Chapter 11: Chapter 10: Delving Too Deeply

Just as Jack was heading to the tunnel to deploy his chosen marines to explore, he jerked to a halt, raising a hand and giving an order to the Marines to come to a stop as well. 'Actually, hang on. Maybe I don't need to risk my troops to explore the tunnel...' he mused to himself, glancing back at his system interface. His eyes were drawn to the battle option, 'Every time that I've wound up doing a virtual battle, I've just been grinding away at my enemy for XP and calling it quits. But it's been simulating my increasing forces with each battle... in that case... why can't I try and scout ahead in a 'safe' environment?' 

Disregarding his previous plan, he waved the Marines to take up a guard position and hurried back toward the command center. Considering he was left immobilized and all but helpless when he processed these battles, there was no way he was going to do it out in the open. Once he made it to his desk and reclined back in his chair, he tapped through the menu of the battle. He had been slacking somewhat on the virtual battling because the miniscule amount of XP he got from each victory seemed almost useless in the face of the rapidly-rising XP requirements to level up... but was displayed XP the only sort of experience worth considering? He began a new match, choosing the easiest game setting so that the automated representation of hostile forces wouldn't be an issue. 

His view shooting back into the vertical observation from above, he took his battle-buffed SCVs and steamrolled over the AI, merely leaving them and some of his Marines surrounding a single Zerg hatchery. As long as he didn't destroy this final structure, the battle simulation shouldn't end. This is where his idea came in. He selected the rest of his Marines and directed them down the tunnel. Sure enough, a fog-of-war seemed to lift as they entered, a narrow stripe of view appearing in the dirt. It was odd, considering he was able to see through the ground to where his forces were, but only the specific area they were standing. When he directed his attention away from those Marines, his view abruptly shot back up to the grassy, hilly terrain of the surface in a fashion he found rather disorientating. 

Deciding that he was just going to focus on the underground portion before he found out if his virtual representation could throw up, he continued to march them along, his viewpoint seemingly drifting along with the forces as they travelled. Minutes passed, and all he could see was a revealed tunnel that stretched for miles and miles at this point. The tunnel was still sloping subtly downward, deeper and deeper into the earth. Soon enough there was a squelching rising from each step the Marines took, their pace slowing slightly as they stumbled across the first signs of the Zerg base he sought: creep. 

The purplish slime was a necessity for Zerg biology, nourishing their structures and enabling their ability to reconstitute damages and entrench themselves in place. Hatcheries and other structures produced it and spread it around as they expanded, and even Zerg infantry units received benefits when fighting atop the sludge. The tunnel eventually gave way to a broad cavern, a good thirty feet before the ceiling above his troops, and Jack felt his heart drop down into his stomach as the view widened when his first troops marched out of the tunnel. 

"Oh f*ck..." He couldn't even manage to make the swear sound upset, it was more a resigned tone of 'Well, I'm screwed'. While what he found was almost certainly a Zerg base, the fact that there were metal-walled structures around made it clear that this had started as some sort of Terran underground facility. Several windows were smashed open in a few of the structures, and doors were broken down. While there were signs of blood smeared around, the bodies were most conspicuously absent. Jack heard the slow 'warning' hiss of Zerg creatures from the darkness around him, before everything stopped moving. There was no further sign of motion from the Zerg and his Marines weren't responding to his orders at the moment.

"Match paused. Combatants detected outside of original parameters. Difficulty parameters are being adjusted." It was the stern, grandfatherly voice of his system's announcer in his ear. A few seconds later, there was a positive-sounding 'ding' and it continued, "Difficulty has been successfully adjusted. Difficulty is now set at: very hard. Match will resume in 3... 2... 1..." 

The moment the countdown finished, a terrifying roar reverberated through the cavern, the metal structures rattling and a few of the still slightly-intact windows shattered in the process. Thud. Thud. THUD. THUD. Some of the structures were being forcibly smashed and shoved aside. Jack ordered his troops to fall back to the tunnel choke point as the first Zerg started to pour out of the openings. He had been expecting the Zerglings, and his troops managed to hold the line valiantly enough, even as the front row of them began to take bites and punctures from the creatures teeth and scythes. 

SCREECH. A force bulldozed through a narrow alley, the buildings on either side objecting with their shrieks of destruction as a positively massive figure occupied the entire space, huge curved blades more battering apart the metal plating rather than cutting through it. A creature forced through, tall as four marines stacked in a pillar, with a thick-looking carapace armor that looks like it could put the rock walls around them to shame, chitin spikes jutting out at savage angles. With a roar of pure, red-eyed fury the creature aimed its attention at the squad of Marines and charged toward them. "They have an Ultralisk?" Jack tried not to shout, but he could feel his heart pounding in his throat. He knew exactly how quickly an Ultralisk would tear through the defenses he's raised around his base, with very little he could do about it. 

The Marines tried to direct their fire at the massive creature, but the Gauss rifles might as well have been firing puffs of hot air instead of 8mm-thick armor-piercing rounds for all it seemed to care. If anything, the gunfire only made it angry. Well, angrier, it was clearly pretty enraged already. With one swipe of a massive scythed arm the creature bisected half of his marines at the waist, and several Zerglings that had been engaged in melee combat with them besides. The only reason Jack had any of his troops left was that they retreated far enough back into the tunnel that the massive behemoth couldn't reach them with the swipe. 

It slammed its massive blades against the tunnel walls, trying to carve the gap open wider as it began to force its huge bulk into the narrow confines. It didn't have the room to swing its blades in the tunnel, but the Ultralisk didn't need to. It merely bulldozed forwards and trampled his forces underfoot. He briefly considered conceding the battle, but this was also a chance to see just how right he was about how a single Ultralisk could brutalize his defenses. Unfortunately, he was correct. The thick hide of the beast seemed to brush off the flamethrower gouts the Perdition turrets could offer, and sending the SCVs out to try and fight it was equally useless. Well, it bought time for the few Marines he had left around the Hatchery to guard it to fire their rounds ineffectually off the Ultralisk's hide. 

"DEFEAT. 0XP awarded." The voice chirped at him, and his view shot back down to staring at the surface of his desk, his system displaying that the battle was now on cooldown. With a long, slow draw of breath, Jack tried to keep his hands from shaking, imagining what would have happened if he actually sent his forces down and provoked those Zerg outside of a battle simulation. "There is no way I'm going to even peek down that tunnel unless I have a foolproof plan for dealing with the equivalent of an angry building with scythes..."

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Jack leaned back in his chair, trying to consider what he could have done better. He didn't have any way to collapse the tunnel on the Ultralisk, and he wasn't even sure if that would kill it or just slow it down. If he managed to level up again and unlock the Marauder, their powerful rocket-based rounds would surely do more than rifle fire did, but would it be enough? And at the root of it all, he would still need Vespene gas! "Aargh! Everything comes back to resources! I'm almost ready to just throw my hands up and take an army back toward whatever coordinates the last base location was and take my chances. But I can't build another command center, and this one can't fly without gas..." 

Jack felt like he was missing something, and the tickle at the back of his mind bothering him just wouldn't go away. What was it? In order to make a new command center, he would need to make an adjutant to operate it. And that required an 'adjutant core template', which his ever-helpful Adjutant refused to give him the details of. He had already considered trying to take the Adjutant apart to find out what the 'core' was himself, but he wasn't a scientist, and he had no confidence in being able to even put the pieces back together after he took a look, even if he didn't take the core out to examine. 

Hold on... was that it? It's that simple! "Adjutant, you said that a Command Center needs an AI in order to operate effectively, and we do not have access to the necessary means to make another Adjutant, right?" The affirmative buzz in his ear agreed with him, "Correct. While we have access to the blueprints for a Command Center itself, it will be rendered inoperable without the appropriate processing power of an AI to utilize." "So, we can't move this base without Vespene gas, but can an Adjutant be disconnected and transported to a new location, then reassigned to the new Command Center?" 

A long pause followed, and Jack began to think that the Adjutant was ignoring him, when it eventually spoke up again. "This is a possibility. But I would highly recommend that acting manager 21283 considers this to be an absolute, desperate last course of action. The moment that an Adjutant is disconnected, the facility will lose the vast majority of its functions. Furthermore, an Adjutant requires direct power linkage to a reactor in order to supply sufficient power. While there are contingencies for total power loss, an Adjutant is not designed to be shuttled around from facility to facility." 

Jack scratched his head and rolled his shoulders in a shrug, "Right, well, I would say that the idea of an Ultralisk potentially deciding to come and introduce itself at any time it pleases through the tunnel on our front lawn motivates me pretty significantly to trying to move house. As much as I want to know what sort of underground facility the Zerg overran down there, sometimes you need to know when to cut your losses." "Agreed. It is also most unusual that the Ultralisk has not already made an advancement in this direction. Perhaps the phenomena of your psionic release did not reach the Zerg through the tunnel? After all, it is well-documented that the Zerg take an interest in psionic manifestations, and the phenomenon surpassed that of the recorded pulses from psionic waveform emitters. In fact, Zerg affected by psionic emitters display a significant lack of battle caution and situational awareness, often throwing themselves at the sources of emission with reckless abandon."

Jack felt the blood slowly drain from his face and a chill ran down his spine. "Adjutant, how far did you say those readings emitted?" "Beyond sensor range. Estimations place the visual phenomena at several hundred miles of travel, while the psionic energy itself could be detected by appropriate devices at an indeterminable distance, likely across most of- if not the entirety of- the planet's surface."

Closing his eyes, Jack tried to feel that same sense of warmth that he had felt course through him earlier. He could feel it, but it was merely there and showed no signs of doing anything. "Great. So I just rang a planet-wide dinner bell for the Zerg, we still have no leads on Vespene gas, as far as we know all other Terran base locations on this planet have been overrun by the Zerg, the Protoss aren't happy about something and there's an Ultralisk pretending its a groundhog on my front lawn. Have I forgotten anything, or does that sum up all the assorted crisis we're dealing with right now?" Jack shouted out in a helplessly frustrated voice, burying his face in both hands. 

He had barely finished his complaining before the Adjutant chirped up again immediately, with a gleeful haste to report further, "Actually, several mineral fields have been depleted by multiple days of harvest, and at current rates, the remaining minerals will last for only four more days. Furthermore, gathering pace has been reduced because of limited positions to mine from. That should likely be considered an issue of some near-immediate importance as well." 

Jack just slumped forward onto his desk, his forehead meeting the metal surface with a dull thump. The cold touch of the metal was a small comfort against the rising sense of being completely, utterly overwhelmed. "Awesome. Thank you, Adjutant, that was just the good news I needed. Try and keep putting out communication attempts, it's a bit late to hide. I don't care what frequency you use, just broadcast and look for contact. I need to find someone to help get me off this death-ball of a planet, at the least. Have the SCVs that don't have good places to mine start collapsing that tunnel, too. I don't care if there's Vespene gas down there, I'm not leaving an open door for disaster. And now, I'm going to sleep."

Slowly, unenthusiastically, Jack sat back up and pried himself out of his chair and rolled into bed. He wanted to blame his lethargy on that huge outpouring of energy, but he was just tired all around. Why did being the guy in charge have to take so much work?