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

You laid out the plan and everyone listened. Artanis nodded. Our fleets will sweep the skies clean, honorable General Clarke. Our warriors will see that no scourge fall upon your back.

"And we have enough Vikings to handle anything those old Alpha Squadron sons of bitches from muckin' anything up," Jim said, nodding as he did so.

You turned to Dostya. "And you?"

"...you do promise to not try and steal the nanotech pattern?" She asked, narrowing those glowing eyes of hers.

You smirked. "Promise."

She cocked her head. Then she grinned. "Then we shall have the Monkeylords you ask for."

Your grin was feral. Fanged.

Swann, then, lifted his mechanical hand into the silence. "What the hell is a Monkeylord?"

You settled into your seat, fingers sliding along the arms. It felt like you'd gone a full circle now, your body settling into a chair that was somehow completely familiar, despite being entirely new. This wasn't even your ACU. It was one of the two surviving ones that Major Horner had kept around Haven, and yet...it was yours. Every molecule might have been different, but it was still sturdy, familiar UEF technology. Your hands reached up, touching the headrest and you closed your eyes, feeling the mingled tension and joy. You were home. But you'd never look at home the same way again, would you?

The radio chatter from the ongoing battle threaded through your headset. But you didn't need eyes to see what was happening - your perceptions swept outwards with a thought.

Raynor's Raiders had pulled off a textbook orbital insertion, dropping in right ontop of Alpha Squadron. Laser bolts zipped between battlecruisers, causing cherry red damage to flare to life along armored hulls, ablative chunks flashing into plumes of steam. Like blood of machines. The Wraith fighters flickered in and out of visibility, engaging and disengaging their cloaks as missiles screamed out into space. The Vikings that the Raiders were fielding didn't have cloaking drives, but were able to shift into their combat walker forms - using enemy battlecruisers as their own cover, crouching behind frantically swiveling turrets and forcing Wraiths to pull away, lest their own near run misses smash into Duke's own armada.

And then past them, plunging into the atmosphere like a golden sword, was the core of the Protoss fleet. A half a dozen carriers, clumped together into a tight formation, their shields overlapping and crackling with blue-white flames, like witchfire, they shot through the atmosphere so fast that the entire formation became a rippling, convulsing pillar of fire. The sonic booms of their entrance into Char's atmosphere shucked that smoke away, blowing it - a sabot casing of hellfire. Before the flames had even died, before the sonic boom had even ceased reverberating, their interceptors began to scream into the air.

Thousands of mutalisks and hundreds of thousands of scourge shot from the plateau and towards those carriers. Their interceptor wings flew in twined, writhing snake-formations, coiling and twisting around one another as bolts of blue plasma spurted from their wings. Mutalisks began to get hacked from the sky, while interceptors dove with the fearless courage of a robotic platform between their capital ships an the scourge biological cruise missiles, which screamed towards the carriers with eager, hissing cries of pure delight. Acid exploded in the sky, and the rest of the Protoss fleet emerged at the same time: A second formation, lowering themselves slower through the atmosphere.

Corsair anti-air fighters and Scout interceptors. Antimatter missiles flashed through the space between the stooping secondary wing and the Zerg - joined by hissing, crackling webs of energy that slapped into the vast colonies of spore tumors that spread along the ground beneath the Zerg.

The end result was a slaughter. Focused on the carriers, strung out in a broad, flat formation, the Zerg fliers were mincemeat waiting. Red rained down onto the plains of Char.

Everyone else was busy.

Time for you to make your part.

"This is ACU-2, ready to go."

Matt's voice.

"This is ACU-3, prepared to drop." Dostya sounded focused.

You nodded. "ACU-1 ready." You spoke into the radio.

"All right. You are a go for drop in five."

The light in your cockpit flicked to red as the countdown started. You gripped the controls of your ACU, warming up the laser emitter on the arm...and wondered, a bit abstractly, if you were actually a bit weaker in the ACU than you were on your own feet. Then you snorted. It wasn't like you couldn't pop the hatch on the back.

"Two. One."

The quantum gate flashed around you.

The roaring explosion of your arrival incinerated who knew how many Zerg. The shockwave was loud enough to rattle you inside of your cockpit, your teeth clenching as you gripped onto the controls, knuckles whitening. The straps around your shoulders bit in deep - but you settled back and focused on the forward view. It showed the next best thing to hell. Redstone had been welcoming compared to this...it had maybe been more volcanically active, but Char had a kind of evil to it. The stones were dark, the ash winds blew in slow, hissing susurrations along the plains around your ACU. In the distance, you could see the flashing firefight of the Protoss overhead, and the brilliant red beams of Yamato guns lighting up the orbit.

Another mushroom cloud rose, just a bit beyond the horizon - Dostya, landing with the same flash and thunder as your ACU.

Fortunately, while Char might have been a shithole, it was still rich with vespine and minerals. Vents and crystal outcroppings surrounded your landing position, enough to start up your economy immediately. Your nanolathe flicked left and right as you started to to lay down the beginnigns of your infrastructure. It felt comforting to watch the structures snap into being - the metal extractor, the gas capping hydropower plants. As your economic income flashed up on your HUD, you felt a feathery connection along your mind.

Don't get cocky.

It was Sarah.

You grinned, aiming your lathe down to start building a tier 1 anti-ground defense. Don't teach your Arminger how-

The ground under the half-phantasmal, blue-white outline of the antitank guns shrank, then humped upwards. Dirt and earth and rock exploded outwards in a spray as something nearly as big as your ACU lunged up and out of the ground. There had only been one thing that could have survived the nuclear impact and be this close - and you hadn't known it could burrow like a zergling could.

The ultralisk that emerged from the ground roared, its massive scythe bladed mandibles swinging wide. Another explosion of dirt near your metal extractor jerked your attention behind you as a second ultralisk emerged.

Great.

Told you, Sarah said.

---
HEAT: 0/6
SPARKS: Functional Economy (3)

[ ] They're just where you wanted them, actually. Teleport out of your ACU and cut one's head off with a psi blade - the other will be distracted by your pre-established ultralisk traps to give you time enough to take him down.
[ ] They're just where you wanted them, actually. That's where you had spawned and buried your banelings.
[ ] They're just where you wanted them, actually. Kerrigan isn't the only one who can take control of a Swarm - these are your ultralisks now.
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