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

You rotated the problem in your head, thinking - and realized that without even considering it, you had immediately started to feel the problem out as your...new self. The instinctive ripping and tearing, until it was done. Baked into your new bones, a song that called through your whole body. Well. You hadn't been chosen - stolen - to just be another Zerg. Were you? If you were here...you were going to do the job you had been asked to do, as the woman you were.

General Samantha fucking Clarke.

Your focus snapped back to the moment. You thrust out your finger and your nanolathe bit into rock, slicing away room. Within a shockingly fast time, the pools were ready, even as slithering hydralisks started to writhe their way up along the low, black ridgeline of the asteroid. Their cobra-like frills swept wide and silent, sizzling projectiles came raining down on the side of your ACU. Black armor flecked with green. You ignored it. You stood between the pool and the fuselage until the first of the zerglings came crawling out of it, shaking the glistening, boiling liquid off its vacuum hardened hide.

"Hey, Cr," you said. "Fuck 'em up."

The zergling in question screeched for joy. He catapulted himself between your legs - and exploded into shredded gore. But the other zerglings were out already, scrambling out of the flash-crafted breeding pits. As they thronged out, you felt a cold chuckle in your mind.

Is that your only tactic? Sarah asked, wryly.

"Watch and learn, Kerrigan," you said, then aimed your nanolathe. The zerglings and the hydralisks were playing. You had an asteroid to core out. The first step was to build the energy infrastructure, then the extraction systems. As the fabricators and the mines went up, you glanced 'backwards' and saw that the zerglings had cleared half the hydralisks and the remaining were starting to draw backwards - you murmured a few soft orders.

"Go around the flank. There, use the gulley."

Then you were back to work.

By the time the Zerglings had finished their devouring and had come back, wagging their tails and licking their boiling claws, blood bubbling off them in the vacuum, you had finished your base and given the immediate orders. It was...strange and dislocating, to shift from giving the song-commands to the Zerg to the cold, mechanical requests of the automated Cybran units. You were also a bit disorientated to see just how closely the engineering pattern fit the one you remembered. Oh, sure their tier-one defensive structures were different, but the basic command diagram was so familiar you had to wonder how much of it the Cybrans had stolen.

Or maybe it was convergent evolution.

Still, you considered that for later as you started to give out the orders to the engineers. Their nanolathes worked, humming furiously as artillery platforms and cruise missiles started to form.

What...are you doing? Sarah asked.

"Quing up the tech tree to atomics," you said, dryly. "If they have enough time, this asteroid will be able to spit nuclear weapons at a pretty staggering rate. Without my directions, it'll be pretty dumb - but I can at least set it up to build nukes and launch them at any bioform it detects without a friendly IFF."

There was a long, long pause over the telepathic link you shared.

...I like the way you think, HIlt.

"Of course, my queen," you said, and felt the way that that tone of voice cut into Sarah.

Good. She deserved a bit of bloodletting sometimes. And then your mind traced that thought to the member of her under your claws - and the mixed feeling of rage and lust and boiling confusion that it all came with. You squashed it down, frowning as your eyes flicked to the orbital sattelites. Whatever Brood was protecting this place had been given directions by Daggoth, you were sure...but you doubt it had direct oversight from anything as sophisticated as a Cerebrate.

Still.

Zerg weren't stupid. They had recognized your forces, and as the nanolathes continued to buzz, the air defense systems only half constructed, the wing of mutalisks came over the horizon. They ignored the buildings and they ignored the Zerglings - it seemed that the Zerg had picked up the number one trick of ACU combat.

They went for the Commander.

Glaive impacts slammed into your shoulder, chest, head, thighs. They rebounded. One slammed into an engineer, carving into its armor plating and leaving it sparking, hissing and wandering in confused circles. Another whipped into some half-finished nanoprojects, disrupting the barely formed slurry of raw material and scattering seconds of delicate work. You scowled, then lashed out - your arm pointing and an infared laser slicing a mutalisk wing off as it shot past you. It tumbled into space.

Annoying.

But you saw the mutalisks were the last real hurdle. If they were gone, then the T2 artillery unit would be finished...no gravity? No problem, most shells had minor self correcting engines built into their plasma sheathing. It was how you could have artillery duels on little rockballs like this. That meant that you could pound the hive into fragments, then turn this asteroid into a nuclear splinter in Daggoth's fucking eye.

Assuming, of course, you got the base done.

Which meant...

You lasered another mutalisk before it could dive on you, the idea forming.

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HEAT: 1/6

[ ] Operation: huck a ling! - lure the mutalisks down close enough to take advantage of the light gravity. Sometimes, it turns out you CAN chew on their starships!
[ ] Operation: Laser Show - you have a laser and superhuman reflexes. Figure it out.
[ ] Operation: My Mutas, Too: You have a nanofabricator and superhuman reflexes. Why kill the mutalisks when you can net them. Maybe Sarah can incorporate them into the Brood?