The Rift

[Noble Ire]

Say, quick question. In the Haloverse chapters, are they just going to ABANDON the Forerunner Keyship and Mendicat Bias? It's the only thing I can think of that might be able to stand up to the ISDs.

I'll just say that the portion of The Rift set in the Halo universe isn't quite over. I'm not promising anything, but I have kept the Forerunner Dreadnaught's fate in mind.

And, yes, the next phase of the battle for Earth will be focused on another theater of combat, and you can expect all relevant characters to play a role in it. After all, how could I pass up on showing a Spartan or a Jedi in top form?

[Hawkwings]

By killing them off during the drop, duh.

(And losing your soul to some deity, but that's not relevant here)

Eagerly awaiting more!

[Vehrec]

Say, quick question. In the Haloverse chapters, are they just going to ABANDON the Forerunner Keyship and Mendicat Bias? It's the only thing I can think of that might be able to stand up to the ISDs.

I'm not sure how strong Forerunner ships are, but assuming they are ISD level, what happens to the Covenant when their gods ships are destroyed in combat?

I don't know how strong they are either, except for the fact that This exact same dreadnought was able to ignore the fire of three UNSC ships, and is supposedly capable of being maneuvered like a fighter. On the other hand, the Prophets stripped it of all the weapons they could find. It's only offensive weapon might be the Haloverse equivalent of gridfire, ripping holes in slipspace on top of its enemies.

[Dominus]

By Tzeentch, what a great chapter. You once again prove that you have a knack for capturing the desperation of a last-stand space battle. This could very well give ROTJ a run for its money.

Incidentally, Noble Ire, would you be willing to divulge some tiny hint as to how you intend wrap up the storyline at the end (assuming that any of the main characters actually survive, of course)? I can't imagine that it will be as neat and tidy as simply sending everyone back to their respective universes... unless you intend to leave the door open to a sequel, of course.

[Noble Ire]

By Tzeentch, what a great chapter. You once again prove that you have a knack for capturing the desperation of a last-stand space battle. This could very well give ROTJ a run for its money.

Thanks. I am trying to capture that mood, and I'm glad I've been successful so far.

Incidentally, Noble Ire, would you be willing to divulge some tiny hint as to how you intend wrap up the storyline at the end (assuming that any of the main characters actually survive, of course)? I can't imagine that it will be as neat and tidy as simply sending everyone back to their respective universes... unless you intend to leave the door open to a sequel, of course.

I'd rather keep the details to myself, but I can say that the ending will be rather messy, and there won't be any nice little bow to cap it off. Charater mortality, or lack thereof, aside, I'll admit that there will be a few plot threads that won't be fully resolved (I have the main ones under control, but there are a few early ones that slipped through the cracks). I have been toying with the idea of a sequel, although I do have some other projects I've been putting off that might take priority.

[Noble Ire]

Chapter Sixty Seven


The flight from the High Council Chamber had been quick and breathless. Numbed by the vicious melee from which he had barely escaped, Barclay was caught completely off-guard by Flitch’s bold bid for freedom. The grenade shoved beneath his chin had shaken Barclay enough for the Imperial agent to move him forcibly into the chamber’s network of claustrophobic ancillary passages, away from the victorious Sangheili. Barclay had quickly realized that his single, newly-rekindled hope for salvation was ebbing away as Flitch dragged him aimlessly down deserted corridors, but before he could mount the resolve to disregard the explosive and resist his kidnapper, the man pocketed the plasma grenade in favor of a blue-cased pistol pillaged from the fresh corpse of an Unggoy guard draped across their path. With a firearm at his throat and the threat of prowling soldiers through every doorway, Barclay could do nothing but wait and follow.

He didn’t have to wait long. Hurrying from the long corridor into a small chamber with a closed doorway on each wall, Flitch considered quickly and then tugged his captive towards the door straight ahead. It slid open smoothly at their approach, revealing an enclosed hall almost identical to the one they had just left. It, however, was not vacant: a single Jiralhanae stood in their path, its blackened hands clutching a long, jagged blade. Its scanty, plated uniform and scraggly fur were coated with a mingling of purple Sangheili blood and its own dark ichor. Turning from a mangled lump at its feet, presumably the soldier that had stained its coat, the alien’s eyes narrowed the humans and it raised its weapon, seemingly oblivious to the gun in Flitch’s hand.

Flitch stumbled back through the doorway, one arm still wrapped around Barclay’s neck as he brought his pistol to bear on the new threat with his other. The blood-maddened Jiralhanae stalked after them, and as it crossed the threshold, the human opened fire. The green pulse hit it on the side of the neck, burning away fur and charring the leathery skin beneath. The warrior brought its free hand up to the wound and unleashed a resounding bellow of anger and pain, but it did not stop or fall. Flitch did not fire off another shot until it was almost on top of them, but the quick burst was better aimed than his last. An animalistic roar still on its lips, the beast toppled down upon its prey, its right eye boiled neatly away.

The Jiralhanae’s bulk knocked them both into the curving wall of the intersection, and Flitch’s hold on Barclay faltered. In an instant, the engineer had freed himself of the arm and was scrabbling away over the Covenant soldier’s massive corpse. Not so easily caught unawares, Flitch grabbed hold of one of the man’s ankles and held him fast as he tried to free his pistol from beneath a limp, muscular arm. Desperately, Barclay kicked with his free leg and, more by luck than intent, planted his heel on Flitch’s nose. The man shouted angrily, but the shock of the blow allowed Barclay to shake free and make for the nearest doorway.

Barely keeping his balance as he tore through the opening, Barclay pelted back down a new corridor, his head swimming feverishly. As he rounded the first bend, he hoped fleetingly that the Imperial would forget him and flee down a different path, but before he could even slow to catch his breath, there was the muffled sound of heavy boots and unintelligible shouting from behind, followed immediately by lighter, faster footfalls closer at hand. Biting his lip, Barclay bent back into a full run.

He knew he had to get back to the Arbiter. That was his only chance. Even if Flitch didn’t kill him, then Barclay was still trapped in a hostile, alien construct, a universe away from any other friend or ally. Worse, the strife of the council chamber seemed to be spreading, and Barclay had no desire to be caught in the middle of a civil war. Again.

Conscious of the man a hallway behind, Barclay attempted to double back towards the corridor down which he had been forced. He saw no identifying markings or landmarks he could recognize, and so was forced to simply barreled through doorways and down short passages almost at random, hoping that his vague sense of where the main chamber had been would guide him. The web of halls was mercifully vacant, but sounds of conflict echoing from down side ways and recent burn marks on the polished walls kept him on edge. And still, footsteps clattered after him.

Barclay ran as hard as he could manage, longer than he had ever done before. With each new corridor and door, he searched for some familiar marking that would lead him back to the council chamber, but found only curving, alien walls and endless rows of alcoves and recessed ornaments. Once or twice, he saw the flash of a plasma discharge out of the corner of his eye, or heard an enraged battle cry, but he kept on past, certain that death awaited as surely from behind as it did in front. Each strange hall or brush with combat heightened the fear bubbling inside of him, and drove him on faster, but he could only keep up the pace for so long. He was no athlete, and weeks of confinement had done nothing to strengthen him.

Seeing what looked like an empty meeting room, dark save for a slit of hazy light that ran high along its back wall, Barclay ducked inside, his heart pounding dangerously. He search desperately for some control that might seal the door, and laid eyes upon a holographic pad adjacent the entryway with a caricature of an alien hand emblazoned upon it. Without thinking, he slapped the control, and a thin barrier of carved metal slid from the wall to close the gap. Barclay slumped against the wall, greedily sucking in air. When his lungs were full again, he fell silent, listening intently for any sound from the corridor beyond. Flitch’s light, deliberate footfalls were discernable almost immediately, and Barclay felt his heart race again. He cast about the dim room for a weapon or alternate means of escape, but it was empty save for a high, long table that filled its center.

Barclay pressed against the wall, his eyes locked on the closed door. As the footsteps came to the door, he balled his fists, suddenly determined to rush the other man as he came in. He would try to wrest the pistol from him, and then…

The steps sounded from just beyond the door and continued on without slowing. Barclay was motionless until the thumping echoes faded away, and then loosed a long, weary sigh.

Calmer, the engineer surveyed his surroundings more carefully. The room was as barren as it had seemed before: a table, a few of what might have been inactive holographic projectors mounted in each corner, and the strip of light the lined the top of the far wall. The final feature attracted his notice, and he slowly crossed the small chamber to inspect it more closely. Rather than a light fixture, as he had at first suspected, the thin band seemed to be venting hazy in illumination from somewhere else. Closer observation revealed vertical lines running down from either end of the strip: another door, slightly ajar.

As Barclay absently ran a finger down one of the fine slits, considering his next move, a new sound broke the room’s tense silence. His hair stood on end and he turned sharply towards the other door, but what he heard were not footsteps, and did not emanate from the corridor.

Voices. Distant and muffled, wafting in from the small gap above him. Something about the remote speakers caught Barclay’s notice, and he listened more closely. They were crisp and harsh, and quickly faded into the soft, airy echoing that also emerged through the crack. He couldn’t understand the words, but the tone was shockingly familiar. It was not the gruff, throaty vocalization of the Sangheili, or the savage growl of the Jiralhanae.

It was human.

The fact dawned on Barclay quickly, and barely believing it, he pressed up closer to the gap, straining for another distant sound. No voices emerged from the soft blanket of echoing wind he could now discern, but there was something else. The faint clip of boots on metal plate.

Joy and desperation mingled in Barclay’s mind, clouding caution and compelling him to act. He managed to restrain himself from pounding on the barrier and crying out, but immediately began searching for a way of opening the wide door further. It didn’t take him long to locate another pad like the one that had sealed the entryway, and he placed his palm on it without hesitation, his heart pounding.

The barrier moved in response, but to his horror, it rushed upwards, sealing the gap and throwing Barclay into darkness. Not knowing what else to do, he slammed the control again, and with a creak the wall section reversed, sliding down. Its progress this time was far rougher, and it slammed to a halt with a loud, pneumatic wheeze, nearly a meter of the opening left blocked. Barclay cringed at the sound, but he rushed to the new exit, and barely stopping to look beyond, clambered out.

He found himself in a narrow passageway, formed by the intersection of the edifice of the complex he had just exited and a darkly-covered slab of metal that arched from a point several meters above him to the polished floor. The slab blocked his view, but it wasn’t wide, and gave way a few meters to either side of him. Looking down, he could see that a large portion of the door and the surrounding wall was burned and distorted, no doubt the cause of its obstruction. He also noted that the sound of wind was far more obvious now, and the dusky illumination of the space gave Barclay the odd impression that he was outside.

Moving quietly to the right and peering around the obstruction, he realized why. Packed at the center of a dozen towering soldiers, Barclay had noticed little of his surroundings on the trip from the Covenant carrier’s transport to the council chamber, but now he fervently wished he had made more of an effort. Beyond the narrow tiered ledge upon which he stood, the vastness of High Charity stretched out before him.

Beneath the boundless sky of a dome and the ocean of white light that was its crowning star, a metropolis unlike any Barclay had ever seen sprawled outward in a great circle. Its mountainous skyscrapers emerged from a low sea gray fog, minute fingers of substance from his lofty vantage point, high upon a perimeter tower that dwarfed all the rest. Only one structure stood higher: a great silver monolith at the city’s center, rising up like the arm of a crystalline star.

In his time aboard the Enterprise, Barclay had seen the marvels of ancient, long-lost civilizations and been in the presence of beings of power and knowledge he could barely comprehend, and yet the great tower before him filled him with awe unlike any he had felt before. Lit by a cascade of ethereal radiance from the artificial star above, the imposing, outstretched pylons and delicate etchings of the monumental construct momentarily banished fear and desperation from his mind. For some reason beyond his comprehension, the tower reminded him of home.

The moment was short-lived. Movement and the flare of energy discharges in the air around the four mountainous pylons at the structure’s base pulled him back to reality. If the fighting had already spread so far, Barclay knew that no hiding place, especially not one so close to the epicenter of the violence, would be safe for long. Now that he could really appreciate the scale of the place, Barclay knew that there were probably billions of aliens on around him, each one a very real threat.

He scanned the narrow ledge of ornate metal that separated him from the kilometers-long drop to the city below. The platform stretched put hundreds of meters in either direction, hugging the curving inner wall of the massive city-structure. Off to the right beyond the long balcony, a great, polished column emerged from the perimeter barrier, and high on it Barclay could see an ornate, well-lit jut of metal that stretched out towards another tower, smaller and free-standing. He could just barely make out movement on each. As he looked on, the tiny form of a transport surged away from the inner platform, drawing a few ill-aimed lines of fire from the other tower as it sped off into the mist.

There was activity closer at hand, as well. Below Barclay’s sheltered vantage point, a set of smaller platforms jutted into the air like piers, each tipped with a rhythmically-blinking guide light. The one closest to him was empty, but he could see two others, each connected to the upper walkway on which he was standing by a broad flight of steps.

The platform immediately to Barclay’s right drew his notice first. It was dominated by a single, landed ship. A gray, rectangular box with a sloped cockpit and a pair of thin wings that were folded up alongside an angular, skyward fin, the vessel looked startlingly out of place on its sculpted, slightly lustrous dock. Moving closer, Barclay could see humanoid figures gathered around a docking ramp under its forward section, and others picking through what looked like the crashed remains of another Covenant transport on the farthest platform. All were clad from head to foot in obscuring white armor.

Barclay didn’t immediately recognize the ship, but the sight of the Imperial stormtroopers around it brought realization crashing down on him.

Suddenly, he remembered the exchange in the council chamber that had preceded its decent into chaos. The Sangheili who had dueled the Arbiter had mentioned the arrival of ‘human blade-ships’; he hadn’t made the connection before, but now it seemed obvious. Imperial ships had followed the Republica through the rift, and he had seen first-hand the aftermath of their battle with the Covenant armada.

Idiot!

Barclay stumbled back beneath the overhang. He could see a squad of Imperial soldiers making their way from the far platform towards the upper walkway. He had felt their pitiless, armored hands before. He remembered his short time on an Imperial Star Destroyer well, pressed into a tomb-like confinement. His escape from whatever had befallen the rest of the Enterprise’s crew had been simple providence, fortune he could not count on again. Going to them only meant more captivity and hopeless isolation. At that moment, braving the embattled alien metropolis suddenly seemed like the preferable option.

Barclay had backed almost to the obstructed door when he heard the thud of boots on the floor behind him. He spun about, only to feel the butt of plasma pistol crash down onto the side of his neck. He fell sideways into the overhang with a loud groan. Instinctively, he lashed out both hands, but a sharp knee to his stomach knocked the wind out of his lungs and he collapsed into a fetal position on the ground.

Gasping for air, he looked up at his attacker. Flitch stared back at him icily, his nose a bloody, crumpled mess. The man had his weapon aimed at Barclay’s face. The pistol began to hum, and a ball of bright green light accumulated on its projection node. The prone man squinted against the glare and attempted get up, but another harsh kick put a stop to the effort.

“Even after all the trouble you caused me,” Flitch hissed slowly. “Even after all of this. That damned aliened. That cell. This blasted place. All of that, and I still didn’t kill you when I had the chance. I dragged you along with me when I should have just shot you and been done with it.”

He shook his head, sneering.

“I guess I was thanking you for saving me back there. I was soft. But you were stupid. Too stupid to let me die when you had the chance, and stupid enough run when you could have tried to killed me. I’m not about to give you a third chance.”

“I never wanted to kill you,” Barclay said, his voice breaking. See saw the malice in Flitch’s eyes, and what resolve he had left melted away. “I just want to get home.”

A short laugh. “Well then. Consider this a parting present. A gift for my nose and this lovely trip.”

Flitch’s finger tightened on the pistol’s firing stud, and the green globe on its end swelled into a blinding fire. Barclay felt the heat of the weapon, and could barely see Flitch beyond its light. As the whine of the building charge reached a crescendo, he drew a deep breath.

One more bit of pain.

Barclay knew the voice, timid and acquiescent. It was part of who he was. Born of an introverted, cautious life aboard the Enterprise, it had stayed with him over all the trials since the passage through the anomaly. It had been there when he had escaped the Imperial warship, and when he had saved the Arbiter’s life on Home One. It had whispered resignation when Flitch had first abducted him and throughout the long days of confinement aboard the Covenant carrier. It had even been present during his most recent escapes, lurking as he rescued the Imperial agent and then subverted his betrayal.

Time and time again, he had managed to suppress the voice and the paralyzing fear that it heralded. But now, as he finally looked upon death’s face, it pushed through his resolve and compelled him to quietly accept his fate? Were his last thoughts to be ones of silent submission?

The idea filled him with revulsion.

A chorus of clicking and the rustle of movement sounded above the hum of plasma. Flitch swung around to face the source of the noise, switching targets as he did. Barclay opened his eyes, and through the residual glare of the weapon, he saw Flitch’s eyes widen with surprise.

In an instant, the engineer took the scene in. The primed gun. The blinding light of the plasma charge. Flitch’s momentary disorientation. Barclay knew what he had to do.

He braced himself against the overhang and swept at Flitch’s legs with his own. The impact caught the man completely by surprise, and as he struggled to maintain his balance, his finger slipped from the trigger of the pistol. The globe of green energy lashed out, straight towards the unexpected arrivals.

Flitch didn’t even have time to lower his gun. A salvo of crimson blaster bolts tore into him, incinerating unprotected flesh and blasting what remained into the half-opened door. The spent pistol clattered to the floor next to Barclay’s head. Motionless, he watched it lose its residual heat to the smoke-laden air as the stormtroopers Flitch had seen cautiously approached. Their footfalls stopped short of the overhang.

“Human,” a stormtrooper said aloud over his helmet speaker.

“What the hell?”

“There’s the weapon. A damned fool, whoever he was.”

A pair of armored legs crossed into Barclay’s station frame of view, and their owner squatted down next what was left of Flitch.

“What was he doing here?” the soldier mused.

“What were they doing here?” another corrected. “Check the other one.”

The crouching soldier turned to Barclay. The engineer looked up into the opaque eyes of his helmet.

“This one’s alive! Help me!”

Barclay repeated the soldier’s words in his head.

Still alive.

As plated gloves closed on his arms, he fully appreciated the truth of the statement. Against all odds, he had survived. And, just maybe, he would continue on a little longer. Perhaps fate was finally done toying with him, and if not, well, he wasn’t particularly inclined to believe in fate anyways.

Hoisted onto his feet, Reginald Barclay barely noticed that no little voice bubbled up to resist his new-found resolve.

----------------------------------------

Captain Meterin Coloth was in a poor mood. Though he had never voiced any complaint, the officers busy at their bridge stations around him knew the source of his ill-humor quite well.

“Sir.” Coloth’s chief tactical officer approached him, his voice respectfully low. “The last remnants of the enemy fleet have engaged their FTL drives and are fleeing the system. The Dominance and the Crucible are requesting permission to pursue.”

The captain shook his head.

“Request denied,” he said, his characteristic frown deepening. “Lord Vader wants all ships to hold here until the boarding teams have finished their reconnaissance of the construct.”

The two fleet officers shared a surreptitious towards the bank of viewports at the head of the Imperial Star Destroyer Torrent’s bridge. There, draped as ever in his heavy, black cape, the helmeted form of Darth Vader stared silently at the bulbous shape of the alien space station and the planet beyond.

It had been more than two long weeks since the Torrent, along with eight other star destroyers and a small fleet of support ships, had crossed through the rift that connected Imperial space with an uncharted and previously unknown galaxy, teeming with hostile aliens. Coloth had been given command of the expeditionary force, a special commission given by Lord Vader himself, in spite of his relatively low rank and recently marred record. Most of his peers would have been thrilled by the opportunity, but Coloth had always been content with the command of a single ship; he disliked the oversight and inter-ship politics that inevitably came with higher rank.

Moreover, little of the campaign he was now part of sat well with him. First, the galaxy Vader had taken them to was so distant from their native cluster that it didn’t correspond to any Imperial galactic table or star chart. For all Coloth knew, they weren’t even in the same universe; from what little the captain remembered from his dimensional physics course at the Academy, the wormhole they had traversed could have easily torn them from their own reality. The forces stationed near the rift’s exeunt kept close watch on the phenomenon and constantly transmitted assurances of its stability, but Coloth still disliked the idea that he could be trapped so far from home if something went wrong.

There was also the matter of their objective in the new stellar realm. Darth Vader had never been exactly clear as to why he had requisitioned a fleet to go through the rift, especially with the Empire as it was after the Emperor’s assassination. The Sith Lord had alluded to a couple of possibilities for their deployment: there was the Rebel cruiser that had escaped through the anomaly, and then the necessary retaliation for the attack on Imperial warships that had pursued the fleeing terrorist vessel into the alien’s territory.

Neither explanation made much sense, however. Reports from the ships that had initially pursued the Rebel ship indicated that it had disappeared into the anomaly again soon after its first transit, and only a small portion of the task force’s resources had been bent towards the analysis of the rift. The majority of the fleet had been bent to the task of hunting down and destroying the alien fleets and facilities that continued to resist the expeditionary force despite their massive technological inferiority. The beings were tenacious and unrepentant, and all attempts to communicate with them had failed, but the campaign against them was still massive overkill by Coloth’s standards. It was almost as though they were fighting the aliens simply for the sake of fighting them.

In any event, neither objective demanded the direct oversight of the Supreme Commander of the Imperial Starfleet and de facto ruler of the Galactic Empire.

That brought the matter to Vader himself. Naturally, the Dark Lord had attached himself to the Torrent after elevating her captain, and he had spent nearly all the time since the beginning of the campaign on her bridge, staring into the blackness of space or hovering over Coloth as he conducted everything from combat operations to simple shipboard affairs. Deep down, the captain was still convinced that Vader was punishing him for his failure with the captured Federation ship.

That was not to say that the Sith did nothing but observe the battles he initiated. Indeed, on several occasions, he had taken his personal starfighter into battle against the aliens, or command soldiers on the ground. It had been him, against Coloth’s recommendation, who had lead the strike force that captured several alien leaders and thus secured the location of their capital, just hours before.

Since his return, however, Darth Vader had brooded in silence before the Torrent’s viewports, content to let Coloth conduct the approach and seizure of the alien super structure without oversight. He had been unimpressed by the unexplained civil strife that had made their approach even easier than it would otherwise have been. Even when orbit around the construct had been achieved, he broke his silence only long enough order the alien capital boarded. After Coloth had dispatched several battalions of stormtroopers to survey the evacuating structure and secure any points of interest, Vader had turned back to silent contemplation.

For once, Coloth was free to conduct his command as he saw fit, and yet Vader’s brooding made him as uncomfortable as he had ever been.

As he waited for the insertion force to make its next report, the captain drew an after-action report from the battle that had won them the location of the alien capital, which was named High Charity according to the intelligence agents and translators who had interrogated a group of high-level bureaucrats seized at its conclusion. Like every other engagement of the brief campaign, the losses were vastly one-sided: well over one hundred alien capital ships destroyed to three on the Imperial side. Even so, it had been an unusually costly battle. On more than one occasion, Coloth had routed an entire planetary defense fleet without more than a handful of Imperial casualties.

He pulled up a representation of the vessel that had commanded the defenders during the last battle. It was a truly impressive ship, more than half a dozen times the length of the Torrent and many times the mass. Even considering its overly-aesthetic design – Coloth thought it looked more like a pleasure submarine than a warship – it should have totally outclassed any Imperial ship short of a star dreadnaught. And yet, he had seen ships of its class fall to a single star destroyer with minimal effort.

The aliens fought with cunning and, failing that, suicidal ferocity. They had an armada that might very well match the scale of the active Imperial Starfleet; squadrons of probe droids and extensive scouting efforts had only begun to gauge the scope of their empire. The very existence of the artificial world beyond the Torrent’s prow indicated that their civilization was both vast and ancient. And yet, simple statistics put their entire empire at the mercy of Coloth’s relatively tiny force.

Weapons yields. Deflector absorption capacities. FTL velocities. Coloth was too seasoned an officer to look unkindly on any combat advantage, but winning a war because of mere technological disparity still didn’t appeal to his sensibilities. He was eager to be done with the affair, accomplish whatever Vader wanted accomplished, and return home.

When another officer approached to notify him that the colonel insertion force was ready to make a progress report, he quickly directed the man to patch the army officer through to one of the holographic projectors at the rear of the bridge. He could have easily delegated the task, but Coloth was eager for distraction.

The projection alcove the captain had chosen linked with a troop transport landed deep within High Charity and produced the image of a middle-aged, prim-looking man in the gray of an army officer. Colonel Madora, attached to the Crucible, was a capable man, and had overseen the handful of planet-bound actions that Lord Vader had deemed necessary. More than any high-ranking officer deployed with the Dark Lord’s expeditionary force, Madora was in a position of challenge and danger. The technological disparity between the Empire and its foe was not nearly so great on the ground.

“Captain Coloth,” the colonel said, saluting.

“Colonel,” the Captain replied. “What’s the condition of your regiment?”

“Our landing and command points have been secured, and we haven’t faced any concerted attempt to repel or eliminate our transports. The intelligence you provided on the location of the alien’s leadership corresponds to several towers on the perimeter of the construct’s main chamber, and my men have successfully secured it. However, it was largely abandoned by the time they locked it down. We did take a few prisoners, and my techs are attempting a central information node or processing center as we speak.”

“Most of the remaining activity on the construct is focused on a tower structure in center of the internal city. Fighting around its base is intense, and most of the alien’s remaining aerial assets are focused on defending it. Fortunately, factions within their ranks seem determined to keep each other from occupying it, and I’ve managed to insert a few platoons into its upper sections through the confusion. My fighter squadrons and gunships are engaging the alien defenders, and it should be secure enough to reinforce within the hour.”

Coloth offered a short nod.

“Good. Have you identified any other areas heavy activity?”

“Yes, sir. There’s fighting all over the construct, and there are masses of non-combatants funneling towards the docking pylon at its base. Intel has also located what appear to be a network of computer nodes and energy exchanges, but occupying them with my current forces will be difficult. I’m continuing recon operations, but my regiment is stretched thin as it is. You’ve received scans of the city, sir?”

“Yes, colonel, I have.”

The images Coloth had seen reminded him distinctly of Coruscant. Even with its inhabitants trying to kill one another, resting control of a city like High Charity, much less the rest of the construct, would require more than the combined marine and army corps of the entire expeditionary force. To make matters worse, Coloth wasn’t even sure what his soldiers were supposed to be doing there.

And as Vader’s silence lengthened, the captain was beginning to wonder if the Sith Lord knew himself.

“Have your troops hold position. Consolidate your hold on the administrative towers and the central structure, and collect as much intelligence on the city and its inhabitants as you can. I’d like to know why these things suddenly started killing each other, and I’m sure my analyst would be happy with any other data you could provide on them. You will be transmitted further orders as soon as they are given.”

“Yes, sir.” Madora shifted noticeably. “There is one other matter that may interest you, Captain. While establishing a landing zone near the administrative complex, one of my forward squads encountered a pair of humans.”

“Humans?”

“Yes, sir. One of them fired on the squad and was killed, but the other is uninjured and in our custody.”

This was something Coloth had not expected. There was evidence of human habitation in the system that the anomaly opened into, but the aliens had been in the process of eliminating all traces of it when the first Imperial ships had arrived. A few probe droids had been dispatched to investigate the possibility of intact human worlds, but so far their search had been fruitless. Certainly, no member of the species had been sighted on any of the worlds Coloth had conquered.

“Have you been able to gather any information from him?”

“Not yet, sir. He had indicated that he was a prisoner of some sort, and that he escaped when the internal violence here began, but beyond that, he has been resistant to questioning. Unlike his companion, he was unarmed, but he was carrying this.”

Madora held up a palm-sized, metallic disk.

“My ship’s protocol droid seems to think it’s a translation device of some sort. I haven’t seen any of the aliens equipped with anything like it.”

Coloth, on the other hand, recognized the universal translator immediately.

“The Enterprise,” he breathed.

A shadow fell over the captain, and the hairs on the back stood on end.

“Lord Vader?”

The Sith Lord was standing directly behind Coloth. Turning to face him, Coloth wondered how he could have missed the approach of Vader’s rasping, rhythmic breath.

“What have they found?” he demanded without prelude.

“My lord, one of the boarding detachments has located a human onboard the alien construct. He appears to have been carrying a device similar to ones used by the captives the Torrent took on several weeks ago.”

“The Enterprise?”

“Yes, my lord.”

Darth Vader was silent for a moment save for the unceasing hiss of his artificial breath.

“Bring him here.”

“At once, Lord Vader.”

“When he arrives, have him escorted to my chambers.”

With that, the Sith stalked off the bridge. When his long cape had vanished behind a bulkhead, Coloth allowed himself a small sigh. He had hoped to never see a Federation crewman after he had unloaded the Enterprise’s remaining crew on Imperial Intelligence. They had been nothing but trouble for him, and Coloth suspected that bringing another back onboard would do little facilitate the return of his old, orderly life.

--------------------------------

Lord Vader’s spartan quarters were only one deck below the Torrent’s bridge. Hastily constructed after he had moved his flag from the dry-docked Executor, the single, circular room was virtually identical to his old dwelling.

Its only defining feature was the black-plated meditation cubicle at its center. Within the atmospherically-controlled chamber, Vader was granted a brief respite from his life-sustaining armor, and he spent the scant hours he wasn’t prowling the Torrent’s command decks sealed inside, contemplating the turmoil that roiled beneath his dark mask.

Now, though, as he waited for the Federation captive to be transported from High Charity, the meditation chamber sat open and empty. Its master stood behind it, his attention focused on the only other fixture in the room, a small worktable fixed to the back wall.

Amidst a scattering of tools and spare parts, the badly blackened and fractured husk of an astromech droid lay in pieces on the tabletop. Fragments of its scored and uselessly melted chassis lay in a neat stack to one side of the work area. A few carefully removed utility arms bearing an assortment of hydrospanners and electrical jacks were assembled in a row next to a box of new components and mechanical parts. The only recognizable part of the droid, its squat, blue and white head section, sat at the center of the area. The dome had been repaired and cleaned with a steady and practiced hand, but the sensory bulbs that ringed it were as empty and lifeless as the rest of its scattered body.

As he had done a dozen times before, Darth Vader gently lifted the small copula up and turned it over in his gauntlet hands. He gazed down at its dominant, glassy visual sensor, its protruding holographic projection tube, each input slot and access panel. All were familiar to the Dark Lord, wrenchingly personal in a way that few other living beings could understand.

This was all that remained of R2-D2. This was the droid that had accompanied him on his first adventures, when he was just a small boy, freed from slavery for a place in the Jedi Order. This was the droid that had belonged to the woman who would be his wife, her belated wedding gift to him, and a companion through the trials of the Clone Wars. This was the droid that had found his way to Vader’s only son, and had tried to save Luke from his father’s blade. For that valiant act, Vader had destroyed him. He had obliterated his old friend in anger, barely giving the act a second thought. The little droid had not been the first such victim.

Vader turned the dome over, revealing a terrain of exposed electronics and delicate machinery. This was familiar terrain; a place the Dark Lord could lose himself. He picked up a soldering tool, and set to work.

Yet again, Vader’s hopes had come to nothing. The campaign against the alien civilization his fleet had found beyond the rift had failed to clear his mind of the specters that haunted it, or focus him for the daunting challenges that awaited him back in Imperial territory. For a time, commanding ships and soldiers in battle had distracted him from the ghosts that intruded upon his meditations, but the respite had been short-lived. Even returning to the cockpit of a starfighter had failed to drive away the shadows. The thrill of battle was muted, and no threat the aliens could pose had sparked emotion in him. No exhilaration, no anger, no fear. Compared to the terrors within his mask, fierce warriors and massed battle fleets were pale and transient.

No matter what he did, unheralded memories and repressed images came to him. Voices of the dead vied with the living, and more than once he had fallen silent during a consult with his subordinates and left for solitude without explanation, unable to discern what was real and what was not.

The last few days had been the worst. In place of the specters of slain friends and broken vows, two phantoms had begun to appear more and more frequently, swelling until they alone haunted him night and day.

The first was the face of his son. When the image came, Luke was as he had last seen him, clouded and cold, on the verge of an abyss that Darth Vader himself had created. This shadow was not a new one, but now as he looked on, his son’s eyes would open, but there would be nothing beneath their lids. Just a bottomless, inescapable void.

Then the second terror would come. From the silence, cackling. It was a laugh both humorless and terrible, muffled by great distance, but still potent enough to drive Vader to distraction, no matter how hard he fought to drive it from his mind.

Vader did not know what had brought on these new ghosts, or what they meant. He had meditated upon them for hours to no avail. He had even gone so far as to suppress the baser instincts of his Sith training in favor of the centering calm of half-forgotten Jedi mantras and focusing exercises, but the root of his new distress still eluded him.

And so he worked.

Vader had located an inactive R2 unit almost identical to his old companion; its headless frame stood next to the worktable, ready to accept a new droid brain. He had spent many long hours hunched over R2-D2’s processor carriage, cleaning and reassembling carbonized circuit nodes, replacing overloaded capacitors, and rewiring conductive filaments. Indeed, all that was left to be done was the installation a few key power transfer couplings and attachment the dome to its new chassis, but Vader continued to tinker and fine-tune.

He was reluctant to finish, for more than one reason.

An unseen comm unit pinged, and Darth Vader delicately laid the polished dome back on the table. With a flourish of his cape, he turned towards the room’s only door and manipulated its controls with a thought.

The gunmetal barrier slid away, and a pair of stormtroopers escorted an unimpressive man in a badly worn uniform into the room. One advanced and handed Vader the small metal disk that had been the captive’s only possession. Vader offered the soldier a slight nod, and men retreated without a word.

“You are a member of the Enterprise’s crew.”

It was a statement, not a question. The Sith Lord had known beyond a doubt as soon as the man had entered the room. There was something about his presence in the Force, a variance that could not be mistaken.

“What is your name?”

Vader could sense a great deal of fear in the man, and none of the force of will that he had felt during his brief meeting with the man’s captain.

“I’m Barclay… Lieutenant Reginald Barclay of the United Federation of Planets. And you… you must be Darth Vader.”

Vader was mildly surprised. There was an air of defiance in the response that he had not expected from what appeared to be a weak and tired man.

“You know of me?”

“Yes. Yes, I’ve heard of you, and what you can do. You’re a telepath. Why even bother asking me questions?”

Vader ignored the comment. “You know there is no point in resisting me. Good.”

He touched Barclay’s mind, and a series of images flowed from him. One, a bald, stern man was immediately recognizable.

“Where is Captain Picard?”

The man grimaced, although Vader could not tell exactly why.

“I don’t know. The last I saw the Captain, he was on an Alliance ship, the Republica. I was separated from it.”

He had to mean the Rebel vessel that had vanished through the spatial anomaly. His interest piqued, Vader probed deeper into Barclay’s mind, but he had difficulty seeing any deeper than immediate thoughts. Frustrated, he advanced, pushing harder, and the other man winced, bringing his hand to his forehead.

The effort only jumbled his perception further. He could only see a few dim images, and a few snippets of memory that erratically flowed into one another or faded without resolution. Either the man was stronger-willed than he had at first estimated, or his own focus was slipping. Unnerved by the prospect of such a weakness, he pushed still harder, and Barclay cried out in pain, falling to his knees.

Abruptly, Vader pulled back from the man’s mind. At last, he had found something. A fragment a memory, lacking context, but crystal clear. A young, dark-haired man. A name: Jacen Solo.

He seemed familiar, even though Vader could not place the name or the face.

“Who is Jacen Solo?”

Barclay looked up at his interrogator, one hand still clasped to his brow.

“The Enterprise found him. Transporter accident. He… he said he was a Jedi. From your universe, I think. He was with the captain.”

Darth Vader stared at Barclay, motionless. This new figure meant something to him, but he could not understand what. Through the Force he could perceive layers of meaning compounded upon the man, but something was stopping him from comprehending them. As he racked his brain, the ghostly laugh emerged suddenly from a drift of thought, and his marrow froze.

Vader turned away from Barclay.

“I will question you again later.”

With a wave of his hand, the door opened, and the waiting guards entered.

“Take him to the detention block. And ensure that I am not disturbed.”

When the others had gone, the Dark Lord resumed his work on R2-D2 immediately, barely aware of his surroundings as he picked up a waiting transfer coupling. His hands attached circuits and aligned power components swiftly and mechanically, working with a mind of their own, a mind untroubled by decades of war, betrayal, and darkness. The sum of Vader’s attention was focused on the young man he had seen in Barclay’s mind, and another within his armor was set free. He didn’t realize it when the last components had been installed and failed to notice reserve power begin to hum through the droid’s processor core. His legs and arms moved unbidden, positioning him before the incomplete R2 unit, and then placing the refurbished dome atop it. Magnetic clamps automatically locked it into place, and sparks flashed behind the droid’s polarized lenses.

Vader stepped back from the machine, suddenly conscious of his work. The completed droid hummed to life with the faint sounds of motivators and servomotors. Its head pivoted 180 degrees to the right and then to the left, and its holographic projector gave a few tentative twitches. A low whistle sounded from somewhere inside it, and the cylindrical body tilted back on its short legs. A third, wheeled foot emerged from a compartment at its base, and it inched forward along the smooth floor, turning right and left, and then backing into its original position. For the effort, it emitted a triumphant hoot.

R2-D2 was alive again.

Darth Vader reached out for the dome of his old friend, and the droid spun its sensory eye towards him, suddenly aware of movement. When it registered the towering form of the armored cyborg, R2-D2 squealed in surprise and put itself into reverse. Immediately, it slammed into the chambers wall and bounced back, head section twitching with fright and confusion.

The machine’s distress confirmed the quality of Vader’s labor. It still retained memory of its last active moments; naturally, it would be alarmed by his presence.

Slowly, Vader laid a glove on R2’s chassis, provoking another flurry of nervous spasms and pivots. A panel on the droids side popped open and an arc welder emerged, aimed at the Sith’s chest. The device jerked as the astromech attempted to activate it, only to find that some of its internal power supplies were not aligned. Vader had retained a healthy respect for the unit’s tenacity, and was pleased to see that that his precaution remained warranted.

Carefully, he pushed the panel closed, and held the droid tightly until it stopped tugging away.

“I won’t hurt you, R2.”

The words emerged slowly, strangled by uncertainty. He tried to sound gentle, reassuring, and found that he barely remembered how. He had had no occasion or desire to be either for more than two decades.

R2-D2’s primary sensor turned to face him, and it loosed an uncertain whistle.

“Don’t you recognize me?”

Vader saw the reflection of his nightmarish mask in the droid’s unblinking eye.

No. I suppose you wouldn’t.

R2 chirped a few times, and then whistled again, questioningly this time. Vader understood immediately: Where is my master?

“Luke isn’t here. He’s on Coruscant. I can bring you to him, but…”

The man trailed off.

Coruscant…

The fabric of the Force around him shuddered, and realization came. A hundred levels of understanding rushed in, and beyond them, the same resonance in the Force, uniting it all, leading… back.

Jacen Solo. The secret that Vader had sensed Aayla keeping from him during her training. He was the Jedi that Palpatine had sensed, so long ago.

Palpatine… The Dark Side…

The specters that had been haunting his every moment fell upon Vader, and blossomed into further understanding. He could barely comprehend the torrent of knowledge, connections he should have made, feelings he should have recognized…

And all of it led back to the Imperial Center. All of it led back to Aayla. All of it led back to his son.

Luke!

Vader leapt from R2 and spun towards his mediation chamber. He had been such a fool! Blinded by ambition and arrogance! Hot fury bubbled within his chest, but he ignored it, trying to focus on what had to be done. There was so little time!

He jabbed at a control panel within the chamber, and a far wall flickered to life with an image of the Torrent’s bridge. Captain Coloth moved into view, but Darth Vader cut him off before he could speak.

He was going back. Coruscant was waiting.

[Vehrec]

*sucks in some air* Feels like home huh? I guess a Reclaimer is a Reclaimer, and anyone will do for Mendicat Bias' example to his creators. I anticipate that structure lifting off, maybe engaging it's primary weapons.

This fleet still maintains the ability to induce premature stellar collapse. I suggest we use it.

[FA Xerrik]

Back to that Galaxy far, far away it seems (finally!). Although, now I have to go back and read the whole story again to remember what's going on. Not like that's a bad thing, of course. Can't wait to see what happens as Endgame draws close.

[Master_Baerne]

Co-ve-nant! Co-ve-nant!

Brilliant chapter, though I'd have preferred less Barclay and more Arbiter. I also anticipate the Forerunner ship opening a can of whup-ass.

[Vehrec]

That ship was stripped of every weapon the Covenant could locate. If there are any remaining, they are either so well hidden or so incomprehensible that they were never found. Of course, slipspace portals can be used as weapons, just see the effect of one closing as Forward Unto Dawn was halfway through one. This is to say nothing of their effects if employed like Gridfire, warping the mundane laws of physics beyond recognition and sanity.

[Master_Baerne]

I was pondering the possibility of the Forerunner ship screwing with space and time, as per the novel First Strike. Such a field would surely hinder the Imperial warships, possibly resulting in their firing on each other.

Plus, Forerunner ships are cool.

[The Vortex Empire]

We know nothing of Forerunner ship based weapons. And true, any weapons left would be hidden, but Mendicant Bias probably knows how to use them. Just because the Covenant don't know exactly how to run the ship doesn't mean a Forerunner AI doesn't. And I see Slipspace rifts being quite useful in combat.

[Themightytom]

Excellent fanfic Noble, I've been following since it started. You write the characters so well I actually bought an X box to try out halo 3 i was not dissappointed. You do great things in ways that keep me guessing (I mean who saw reginald Barclay as being a main character?)
Is Luke really dead or will one of the many zombie themed antagonists consume him (Borg, Gravemind, Zerg or whatever)
Either way its an awesome story I'm hooked.

[Dominus]

Oh yes, things are most certainly going to get interesting in so many ways. Aayla has been very naughty while Lord Vader has been away, and I imagine that the Dark Lord's wrath upon discovering what she has wrought with be terrible; his retribution swift and sure. One thing is certain -- the Star Trek galaxy isn't the only one that is due for a complete upheaval.

All I can say with regards to Barclay is: please don't kill him now that you've given him some semblance of a spine.

Ah, may I just take a moment to express my relief at the Executor's survival? It's long been one of my favorite Star Wars ships; its seeming destruction by Ackbar was nearly as terrible as the fate which befell it at Endor in the OTL. Glad to see that it's still intact, at any rate, if a bit laid up for a while.

As for High Charity and the Dreadnought, I can only echo what others have said; with the Imperials now ready to beat a hasty retreat back to the GFFA, it all falls upon that vengeful (and perhaps somewhat insane) Forerunner AI and the Arbiter's faction to settle the score with the Covenant. It may be vindictively petty, but I really would like for Truth to see all he has worked for, all machinations and plots and schemes, brought low and destroyed before he is killed; to see that the end sum of his pathetic existence has amounted only to this. His death in Halo 3 was rather... unsatisfying in that regard. Hopefully the Arbiter will outdo himself this time around.

I tip my hat to you on a most excellent chapter, Noble Ire -- or at least I would, if I had one at hand.

[Noble Ire]

Excellent fanfic Noble, I've been following since it started. You write the characters so well I actually bought an X box to try out halo 3 i was not dissappointed. You do great things in ways that keep me guessing (I mean who saw reginald Barclay as being a main character?)

Thank you very much; I'm glad to hear I've successfully avoided some traps of normalcy.
And perhaps I should start asking Bungie for a small commission.

Is Luke really dead or will one of the many zombie themed antagonists consume him (Borg, Gravemind, Zerg or whatever)

I feel comfortable saying that, unfortunately, Luke is quite dead and he'll probably end up staying that way. Of course, very few people know about that yet, his father included.

As to the discussion of the Forerunner dreadnaught and the Halo universe, I'll say again, the Halo portion of The Rift has come to an end (it has entered endgame, after all). That is not to say I'll never revisit it, though; if I do have time to devote to a sequel, it will almost certainly involve the remnants of the Covenant.

[Noble Ire]

All I can say with regards to Barclay is: please don't kill him now that you've given him some semblance of a spine.

I'm still extremely fond of Barclay, and I regard him as one of the main characters of the story, almost as much as the Arbiter or Jacen Solo. If he is set to die, and I'm not saying he is, it won't be an empty end.

Ah, may I just take a moment to express my relief at the Executor's survival? It's long been one of my favorite Star Wars ships; its seeming destruction by Ackbar was nearly as terrible as the fate which befell it at Endor in the OTL. Glad to see that it's still intact, at any rate, if a bit laid up for a while.

It'll take more than a big, off-white pickleship to take the Executor down.
Her story isn't over, even if I might not continue it in this particular tale.

[Stuart Mackey]

I rediscovered this the other day..so any ETA on a next installment?

[Noble Ire]

I've been swamped with school and work for the last few weeks, but I hope to have some time to work on The Rift in the next week. The chapter's already half-written, so I hope it isn't that long in coming. I apologize for the delay; I'm as eager to see the story continue as anyone.

[The Vortex Empire]

Please let it be about the Chief.

[Noble Ire]

Chapter Sixty Eight


With eyes that were not their own, six minds watched as the fissure in the Zerg defensive line in orbit widened and Allied warships began to pour through. One, the greatest of them, was content to observe as dozens of Starfleet and Klingon hulls plunged into Earth’s gravity well, plowing through the crossfire from the array of armed satellites and space stations hanging in low orbit. The lesser five, however, did not have the same luxury. Each earthbound Cerebrate was rallying its mindless hordes from their brood caverns and noxious holes, ready to deploy them anywhere on the ruined globe at a moment’s notice.

All of Kerrigan’s Cerebrates were bred to think of themselves as their Queen’s favorite lieutenant – burdening powerful and valuable tools such as they with jealous compunction would not do – but of them all, the being named Boil had the greatest claim on the title. Positioned within the Queen’s own citadel, the pulsing mound of flesh and psionic essence was the principal commander of Kerrigan’s elite guard. A pair of other Cerebrates kilometers away boosted the level of coordination he could impose on his subordinates and were tasked with the defense of their own sectors, but he was the prime mover. With his consciousness bent to the task of securing the Queen of Blades and her fortress, the entire continent around him became a single, mighty rampart, manned by a host of the finest Zerg genetic stock.

When the defensive platforms above began to disintegrate under the assault of two dozen tiny fightercraft, the invader’s greatest weapons, Boil was unconcerned. He was eager for the pitiful creatures to intrude further. He wished for nothing more than a chance to serve.

The breakthrough had taken a heavy toll on the Allied formation, but two dozen ships had managed to penetrate Earth’s innermost orbital perimeter. The collection of heavily-battered vessels was focused on the quickly-growing landscape below them, pumping its energy reserves into shields that glowed brightly as they absorbed the heat and resistance of rapid atmospheric entry. It was obvious that large-scale bombardment was not on the mind of the approaching commander; his objective was landfall.

Boil was eager to see the frail beings that would disgorge from the ships meet the claws and teeth of his vanguards, but duty to his Queen prompted him to make the first move. An organic engine of war, Boil was only dimly aware of the perverted humor behind his given name, but he was instinctually compelled to seize tactical opportunity when it presented itself.

A chain of thoughts spread from the Cerebrate, passing through hardened rock and stone and worked its way into the minds of billions of lesser creatures. It was both rallying cry and coordinating impulse: Boil had concluded that the entirety of the approaching force was focused on the lands surrounding the Queen’s fortress. Half a globe away, warrens emptied. Zerg spawn poured into waiting, living transports, and the giant sacs of gas and flesh rose into the air, obscene flocks converging upon the expanse of desert and corrupted wilderness Kerrigan had made her home. Nearer spawning complexes excreted an even greater volume of ravening minions, and they stampeded over land-fouling creep and through lifeless soil, compelled forward by the Cerebrate’s alarm.

The impending reinforcements were a necessary usage of available forces, but Boil was confident that they would be unneeded. Overlords, lesser coordinating minds that served as field commanders of sorts, conduits of a Cerebrate’s will, were scattered across the lands surrounding the fortress. The psionic fields they generated had the side-effect of disrupting the matter-energy transporters the beings that had once thrived on Earth used so much. Boil had seen the havoc this wreaked amongst the human ranks first hand in his infancy, during the disastrous evacuation sparked by the Queen’s emergence. Now, the devices would not be able to deploy soldiers, either, so the invaders would be forced to land their vessels.

That gave Boil the chance to slaughter the interlopers before a single one could set foot on the planet’s surface.

The first Allied ships crossed into stratosphere hurtling over a blackened ocean for a few moments before they reached the western tip of the continent they called Africa. As soon as they did, hill-sized cysts bulging from the dark slime that covered the coastal areas exploded violently. Amidst fountains of gore, the organic constructs unleashed Boil’s first line of defense: thousands of Scourges like those still harassing the fleet in orbit. The flying beasts surged after the hurtling artificial forms, toothy maws clacking excitedly.

Weakened by the breakneck descent and the preceding battle, the first Allied ships were no match for the suicidal attackers. Under the precision guidance of one of Boil’s adjunct Cerebrates, the Scourges found their targets within seconds, bashing through failing shields and biting deeply into taxed hull plating. Half a dozen of the invaders simply disintegrated in mid-air or spun out, their maneuvering jets disabled. Now easy targets, the wounded ships were torn apart by other massive growths that dotted the landscape, ones which lobbed explosively-corrosive spores into their hulls as they passed overhead.

The remaining Allied vessels were scattered, staggered out across half of the continent, but they pressed on, and Boil set about bringing them down one by one. Perhaps, he reflected with a tinge of regret and disgust, the pitiful creatures wouldn’t require a single pack of Zerglings to dispose of.

Then something wrenched at his mind. It was a feeling unlike any he had felt in his short life. Another Cerebrate was crying out for aid. His brother was… afraid.

He switched the breadth of his attention towards the other, located a few hundred kilometers north of the Queen’s citadel. Almost as old as him, Welt was tasked primarily with overseeing the region’s air forces, the Scourges and other Zerg minions gifted with flight. Boil reached out, communing with the Cerebrate, and received a few flashed of thought. Explosions rocking the earth. Zerg flesh burning. The small, angular forms of starfighters surging through the lower atmosphere, their weapons alight.

Then, a scream, and silence.

Confused by the sudden absence of the other’s thoughts, Boil pulled back, commandeering the eyes of an Overlord positioned near the living complex that sheltered Welt. The image he was presented was distorted and shaky, and he could barely force the creature to turn towards the site of his brother’s post. Nevertheless, he perceived the organic construct, or rather the patch of desert where it had once lain. A column of black smoke rose from a deep scar in the land, and nothing else moved within Boil’s frame of vision. The bone shell of the other Cerebrate and the rooted creatures that had attended it were gone. A moment later, the image faded away: the Overlord had succumbed to injuries sustained during the attack.

Boil was still processing what he had just seen and felt when a voice crept into him, filling his mind completely and irresistibly.

Welt was careless. The Queen of Blades seemed completely unfazed by the sudden loss. He let the Alliance starfighters get too close. But do not concern yourself. We are safe from their weapons here, and I have told your other brother to tighten his defenses. Now, return to the battle. See if they have anything else to offer. I am waiting…

The overriding consciousness slipped away, and Boil was left feeling refreshed, unburdened by fear. If the Queen was unconcerned, then he had no cause for alarm. Welt’s loss was unexpected, but hardly devastating. His forces would fall easily under Boil’s sway until a new Cerebrate could be grown. Perhaps his Queen would even resurrect Welt with the spark of his brother she kept within herself. No organ of the Swarm truly died as long as the heart was still beating.

--------------------------------------

Lt. Commander Addel and more than half of his remaining fighters shot away from the remains of the Zerg coordinator, atmospheric flaps open and straining against the wind of a gathering storm system. The pilots scanned the darkening African sky for signs of the Scourges that had harassed them since they had followed Battle Group Earth into the planet’s lower atmosphere, but their work had granted them a momentary respite. Tassadar’s tip, a short-burst communiqué from one of the Starfleet ships containing a simple set of coordinates, had paid off.

The Scourges weren’t the only creatures affected by the loss of the Cerebrate. The Overlords that had been feeding its orders to lesser minions were disoriented and directionless, suddenly without the invisible, guiding hand that they were designed to depend upon. The surviving Cerebrates hurried to regain control of their conduits, but the disruption only needed to last for a few moments. The Overlord’s psionic broadcasts had subsided, and so had their interference on the transporters within the Allied ships.

At more than a dozen sites where holes in the curtain of disruption had appeared, some less than twenty kilometers from Kerrigan’s fortress, the glimmer of materialization beams shown behind rocky outcroppings and in sheltered depressions. The energy-matter transferences did not go unnoticed by Boil and his observers, and he immediately dispatched hundreds of warriors to scout each incursion site and prevent the expansion of the new arrivals. Only a handful of Allied vessels remained intact, most still moving rapidly towards the Queen’s citadel: the rest had fallen victim to the clouds of Scourges that still prowled the skies, forced to ground hundreds of kilometers away or destroyed outright. Boil delegated the task of tracking them to his remaining subordinate, and turned his attention to the transportation sites.

The field of vision of an Overlord attached to one of the fastest responding groups caught his attention. Below the bulbous, floating creature, he saw hundreds of sets of powerful legs pounding the barren ground. A sea of quadruped Zerglings rushed over exposed rocks and tore through dead vegetation with raised claws, and among them he perceived the powerful, serpentine forms of Hydralisks, their keen sense’s trained for the slightest hint of prey.

A few partially caved-in buildings, all that remained of a once-vibrant human settlement, came into view and Boil compelled his minions towards them: the ruins were ideal beachheads for the invaders.

The swarm of Zerg hurried down the wind-swept remnants of a roadway into the town, disregarding opportunities for stealth or cover in favor of speed and overwhelming numbers. As his horde closed within a few dozen meters of the first building, Boil expected the first lances of phaser fire to burst from roofs and windows, but the structures remained lifeless, still the graves they had been for months. Intrigued, he moved his Overlord closer, compelling it to navigate between the sagging wrecks of what had once been apartments and shops.

Rounding a vacant edifice, the Cerebrate finally found his targets: a dozen or more humans and Klingons standing beneath the graying awning of a little hotel. The hunting packs saw them too, and surged forward, some hissing or chattering with anticipation. Boil noted that the humanoids did not move to cover or open fire on the ravening creatures; they simply stared at their impending destruction, phaser rifles held at their hips. Fear had frozen them, perhaps, the Cerebrate mused. Pitiful creatures.

The lead Zerglings dove into their ranks, ready to taste hot blood and living flesh, and yet none moved an inch or made a sound. This gave Boil pause, and the Zerglings as well. They ground to a halt, peering up at their prospective victims with tiny eyes, glazed with uncertainty. One sniffed the air and backed away from the stolid soldiers. A Hydralisk moved through the ranks of the lesser warriors, stopped before a Starfleet officer, and swung at it with a scythe-like claw; a decapitating blow.

But the man’s head did not fall from its shoulders. Instead, a metallic clang resounded from him and he vanished in a spasm of horizontal static. In his place, the erect shaft of a photon torpedo stood affixed to the ground. The silvery chassis of a holographic projector, bisected by the Zerg’s blow, fell sparking from the weapon’s armored shell. A moment later, the other soldiers vanished, and in their place stood another pair of the devices. The impact seemed to have triggered something within the first, and a display on its side lit with a few blue numerals.

The numbers flashed twice. Deep within his protective cavern, Boil’s brain-mass twitched.

Fourteen points of light and heat swelled across the continent’s surface. Thousands of Zerg warriors died instantly, utterly obliterated by the photon blasts. Hundreds of Overlords and other greater beasts perished as well, momentarily blinding their masters and sending psionic feedback roiling across hundreds of kilometers. The uncounted hordes that had rushed to their Queen’s defense reeled, and their monarch sat up in her throne, her thin smile gone.

When the sky cleared of glare, Zerg alone occupied it. Battle Group Earth had landed.

---------------------------------------------

The Master Chief stepped carefully from the hold of a shuttlecraft into the landing bay of the Excelsior-class Montgomery. The deck plate beneath his feet was at an incline, less than ten degrees, but still enough to require some attention to balance as he stepped away from the transport. The dim illumination of emergency lights above and the unusual orientation of the chamber – a sign of failing gravitational fields - was enough to tell the Chief that the ship had suffered quite a beating during its “landing”. The impact had been jarring even through the inertial dampeners of the shuttle, and he was willing to bet that the Montgomery would never fly again.

The bay seemed relatively intact: it had been completely stripped down before the Allied Fleet’s journey to the Sol system, and eight shuttlecraft had been carefully packed and secured into its relatively small area. One of the vessels had broken from its restraints during the landing, and was now leaning against a dented bulkhead with a fractured nacelle case, but the rest were in place and undamaged. They were all top-of-the line craft, short-range rectangular shuttles, hastily modified for added durability and firepower. These were the Chief’s warhorses, the armor and air support of Allied combined arms. They weren’t the Scorpion battle tanks or Pelican dropships of the UNSC Marine Corps, but they would do.

He hoped, at least.

The main hatches of the shuttles opened and Allied soldiers poured into the bay. The ten-man load out of each set about their pre-assigned duties, freeing their ships from crash bands and external inertial absorption units, checking them for damage, and checking the weapons and equipment each carried. It was noisy work, but the Chief noted little bravado or pre-battle chatter among them. Perhaps it was the jarring nature of their entry into the battle. Perhaps it was the knowledge that some had already lost friends and colleagues today, lost with those ships that didn’t reach ground.

Or perhaps it was the fact that, deep down, they didn’t think they were ready for the fight. Most were Starfleet security officers or Klingon soldiers, used to ship-to-ship combat exercises and small-scale urban actions; experienced Alliance marines were few and far between. Very few of them had ever fought Zerg face-to-face. Most of the battles of the war had been fought and lost in space, and few escaped the world-bound slaughters that inevitably followed. The Chief and Major Truul had prepared them as best they could, but they had had only a few days, mostly taken over with the formation of combat squads and rapid training of unit leaders.

The Chief could see that they all had to will to fight. But they lacked appropriate training. They lacked a tried-and-true command structure. They lacked real armor support, and weapons worthy of full-scale ground combat.

Will would have to be enough.

“Communications officer!” he called, moving away from the bustle that filled most of the chamber.

An Alliance marine turned from the door of his shuttle and hurried over.

“Sir?”

“Do we have a link with the other ships?”

“The Montgomery’s comm suite is busted, sir, but we’ve chained the systems of the shuttle group. There’s a lot of interference out there, but we’ve got responses from the Troy, Rhine, Butte, and Gla’Mach.”

“And the rest?”

More than half of the battle group had been composed of crewless decoy ships, programmed to cover the descent of those vessels that contained Allied ground troops, but there had still been over a dozen that had been intended to make landfall.

The soldier shook his head. “It’s possible that some were forced down beyond comm range. Our effective range with all the distortion the Zerg are putting out is less than fifty kilometers. As for the rest…”

The Chief didn’t need him to finish the sentence. Anticipated casualties for the first stage of the incursion had been high.

“Get me the Troy and the Gla’Mach.”

The communications officer hurried back to his shuttecraft, checked with a few soldiers inside and then turned back.

“I’m patching them to your comm line,” he called. “It’ll take a few more seconds, and I can’t guarantee how long I’ll be able to hold the signal.”

The Chief nodded, and then made for the bay’s outer wall, which was now open to the air outside. Climbing to its edge, he stepped past a group of Starfleet crewers and peered at the landscape beyond.

The gray-white aft sections of the Montgomery stretched out for a hundred meters below him. To either side, the pylons of the ship’s warp nacelles rose up, obscuring some of the view. The higher, on the left, seemed largely undamaged, but the right was badly mangled, its base ground into the scorched dirt. Its drive was partially broken free, and looked as though it was in danger of falling upon the outstretched branch of its support. The ship had evidently run up against a hill or rise, and its whole port side was pressed into the furrowed ground.

The African Savanna lay beyond. The Chief had never seen the place – the Africa of his Earth - outside of educational vids in his youth, but he knew what it should have looked like. Dry and rocky grassland, stretching from horizon to horizon, dotted with isolated lakes and the occasional village or town. He fleetingly pictured herds of endangered elephants and hunting prides of lions, romanticized visions that were probably far-fetched even on his industrialized world.

Whether the Federation’s version of Earth could once have upheld the fantasy before Kerrigan’s arrival, it certainly could not now. The roiling plains and rocky outcroppings were still visible beneath the darkening sky, but they were covered in a dark-purple sheen that choked out vegetation and blocked sand from view. The thick mat of slime, creep, as Tassadar had called it, enveloped virtually all the land in the Chief’s line of sight. The Montgomery’s landing had carved a long, broad furrow in the material, leaving charred earth and cast-up stones in its place, but it looked as though the substance was already beginning to probe the still-hot surface, eager to consume it once more.

The endless field of tainted, livid ooze was only broken by a single landmark. Almost directly in front of the Spartan, the gray hulk of a mountain filled the horizon. Through a haze that seemed to emanate from the creep itself, he could see its barren, vertical slopes and long, gradual peak. The natural monolith seemed relatively untouched by the dark mat that engulfed everything around it, but the Chief’s enhanced vision could perceive buildings or constructs of some kind rooted in its crags and beyond its steep slopes.

This was Mount Kilimanjaro, the greatest peak on the entire continent. And, if Tassadar was right, the seat of Kerrigan’s power. As the Master Chief stared at the imposing mass of rock, he couldn’t help but admire the audacity of the Zerg Queen’s choice. It was obvious, certainly, and subtly was often a far better defense than ramparts of stone, but it was still an intimidating obstacle for any attacker to even approach, much less overcome. And the Chief knew that the path there would be haunted by beings far more formidable than lions.

The comm unit in his helmet crackled.

“Sierra,” he reported.

“Beta,” crackled Truul’s voice, heavily distorted but still recognizable.

“Alpha,” Jacen Solo said a moment later. “Quite a landing.”

“Status?”

“Clear. Beta Unit is on target and ready to go. Gamma missed her mark by about a kilometer, but she’s gearing up, too.”

The Chief nodded slightly, ticking off points of a mental checklist. Gamma Unit, attached to the Butte, was headed by Commander Worf. All the strike commanders had survived landfall.

“We’re clear, too,” Jacen said. “Alpha Core is eager to move.”

Alpha Core, Tassadar, was the pivotal component of the strike force. He had provided them with as much intel on the disposition of the Zerg defense as he could on the way down, and picked up on hidden warrior concentrations and traps conventional scans had missed. The High Templar was also absolutely set upon penetrating Kerrigan’s fortress himself, and it was everyone else’s job to make sure he got there.

The creep and the darkness that seemed to rise from it made it difficult to see at any distance accurately, but the Chief perceived movement around the base of the mountain, only a few kilometers away. A great deal of movement.

It was time.

The Chief spun from the opening and jogged towards his waiting shuttle, now free of its restraints. The other soldiers were already piling into theirs, phaser rifles, disruptors and blasters at their sides.

“Mission clock: zero three point five,” he said, checking his HUD’s chronometer. “Sierra is deploying.”

“I copy.” Truul sounded calm and professional, in his element. “Beta and Gamma are engaging the Secondary. We’ll keep as many of them off you as we can.”

“Alpha and Epsilon are ready to join up with you, Chief,” Jacen said, more noticeably nervous. “May the Force be with you. And you, Major.”

“And you, Solo. Let’s show Queen Bitch what we can do. Time’s wasting.”

“Copy that, Beta,” the Chief said. “I’ll see you all at the Primary. Sierra out.”

The Spartan shared a short nod with his two lieutenants, a Klingon in full battle regalia and a woman in a shock-padded Starfleet uniform, and then climbed into his shuttle. The door closed quickly behind him and he climbed passed twin rows of seats, packed with Allied personnel. Some looked wide-eyed at the armored giant as he walked past. Others checked the sights on their weapons, avoiding eye contact with anyone else.

He could only hope they were ready. The task before them was one he wouldn’t give lightly, even to a corps of Spartans like himself. No one had told them it was a suicide mission, but they all must have known it probably was.

And yet, they were all there with him. They knew that this was their last hope, every one. They would succeed because there was no other option, even if none of them lived to see the flag of victory raised. And that resolve was all any commander could ask for.

The Master Chief Stopped behind the pilot and peered out through the canopy at the looming face of the mountain, and the creature it housed. Above it, he could see the minute, flitting forms of winged beasts, Scourges and other monstrosities. The Zerg citadel was a scant few kilometers away, but moving on foot over open terrain, pock-marked with Zerg holes and writhing with thousands of enemy contacts, would be impossible. Air was their only option.

“Keep us fast and low, pilot.”

“Affirmative, sir.” The man looked up at the supersoldier’s faceplate, and attempted a weak smile. “The bottom of this ship we’ll be purple by the time we get there.”

The Chief laid a hand lightly on the pilot’s shoulder. He looked back up at the mountain, and then at the storm-laden sky. For an instant, he thought he heard a familiar voice just by his ear, a joke or focusing remark, but there was only the rev of his shuttle’s drives and the breathing of the men behind him.

“Sir?”

The Chief grabbed a handhold on the frame above him.

“Punch it.”

As the ship surged from the Montgomery’s landing bay, the Chief realized that he would willingly take on Kerrigan’s hordes alone, if only that little voice was back inside his helmet.

-----------------------------------

The Millennium Falcon tumbled through space, its flattened hull flipping almost end over end. It maneuvering thrusters fired in an automated sequence intended to stabilize the freighter’s course, but the ship continued to wobble violently, dipping suddenly and then overcorrecting only to plunge into another barely-controlled spin. The space it had inhabited moments before was filled with an expanding cloud of fragmented hull plating, some of it still superheated from high-velocity contact with the Falcon’s skin-tight deflector screen. The angular hulk of a Klingon cruiser drifted away from the field, bleeding more debris from a massive breach in its midsection. The red illumination visible through slots in its angular nacelles flickered dangerously.

Han Solo ground his teeth, straining against his control yoke and the sudden increase in G-forces he could feel pressing on his body. An unwelcome hissing in the bulkhead above his head confirmed his suspicions: his ship’s primary inertial dampeners had been knocked offline by the glancing impact with the Zerg warship. Fortunately, the auxiliaries had kicked in. If they hadn’t, he and everyone aboard would be unpleasant-looking paste smeared on the deck plates.

A long, arcing push with his main sublights and a few emergency blasts from the ventral thrusters managed to stabilize the Falcon’s roll, but his instrument panel was still going wild, and Han couldn’t take his eyes off his navigational displays and the wide canopy before him long enough to sort them out. The crimson glow of a photon torpedo shot across his bow, forcing him to initiate another dive to avoid the subsequent detonation.

A single bead of sweat dripped onto Han’s eyebrow. The odor of burning polyplast and an echoing roar from deeper within the ship were doing little to improve his concentration.

“There was nothing I could do!” he called out to his perturbed gunner. A lance of phaser energy lased against the freighter’s underside, and another light on Han’s interface began to blink angrily. “Even the heavier ships are trying to ram us now! It was all I could do to avoid their center mass!”

The bellow that thundered down the access corridor beyond the bridge in response sounded unconvinced.

“Just keep on that gun, Chewie! I can’t draw a bead on the Cerebrate if I’m dodging exploding eyeballs and flying plates!”

And Picard had been right about the Cerebrate. As soon as the Millennium Falcon had gotten within a thousand kilometers of the fast little Starfleet picket ship the Captain had pointed out, all its escorts had opened up on him with suicidal fervor. They were still more sluggish than the other infested warships the Falcon had engaged, but whatever the Protoss had done to them was wearing off, and the freighter was still outnumbered ten to one, not counting the Scourges that were still flitting between the larger enemy vessels.

Han felt the report of his ship’s pair of quad laser cannons through the soles of his boots as he surged past a pair of ponderous Cardassian hulls. As he shot around them in a wide arc, a contact dropped off of his FOF scanner.

Nine to one. Han grinned. Those were odds he could deal with.

The Corellian yanked on his maneuvering pulls and the stars before him briefly spun into dashes of light before stopping again. The turn had placed a new point of light directly in Han’s sights. Electronic aides showed a representation of the Cerebrate’s ship, surging as quickly as its drives were able towards the gentle, bright arc of Earth. The Falcon outperformed Starfleet designs in virtually every category of comparison, but some could still top it at sublight speeds, and it looked like the Zerg coordinator had chosen one that did. There was no way he could get within weapons range of it before it disappeared into the thick of the Earthward Zerg battle line.

That was, if he played fair.

Heavy footfalls pounded through the low hatchway of the Falcon’s cockpit. Han didn’t take his eyes off the receding point of light. He jabbed at the interface of a navigation panel, his brow furrowed.

“Chewie, the guns!”

Chewbacca pulled a breath mask from his muzzle and moaned urgently, indicating back down the entryway, which was now choked with acrid smoke.

“I know the automated fire suppressors are offline. Have one of the guys you’ve got on the quads grab a hand-held.”

The Wookiee was about to turn back into the haze when he caught sight of what Han was doing and issued an alarmed question.

“You recalibrated the micro-jump ranging in the navicomputer before we left, right?”

A cautious affirmative sound.

Han grinned.

“Then you’d better grab a seat, buddy. This’ll be tight.”

Chewbacca wailed and threw himself into the co-pilot’s chair. Before the Wookiee even hit the cushions, Han deactivated a safety switch with a flick and shoved forward on his control sticks.

“Come on, baby.”

The stars before them surged into smears of light as the freighter lurched into hyperspace. Before Chewbacca could even fully register the change, the Millennium Falcon jerked back into realspace with a tremendous bang that rattled every plate, person, and machine within its hull. The abrupt jump and reemergence knocked Alliance techs standing in the Falcon’s hold off their feet and into the nearest bulkheads and slammed the breath out of both the occupants of its cockpit.

Han tried to ignore the pained screech of overtaxed machinery from his ship’s aft sections and pushed through the suffocating blackness that attempted to close over his eyes. The transparisteel canopy was now filled with nothing but interstellar blackness and the distant sparkle of alien suns. Holding his breath, Han sent his ship into a narrow, 180-degree turn. For an instant, there was nothing before him but more stars…

… and then the full mass of Earth loomed directly before them, eclipsing the rest of space with its great, blue form. They were now just beyond the Zerg line and the heart of the battle. And between them, a small shape against the planet’s reflected shine, still racing from an unseen pursuer.

“Chewie!” Han demanded, pushing into his controls again. “Missiles!”

The Wookiee’s huge paws fell upon his weapons interface without question as the ship surged forward, closing what remained of the gap. Within the freighter’s split forward section, a pair of blue-tinted concussion missiles slid from storage racks into waiting shafts.

The smooth lines of the Cerebrate’s runner resolved against the glare, a spot of black in a wall of light.

Han’s eyes widened.

“Now!”

One after the other, two elongated projectiles rocketed from the Millennium Falcon, slashing through space so quickly that Han and Chewie barely saw the flash of their departure. They flew straight and true, adjusting only slightly with the mounting gravity of the planet beyond. No other corrections were required; Han Solo had aimed well.

The first missile shot under the Zerg ship’s drive section, missing its shield bubble by meters. Before it could travel any further, however, the second found its mark, and both ignited with tremendous force. The shield shattered uselessly and the vulnerable plating underneath was laid bare to the ravaging energies of the twin weapons.

The two pilots shared a yell of triumph as they watched the flayed remnants of the Cerebrate’s vessel plummet into Earth’s yawning gravity well.

The fragmented vestiges of the ship burned into nothingness as they were pulled into Earth’s atmosphere, joining the storm of fiery streaks that rippled across half a hemisphere. Much of the debris was the handiwork of the Allied fleet earlier in the battle, but an increasing volume of the rain of misshapen duranium ingots and charred casings was the product of Zerg resistance. As the Millennium Falcon skimmed Earth’s outer atmosphere and surged back towards the main combat zone, the significance of those lost vessels became clear.

The five space-borne task forces of the Allied fleet, arranged into cohesive forward and rear combat fronts when the Falcon had begun its hunt, had compacted into a rapidly-shrinking orb. Pinned in the space above the African continent, the fleet was almost completely surrounded by the massed Zerg armada. Only a narrow, planetward corridor on the fleet’s perimeter remained free of enemy ships, and that too was beset by half a dozen tendrils of infested contacts. The rest of the space around the allied force was crowded with an endless number of confused dogfights and a still greater quantity of shattered hulls.

Captain Picard stared at the Enterprise’s primary viewscreen, his hand clenched tightly on the back of his navigation officer’s chair. Before him, a thin band of Klingon warships maneuvered through a screen of debris and phaser fire. The formation, no more than twenty ships, was all that remained of Battle Group Qo’nos. General K’Nera’s forces had been cut off when the Allied fleet had begun to collapse inwards, and hadn’t made contact with any of the other commanders since.

“Has Qo’nos reached the Fleet’s perimeter?” Picard asked, turning to Commander Data.

The android glanced down at one of his displays. “They will reach it in eighty seconds, sir. However, it appears that the Zerg units pursuing it have not broken off. They will overtake Qo’nos in forty five seconds.”

“Can’t the squadrons in that sector assist?”

“Negative, sir. All ships within range are heavily engaged. Diverting units in that area might allow for an even larger incursion.”

Picard looked back at the Klingon ships, keenly aware that there were fewer of them displayed than when he had last looked.

With the Alliance fighters tasked with providing air support for Battle Group Earth, the Allied fleet was severely out-gunned. The Zerg armada had lost a Cerebrate due to General Solo’s efforts and perhaps another during Earth’s breakthrough, but sheer weight of numbers was made up for their lessened coordination. The Fleet as a whole was down to half-strength, and it was all that it could do to hold the sphere above in orbit above Africa. The remnants of each battle group were beset by unending series of suicide charges and running low on heavy munitions. The Zerg casualties were staggering, but at the rate the battle was progressing, the Alliance would run out of ships and missiles long before Kerrigan’s minions did.

The Allied forces had to rally if there was to be any hope of their survival, and Picard knew that losing an entire division of the fleet would make such a turnabout even more unlikely.

“Helm, put us on an intercept with Qo’nos’ pursuers,” Picard ordered.

“Sir, if this squadron leave the line…” the tactical officer began to protest.

“Not our squadrons,” Picard said. “Just the Enterprise. Have the other captains keep their ships here. The perimeter must hold.”

There was a momentary lull on the bridge as the command officers digested the significance of the order. Data stared at his commanding officer and Picard locked eyes with him. What he had just ordered them to do was logically and tactically unsound; risking a command ship to potentially cover another could result in the loss of both. And even if the distraction of the Enterprise’s attack managed to buy the Klingons enough time to rejoin the rest of the fleet, the ship would be alone in the midst of overwhelming numbers. Had Riker been sitting in Data’s chair, he would have abandoned decorum and jumped up to dispute the plan in full face of the captain’s crew. Picard would have expected him to; the move was suicide.

Data’s face was impassive, but he did not respond immediately. Picard knew his second was carefully considering the order, trying to deduce its possible precursors and likely outcome.

Trust, Data.

“I suggest that you keep the Enterprise within the Fleet’s as long as possible, sir,” Data said, only slightly more slow and careful than unusual. “It will decrease the likelihood of the Zerg units anticipating our maneuver.”

Picard’s lips creased with relief.

“Make it so.”

The Enterprise banked away from its flanking host of Starfleet warships and shot away from Earth, arcing to match the tight curve of the besieged battle line.

As embattled warships and tumbling wrecks turned into streaks of light and movement, Picard looked out towards the great circle of Luna and the dim stars beyond, eerily placid against the carnage they backed.

If you’re out there, now is the time.

[fusion]

Very nice, but next time you should be quicker on the writing.

[FA Xerrik]

FUCK YEAH THIS IS AWESOME!!
I'm glad you got back to the Alpha Quadrant happenings. The Covenant were getting boring

[JointStrikeFighter]

Hell Yeah! Fucking awesome as always Noble Ire.

[Vehrec]

So where is Cortana again? On board Enterprise commanding the battlenet of the fleet, or is she back on Deep Space 9 ready to dish out the hurt? And yes, very good. It's like a good meal, fills you up but makes you want MOAR. And by the way, what is Master Chief carrying for a weapon these days? Did Cortana take some time on the holodeck with him to design a practical Phaser rifle or some kind of handheld gauss rifle, or is he toting around a blaster like the E-11?

[Noble Ire]

Very nice, but next time you should be quicker on the writing.

Unfortunately, The Rift has to take a back-seat to work and school, and I've been extremely busy of late. Nevertheless, I do hope to release the next chapter in a more timely manner, but I can't promise anything.

So where is Cortana again? On board Enterprise commanding the battlenet of the fleet, or is she back on Deep Space 9 ready to dish out the hurt? And yes, very good. It's like a good meal, fills you up but makes you want MOAR. And by the way, what is Master Chief carrying for a weapon these days? Did Cortana take some time on the holodeck with him to design a practical Phaser rifle or some kind of handheld gauss rifle, or is he toting around a blaster like the E-11?

As of yet, Cortana has not been involved with the battle.

And the Master Chief is carrying a blaster rifle requisitioned from the remainder of the Republica's marine complement.