MOTHERSHIP
A SHORT STORY BY
BRIAN T. KINDREGAN

The zerg would be in soon. They tore at the door, the walls, the ceiling. Erekul could feel the other high templar, his brothers and sisters, fighting and dying. Buying him precious seconds. He closed his eyes; the Khala pulsed within. The collective thoughts and feelings of his people were filled with chaos, terror, and pain.

The zerg had control of Erekul’s beloved homeworld of Aiur. The invaders likely thought themselves ascendant; they did not know that the fight was far from over. Erekul moved through the dark chamber to the console, his hands bathed in its soft blue glow. He entered the codes with serene grace. Behind him the door began to shudder.

At the edge of protoss-known space, the signal was received and noted. Crystals long dormant began to glow; energy wells irised open. Power flowed.

Erekul turned as the door finally crumpled. Two high templar, already dead, flew across the room and slid down the far wall. A mass of brown and grey flesh poured in: small, fast-moving zerglings – all spittle and mouth. Next came hydralisks, larger creatures bristling with spines and fury. Erekul’s eyes glowed icy blue, and he bowed his head, gathering his psionic energy. They came at him, a furious whirlwind of hate. He threw his arms wide, opening the floodgates. The zerg writhed, their bodies breaking and tearing. More poured through the door, choking it with their numbers. Erekul brought his psionic energy to bear on the largest of the slavering hydralisks, tearing its brain apart. More zerg spilled into the room, crawling over the quivering hydralisk, snarling. They moved to surround him. Erekul was spent – there would not be another psionic storm. With a mental scream of rage and pride, he threw himself at the zerg, tearing at them with his hands. Teeth and spines pierced his flesh, zerglings and hydralisks poured over him until he was gone.

Juras opened eyes that had not seen for centuries. The engineers had told him that awakening from stasis was unpleasant. They’d lied – it was horrible. His skin, his eyes, his nerve cords all hurt. He stumbled from the waking chamber, shielding his eyes from the soft glow on the bridge of the Moratun.

He’d been slated to wake only when his ship detected intelligent life. It was a moment Juras had dreamed of since he’d first designed this enormous vessel. Contact with rational alien intelligence would bring the protoss to another golden age, would spur a renaissance of art and culture. And Juras would be there to see it.

He moved cautiously to the main control console and studied the readout. The ship was moving, shields at full strength, weapons primed. Juras had designed the motherships as peaceful exploration vessels, but space was a dangerous place, and the massive ships were heavily armored and shielded. They also boasted the deadliest weapons the protoss had ever designed. Juras had opposed the inclusion of weapons, but the Templar caste had insisted. The templar had even converted some of the vessels to command ships leading armadas. But Juras had kept his beloved prototype, the Moratun, for exploration.

He was sure the weapons would never be needed; it was impossible to imagine a species achieving interplanetary travel unless it was driven by the need to reach out to others, to understand, share, and learn.

And the protoss must never repeat the mistakes of the past. Juras recited this imperative in his thoughts: the protoss would not repeat the mistakes of the past.

He touched the console. In a moment he would see the first communication from a new species. As the image came up, his brow furrowed. It was a simple burst transmission sent to all the dormant motherships: “Come home. We are lost.”

Fear coiled in Juras’ chest. Instinctively, he reached for the Khala and felt the reassuring touch – his people were out there somewhere.

He closed his eyes, feeling at one with his ship as it hurtled through the darkness. Although he was an explorer and used to solitude, it would be nice to return to the calm, warm embrace of his people. He settled into a meditation stance. Juras was concerned about what he would find at the conclusion of his journey, but under that concern was serenity. His people were the Firstborn: they had the Khala, and they had the Conclave. Any problem could be surmounted.
Juras’ mind wandered, flowing through the depths of his many memories. He heard psionic screams, saw a flash of light. The kalathi had gathered at dawn, two great armies bent on destroying each other. Protoss researchers had watched the young species from an enclosure, protected by their shields.

Juras heard his own voice saying the fateful words, “We must stop them, Executor. They are like children; let us use our weapon to scare them into submission. We cannot stand by and let them destroy each other.”

Juras flinched. He did not want to remember this.

Walking through a devastated city. Slabs of stone lying askew, kalathi bodies strewn everywhere. Splintered bones protruding at odd angles, torn flesh sagging as blood drained from young and old, male and female. All dead. The executor had indeed used a powerful weapon as a warning, but the kalathi had not desisted; they had turned on the protoss researchers. Kalathi Bloodreavers had attacked the shields, screaming their bloodlust. Outnumbered and surrounded, the protoss had let loose their mighty weapon, and the kalathi had died. That was the flashpoint. The kalathi attacked protoss at every opportunity thereafter. General war had erupted and Colossi had been deployed. By the end of it all, hundreds of thousands of kalathi were dead.

Later Juras had walked alone in the kalathi’s great city, letting the images of death, of lives shattered and ended too soon, burn into his mind. He would never forget: the protoss had used a terrifying weapon on another intelligent species.

A weapon designed by Juras.
He was pulled from his reverie by an insistent beeping. The Moratun had warped into a system for a course adjustment and detected a protoss outpost. He was still some distance from Aiur, and it seemed like a good idea to pick up compatriots to serve on the ship. He could pilot it for simple warps, but anything more taxing would require a crew.

Juras took manual control of the ship and brought it down into the atmosphere of planet Samiku. He’d been in stasis a long time; would the protoss of today be very different?

Martul leapt through the air. Spines came at her: a hydralisk. She spun, nerve cords fanning out, and brought her blades up, into the hydralisk’s underbelly. They swept through the flesh in a blue streak, and purplish ichor exploded around her. She landed on one knee, ducked under the spines that she knew were converging on her from either side, and rolled forward to the next beast. All around, her zealots fought off the implacable zerg.

They couldn’t keep this up.

Martul and her comrades had all felt a change in the Khala recently; a strange and troubling sensation. Now the promised reinforcements from Aiur were overdue. That combination of factors worried Martul a great deal. There was nothing on the backwater planet of Samiku worth fighting for, and Martul would have been happy to evacuate. But it did not look as if that were going to happen soon.

To her left, Xulata went down under a pile of zerglings, his blades thrashing and cutting. The zerglings swarmed, and he was gone. Martul came to her feet, extending her blades to either side as two zerglings leapt at her; they impaled themselves and fell away. Her shields were sputtering, giving off the telltale sparkle. They would fail soon.

She felt a vibration beneath her feet, and three hydralisks burst from the ground in a shower of mud meters away. She raised her blades, taking a step back. The hydralisks mistook her action for fear and rushed forward, mandibles twitching. They never saw the two zealots charging in from the flanks. In an instant two hydralisks lay dead and twitching. Martul leapt into the attack of the last, stepping lightly on a large scythe-like arm and propelling herself up past the hydralisk’s dripping mouth. As she flipped over its head, she plunged her blades down, splitting its skull in two. She landed gracefully behind the still-falling hydralisk – and collapsed. Her leg had a long gash running down one side, deep into the muscle. She scrambled back to her feet as a wave of zerglings poured over the horizon.

The air cooled; a shadow fell over her. The sky was filled by a giant disc with three great wings of metal. A thing of gold and blue, it shimmered with the telltale glow of shields. Martul knew every type of ship and vehicle the protoss military could field, and this was something different. It bristled with weapons, and it moved slowly forward, rotating in perfect silence.
Juras looked on in horror.

The readouts showed the devastation below with too much clarity. Protoss zealots lay dead, strewn across a battlefield of craters and wreckage. A small band of them huddled on a hilltop fighting off… an alien intelligence. The aliens were incredibly varied – so much so that Juras immediately deduced that they must assimilate other species into their own. More importantly, he could sense their minds. Unthinking feelings of hunger washed over him: a desire to consume or assimilate all. They were naturally a collective conscious. The creatures on the hillside were simple organisms that should operate under a greater intelligence.

But they moved and fought with no direction, tearing at each other as much as the protoss. It was as if their guiding intelligence had abandoned them.

Clearly the protoss had met another intelligence while Juras slept. And the result was carnage.

Blood and ichor mingled freely; chunks of meat and bone stuck out of the mud alongside scorched rubble. Light flashed off of protoss shields and alien claws alike. Once again, protoss weapons were being used against an alien intelligence.

Juras saw himself walking through a deserted city, past the charred corpse of a kalathi.

It must not happen again.

Juras brought the ship completely over the battlefield, casting it all into shadow. An eerie moment of calm descended as combatants on both sides looked up. There was silence. The moment ended; with a rush of action, the aliens resumed their attack. Through a haze of anguish, Juras felt the psionic screams of every zealot who perished. Those screams wrenched him to action – he reached out to the protoss below with his mind.

The response was immediate and hard-edged: “I am Commander Martul. You are Juras. But where are you from, and why are you here?”

“I am a researcher,” he said. “How have you come to violence? Can you not just avoid these creatures?”

“Are you mad? If you have weapons, use them!”

“The weapons on this ship are for self-defense.”

“We are surrounded. Either the zerg die – or we do. ”

Juras saw that she was correct. He could not let his fellow protoss die. And the creatures below had been cut off from their guiding intelligence – perhaps it would be a kindness to end their lives. With shaking fingers, Juras activated the Moratun’s khaydarin crystal and brought the purifier beams to bear. A buzz filled the battlefield as molecules in the air ionized. The light seemed to rush away only to burst forth again from the bottom of the ship.

Pure energy poured down onto the muddied, bloodied battlefield. The zerg writhed as the beams ripped them to pieces. Some creatures simply ceased to exist. Juras felt the joy of the zealots as they saw their foes disintegrate, and it mingled with his own shame.

Once he’d cleared a space near the crown of the hill, he brought the ship in low and activated the short-range teleport beam. Seeing their chance, the zealots charged. The aliens came at them from all sides, determined to keep the trapped protoss where they were. The zealots cut a swath through them, a few of their number falling. Juras saw the protoss reach the blue column of light that represented safety. As they approached the warp, the mothership’s cloaking hid them from view.

The young zealot commander, Martul, reached the warp first, but stood next to it and fought off the ravening aliens while her people rushed past. Juras could not use the Moratun’s more exotic weapons, such as the vortex or the temporal rift, this close to his own people, but the purifier beams kept the aliens at bay.

The final zealot arrived at the gate. The pursuing zerg surged forward. Martul cut down two of them. The last zealot hesitated just outside the cloaked area, ready to help. A hooked arm caught him up and dragged him back into the maelstrom of writhing zerg flesh. Martul’s blades whirled toward the arm, but it was too late: the zealot was dragged into the tightly packed aliens.

Martul leapt after the zealot, heedless of her injury, blades whirling. She felled three, then four. But the aliens were numberless, and the other zealot disappeared into the chaos. Martul registered the death of her comrade, then swung her blades in a great arc and leapt back into the cloaking field.
Martul limped onto the bridge.

“There are more down there,” she said. “Eliminate them.”

“You’re welcome, Commander,” Juras replied. Even with the reassuring touch of the Khala, Juras’ habitual irritation with others had returned in full force.

“It was not a request,” Martul said.

This was Juras’ ship. He’d designed it and piloted it. He’d rescued this young one with it, and he was not going to let her use it for more carnage. If the zealot thought he would submit simply because she was a warrior and he was a scientist, she had much to learn.

Her eyes narrowed as she sensed these feelings welling up in him. “Those things killed my warriors,” she said. “My friends. And you have the power to destroy them. We are at war.”

“I saved you, Commander. That will have to suffice for now. We will go to Aiur, and I will speak to the Conclave. We must learn more about these zerg – perhaps we can find a way to avoid them, to leave them in peace.”

“There will be no peace.”

“I will speak to the Conclave about it.”

Martul spun and stalked to the door. “Let us just get to Aiur then. I will be in the crew quarters, studying the schematics of this ship.”

“Do not think you will take control of the Moratun from me. I will always know it better than you, and I answer to the Conclave.”

“You have been too long away from your people, scientist. You have gone mad,” she said.

“When we destroyed the kalathi, we thought we were doing the right thing. We thought our motives were the best and we had no other choice. When we realized our mistake, it was too late. Once you have destroyed an alien intelligence, you cannot bring it back. As terrible as the zerg seem, we must learn more; we must understand them. The stakes are too high.”

Martul stared at Juras for a moment, her gaze a mix of anger and pity. She turned and left the bridge without another word.

Juras took the Moratun up, away from the planet, from the zerg, from the devastation. He looked out into the depths of space. The universe in which he found himself was not as he’d imagined.
The Moratun warped into the home system, outside the orbit of Aleun, the farthest planet. The bridge bustled with life: zealots worked at various stations and consoles, monitoring energy levels, crystalline fluctuations, and weapons readiness.

Martul stood next to Juras. Tension still simmered between them, discomfiting the other protoss. It was clear to Juras that the universe had become a harder, more violent place. And the protoss had changed along with it – or perhaps in reaction to it. The young zealot by his side was an example of that. Perhaps Juras’ presence could have a balancing influence on his people.

Martul began to tremble. Juras looked askance at her.

“Aiur,” she said. “Aiur and the Khala.”

Juras had felt the comforting presence of the Khala since he’d awoken. But this close to Aiur, it should have filled him with the warmth and comfort of billions of protoss minds. Instead there was an emptiness. Hundreds of thousands of protoss had died, and their absence left a hole in the Khala.

Juras realized he was shaking as well.

Unthinking, he turned to Martul and touched her shoulder. It was an unheard-of gesture of intimacy, but both protoss were shattered by the terrible realization. In that moment of contact a rare event transpired: Juras could see deep into Martul as if they were joined in the Khala. He could see her overwhelming determination to defend her people, her compassion for her fallen allies, her anger at the zerg for the pain they had inflicted. Beneath it all was an instinctive abhorrence at the existence of the mindless Swarm. After a time, Juras turned to the console.

“We must get to Aiur,” he said, feeling the wordless agreement of Martul and all the other protoss. He brought the ship into the system and accelerated toward Aiur, his dread growing. The planet appeared at peace from this distance.

Martul hobbled over to a weapons console and took control of some of the Moratun’s more exotic weapons. She locked eyes with Jurasfor a moment. The tension was back: she was prepared to use the weapons of his ship for aggression. And he was prepared to stop her. There must be hope for the zerg.

They entered Aiur’s atmosphere and neared the cloud layer.

The clouds erupted as winged zerg spiraled out to surround the ship. Devourers dived in, spitting corrosive acid, while mutalisks circled to the flanks. Dozens of tiny scourge crashed into the shields and exploded. More of the mutalisks banked, wings flapping and circular mouths pulsing as they tried to find the right vector to do more damage.

“Contact!” cried one of the crew. “Shields are dropping faster than the crystal can regenerate. We must destroy these beasts!”

“We shall,” Martul said, her hands flying across the console. Then she stopped. “Weapons are not responding. Juras, what is wrong with your ship?”

“Nothing,” he said calmly, guiding the ship through the swarming zerg. “I have overridden the weapons systems. We are here to find out what happened to our people and to offer assistance. We do not yet know enough about the zerg to simply consign them to genocide.”

“I was right: you have gone mad! Those scourge will destroy the shields, then the mutalisks and devourers will be all over your precious ship!”

“Shields at eighty percent.”

“The Moratun can take a good deal more damage and survive. We are almost through the cloud cover,” Juras said. He accelerated, leaving some of the zerg behind. A new squadron of the creatures dove out of the sun in an attack pattern.

Juras banked as hard as possible. The enormous mothership was not designed to be maneuverable, and the zerg compensated easily.

“Shields at sixty.”

“Release weapons, Juras!”

“My creation will not be used for genocide!”

Dozens of the creatures emerged from the clouds on an intercept vector. Juras put the ship into a steep dive, straining the inertial nullifiers. The zealots had to grab onto their consoles to avoid being knocked over.

They entered the lowest cloud layer only to be met by more tiny scourge that slammed into the ship, giving their lives to do a little more damage.

“Shields at fifty – forty!”

Juras leveled out the Moratun, picking up more speed and gradually losing altitude. “Almost under the cloud layer,” he thought, and then he froze, feeling a pinprick on the back of his head where his nerve cords met his skull. In the reflective surface of a console, he could see Martul behind him, standing stiffly, one arm outstretched, holding a psi blade very close to the back of his head.

“Our homeworld is under attack by the zerg, and we are going to fight them,” she said coldly. “Activate weapons systems.”

“I will not do it, Commander. There is another way.”

Zerg of all shapes and sizes chased them. Dozens more swept down to intercept them. Even more rose ahead to meet them.

“Shields at twenty.”

“I will kill you.”

“Then the weapons systems will be locked forever, and you will have returned us to the Aeon of Strife.”

They emerged from the bottom of the cloud layer. The surface of their homeworld lay revealed.

A roiling mass of grey organic matter covered the ground from one horizon to the other. Lumps appeared here and there, the remains of once-proud buildings: temples, homes, universities. Forests, lakes, mountains, all were gone. Veiny, pulsing matter covered everything. Tiny creatures trundled along the surface, burrowing into and out of it, moving mindlessly.

Martul was wrong; their homeworld was not under attack. It was under occupation.

“Shields at ten.”

“Activate those weapons!”

New hordes of zerg flew at the ship, destroying the shields, trying to get at the armored surface underneath.

Juras’ eyes were drawn to motion on the surface below: a protoss was running toward them. She’d been hiding but had broken cover at the sight of them, hoping for rescue. Juras brought the ship in low, toward her. He could see from her markings that she was of the Khalai caste, likely an artisan or craftsman.

Zerglings boiled up out of the ground around her, cutting her off. Juras accelerated, knowing he could not make it to her in time. He let out a wordless cry of horror: this protoss was no threat to the zerg. She was not a warrior, not a templar. She would not even be able to fight to defend herself. They didn’t need to kill her. It would gain them nothing.

They swarmed all over her, and a plume of protoss blood shot up from the squirming mass of zerg. She was gone.

Time slowed for Juras. He sensed the urgency of those around him, felt the ship shuddering under the relentless attacks, felt the tip of Martul’s blade pressing harder against the back of his head. But it all had a disconnected quality, as if it couldn’t possibly be as important as what he was seeing through the console.

The zerg had killed a fleeing, defenseless being. And they’d done it for no gain; it simply had to happen because she was not zerg.

Juras had known that other intelligent life might be hostile, that it might put its own interests ahead of all else. But he’d believed that behind any intelligence was a guiding spirit, an understanding of commonality. In this moment Juras finally understood. There was no empathy in the zerg, no compromise. Anything that was not zerg must be destroyed. Sentience came in many forms, and this one was the opposite of all that he cherished.

This one was his enemy in every way possible.

Juras activated the weapons systems – including the vortex, the temporal rift, and the wormhole transit, which Martul likely didn’t know about. “Go!” he roared. “The systems are online. Kill them; kill them all.” Martul stumbled back to her console, and all the zealots began to do what they did best: fight.

Juras guided the ship lower so its weapons could take out the disgusting creatures on the ground as well. Light and power blazed from the Moratun in all directions. The full power of the mothership was finally unleashed. Zerg writhed, combusted, exploded. Zerg ichor showered the Moratun’s shields; zerg meat and viscera dripped from the bottom of the ship.

“Shields are stabilized.”

“More incoming,” another zealot reported.

“Bringing weapons systems to bear,” Martul said.

“Take the helm,” Juras said. “I have another task.” He moved to another console and accessed the scan readouts. He noticed that other motherships, having received the same burst transmission as the Moratun, had begun to arrive. They sat quiet and empty at the edge of the solar system. But that wasn’t what Juras was looking for. He scanned the surface for life. A massive number of readings came back, but he sorted through the data, looking for anything not zerg. There had to be survivors hiding or fighting somewhere. There had to be someone who could tell him the fate of his people. Juras would rescue them and withdraw. Aiur belonged to the zerg now.
Juras and Martul stood in the med-bay. The Moratun now led a fleet of motherships through the blackness. The ships had skeleton crews: the original zealots he’d rescued, augmented by a few survivors from Aiur and a few more out-world garrisons they’d found.

They were occasionally intercepted by zerg leviathans, but the fleet made short work of them.

A protoss lay before Martul and Juras, eyes dulled with pain as the med-bay quietly worked to heal his many wounds. When they’d found him, his pain-soaked thoughts had hinted at protoss escaping Aiur, but he’d lost consciousness before they could get the story from him. The other survivors they’d found had heard the call for evacuation but had not been able to get to the warpgate. They had no idea where the protoss had gone. Juras was impatient to interrogate him, but Martul had forced Juras to wait until the med-bay readings indicated that the protoss was well enough. That time had finally come.

“I do not know how long I….” His thoughts were clouded by pain, unclear. “I was underground often…. I could… hear them burrowing.” Images poured from him: hiding in cramped spaces underground, hours of listening for the telltale scritching of zerg digging. Nightmarish moments, fleeing through the darkness, expecting hydralisks around each corner. Leaving the fallen behind, sensing their fear and pain as they were ripped to pieces.

Juras had to draw back for a moment or else get trapped in the spiraling nightmare.

“And everyone else is dead?” Martul asked, her tone flat, hopeless.

“No… not gone…. Just too far,” the protoss thought. Juras leaned forward, a tiny flame of hope awakening. “Warp gate. During invasion… dark templar….” The injured protoss trailed off. Juras and Martul shared a look – the dark templar were an offshoot of the protoss, renegades who’d fled Aiur long ago. Could this protoss be hallucinating? “They opened warp gate to… world.”

“What world?” Martul asked gently, her touch on the wounded protoss’ mind feather light.

“Far away.”

“Where?” Juras asked more urgently, stepping forward.

"Far…. "

“Could you sense anything while the warp gate was open?” he asked forcefully. “We must find our people.”

“Do not know… ”

Juras felt Martul’s hand on his arm, pulling him back. He turned to regard her. Perhaps he had brought a sense of balance to her view of the world. But she’d brought a sense of balance to his view as well.

Their people still lived, somewhere far away. Juras and Martul would lead the motherships through the darkness of space until they found their people, even if it took years.

Then Juras would deliver the motherships into the hands of the protoss, and they would bring fire and death down on the zerg. They would take back what was theirs.

Juras had dreamed of meeting an alien intelligence, of washing away the shame of the Kalath Intercession. Now he’d met an alien intelligence, and his only dream was to see its destruction.

END