BROKEN WIDE
A SHORT STORY BY
CAMERON DAYTON

Tactical Data L45.967.22

Remnants of the damaged audio files recovered
from the wreckage of the battlecruiser Emperor’s
Fury (holo files were completely unsalvageable)

Subject: Private Maren Ayers, Medic, 128th Platoon
“Iron Jesters”

Receiving: Captain Serl Gentry, Doctor, Special
Research Ops

Captain Gentry:
Have a seat, Private. I can imagine that you’re upset after what you’ve just been through.

Private Ayers:
Upset? Don’t be silly, Captain: this wasn’t a complete surprise. Nature doesn’t just adapt. Nature cheats, changes the rules, and slips out the back door with your wallet while you’re still trying to figure out what happened.

Captain Gentry:
I’m not sure I follow.

Private Ayers:
Sorry; those aren’t my words. That’s from my father, the venerable Dr. Talen Ayers. It’s his own special flavor of insight: one part renowned research geneticist and two parts backwoods yokel. Always embarrassed the hell out of me.

He’d throw that proverb out whenever I complained about unexpected results in my research. Force of habit, I suppose.

Captain Gentry:
Private, if we could start at the beginning?

Private Ayers:
It’s like the time an entire control group of my fruit flies decided to breed small enough to escape the netting in its container and spread into the other habitats. They deliberately ruined three months of long-chain protein sculpts. At least it seemed deliberate to me.

I was twelve at the time and had been slaving away on my own custom mutation of Drosophila melanogaster for a school project. Dad just laughed, told me to use jam jars next time. Old bastard. He didn’t have a clever maxim ready when I dropped out of grad school to join the marines, did he now?

Captain Gentry:
Private Ayers, if we could please just stick to the matter at hand?

Private Ayers:
Sorry – too personal? You said to start at the beginning, but I guess you’re not interested in my daddy-daughter issues. It’s just… it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to really talk with anybody who has more than a boot-camp education, and we’ve got a long flight back to civilized space.Captain Gentry:
(Clears his throat.)

Private Ayers:
OK, I’ll cut to the chase.

Captain Gentry:
Please.

Private Ayers:
Six months back, our platoon was headed to a remote sentry outpost on the frosty side of Anselm, swapping chairs with the poor slobs who had been assigned to that ice world for the previous year. We had just warped in-system and were calculating to make our final jump when we got the priority call from Korhal IV: all Minotaur-class battlecruisers were being recalled to the capital to be refitted for interatmospheric combat.

Instructions were for any non-critical missions to belay their progress, drop any passengers and payloads at the nearest habitable checkpoint, and warp to HQ posthaste. Retrieval would be assumed by secondary military vessels as command deemed appropriate. That sobered us up real fast. You know as well as I do that the term “habitable” can be used a little too loosely by the Dominion.

Captain Gentry:
Unexpected transfers are a part of military life, Private.

Private Ayers:
Yeah, well, I don’t think anybody was happy about being indefinitely sidelined for a vehicle upgrade.

Our nav comp calculated that the nearest rock fitting these criteria was a barren mining world on the edge of our in-system range: Sorona. You’ve seen it – a rust-orange planet with a slender asteroid ring around its midsection. Looks like a fat kid wearing a dirty little belt.

Captain Gentry:
(Laughs, then catches himself.)

Yes, I’ve seen Sorona.

Private Ayers:
Right. I’d been a medic with the 128th platoon for two years at that point. We called ourselves the Iron Jesters, under the command of Lieutenant Travis Orran. Only a handful of our crew had ever seen combat before, and most of that was just minor peacekeeping actions. Yeah, we were hardly the Heaven’s Devils, I know; they don’t send war heroes out to sit watch on Anselm. Regardless, I don’t think any of us imagined that our temporary setback was going to be somewhat more than temporary.

That was six months ago. Six months, Doc.

Captain Gentry:
That’s Captain….

Private Ayers:
Regardless, there was no welcoming committee waiting for us on the hot tarmac.

Captain Gentry:
This is not uncommon, Private. Some of the smaller colonies lack the personnel to keep a starport fully staffed.

Private Ayers:
This wasn’t a case of arriving during lunch break, Doc. The place was empty. Had been for a long time.

The lieutenant’s plan was to gather whatever supplies we could carry and slog the fifteen miles to the nearest colonial outpost, a little hole in the ground called Cask. There we would make contact with the local mayor and try to find a comfortable place to camp out for the duration. Lieutenant Orran joked that we’d at least be able to work on our tans before shipping out to Anselm. There were a few laughs; I think we were all trying to look on the bright side of the situation.

The zerg cut that short.

(This is followed by a long pause and the sound of Gentry shifting in his seat.)
Captain Gentry:
Please, Private.

Private Ayers:
We were about five miles from the colony when the ground just… just exploded all around us. All I can remember is a chittering sea of claws, gnashing teeth, and blood. So much blood. The zerg swam through our platoon like fish in an ocean of red. Private Braden was just in front of me, and I watched as his arm was ripped clean off – armor, bone, everything – and he went down under a pair of the beasts.

You and I both know there hadn’t been any zerg activity in terran space for years. I’d heard of these xenos, seen the training vids. But nothing can prepare you for the sheer animal terror that hits you when these monsters attack. The speed. The savagery. I’ve seen hundreds of zerg since that time, but the first attack still haunts me. Always will.

(Another long pause.)

Captain Gentry:
So how did you survive the ambush, Private?

Private Ayers:
Well, it was the lieutenant who kept his head, who finally pulled us out of a blind panic. He called for the Jesters to drop their packs, circle up, and open fire. I can remember his voice – steady and even in the midst of that chaos. He’s a good leader. A good man.

Five marines were already wet piles on the sand before the first shot was fired. On instinct, I had holstered my A-13 and was headed to Braden with medkit charging when Private Delme grabbed me and shouted that I should save my breath. She was right. There’s not much my nanos can do when a marine’s had his viscera pulled out through the belly of his CMC.

It probably wasn’t two minutes before Lieutenant Orran called for a halt. The smoke cleared, and we just stood there, stunned.

Captain Gentry:
Stunned? Come now, Private. All Dominion marines are trained for the eventuality of a zerg attack.

Private Ayers:
You’ve never seen combat with the zerg, have you, Doc?

Our troop of sixty marines had just dropped by twelve, and three more would be joining them shortly. The zerg had caught us flat-footed, and all the training in the world hadn’t counted for squat. The worst part? After checking and double-checking, we were only able to recover ten alien bodies. Ten xenos. A handful of zerglings had taken out a quarter of our platoon in a matter of minutes.

And we wouldn’t have seen the next dawn if the colonists hadn’t heard our shots and come to investigate. We saw a dust cloud on the horizon, red in the evening light. The lieutenant called us into formation, and we readied ourselves for another attack. Then we heard the welcome sputtering of a heavy terran motor. A mining vehicle – a big ore loader, by the look of it – was heading our way, and we started cheering.

The cheer stopped when the vehicle got within eyesight.

Captain Gentry:
Not what you had expected?

Private Ayers:
Let’s just say that the loader had seen better days. Deep gashes cut through the chassis in places, and the treads appeared to have been gnawed through on one side. Mounted on the front of the transport were two hydralisk skulls, and the plasteel headlights shone grimly through the empty sockets. Not the welcome wagon we’d been hoping for, but at least it had room to spare for our platoon in the dented ore trailer. We loaded up and tried to ignore the hopeless look on the faces of the civvies crewing the thing. They’d obviously been expecting more than our wide-eyed platoon.

We got the story on the drive back. The zerg had first hit the outlying Soronan settlements about eight months ago and then quickly swept across the remaining terran holdings. Yes, that’s right – eight months. The colonists claimed to have been sending emergency messages to the Dominion and any nearby ports on a daily basis ever since then. No reply. They assumed that their comm station must have been faulty. Helluva time for the fones to go out, huh, Doc?

Captain Gentry:
So how did a civilian population of unarmed miners survive an eight-month siege by one of the most dangerous enemies mankind has ever come across? This has us baffled.

Private Ayers:
Any chance you got a look at the recon vids from when youfinally decided to show up? If they haven’t already, have your tech boys pull up the schematics on Cask.

The colony is well named. Situated in one of the most perfect natural fortresses I could ever imagine, the colony is a military architect’s dream come true. Cask is nestled in the folds of a high-walled canyon that terminates under a massive arch of rock. Apart from providing shade from the planet’s twin suns, the arch shields the colony from anything but the heaviest air attack. A land-based assault would be forced through a narrow bottleneck that the miners have affectionately named the Wedge. Even our single transport was scraping the walls as the miners opened the scarred paristeel gates to let us pass inside the makeshift barricade.

Doc, the zerg had been swarming the Wedge for eight months on a daily basis and had been held off by civvies armed with shotguns and mining lasers. It was the first time I’d ever heard of civilians stemming a zerg assault, and I think we dared to hope that a strategy of attrition might bear fruit. The zerg couldn’t sustain this kind of activity on a practically lifeless world forever, could they?

Captain Gentry:
I am unable to relay any further scientific information on the xenos than what you have been cleared to see in your training vids, Private. Please continue with your report.

Private Ayers:
Right. Sorry.So we made contact with the local leader, who grew more and more despondent as we made it clear that, no, we weren’t part of a larger force and, no, we didn’t have any idea when our transport would return. The colony’s doctor had taken his own life only a month before, so I found myself quickly inundated with sick and injured civvies.

Malnourishment had set in once the supplies had run low, and the civilians were scraping together whatever they could from the beleaguered hydroponic gardens and a native mold that grew along the shadowed edges of the canyon. The stuff was acidic, tasted like paste, and had an odd peppery scent. But it had enough protein and carboxylic compounds to keep the people from starving. The acid had worn through most of the enamel on their teeth, so I actually spent a lot of time doing dental extractions. Not what you’d expect following a zerg attack, I know.

The first wave of zerg hit only an hour after our arrival. We were unloading what gear we had been able to bring with us when the Klaxon went off. In between the sounding alarms, I could hear a rustling crescendo as the canyon walls seemed to shiver. The lieutenant had us drop everything and take posts along the makeshift walls the civvies had erected.

Being ambushed by the zerg is one thing. Being prepped, locked, and loaded for them is an altogether different experience. The first zerglings turned the corner to meet a withering crossfire of three dozen C-14 rifles and eight mining lasers. A shower of ichor painted the canyon walls, and the next wave of creatures rushed forward, the aliens wet from the remains of their siblings. They were mowed down just as quickly.

The next twenty minutes were filled with regular bursts of gunfire punctuated by the hissing cries of dying zerg. After it became obvious that my field-dressing skills wouldn’t be needed, I took a spot on the wall and started firing with a loaned C-7.

Firing. Punching wet holes into zerglings. Watching them squirm, drop to the ground, twitch before going still. Hippocratic Oath notwithstanding, it felt good.

Captain Gentry:
Mmm?

Private Ayers:
Yeah. It felt really good. Putting spikes through those fekking demons. After they had murdered so many of us… just being able to kill and kill and kill and…

(Soft sounds of crying.)

Captain Gentry:
(Into his lapel) This is Gentry. I don’t think I’m going to be able to get any further here. Get meds down here and a gurney prepped for –

Private Ayers:
No! No, I’ll be alright. Just need… just need a minute.

Captain Gentry:
(Still into his lapel) Hold on that.

Private Ayers:
(Sniffs, then takes a big breath.)

I apologize, Captain. For a moment I was back down there and…

Captain Gentry:
Steel yourself, Private. This is information the Dominion needs to save lives. Remember that.

Private Ayers:
Save lives? Ha. I’m glad you put it that way, Doc. That will make this much easier.

So my platoon is locked down on this dirt world, and the zerg are hitting us on a daily basis. Like clockwork. We hold the line. Days go by. Weeks.

We learned to conserve ammo, relying on the mining lasers the civvies had jury-rigged onto platforms above the walls to control the xenos. The Wedge really did seem to nullify the zerg offense: no matter how many claws stormed down that canyon, they could only get close enough to scratch at the barricades before being picked off. It was almost more work to burn away the corpses with the lasers when the attack was over.

We settled into a routine. Attacks would come at indeterminate times during the day, but only once in any twenty-four hour period. It started with a few dozen zerglings, then spilled into a rush – hundreds of the things crawling over each other in such masses that each shot was guaranteed to pierce two or three bodies at a time.

Captain Gentry:
Alright, Private, now we’re getting to the important information. What form did the attacks take? Were you only assaulted by the smaller zergling strain?

Private Ayers:
Yes. I asked about the other types of zerg that I’d learned about – hydralisks, ultralisks, devourers – you know, the whole cast of uglies. Apparently they had been part of the initial assaults, but their numbers had diminished as the siege wore on.

Captain Gentry:
Diminished?

Private Ayers:
Diminished and then disappeared entirely. The colonists noted this as a significant change as the months passed, and we surmised that this was a sign of the zerg population being worn down to its cheapest weapons.

Captain Gentry:
Is that still what you think was happening?

Private Ayers:
No. I wish I had seen it for what it really was.

Captain Gentry:
Care to elaborate?

Private Ayers:
I’ll get there. You need to hear the rest to understand.

The civvies were grateful to have us there, and they made sure that we were provided with water from the colony well and ammunition hot off the colony’s modified tool factory. The food and supplies that we’d packed in provided some relief, and our tech-savvy Private Hughes did a checkup on the comm gear. It was all up to spec: as far as he could tell, the messages had been going out. It’s just that nobody was answering.

(A long pause. Captain Gentry again clears his throat.)
Captain Gentry:
Go on.

Private Ayers:
It wasn’t until the first few weeks had gone by that my suspicions started to grow.

Captain Gentry:
About the comm system?

Private Ayers:
No, about the zerg. Why would I be suspicious about the comm? I’m no techie. It was the constant and utterly fruitless zerg attacks that got me thinking.

I was reminded of an argument I’d had with my father after his lecture one day. We had been focused on evolutionary theory, and I made the mistake of complaining about one of his tenets – something about instances of mutation occurring more frequently in populations that suffered from drastically diminished numbers. I thought it was ridiculous to consider a population of organisms as some sort of collective unconsciousness that could react to threats with a gestalt reasoning apart from the whole.

Captain Gentry:
“Gestalt reasoning”? Private, I’ll give you high marks for vocabulary, but you’ve just used a lot of fancy words to describe the widely accepted zerg cerebrate concept. It’s certainly nothing new or groundbreaking.

Private Ayers:
Pardon me, Doc, but I don’t think you understand. That’s not what he was proposing. He claimed that a separate population of individuals within a species could have a group-wide increase in its offspring’s mutation frequency due to severely dropping numbers. This supposes that some sort of biochemical communication exists at the genetic level for all species. Even my damn fruit flies.

Captain Gentry:
So… you’re saying that an isolated group can mutate to deal with unexpected situations. This is nature slipping out the back door with your wallet, right?

Private Ayers:
Well, you’re getting warmer.

The theory was stupid, I thought. It didn’t follow any formulas, algorithms, or predictable patterns. Most of science is like a pistol, right? You load it, pull the trigger, and it fires a slug. Once you understand the mechanism, you can predict it every time. Why do you think I joined the marines? Daddy issues aside, I mean. Fire guns; patch the holes they make; and win the battle. Simple, clean, and easy. My father hated my hunger for that simplicity, an unrealistic black-and-white universe that he called “a foolish binary fantasy.”

“Maren,” he’d say, “sometimes A plus B doesn’t equal C. Sometimes it equals M; sometimes it equals 42; and sometimes it responds in the form of an essay. You have to accept the fact that the most important questions have too many facets for you to count. You have to step back and be content with the fuzzy big picture.”

He failed me that semester in spite of perfect test scores. Said I just didn’t get the most important part.

Captain Gentry:
So Cask had you rethinking your father’s theories?

Private Ayers:
Yeah. It burns me to say it, but yeah. Something about being stranded on a desolate rock, being surrounded by homicidal cockroaches, and eating alien mold. I finally started to see the big picture. Father would be so proud of his little girl.

First of all, why would supposedly intelligent spacefaring aliens deliberately and systematically throw their forces at an impenetrable target? And why do so at such a constant, methodical rate? Cask certainly didn’t hold any position of strategic importance. Neither did Sorona, for that matter.

My studies in xenobiology had never gone too deep; I was out of school, out from under my father’s thumb, before zerg physiology was really taught at a scholastic level. From what I’d been able to piece together from the dumbed-down boot-camp vids, the zerg Overmind used an adaptive form of DNA to incorporate other useful bits from distinct, unrelated organisms into its own genetic palette. This made my fruit fly gene sculpting look like child’s play.

What if whatever consciousness was controlling this population had recognized a unique dilemma in this terran holdout on Sorona? What if my father’s theory was true? What if the inverse relationship between a population’s survival rate and random mutations was a concept not only understood by this consciousness, but also used to overcome obstacles when all other tactics proved useless? Was our desperate holdout providing a damn testing ground for the enemy?

Captain Gentry:
I’m impressed, Private. I can’t go into detail here, but your field analysis syncs up with much of the data our tactical team has been running through. What was your conclusion?

Private Ayers:
I had to know. Had to know if we were being used, even helping the zerg by playing into a forced mutation strategy. We had to seek out the hive responsible for this population of xenos. We had to destroy it.

The lieutenant laughed at me. I tried explaining it to him again, and he cut me off; this time his expression was stern. He told me that he had no idea how long we were going to be stuck on this rock and that, through the grace of whatever god looked out for atheist marines, he had found a way to keep his platoon alive in the midst of a zerg assault. He was going to sit tight and wait for the cavalry. “Leave the science to the scientists, Private.”

That stung. Believe it or not, it stung. I’d been trying to distance myself from my father and his world of intellectual vagaries for years, and now I ached for that understanding. That perspective. Here I was literally stuck in the center of what was potentially the next evolutionary step of an entire species, and I lacked the tools, training, and support to do anything about it.

Captain Gentry:
So what did you do?

Private Ayers:
I did what I could. I waited until the next attack had petered out, and I climbed over the barricade.

Captain Gentry:
A little field research?

Private Ayers:
Exactly.
The other marines all started shouting, and I could hear Private Delme calling to the lieutenant. Something about “losing another quack to suicide,” and I had to smile at her tender concern. Hey, if the pattern held true, the next attack wouldn’t come until tomorrow morning at the soonest.

The lieutenant had reached the top of the wall and was yelling by the time my feet hit the sand. I ignored him and got to work, collecting samples from carcasses. The attenuated surgical lasers on my armor made quick work of this, and I kept my C-7 at the ready in case the zerglings weren’t as dead as they seemed.

By the time I had gathered a good sampling, Lieutenant Orran had raised the gate and was standing just inside, fuming.

What was he going to do? Shoot the only medic on the planet? I was shouted at for a good hour and then confined to quarters. The moment my door was shut I set to work, turning the room into a miser’s laboratory. Most of the equipment I needed could be adapted from the instrumentation in my armor, and within the hour I was doing comparative analysis on the flesh of our attackers.

Captain Gentry:
You built a lab out of your armor? Again, I’m impressed, Private.

Private Ayers:
You higher-ups think we grunts are all a bunch of brain-dead apes, don’t you? Didn’t really expect us to see what was going on?

Captain Gentry:
“Going on”? I don’t know what you’re implying, Private, but I suggest you continue with your report.

Private Ayers:
Uh-huh. The lab was nothing fancy – just enough to run some basic tests. It didn’t take long to locate the mutation, even with my rusty training. You know how human transplant surgery is all about fighting the host’s bodily rejection of the foreign new flesh? Well, imagine the reaction if the new cells are from an entirely different species.

The zerglings’ connective tissue – the tough, leathery stuff that binds the hardened zerg exoskeleton to muscle tissue – was blistering. Every sample that I collected showed some level of swelling and agitation due to the bulbous pustules clustered across it.

My next discovery took me completely by surprise. The agitated flesh had a unique peppery smell. A smell I’d grown accustomed to at every meal since we’d arrived on Sorona.

Captain Gentry:
The same smell as the –

Private Ayers:
Why the zerg would want to absorb a local mold into their potpourri of genetic features was beyond me.

Maybe this wasn’t deliberate. An alien infection caused by some?? insidious algae? Ha. I doubted that anything could get through the bio-defenses of these monsters, but it was possible. I decided to dissect one of the smaller blisters, an angry green specimen the size of my fingertip. I charged up the med-laser and made a small incision.

Captain Gentry:
And?

Private Ayers:
And I woke up two hours later in the med-bay with my skin burning. Lieutenant Orran was standing over my gurney, his face sick with worry. He told me how the grenade had brought him running, how he had found me underneath a collapsed wall in the next room. That’s when I glanced down and saw the remnants of my suit. The entire right side looked like a candle that had been held to a flame: the armored plates had been fused together. The lieutenant told me that, the next time I wanted to “off” myself, I should remove my armor first. Yeah, he’s a funny guy.

I asked him to take me to my quarters. Either Lieutenant Orran was feeling pity or he had just given up fighting me, because he ducked under my arm and half dragged, half carried me from the med-bay. My room had been flattened, with the walls blown out in all directions. I was lucky to have survived.

“This wasn’t a grenade,” I told the lieutenant. “It was a blister.”

He laughed, convinced that I’d gone insane. I asked him to explain how I had managed to find an acid grenade in my quarters. He supposed that I’d cobbled it together from parts of my suit: they’d found pieces of my makeshift lab scattered throughout the wreckage. I could hardly fault him, you know. Who would believe my story about vicious alien pustules?

In the end, I was confined to another room with Private Delme on constant watch. My skin blistered, cracked, and then started peeling; you can still see the patches on my hand here. I told the private about my worries, about the need to broadcast what was happening here. I told her that maybe news of a new zerg mutation would get somebody to listen to us.

She only nodded, smiled, and then focused on cleaning her sidearm. Delme must have cleaned that stupid thing a dozen times over the next few days.
Captain Gentry:
Meanwhile, your troop was still coming under daily zerg assaults, correct?

Private Ayers:
The zerg? Oh, no. They stopped coming.

Captain Gentry:
They stopped?

Private Ayers:
Yes, sir. One last assault the morning after my accident, and then nothing. Delme told me that everybody was being cautiously optimistic, and even I dared to hope. Maybe this really was some sort of miraculous infection that had blistered the zerg into submission. Did we owe our lives to the Soronan mold?

Lieutenant Orran relented after a few days and let me out of my confinement. I’m not sure who was more relieved: me or Private Delme. Another week went by without incident, and the lieutenant decided to risk a scouting party. He picked three marines from a crowd of raised hands; we were all feeling some high-grade claustrophobia after so long in that damned Wedge.

I found some tools and got to work on my poor melted suit, and I freed up the leg joints to a point where I could wear the ugly thing. Zerg or no, it felt better to walk around in my modified CMC again. I wasn’t the crazy wannabe scientist anymore. I was a Dominion medic, damn it. My father’s views on nature as a shrewd pickpocket had been gloriously shattered by an infectious mold.

Captain Gentry:
Yes, yes. What did the scouting party find?

Private Ayers:
We were all curious when it got back, and the civvies gathered around too, hopeful to hear if the attacks were over for good. Lieutenant Orran decided to break protocol and take the report in front of the crowd.

Orran asked if the party had encountered any hostiles. The three marines just looked at each other and smiled. Private Godard even started laughing. They said that they’d found an entire valley full of sick, dying zerg. Claimed that the beasts were swollen with disease, sluggish.

Private Evans said that they had spent the afternoon emptying their clips into “the poor bastards.”

The civvies started cheering, and Lieutenant Orran had a big grin on his face. It was the first time those canyon walls had echoed something akin to hope in a long time. But something the marine had said struck me as odd. Maybe I’d misheard him. I had to shout over the noise.

I asked if they’d really emptied all of their clips. I asked how many of these sick zerglings they had seen. Evans smirked and shrugged his shoulders. Said he wasn’t sure, but the valley was full of ’em.

My insides went cold. This was wrong. Very wrong. An infectious disease would result in a population producing fewer offspring, not more. The zerg weren’t dying. The zerg had found their mutation. A new strain was swarming, and the Wedge was about to burst wide open.

I turned and ran. Lieutenant Orran called after me, confused by my reaction. I had to get to the comm station, had to make some attempt at getting the message out. I don’t remember how long I ran, but I made it to the station by the time the first explosions started echoing through Cask.

(Another long pause.)

Captain Gentry:
Private?

Private Ayers:
The rest you know, or at least most of it. You heard my message. You came. The right motivation got you here with an entire fleet of battlecruisers in only four days. Four fekking days! You monsters had been listening to this colony die for months and didn’t lift a damn finger until we had some precious military intel for you!

Captain Gentry:
I’ll ask you one more time for the rest of your report, Private. You’re on dangerous ground here.
Private Ayers:
The rest of my report? You want to know what happened in those four days? I got to see a wall we’d defended for six months dissolve under a slowly crawling wave of acid. I got to watch a platoon of marines giving their lives one by one, trying to stop an endless horde of swollen green xenos inching closer and closer with every detonation. I watched the last rays of hope disappear in those marines’ eyes as the next generation of explosive zerglings arrived – creatures that had gained the ability to roll into balls and project themselves along the terrain faster than a fully armed marine can run.

And finally… finally I got to watch a colony of civilians die, screaming in slow motion while this new breed of zerg destroyed Cask inch by inch, an endless series of explosions echoing through the Wedge.

Captain Gentry:
That’s your report?

Private Ayers:
That’s my report. Yes, I know that I have rambled and not shown you the proper respect due a superior officer. I also know that I’m not going to see the end of this flight, that you’re just the first and gentlest of the Dominion interrogators who will be visiting me. I’ve known ever since you brought me onboard with Lieutenant Orran. He’s not going to see daylight either, is he?

Captain Gentry:
If that is all, Private, I can have you escorted to –

Private Ayers:
That is most certainly not all. Perhaps you’ve been listening close enough to my report to know what this is.

(Sounds of a gasp and a chair scraping backwards.)

Yes, I brought a sample for your labs, Doc. It’s significantly bigger than my fingertip, isn’t it?

Sit down. Sit down, sir. You stand up again, and I will blow this room through the fekking hull. I barely survived a blast in a suit of armor, and that pustule wasn’t half as big as this one. That’s right: sit still.

You were so anxious to get my report; you probably should have gotten me out of this beat-up suit of armor first, eh? Or at least searched my storage vials for foreign matter, maybe deactivated my little lasers? A dumb field medic would never turn violent, would never suspect….

Captain Gentry:
(Whispering into his lapel) This is Gentry: I need security in interrogation room 7E stat.

Private Ayers:
Oh, by all means, call for security. This won’t take long.

I know that you bastards heard our cries. That you’d been listening the entire time. I know that you wanted to see how long a civilian population could stand against an incursion. And I know that you wanted to see how the infamous zerg adaptability would deal with an insurmountable problem. I can read the excitement in your eyes from this new data, you sick, murderous sonuvabitch. Well, I’ve got some bad news for you.

I saw something else in those four days. I saw the zerg pull back once they’d beaten the Wedge and destroyed the colony. The lieutenant and I watched the creatures turn and crawl from the smoking ruins of Cask, watched from our hiding place in the cliff face where you found us. They left because their experiment was done. It was a success.

You thought you were experimenting on them? They were experimenting on themselves. It’s how they grow, how they become stronger.

And for the last twenty-four hours before your fleet arrived, we listened to the massive spore cannons that they’d grown in the surrounding mountain ranges. Cannons that could have been turned on Cask at any time, mind you. But that would have ruined the experiment. No, these cannons were firing spores into space – no doubt on trajectories to other zerg planets. They were sharing what they’d learned with the rest of the Swarm. I know that it has been years since we’ve seen any zerg activity in terran space. But I hope you’re prepared for the next encounter. The zerg are coming. The zerg are nature in all her fury.

Still recording? Good.

Dad was right, Doctor. Nature doesn’t just adapt. Nature cheats, changes the rules, and slips out the back door with your wallet while you’re still trying to figure out what the hell happened. Now shut off your recording and stand up.

(The recording registers a long pause, a gasp, and a wet explosion. It then cuts to static.)