SURVIVOR
Chapter One: The Last of his Kind.
"The only thing we have to fear, is fear, Itself."– Franklin D. Roosevelt.
This is my rifle.
The sun-scorched wastes of Korhol were strewn with bodies, more than anyone would have cared to see. Mixed in among the stark white and black armored combat suites that the United Earth Directorate Marines wore were mounds upon mounds of dead Zerg. Hundreds, maybe thousands had been concentrated on this sector of Augustgrad and its outlying desert.
There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Not everything on the hellish plain was dead, though. A single man in white armor walked slightly dazed among the rest. A brief smile flickered across his face as he thought of his training. CMC-400A Powered Combat Armor. Neo-steel outer section rated to stop an 8mm Gauss round at ten feet. Full life support, independent communications network, computer-assisted targeting, and it boosted speed and strength five-fold. Calling it merely armor was almost insulting. His instructor would have had his ass for just thinking it.
My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.
The Marine was indifferent to who or what he stepped on. The slaughtered men on the ground used to be comrades, but they were just as dead as the Zerg carapaces that crunched beneath his boots. Respect for the deceased may have been prominent in some religions and cultures, but it didn't matter to him. Not to a Resoc.
My rifle, without me, is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless.
Maybe the man had been useless, before the Corps got a hold of him. He didn't care. The Marine remembered nothing of his previous life, and would have been callously uncaring to hear that he had been a psychotic murderer. He walked.
I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will.
The sun continued its relentless barrage of UV light and radiation on the grunt, but he was relaxed in the cool air-conditioned comfort of his armor. He stopped at a dead corpsman, Hospitalwoman Second Class Amelia Firetag. The Marine remembered she had treated a shrapnel wound he'd received on Braxis, remembered how even though she was usually covered in blood, HW2 Firetag had always been mildly attractive.
Now, her pretty mouth was frozen in a gasp of shock. A Zergling's scythe had wedged in a soft point in her CMC, just below the left breast. He noted with what could be called a primitive sympathy that she had died relatively quickly. The Marine felt her down for medical supplies and stim-packs, retrieving a roll of gauze, a few clot-inducing auto-injectors, and anesthetics. He stored them in his armor's shoulder storage compartments, dismayed that he didn't find any stims.
My rifle and I know that what counts in war is not the rounds we fire, nor the no----
The man twitched as his mind seemed to skip over the line. For a moment, a brief lapse in his neural resocialization let him slip into his old ways of thinking, but it returned and quelled any traitorous thoughts he might have had. He tried to focus on the Rifleman's Creed he'd been repeating to pass the time, but forgot where he was. He picked up in the middle.
My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus I will learn it as a Brother.
About midday, the Marine stumbled onto a survivor. His armor's FOF sensor displayed 'Lieutenant Broudmyer, Lars P.' across his vision. The man stood over Broudmyer's broken body. Broudmyer quinted back through his cracked faceplate.
"Marine," he rasped. The skin on his face and lips was cracked and peeling from only a few hours in the sun. "Give me some water, and find a corpsman."
The Marine looked around for a corpse with a canteen attached to its web belt, but didn't see one. Most of the Marines had only their armor's hydration system, leaving their canteens back in the barracks, a mere 400 yards away This had been destroyed in the second wave of the attack The Marine had exhausted his own HS about an hour ago.
"All allied forces in Augustgrad have been destroyed, sir. I don't have nor see any water," the Marine reported.
Broudmyer looked grim. "I feared as much. DO you have any coagulants? There's a deep cut on my back where a 'ling stuck me. You should be able to move me when the bleeding stops."
"Yes, sir." The Marine opened his left shoulder section and rummaged for the auto-injectors he had found earlier. He retrieved one and held it in his gloved hand, bending over to help the officer.
As he leaned in to roll the el-tee, Broudmyer's face began to warp. It turned light brown, then rounded and hardened into a tough exo-skeleton. His lower jaw split and entire head elongated. The man recoiled as the arms of the armor bent and twisted into razor sharp scythes, and was now face-to-face with a Hyralisk.
Instinct and training kicked in. The grunt dropped the injector and stood up, raising his C-14. The Zerg's deep-set, malicious eyes caught the barrel in reflection. The buzzing jumps in the Marines brain had started again.
I will guard it against th-------------r and damage, as I would ever guard m----gs, my arms, my eye------------from damage. We will become part of each other.
The rifle did become part of him, almost an extension of his left arm. He had already raised and fired before the thought had registered in his brain. A six or seven round burst of 8mm APFSDS spikes from the C-14 smashed into former-Lt. Broudmyer's face and chewed it apart. Flecks of red blood specked the white sections of armor they hit as it sprayed up from Broudmyer.
The buzzing stopped and his mind refocused again, settling on a normal U.E. Marine officer, sans head. Now confusion was setting in. The Marine had never experienced this before, only heard rumors of it happening. And then, only around Ghosts or other equally-strong psyonic presences. There had been none with his unit, and there weren't any Protoss Templars in sight. Zerg were attuned to it, but only cerebrates would be strong enough to affect him like this, and they're hard to miss.
Enough. The man pulled himself together and though about the immediate situation. Every member of the UED Expeditionary Force stationed in Augustgrad had been killed. There were no officers or NCOs to give him orders, no enemies to surrender to (though he couldn't, being a Resoc), no enemies to kill, and no way to contact Command for retrieval (which they wouldn't send. Again: only one Resoc). That left pressing on to the south-west, where the UED's original outpost for the invasion of Augustgrad had been.
Picking up the injector, he found it to be cracked. The Marine's face curled in degust at the waste of perfectly good supplies. He began his long march towards the UED outpost. The sea of bodies had thinned out to only Zerg, and he was grateful that there weren't likely to be more any time soon. The man turned off the computer-tracking/targeting to conserve armor power. If he hadn't been so distracted by the damnable buzzing, the man would have thought to grab ammo and water in addition to the meds.
He'd been walking for three days, almost non-stop. The few hours of sleep the man grabbed had been standing up, supported by the CMC. The buzzing had grown worse with lack of water and sleep. Now it seemed every time the Marine had tried to focus on the Creed, or anything else, his mind hevaved like a scratched CD, jumping over words, and switching back to his murderous former self. Exhaustion adding to this despite the armor, he barely managed to scramble over a large dune.
Before God I swe--------is creed. My rifle and I are the de----ers of the Directorate.
The man reached the top of the dune. To his surprise, a small ramshackle gathering of houses sat in a dusty plain. Various crops struggled out of the ground, thirsty as he was for water and chocked with weeds. Dirt farmers. No, wait. Hostiles. A hostile encampment, only twenty klicks from a Directorate base. Anger flashed through his strained mind. The C-14 came up on the nearest hostile.
We are the masters of our enemy.
The target, a middle-aged woman, pointed at him and yelled something both unintelligible and inconsequential. Auto-tracking was off, ans so was the targeting reticle. Aiming from the hip, he stitched the ground around her with metal spikes. Sweat from his brow clouded his vision, making it even harder to hit the target.
We are the saviors of life.
Almost as if a swithc had been flipped, the Marine ceased firing at the woman. She was a farmer. Local Indigenous Personnel. LIP. Lowly Insignificant Piss-ant. Possibly a friendly.
Masters of our enemy.
Her shouts had brought reinforcements. Though primitively armed, there were easily six dozen of them. They could cross the distance and kill him before he could kill all of them. Unacceptable.
Kill the enemy before he kills me.
The rifle clicked on empty. The man blinked. What was he doing? Those civilians were probably the only onces with any water until the Directorate base. Hell, probably the only people in fifty klicks. Even his warped mind recognized that they were harmless.
Our enemy.
It was a ploy. They couldn't be friendly. Why would they camp so close, unless massing for an attack? He patted his ammo belt for more magazines, but they were all empty. Somewhere along his trek, the rest of his webbing had come off, leaving the Marine without a sidearm, or bayonet. There was only one thing to do. His power armor lent him enough strength to crush a Terran head with his hand. The rifle should snap the hostile forces in half if used as a quarterstaff.
Masters of our enemy. So be it, until victory is Earths, and there is no enemy but peace!
Snap in half? Jesus H. Christ, they were only farmers! What was happening to him? He tried to think clearly, but he couldn't, not with that damnable buzzing. It was like a swarm of bees in his ears, and he couldn't make left from right with all this fucking buzzing! If it would let up for just a second he could...
...could kill them. Kill them all and finally have some peace and quiet. Kill them, and have a fucking good time doing it. A full blown smile played across the face of Caleb Carver.
Allison Dunn watched with a blend of fear and horror as a white-armored soldier hurdled towards her mother. He was screaming obscenities and swinging his gun back and forth like a club, and she hoped it was because aside from a few old shotguns, the settlement of Kit's Valley had no way of defending themselves.
Her father, John Dunn, threw a rock at the soldier, who halted in his mad dash a mere six feet away from Allison's mother, turning his fury on the small group of townspeople/farmers. He began to chase after them with the impromptu staff. Most of the people turned and fled with the exception of those frozen in fear. Allison and her father were among those few.
Just before he reached John Dunn, though, the soldier again stopped suddenly. He was within an arm's reach of John and shaking his head, like he was trying to clear it. This close, Allison could make out details.
The massive power armor he wore, almost identical to the Dominion Marines, contained no coloring identifying his unit. It was mostly matte-black, and the sections usually colored on Korhol forces would have been dazzling white, except it was covered in dust and grime. The helmet resembled an ancient astronaut's. The faceplate bowl was down and polarized, making the soldier look more like a robot than a man. The armor's shoulders made him all the more physically imposing to the malnourished Terrans.
The pause ended, and the soldier swung his gun at her father's head. But it had given John Dunn a chance to regain his motor function. He ducked, and the gun sailed past his head and collided with a neo-steel vapor collector. The impact of the weapon had rendered the collector useless, but it also shattered the gun. The soldier looked at it, then at John and Allison, then back to the gun. He dropped it in favor of strangling them with his bare hands.
Allison felt the ground jerk out from under her feet as she was hauled up. The soldier's hand began to squeeze, but not as hard as it could have. He could have killed her in a second by crushing her windpipe, but instead he held both her and her father dangling above the ground.
"Sing for me, won't you?" the soldier cackled. "Come on, bitch. Let me hear you sing."
Allison beat the vice-grip that held her, but to no avail. Her vision began to dim. Moments before she entered unconsciousness, she reached out to the polarized visor and flipped it up. It must have been unsealed she thought. The last thing Allison heard was the cracking boom of thunder.
It hadn't been thunder. Caleb dropped the homely bitch and geezer he had been choking as he felt something slam into his left kidney. They hit the dirt, sending up a small dust cloud. Caleb turned and faced his assailant, a small boy of fourteen with a pump-action shotgun.
In one long stride, Caleb reached out and plucked the shotgun from the boy's hands. He wagged his finger at the boy, then bent the shotgun into a C.
"C for Caver," he chuckled. Still laughing, he picked up the boy and punted him onto a nearby barn roof. It was good to be back. Caleb was laughing so hard he didn't notice John Dunn get back to his feet and slam a rock into his open helmet. Caleb dropped like a sack of bricks.
"What do we do with him?" Paulina McCallister asked as the town of Kit's valley stood over the twitching UED Marine. His nose had been broken by the rock John had hit him with.
"I say we string him up and hang him!" David King said to roars of approval. "Hang the Earther!"
John held up his hands, trying to calm the crowd. He'd been a Confederate Marine himself, and knew what combat could do to a man. "Friends, let us calm down! This man didn't kill any of us."
"No, but he tried, John. Your own daughter was nearly strangled alongside of you, for the love of God!" King said.
"David, this man is probably delusional. He's been through hell and back, and probably thought we were a Dominion base."
"So what's to stop him from attacking again? He's here to enslave us all."
"We take him out of that armor," Allison croaked through her sore throat.
"Yes," John agreed. "I and my family will watch over him."
King narrowed his eyes. "You would take in a man who would gladly rip you limb from limb. Why? What purp–"
King's voice cut out as the Marine rose to his feet. He wobbled unsteadily for a bit, then asked, "Where am I?" before collapsing again.
A little under twenty miles from Kit's Valley, the last UED dropship fled the Korhol with the survivors of the combined Protoss/Dominion/Zerg assault, leaving Carver the only Marine from the UEMC on the planet. On board the flagship Aleksander, Admiral Gerard DuGaulle lost contact with his forces on Tarsonis. And in the center of it all, the Queen of Blades laughed as she acquired another puppet to play with.