chat.
The two highly trained psionics launched at each other and locked blades, eye-to-goggle. After a second of straining against the other's strength, Asuka wrapped her right leg around Traz's and pulled it out from under him, causing him to lose balance and fall back on the floor. Not wasting any time, Asuka drove down at him with her knife.
He ducked out of the way and her blade wedged itself in the tiled floor. Traz jumped up and stabbed at her. Just in time Asuka was able to pull her psi knife out of the ground and block his thrust with her own blade. Sparks flew due to the combined energies of the two knives. He was above her and had the weight advantage, which he was using to decrease the distance between his knife and her right eye.
The door to the lab suddenly opened and Asuka saw Jim, Nick and Jax enter. Traz turned his head to look at this new development and Asuka seized the moment's reprieve in his advance to punch him in the side of the head with her free left hand. Now with no pressure on her knife, Asuka went on the offensive, stabbing his wrist computer.
Traz decloaked and Jim instantly saw him, classified him as a hostile, and loosed a barrage of Impaler fire in his direction.
The Ghost jumped out of the way with cat-like reflexes and started climbing the ladder up into the rafters. As he reached the top, one of Jim's bullets hit him in the shoulder blade. Limping, he ran across the remainder of the rafters toward a hole in the wall. Jim's rifle clacked empty and as he started reloading he looked over to Nick, who up until this point had done absolutely nothing to contribute to the firefight.
"Well throw one of your fuck balls!" Jim shouted.
Nick snapped back into reality and hurled a D18 charge at Traz, which latched onto the hole just after the Ghost ducked through it. It went off and closed the hole, covering the standing people with dust and smoke.