A fleet of twelve modified corvettes approached the leviathans from the bottom.
“Wow. I’ve heard how advanced the Umojans are but I have to say I’m impressed.”
Raynor commented as he scanned the inside corvette.
Behind him were three hundred men in blue. Half of them were mercenaries. The rest were simply Raiders. At first he considered bringing some Warden units with him, but he changed his mind after he saw something from the Umojans. A large case was beside him. Blue light shined out of the gaps all around the suitcase.
Beside the Raiders were two hundred Warden units. The only thing differentiating them from Raider Warden units was the fact that they were in white armor rather than blue ones. Also, Umojan Warden units were much more well equipped than Raiders ones. While Raynor had to be a mercenary to maintain his military forces, the Umojans had their own taxing and industrial systems. Even before Jean took power, she was able to use the infested threat to convince the Ruling Council to pour countless resource into the Wardens. After she took power, all the factories in Umoja were ordered to construct Warden units at full power. The resulting units were both superior in both quality and quantity than their Raider counterparts.
Raynor didn’t bother to question the Umojans why they had Warden units that Jean invented. He knew the Raiders weren’t exactly capable in the field of counterintelligence. The Dominion had ghosts. The Umojans had shadowguards. Both weren’t shy to use these covert units to both steal technology from other factions and keep other factions from stealing their own tech. The Raiders had nothing. It would be easy for the Umojans to get information on the Raiders. Plus, mercenaries hired by the Raiders have seen Warden units in action, and they weren’t the best at keeping secrets. Buy them a drink, and they would tell you everything they knew. Even if just one of the mercenaries leaked the idea of an army of mechanical units, controlled by AIs, to the Umojans, it was enough to start an entire project.
The technical part rose even less question. Everyone knew the Umojans were the most advanced in terms of technology and warbots.
Raynor might decide to go for a mole hunt to end this leak of information, eventually, but this wasn’t a concern right now.
All twelve corvettes were equipped with cloaking fields. Jean designed and constructed them for boarding missions that require stealth rather than brute force. While thousands of drop pods might be enough to break through the enemy lines, sometimes the enemy firepower and carapace was just too much.
This was the case here.
As the leviathans and the Gorgons traded rounds, the corvettes sneaked to the bottom of Kerrigan’s flagship.
Suddenly, two of the leviathan’s tentacles turned toward the corvettes. Cloaking fields were brilliant, but the leviathans weren’t defenseless against cloaked flyers either. Detections were able to catch a scent of the corvettes, and the tentacles reacted.
“Enable defensive matrix!” An elite pilot of the corvette Raynor was in ordered. Jean spent big money on these specialized transports. Apart from the cloaking fields and warp drives, Jean even gave these corvettes the defensive matrix of battlecruisers. All these equipment came with a price, as they exhausted the ship’s energy storage quickly, rendering the ships incapable of long time combat, but their ability was certainly worth the cost.
The tentacles bounced off the green defensive matrixes. They tried to come back for another run. Several spore crawlers rooted at the bottom of the leviathans and started opening fire. But the corvettes were already ready for action.
The corvettes had sharp tips, and they weren’t just for show. The ships’ engines were turned to full power, and the tips of the corvettes were jammed into the leviathans.
A single tap from the pilots sent the tips opening to the sides and cutting through everything in its way, revealing several openings.
Terran units poured out of these openings.
The Raiders and the Wardens weren’t the only ones on this mission. With them was a squad of Dominion strike team, led by a Dominion colonel.
Say what you want about the Dominion soldiers, but they had courage. Warfield deployed one thousand men into the field. Among them were three squads of ghosts. The rest were the best of the best as well. They might not be as good as Dominion Special Forces, but they were still hand picked from hundreds of thousands of men from the entire Dominion Fleet under Warfield’s command.
Jean sent twelve corvettes. Each held five hundred men. It was six thousand in total.
They would be facing hundreds of thousands of the best of the Swarm.
“Formation! Advance!” A Warden Command Unit ordered. Out of the six thousand attackers, forty eight hundred of them were Wardens. Immediately, they formed lines and lines of steel and started moving down the creep covered halls.
Kerrigan sensed the boarding parties the moment the first terran boot hit the creep. The terran assaulters barely had time to settle in when they felt the ground shaking.
“Prepare for…” Raynor started, ready for action, only to get cut off.
“All Warden units, defensive formation! Terminate all zerg units.”
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“Affirmative.” Countless voices resonated.
The ground continued to shake. If they weren’t on an alien spaceship, the terran would think they were facing an earthquake. This wasn’t an earthquake, but it might be much worse than an earthquake. Countless zerg came out of every corner of the leviathan and poured down the halls. Their speed was amplified by the creep beneath them.
The Warden units fired as soon as their AIs recognized the zerg units were in range. Marines constantly unloaded on the zerg in the front. In a surprising transformation, the first line’s body transformed. Their legs and body came together, forming a machine that occupied as little space as possible. The combat shield was put in the front. The marine’s head was just over the combat shield, allowing it to see the enemies as well as open fire on them with the gauss rifles that were placed on top of the combat shields.
In essence, these Warden units looked more like minimized moving fortresses than marines.
The second line made a similar transformation, only their shields and rifles were above those of the first line. The third was at the normal height of the marines, with the rifles and shields over the head of the first and the second line.
Jean made these modifications back on Umoja. While maintaining their combat abilities as marines, Jean made sure she could make them as efficient as possible in a situation that required as much firepower as possible. The mechanical nature of the Warden units made things impossible for biological marines possible.
This meant three times the damage of normal marines.
Zerglings fell like flies. Hydralisk did their best to shoot their spines, but the only target their spines could find were shields and guns, and neither target was ideal. Even if some spine penetrated the shields and fractured the Warden armors, they failed to do much. Machines don’t get completely destroyed by a single shot to the arm or to the leg.
Even roaches couldn’t survive firepower this dense long enough to get close enough to the terran to spit acid on them.
It was a massacre. Across all the sides of all the landing sites, the zerg were losing hundreds of units every second. If it was on a plain, then perhaps the zerg could take better trades, but inside the halls of the leviathan, the points of engagement were limited. Thousands of zerg were forced to go through corridors which only allowed several hundred zerg at once, and when some zerg were lucky enough to be in the front, they were gunned down before they could do anything. Those that replaced them immediately suffered a similar fate.
The fact that the zerg fought on a home front turned the tide a bit. Kerrigan was able to gather several ultralisks and toss them at one of the Warden lines, but the Warden Command Unit on site already had everything figured out.
The first line of Warden units transformed back into their marine form and jumped in front of the ultralisks. Instead of shooting, these marine units simply exploded. The reactors installed in their CMC armors were overloaded, generating enough power to create quite an explosion.
The ultralisks were blasted back by the explosion. The entire time they were continuously targeted by Warden marauders. Even with layers of carapace, most of these ultralisks were torn apart.
Suddenly, from the smoke, one final ultralisk emerged. It was maimed, but it was still moving, and a single ultralisk inside the Warden lines was more than enough to change the tide of battle. There wasn’t much Warden units could do in a melee against an ultralisk.
The Command Unit’s eyes flashed, and the next second the ultralisk collapsed with a hole in its carapace a little to the left of its head. It was where its brain was.
Ultralisks had their brains located at random parts of their body to make sure they could take as much damage as possible. Unfortunately, Warden Command Units were able to render those designs useless with their advanced scanners.
As soon as that was done...in the back of the Warden marines and marauders, a Warden ghost reloaded its weapon.
Jean wasn’t able to create mechanical units which could use psionic energy, but she was able to use technology to create replacements. For example, instead of C-10 canister with the ability to fire psionically powered bullets, these Warden ghosts had railguns. Modified railguns were capable of punching through even the heaviest armor. With great power comes a great price. The recoil and the weight could kill a fully armored biological terran even before the enemies do.
Warden ghosts didn’t share the same problem. Their arms were designed to handle the railguns.
EMP grenades didn’t realize psionic energy in the first place. Warden ghosts replaced psionic blades with plasma blades. Their AIs were programmed to use all these weapons effectively. Perhaps in a straight up fight against a terran ghost, the Warden ghosts weren’t as competent, but keep in mind ghosts require decades of training. More importantly, ghosts could only be created from psionically gifted individuals, which were extremely rare. The entire Dominion population of billions and billions only yielded a couple thousand ghosts.
As for Warden ghosts...Jean didn’t have a single one of them when she arrivedato Umoja. Now, a few months later, she had hundreds of them scattered around her Warden army.
The zerg pushed on, but the tens of thousands of casualties only bought them a few more meters of ground. Bodies were starting to pile up, creating a barrier that blocked the zerg’s path and aided the terran cause.
The Dominion forces and the Raiders looked at their leader in amazement. Their Umojan allies seemed to be dealing with the zerg by themselves already. In that case, why were they even here?
The Dominion Colonel leading the attack was slightly taken back. As an officer, he saw much more than the victory at hand. For example, he was well aware the Dominion was no real friend with the Umojans. The stronger the Umojans were, the more threatened the Dominion was.
Then again, at this moment, inside the heart of the Swarm, the Umojans might be the least of the Dominion’s problems.
Zerg kept on pouring in. Some of the Warden units have ran out of ammos. When they did, they charged forward and self destructed, taking down another pile of zerg with them. The opening their departure left was covered by fresh Warden reinforcement from behind.
But there was just too much zerg. There were hundreds of thousands of zerg on the ship, and there were less than five thousand Warden units. The positioning saved the terran, but it won’t hold forever. After all, the terran needed not only to survive but also push forward and hunt down Kerrigan.
He thought of ways to help, but there was very little his men could do. If he tried to replace Warden units with Dominion ones, it would even decrease the amount of overall firepower.
Raynor was different. He knew just how to help.
“Set up the Keystone and start charging it up.” He ordered, and Raiders behind him started working.
If the Warden units could hold their ground long enough for the Keystone to be charged up and fired, he could effectively wiped out not just this leviathan but also turn Kerrigan back into terran. This would practically eliminate the zerg threat.
Kerrigan knew that as well, which was why she decided to get her hands dirty.