Starcraft Co. 11- Zerg Farm
The next target looked insignificant on the charts. Canaan had once supported a small Terran colony built around mineral prospecting and deep geological research, but the economics had never worked. The planet was mostly desert cut apart by enormous canyon systems, and virtually all accessible surface water had disappeared billions of years earlier. Water existed deep underground, trapped within vast deposits of ringwoodite, but extracting enough of it to support a permanent population cost more than anything the colonists could produce. Subsidies kept Canaan alive for several decades before the UIC finally stopped paying. The population was evacuated, valuable equipment was removed, and the settlement was abandoned to the desert. For almost twenty years, nobody had a reason to return. Then classified reconnaissance detected power signatures from the old colony. The renegades had brought Canaan back to life, but the colony itself was only infrastructure. The real operation lay inside the surrounding canyons. Long-range imagery showed creep spreading across enormous sections of the canyon floors, biological structures growing against the walls and concentrations of Zerg numbering in the thousands. Delos had been an experiment in infestation. The clandestine laboratory before it had been a breeding program. Canaan was something several orders of magnitude larger. The commander looked through the reconnaissance photographs and finally found the right word for it. They were farming Zerg.
Despite the scale of the facility, StarCraft Co. deployed surprisingly little. One company of experienced marines accompanied by several squads of medics landed outside the canyon system. No siege tanks. No Goliaths. No ghosts. The UIC liaison questioned the decision when he saw the deployment plan. The commander explained that Canaan appeared to have almost no meaningful Terran military presence, no significant anti-air network and no evidence that the Zerg were being organized for combat. Most were contained in separate breeding areas. Heavy equipment would slow the operation down. The liaison looked at the estimated number of Zerg on the planet and asked whether one company of infantry was enough. The commander looked at the personnel roster. Many of them had fought at Kestral or Delos. Others had cleared the breeding facility or hunted ultralisks on Ardea. “Yes.” They landed near the original colony shortly before dawn. The buildings were still there, but barely. Anything easily removed had disappeared. Structural beams had been cut from warehouses. Entire sections of prefabricated walls were missing. Vehicles had been stripped down to frames. Pipes, machinery, wiring, storage containers and even sections of the colony's landing pads had been dismantled. At first the commander assumed the renegades had cannibalized the settlement to rebuild their own facilities. Then the marines found piles of metal fragments beside tracks leading toward the canyons. The commander remembered the feeding stores beneath the first clandestine laboratory. Scrap metal had been provided directly to Zerg organisms capable of metabolizing minerals. Canaan's abandoned colony hadn't been salvaged for construction. It had been turned into feed.
The first canyon confirmed the scale of the operation. The company reached the rim and looked down onto something that barely resembled a Terran world anymore. Creep covered almost the entire canyon floor, stretching for kilometers as a continuous layer of living tissue. Spawning pools rose from it in clusters. Hundreds of zerglings moved between them. Some were fully grown. Others were newly developed organisms clustered around the pools. There were no fortifications, no defensive formations and almost no evidence that the creatures understood they were under threat until the first marine squads descended into the canyon. StarCraft Co. cleared it systematically. Squads formed a broad firing line and advanced along the canyon floor while others occupied elevated positions along the walls. Zerglings charged whenever the marines approached closely enough to trigger them, but they did so as animals rather than soldiers. Hundreds could have overwhelmed the company if they attacked simultaneously. They never did. Groups of twenty or thirty rushed forward and disappeared beneath concentrated Gauss fire. Marines rotated magazines while adjacent squads fired, creating an almost continuous wall of ammunition. Medics remained several meters behind the line and treated the handful of soldiers injured when individual zerglings managed to close the distance. Within three hours the canyon was quiet. Demolition teams moved behind the infantry, destroying spawning pools and burning sections of creep as they advanced.
The Terran personnel offered little resistance. Most were scientists, technicians, animal handlers and logistics workers. A few carried weapons. Some tried escaping into the desert. Others barricaded themselves inside prefabricated laboratories scattered between the breeding areas. StarCraft Co. had already learned what the UIC expected at facilities associated with the conspiracy. Research personnel directly involved in the Zerg program were eliminated. Data systems were seized. Communications equipment was destroyed before anyone could warn whatever organization controlled the other sites. The entire Terran security force on Canaan amounted to fewer people than StarCraft Co. had lost during the final hours at Kestral. The second canyon demanded more respect. It was narrower, forcing the company to divide into smaller formations, and the walls themselves had become part of the Zerg habitat. Creep climbed the sandstone until enormous sections of rock were barely visible beneath pulsating biological material. Hydralisk dens had been embedded directly into cavities along both sides of the canyon. The first squad entering the passage took spine fire from above before anyone realized the creatures were there. One marine died immediately. Two others went down wounded. The company pulled back rather than forcing the advance.
The second attempt looked nothing like the first. Marines moved along both rims while squads advanced below, forcing the hydralisks to divide their attention between targets at different elevations. Grenades were dropped into dens from above. Rifle teams on the canyon floor deliberately exposed themselves just long enough to draw fire while marksmen on the rim identified the source and concentrated on it. When hydralisks emerged to pursue retreating marines, entire squads were waiting for them. Progress slowed to a crawl, but casualties stopped accumulating. StarCraft Co. cleared one den, advanced fifty meters, cleared another and repeated the process until the canyon belonged to them. The next breeding field was almost disappointing. Zerglings and hydralisks occupied it together, but most were immature. Whelps scattered across the creep when the marines entered. Juvenile hydralisks fired weak spines that sometimes failed to penetrate combat armor. The soldiers exterminated them methodically. Nobody treated the smaller organisms as harmless. Everyone on Canaan had seen what a mature hydralisk could do, and several had fought the Hunter Killers at Kestral. Whatever sympathy might once have accompanied killing immature creatures had disappeared several contracts ago.
Then they found the livestock canyon. The smell reached them first. Thousands of imported animals occupied fenced sections extending along the canyon floor. Some were ordinary Terran livestock. Others were creatures the marines couldn't identify, apparently imported from multiple colony worlds. Huge herbivores stood beside pens containing smaller animals bred rapidly enough to provide a constant supply of biomass. Automated feeding and watering systems kept them alive until they were needed. At the far end of the canyon, conveyor systems led toward processing machinery and enormous storage vats. The implication was obvious. The renegades weren't hoping their Zerg population survived. They had built an agricultural supply chain to sustain it. The commander ordered the containment systems opened and marked the canyon as a noncombat zone. Thousands of terrified animals scattered into the surrounding desert. Most probably wouldn't survive Canaan for long. That wasn't StarCraft Co.'s problem. Feeding them to Zerg wasn't going to be their fate either.
The fifth canyon descended much deeper into the planet. Its walls twisted tightly enough that orbital observation had revealed almost nothing about the interior. The first indication of what lived there came when a marine looked upward and saw something moving between the cliffs. Mutalisks. The company immediately withdrew to the entrance. Infantry could kill Zerg fliers, but fighting them inside a winding canyon where they could attack from above and disappear behind rock formations would be unnecessarily expensive. The commander studied the terrain and decided to use the canyon against them. Marine squads divided into small groups and occupied defensible positions along the canyon entrance while others climbed onto the surrounding heights. A few soldiers advanced just far enough to provoke the inhabitants. Mutalisks emerged first, pursuing the retreating marines toward the entrance. They flew directly into concentrated fire from both rims. The narrow canyon prevented them from spreading out, and dozens died within seconds. More followed. Then scourge appeared. The marines withdrew completely and allowed the creatures to continue toward what looked like exposed infantry positions. Instead they encountered remote-controlled demolition charges placed along the cliff walls. The explosions filled the canyon mouth with rock and fragmentation, destroying much of the swarm before rifle fire finished the survivors.
The deeper nests required more patience. StarCraft Co. advanced in stages, provoking groups of fliers and drawing them toward prepared firing zones. Guardians were particularly vulnerable. Their enormous bodies could maneuver through open space but struggled inside the narrow canyon turns. Marines fired from positions the creatures couldn't easily approach, then relocated whenever the guardians found an angle. Devourers absorbed astonishing amounts of ammunition, but without smaller organisms screening them they became enormous isolated targets. Overlords simply tried to flee. StarCraft Co. allowed none to escape. By nightfall the canyon floor was littered with pieces of Zerg fliers. The final breeding ground occupied the largest canyon on Canaan. Reconnaissance had identified enormous cavern entrances along the walls, but nobody understood what they contained until the company approached and the ground began trembling. Ultralisks emerged one after another. Ten. Fifteen. More movement remained inside the caverns. There were dozens. The commander ordered the company back. Nobody wanted another Ardea. StarCraft Co. had proven that infantry could kill ultralisks, but it had paid for the lesson in blood. Fighting several dozen simultaneously would accomplish nothing except providing the farm with fresh biomass. The commander studied the canyon instead. It was enormous, but the exits weren't. The ultralisks had been bred inside caverns opening onto the canyon floor through passages barely wider than the creatures themselves.
StarCraft Co. turned the entrances into killing zones. The first team approached one cavern and fired several rounds into the nearest ultralisk. It charged. The marines ran. Only one creature could fit through the narrowest section of the passage at a time. Outside, nearly a hundred rifles were waiting. Armor-piercing ammunition concentrated on the legs and underside as the ultralisk emerged. It survived long enough to cross perhaps thirty meters before collapsing. The next creature came through behind it and encountered the same fire. It stumbled over the first corpse, exposing its underside as it tried climbing across. The marines killed it even faster. The bodies became part of the defense. Dead ultralisks partially blocked the cavern mouth, forcing living ones to climb over them. Every creature that emerged had to expose its softer underside while dozens of marines fired upward. When the pile became too large, StarCraft Co. stopped provoking that cavern and moved to another. The process was repeated along the canyon wall. One ultralisk at a time. One hundred rifles at a time.
Not every cavern cooperated. At the fourth entrance, three ultralisks forced themselves through almost simultaneously and scattered before the company could concentrate fire. The commander ordered the formation apart rather than allowing the creatures to charge a massed target. Squads moved in different directions across the canyon floor while firing into the nearest animal. The ultralisks tried pursuing separate groups, spreading themselves farther apart. Once isolated, each became the target of several squads while the others kept moving. Two went down without reaching anyone. The third caught a marine squad against the canyon wall and killed five soldiers before concentrated fire shattered one of its legs. The last cavern was the largest and contained more than a dozen remaining animals. By then the commander had no interest in fighting them individually. Demolition teams climbed the canyon walls while rifle squads kept the ultralisks agitated inside. Charges were placed along a fractured section of rock hundreds of meters above the cavern entrance. The infantry withdrew. One squad fired into the opening and ran. Several ultralisks emerged. The commander detonated the charges. A section of Canaan's canyon wall came down. Thousands of tons of sandstone buried the cavern entrance beneath an avalanche of rock. Two ultralisks were crushed outright. Another disappeared beneath the collapse with only one kaiser blade remaining visible. The rest were trapped inside. Seismic sensors detected movement beneath the rubble for several minutes. The commander marked the location for orbital monitoring and moved on.
Thirty-four hours after the first marine landed on Canaan, the operation was effectively finished. Every known spawning pool had been destroyed. The hydralisk dens were empty. The rookery had been exterminated. The Terran research personnel were dead or captured. The feeding infrastructure was dismantled. Fires burned across kilometers of creep while demolition charges collapsed the remaining laboratories. The numbers were almost absurd. StarCraft Co. had eliminated thousands of Zerg organisms in less than a day and a half with one company of infantry. Casualties existed, particularly from the hydralisk canyon and the ultralisk breach, but they were a fraction of what the same operation would have cost the company months earlier. There had been no desperate last stand. No miraculous breakthrough. No elaborate new weapon. They were simply getting very good at this. The commander watched helmet footage from the first breeding canyon while transports collected the surviving troops. The marines moved through hundreds of zerglings with an efficiency that would once have been unthinkable. Squads rotated automatically. Fire concentrated without orders. Medics repositioned before casualties occurred. Veterans recognized Zerg behavior quickly enough that younger soldiers simply followed them. Canaan had been an industrial-scale Zerg breeding facility. StarCraft Co. had treated it like pest control.
That should have been reassuring. It wasn't. Someone had gone to extraordinary expense to build the farm in the first place. They had transported animals across interstellar distances for food, extracted water from ringwoodite deposits, stripped an abandoned colony for minerals and maintained enough infrastructure to breed Zerg by the thousands. Nobody invested that much money to produce something they didn't intend to use. The intelligence recovered from Canaan made the situation worse. Analysts initially assumed a facility capable of producing thousands of Zerg had to represent one of the conspiracy's central operations. Within days, recovered shipping manifests, financial records and encrypted communications demonstrated otherwise. Canaan was important, but it wasn't the center of anything. It was one production site in a network whose true scale the UIC still could not determine. Several references pointed toward facilities substantially larger than Canaan, supported by supply chains stretching across multiple sectors. The Zerg farm StarCraft Co. had just destroyed—an operation that had consumed an entire abandoned colony and filled canyons with thousands of organisms—was apparently a smaller component of something much larger.
For the first time, however, the conspiracy was not the only side preparing for what came next. Data from every engagement had been accumulating in StarCraft Co.'s research division: Ardea, Cressida, Kestral, Delos, Canaan. Engineers had thousands of hours of combat telemetry showing exactly how Zerg organisms attacked, moved, survived and died. Armor recovered from Hunter Killers was being studied alongside tissue from ordinary hydralisks. Weapons teams were testing new ammunition. Defensive systems were being redesigned around lessons learned from scourge and infested Terrans. The custom research programs funded after Cressida had grown considerably under the UIC retainer, and prototypes were beginning to leave the laboratories. Whoever was behind the conspiracy had spent years breeding better Zerg. StarCraft Co. was hard at work developing better ways to kill them.