THE INFINITE BROOD (Starcraft/Supreme Commander Crossover Quest!)

Your frown was carved into granite. You tried to imagine what Major Horner would say if he had heard you gotten spooked by some malfunctioning chipset playing a goddamn entertainment program for a nine year old. Hell, then you imagined the teasing you'd get from Sarah. Your laugh echoed through the corridor and you rolled your shoulders slowly, feeling the knots relaxing around you.

How can someone with biceps this big be scared of a ghost? Sarah would say, or something like that. With kisses, too.

You shook your head, then frowned. "First things first," you said.

You started towards the cafeteria. One of the objectives was to learn more about how the base had gone down - so, if the jamming signal let you, you did want to send the data you could get off the bodies in there. You walked confidently, and the strange sense of unease felt as if it had almost completely died down, though not enough to let you get a signal past the QJ interference. You came to the cafeteria room, and swept the flashlight over the bodies. You counted twenty, all in labratory coats. One thing the drone had missed thanks to the angle of its camera was the heavy crunching footprints that had cracked the somewhat thinner wooden surface of this gymnasium. You knelt down, frowning a little.

Power armor boots.

"My father..."

You jerked your head up, frowning. You had heard, ghostly and faint, something whispering. It had been male and close. You looked around, but the cafeteria remained quiet and empty. You paused, then shone the light on the bodies. None of them had moved.

Then.

Something happened.

Flickering and semi-translucent, a row of men and women stood above the bodies. They looked only vaguely there, like blurry holoprints. They murmured among one another, soft whispering sounds that almost but didn't quite cohere into words. The concern in them was coming off in waves - and a voice that almost made sense rose up out of the susurrations. It was like hearing a shouting match through plexiglass.

Mmhmmhmm mmhm thmmhmm

"My father appreciates all you've done here. He's sent me to decide how this program will continue."

That voice again - coming from behind you. You looked back, but saw nothing. No holo projection, nothing. A malfunctioning...recording device? Maybe. Your mind reached for answers - but then you jerked your head back as the muffled voice came again. This time, you could almost make out words.

mmhmm this project mmh mm delay is mm

"The computer files have been downloaded and your subjects are coming with me to the Protectorate."

And us?

"You get what you deserve," the voice, which had been cold but calm actually broke slightly. "Men. Disengage aggression inhibitors for thirty seconds."

Muffled sounds of eager agreement - again, coming through thick glass. Then the faintest outlines of bulky, power armored shapes came into view to either side of you. Your brows drew in as you heard, subliminal, almost deep in your bones, the aching sound of jackhammering gunfire. The ghostlike holograms in the cafeteria twitched, writhed, then dropped as one - only one had managed to move. Their form fell and overlain one of the desiccated corpses that lay on its face, a few feet from the others. The only one that had been shot in the back.

The images faded and the feeling of being in a freezer went away. You shivered and then almost screamed and jumped out of your skin as Lt. Stukov's voice came over your com. "...General, do you read me?"

You put your hand to your com, breathing slowly, steadily. "Yes," you said, firmly, not letting it show how fast your heart was hammering.

"Sam, what is going on down there - your biocomp is giving us some bizarre readings," Matt said.

"I..." You looked around the room. "I need to check something."

You moved to the walls, checking for doors - listening to Dr. Hanson recount everything she had picked up to you in an excited, nervous flurry. "Your stress levels are high, but what's interesting is your brain scan feedback - we're detecting spikes in neurotransmitters that appear to be emerging extemporaneously - no source stimuli, primarily centered in your hippocampus and temporal lobes, those subcomponents most commonly associated with longterm memory, are you having any traumatic flashbacks right now?"

"No," you said, grimly. You had found a door and opened it - the hinges weren't even that rusty. Inside there was actually an ancient holographic recording and playback device - something that could have picked up every single moment in the gym and replayed it again and again. Great, you supposed, if you had students who were being trained and monitored and studied. But there was just one tiny problem with this comforting, logical explanation for everything you had just seen.

Someone had shot it.

Not just shot it, they had riddled it with long spikes - the ferrous gauss rounds that the local Terran infantry tended to use in their various makes and modes of man portable rifles. You put your hand on the console, then frowned. You turned your back on it, and remembered a pencil, floating in the air without anyone touching it. Without instrumentality - without an agrav tractor or emitter or even a piece of fucking string.

The smug bastard had even offered to do it again naked in a room you had prepared, if you wanted.

"...Dr. Hanson," you said. "I just saw some fucking ghosts."

"As in...the special operatives?" she asked.

"No. Quasi-holographic sounds and images, replaying the moments before a violent death, like out of a goddamn Hiram Wen feely novel," you said. "Someone came here on orders from his...father..." you frowned, slowly. "The Dominion has a crown prince, right?" Your scorn for lines of succession based on hereditary bled into your voice.

"Yes, a Prince Valarian Mengsk. Currently in a diplomatic mission with a smaller Terran state called the Umojan Protectorate," Stukov said, clearly reading from a dossier.

You nodded. "I think he came here to clean up."

"He executed all those people?" Horner asked. "Do you think this could be a propaganda coup for us? Mass murder of innocent civilians."

You considered the voice you had heard. Your hand slid along your shoulder, feeling the solidity of hard muscle. "I doubt it," you said, voice grim.

"Well-ssszzsss-" Matt's voice vanished in a blur of static.

You frowned, then stepped from the small recording and control booth. You had half expected to see what you saw. But that didn't make the urge to draw your gun and aim it any less strong. A young child in a white labratory smock that hung, dresslike, around their slender shoulders and dangled around to their knees - leaving their shins and their blood soaked feet exposed. They stood in the doorway, their hair grown long and rangy and black, concealing features behind a curtain of uncombed, untamed wildness. You gulped and between blinks, the child seemed to vanish, then appear - and this time, they were five or so meters back from the door, an almost invisible white flash in a darkened corridor. You walked forward, keeping your pistol down - the flashlight illuminating bright red footprints on the floor.

"-eneral, do you read me?" Matt's voice cut through the static.

"I do Matt, playback my cam footage for the past sixty seconds," you said, quietly.

There was a short pause. "I'm...not seeing anything," he said.

"Figured."

---
HEAT: 0/6

[ ] Follow the Ghost (Resilience Diff 4 check - 2 Heat)
[ ] Call for backup, then follow the Ghost (UEF General check diff 6 - 4 heat - then Resilience diff 1+1 check, 0 heat)
[ ] Leave. Now. (Fail Resilience check and leave)
[ ] Write in


(calling for backup has the side effect of giving you a squad of goons with the People (1) characteristic, augmenting your actions.