o 012cb099c1ab6050 by POTATO (freda ebook reader TXT) 📕

seen the spines coming, and turned instinctively.

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