Number 24 looked down slightly.
“Ah, she yelled at you. And so you used your ability to try and make her stop. And what happened next, hmm?”
Tears began to run down the girl’s cheeks.
“Massive cerebral hemorrhaging, as I remember. I spoke to your father, who saw the whole thing happen. He would say only one thing, over and over. Do you know what that one thing was?”
Sarah closed her eyes.
“He said, ‘I saw her head come apart’”
The girl bolted to a standing position, her hands balled into white, tiny fists at her sides, her voice breaking as she screamed: “I’ll never use it on anyone ever again, and you can’t make me! You can’t make me!”
A door on the side of the room opened, and two men dressed in sealed flak armor emerged. They grabbed the girl by her arms and feet and dragged her through the main doorway and down the hall.
Lieutenant Rumm stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his head lowered in thoughtful consideration.
On the table not far away, the little kitten exhaled one final, quavering breath and was still. The lieutenant did not notice.
AMANDA COULD feel the moment drawing near. She told herself not to look when the creature stepped through the doorway. The distraction would be too much. She could not afford to have her focus interrupted. She prayed that whatever dampening field these monstrosities held over her was not wholly unyielding.
A noise, intermittent and barely audible, came from the hallway outside. It was a sound she didn’t immediately recognize. Then, with dawning horror, she identified what the sound was—it was slithering.
The noise drew undeniably closer. Amanda shut her eyes tight and forced all nonessential thoughts from her mind. Time’s up, said a tormenting, childish voice inside her. End of the line.
Amanda took a deep breath, felling her heart pounding in her chest. She hoped against the hope that the voice inside her was wrong. No more thoughts. Clean the slate, Amanda, and steel yourself….
As the lights began to flicker, Amanda heard the crackling sound of the door across from her phasing open.
THE QUEEN glanced over at the monitor bank as the cocoon underwent preparation. Hey eyes, growing wider, were fixed on the monitor displaying the young woman’s cell as the lights inside began returning to half power. She could not believe what she was seeing.
The worker had stopped in the doorway, tentaclelike appendages clutching at either side of its cranium. As she continued to watch, captivated, the worker crumpled to the floor, its head expanding.
Unwelcome memories rushed back to the Queen in a flood: the image of her mother clutching at her temples and screaming; her father observing with eyes full of horrific revulsion at first, the only blankness; the sound of her mother’s skull splitting open….
The Queen shut her blazing eyes tight, reopened them, fixated once again on the current crisis.
The young woman inside the cell was gone. The worker was now lying still, its lifeblood oozing from a rupture in its skull and spreading across the metallic tiles.
The Queen took the catwalk in the opposite direction of the monitors, toward the cargo ay access lift. Once there, she stepped in and pressed the button marked HANGARS 1-12.
How could this have happened? She asked herself, even as she answered the question.
She had simply underestimated the girl, had lumped her in with all the rest of her kind—human beings made inferior by fear and emotional dependence. But, as the Queen had suspected once before, this one was different. The Queen could not help but feel a kind of…respect.
Telepathically summoning one of the warriors to follow, the Queen stepped out of the elevator and into the hangar level. Now that her instincts had been reawakened, the Queen was fairly certain that the female was intelligent enough o hope that some of her race’s craft had been left in the hangar. Of course, all such nonessentials had been jettisoned long ago, but the subject did not know that.
And so the Queen proceeded to the only lift connecting the cell-block level with the hangar level. She stood in front of the doors, waiting. She heard an engine winding down, gears grinding, a gush of hydraulic steam…then the doors before her opened, and she looked into the eyes of Amanda Haley.
AMANDA FELT her heart sink. The creature standing before her must surely be the leader of the monstrosities. The characteristics that marked her as alien—from her luminescent yellow eyes and olive skin to the spindly blades protruding from her back and shoulders—also served to mask something beneath: features that suggested that this creature had not only been human at one time, but had been attractive as well.
Glancing briefly over the creature’s shoulder, Amanda could see that the hangar was empty. Any hope of escaping this place was instantly dashed. Don’t give up. Not yet, she told herself, forcing her eyes to meet those of the alien being before her.
“I applaud your effort, though it was in vain,” said the Queen. “I am Kerrigan, matriarch of the Zerg. I would know your name.”
“Just go ahead and get it over with,” retorted Amanda.
“Oh, we shall.” The Queen smiled. The girl remained defiant even in the fact of unquestionable defeat. The Queen was reminded so much of herself that for a moment she felt—
There has been a setback, Queen? Interrupted the Cerebrate.
Not at all, she responded. Merely an intriguing turn of events.
I trust the operation will continue to run smoothly, answered the Cerebrate.
Put your trust where you will, returned the Queen. The schedule I adhere to is mine alone.
Just then the warrior arrived. The Queen sent a message. The creature obeyed, wrapping a snakelike cord around Amanda’s throat with one appendage and restraining her arms with the other.
Amanda closed her eyes, hoping that whatever the creature did, it would be quick.
A diminutive, spiked tentacle wriggled out from under the creature’s skin. Amanda felt a prick as the spike-needle pierced one of the tiny veins at her wrist.
The warrior stood still for a moment, then turned its head in the direction of the Queen.
Genetic strain incompatible, it relayed telepathically.
The Queen nodded.
Then the formula will likely be ineffective, offered the Cerebrate.
The Queen knew. Most likely the process would result in failure, stripping the woman of any shred of humanity, rendering her a base, servile mutation for the rest of her days. The brave girl would become a thoughtless, debilitated drone.
You wish to proceed, Queen? asked the Cerebrate.
The Queen hesitated.
Queen…?
THIS ROOM was new. Sarah had not been taken to this place before. She sat abound to a chair with reinforced restraints, facing Lieutenant Rumm, who paced back and forth before a blank wall.
The lieutenant stopped pacing and lowered his somber gaze to the little girl. “I want you to know that you forced me to do this. It was not my intention to take this course of action.”
Sarah stared back, impassive.
With an electric hissing sound, the solid wall behind the lieutenant phased into transparency, affording a view of an adjacent room, not unlike the one Sarah was in. Bound in a chair similar to Sarah’s, and facing her, was the emaciated form of Patrick Kerrigan, her father.
She had been able to visit him only once since “the incident.” He had appeared then much as he did now—staring forward, not looking at Sarah but through her, with wide, unseeing eyes.