Rounding the corner, the invaders came on a T junction, with another alien-looking lift at the left and an ordinary iris valve at the right. After investigating the lift and finding it to simply go back up to level 4, they moved to address the iris valve.
Jacques holed it in his usual fashion, and squinted his armour's periscope lens through the gap. Beyond, he could see a long, narrow corridor with a glass observation window set along its' entire length on the left and a flight of stairs leading down from it at the far end. There was Creep oozing across the floor.
Guarding those stairs was a pair of Ultramarines, who, even as he watched, were pointing to the suddenly-appeared hole in the iris door and hefting their boltrifles to the ready. Jacques waggled the sabre, widening the hole, and stepped back to allow Uriah to get at it. The fusiongunner poked his muzzle through the gap and fired. Wounded but not disabled, one of the Ultramarines returned fire, and Uriah gulped as the SLAMM round tore through the bulkhead door like paper and sizzled past his helmet. He fired again, this time blasting the Ultramarines back down the stairs at the end.
Turning round, he realized that he was on his own; the others had ducked back around the corner just in case he missed the hole in the door. With the coast cleared, Jacques returned to the door and cut out a section with his sabre, allowing them access to the corridor.
Now they could see what was on the other side of the glass. 20' below the window was the main base computer room, like the one at Rhagosus, equipped with rows and rows of data stacks. The floor was thickly coated in Creep, and several Ultramarines and Hydralisks were patrolling between the stacks.
At the far end, a huge hole had been tunneled through the side of the room, through which could be seen a glimpse of a much larger cavern beyond.
While the three InSec troops worked their way to the midpoint of the corridor, Verral crawled down below the level of the window and made his way to the stairwell at the end. Siting a sensor ball at a corner of the window, he used the data from that to target his backpack RAM launcher on four of the monsters below, before descending the stairs to lurk ready behind the door at the bottom.
As they watched, a new figure appeared, climbing up from the lower level, and apparently giving orders and organising both the Ultramarines and Hydralisks. Clearly this had once been a very attractive human woman, but a hideous transformation had taken place, and she was now a terrible blend of human and Zerg. Eruptions of Zerg skin appeared at intervals across her skin, her eyes were a bloody red from edge to edge and she had a strange biomechanical implant of some sort in her forehead. Dressed in strange clothing, she carried a boltrifle in one slender hand and a lightsabre in the other.
With horror, Reagan realized that he knew her. This was - or had once been - his distant cousin Severina Destri, fellow scion of the mighty Destri shipping clan, and the third conspirator in the Ultramarine Conspiracy. Several of the marines adjusted their target locks to point at her instead.
On the given word, everyone opened fire. A hail of laser, RAM and FGPP fire rained down into the computer room, sending Ultras and Hydralisks flying in all directions.
The only person who fired at her and missed was Private Bunce of the InSec; and his shot was lucky in other ways, because his RAM grenade struck her boltrifle instead where it lay on the floor and set the ammunition off. A massive explosion marked the collapse of the antimatter containment in the SLAMM rounds, and the Queen of Blades disapeared in an enormous blast which also blew one of the Ultramarines across the room and into a data stack. Oddly, when the smoke cleared there was no sign of her body...
The Ultramarines returned fire now; Uriah and Private Bean were hit, but their Protoss shield belts absorbed the impact, though Bean's fizzled and died under the strain. The removal of their leader seemed to have taken something from the Ultramarines, though, and they rapidly fell to the attacks of the marines. Another's ammunition exploded, and this time a huge chunk of metal framework from one of the data stacks was blasted up and through the window into the corridor, striking Private Bunce and smashing him into the wall behind. Though his shield held, the simple kinetic force of impact from half a ton of mangled steel was too much for his armour, and he was smashed to jelly inside it.
With resistance ended, the Marines sent a sensor ball down into the lower cavern. There, they found a full-scale Zerg colony - not the stunted, cultivated Hatcheries used by the Conspiracy - with all the structures they'd seen in Wounded Knee Caves on Sirnoth, and what looked ominously like a Cerebrate at the far side.
Near the computer room end, though, was a human-made passage, leading off in roughly the right direction for the power plant they were seeking. Tuning their armour to chaemelon, the invaders floated on their gravbelts across the lip and down into the cavern, heading across to the passage.
Halfway there, a grenade slipped out of Uriah's belt and dropped onto the Creep below, near where a Worker Drone Zerg was doing some incomprehensible maintenance operation. Everyone winced, expecting a mass assault, but the creature merely picked the object up, examined it for a few seconds, and set off across the Creep with it. From the distance came a dull crump! as the charge detonated.
Breathing a sigh of relief, the Marines floated into the tunnel and made their way down to the far end, where they found the base power plant at last. Unpacking the nuclear charges with a sigh of relief, Verral handed them over to Jacques who laid them, setting two-hour timers and tamper detectors. He then mined the doors into the power room, and, as the party retreated through the corridor back to the Zerg colony, set breaching charges on 5-minute timers to bring the passage down and seal the power plant.
As they cleared the lip of the cavern back into the Computer Room, they realized why they hadn't found Severina's body. Battered, and bleeding purple Zerg blood, she was nonetheless standing waiting for them, lightsabre and a fresh bolter in hand.
Thanks to the ubiquitous sensor ball, though, the invaders were ready, and a co-ordinated salvo of RAM and laser fire converged on her before she could get a shot off. [In one combat round SD took 1,412 points of damage, and had she had a heart to bleed by then would have sustained a further 2D for two more combat rounds on top of that!].
The massive blast brought the roof of the computer room down, huge chunks of concrete raining down on the data systems below. One of these struck Sergeant Hanmore, knocking him unconscious. Jacques tried grab him as he fell, but missed and dropped him. Reagan, snapping commands into his battlecomputer, reached out through the telemetry channel and overrode Hanmore's flight systems, slaving the guidance to his own armour so as to make the stunned InSec sergeant follow him automatically, as they swooped out of the computer room and up the lift shaft.
Half an hour later, they were touching down outside the mountain base, next to the APC which LZ had already prepped for launch in answer to their radio calls. Taking off almost vertically, he shoved the throttles as far forward as possible and the grav vehicle hurtled across the planet, putting as much distance as possible between it and the doomed base.
At the appointed moment, the atomic charges Jacques had laid detonated, triggering the fusion plant and producing a massive thermonuclear explosion. Hard on its' heels came an even bigger detonation, as the long-dormant volcano blew its' cap and blasted the entire mountain to bits.
A week later, safely back on the Brazos, the Marines took stock of the effects of their raid. Artanis was rather rueful; it appeared that the Protoss had never considered geophysical catastrophes as a means of attacking the supposedly invulnerable Cerebrates, but he had scoured the Bifter biosphere for over a day and found no trace of any Zerg whatsoever. Clearly, Bifter was no longer a problem, and so the ship set off back to Gilussor.
Upon re-entering the Gilussor system, the marines discovered that a great deal had changed. The Protoss warship Esrator was still uncloaked, and apparently operating in co-operation with the Imperial ships in the system. And there were a lot of those....
A full-sized Imperial Task Force was insystem, warships, troop carriers, and command craft orbiting at a variety of heights. The Protoss were obviously sharing sensor data, too, because soon after Jumping in, despite being cloaked, the Brazos was hailed by the Imperial Command ship Kelfazin, and requested to dock for debriefing. The crew and marines were understandably worried by this, given their current AWOL status, but a quick conflab with Artanis revealed that the Protoss had answered a lot of questions for the Imperials when the task force arrived, and a nice comfy cell was waiting, not for the Marines, but for ex-Duke Henry and his six scientists.
As the ship headed in, Reagan was busy at the main console, dumping something onto data slugs. Jacques became suspicious about this - some residual suspicion from the revalation of Reagan's relation to the Queen of Blades - and investigated, to find that the schematics for the Protoss shield generators and Arbiter Cloak had all disappeared from the computer. He confronted Reagan over this, and the other explained he was creating backups for them all, while ensuring that the technology didn't faill into the hands of the Imperium in general.
Jacques remained suspicious, and later asked Artanis to read Reagan's mind and confirm this, but Artanis reminded him that as a trained psionic, Reagan was immune to casual probing and could only be read if he was mentally assaulted. Jacques subsided, especially once the disks were distributed, but remained suspicious.
The investigation took a long time. In the end, however, the crew and troops of the Brazos were completely exonerated, and indeed commended for their decisive action. Each was promoted a rank, and Verral's brevet promotion to Sergeant confirmed. MCG were awarded to the surviving combat Marines and InSec troopers, and MCUF to LZ, Maid Marian and Lt Stalker.
Each was granted six months' leave, and choice of their next assignment. After some consultation, they elected to remain together as a unit, and requested to be assigned to the continuing hunt for rogue Zerg and Ultramarines in the Elchev Sector. The authorities agreed, and so, nearly a year later, better armed and equipped, the Brazos once again headed out to the stars, to join battle with the terrible Zerg Swarm....
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