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  “Don’t look back! Run, you

  bastards! Run!”

  Ardo ran next to Littlefield, the metal case banging wildly between them. His free hand held his rifle, swinging as it spewed carnage indiscriminately in his path. There was no effort to fire for effect—all he could do as he ran was random damage and add to the carnage already taking place. The flames wrapped around Ardo as he crossed the line. The footing had already gotten difficult, the ground slick with charred and ruptured Zerg. Still the metal box banged against his leg, letting him know that Littlefield was still there, still running and pulling him forward.

  An unearthly scream tore across the com channel. It continued, an ear-piercing squeal of terror. The internal temperature of his battle armor was growing by the moment. He could feel his hands and feet starting to blister. Suddenly he ran directly into a standing Zergling. Ardo screamed but did not stop, knocking the creature down in his rush before both vanished from each other amid the conflagration.

  “Keep running, you dogs!” Breanne spat through the com channel. Her own voice had an edge to it Ardo had never heard before. Was she winded or just afraid? “Keep running and don’t look back!”

  Instinctively, Ardo looked.

  TRACY HICKMAN

  POCKET BOOKS

  New York London Toronto Sydney Singapore

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  To the fine men and women of the

  U.S.S. Carl Vinson (CVN-70).

  May God go with you as you cross the beach

  and grant you calm seas on your journey home.

  Vis per mare.

  THE SPEED OF

  DARKNESS

  Chapter 1 Downfall

  Chapter 2 Mar Sara

  Chapter 3 Out Country

  Chapter 4 Littlefield

  Chapter 5 Mission Elapsed Time

  Chapter 6 Rabbit Hole

  Chapter 7 Spit and Polish

  Chapter 8 Seeing the Elephant

  Chapter 9 Fall Back

  Shapter 10 The Gauntlet

  Chapter 11 Homecoming

  Chapter 12 Ghost Town

  Chapter 13 Merdith

  Chapter 14 Diminishing Returns

  Chapter 15 Mind's Eye

  Chapter 16 Barricades

  Chapter 17 Weak Links

  Chapter 18 Jaws of Victory

  Chapter 19 Debts

  Chapter 20 Sirens

  Chapter 21 Seige

  Chapter 22 Farewell

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  DOWNFALL

  GOLDEN . . . That was his word for it, that rare, perfect day that warms the soul with a golden glow of joy. There was peace in a golden day.

  Some days were gray, hung with leaden clouds and rain punctuated by brilliant flashes of burning white and rolling thunder. Other days were a vibrant cold blue arching over the frost-encrusted domes and sheds of the settlement. Some days were even red—the evening sky painted by the dust in the spring winds before the crops had gotten their own hold on the soil. Some days even extended into the night with a velvety cobalt blanket across the sky.

  He liked those autumn nights when he could leave his world behind by staring up into that rich darkness. God had put pinpricks in the dome of the night, he imagined, so that His light could shine through. As a child he had searched the stars, hoping to see through to the other side and catch some glimpse of this Creator. He had never stopped looking, even though he had reached his nineteenth birthday and had thought himself too mature for such things.

  Each day held different colors for him. He had experienced them in all their hues. Each held a memory and a place in his heart. Yet none in his experience could compare to a golden day. It was the color of the wheat fields that rolled like waves across the low hills stretching out from his father’s homestead. Golden was the warmth of the sun on his face. Golden was the glow he felt within him.

  Golden was the color of her hair and the sound of her voice.

  “You’re dreaming again, Ardo,” she whispered playfully. “Come back to me. You are much too far away!”

  He opened his eyes. She was golden.

  “Melani, I’m right here.” Ardo smiled.

  “No, you aren’t.” She pouted—a formidable weapon in getting her way. “You’re off dreaming again and you’ve left me behind.”

  He rolled onto his side, propping his head up on one elbow so that he could get a better look at her. She was just a year younger than he. Her family had arrived back when Ardo was nine years old, another group in a long line of religious refugees that fell from the sky to join with other Saints in Helaman Township.

  Refugee survivors had been gathering from nearly all the planets of the Confederacy back then—reluctant pioneers of the stars. Many devout religious groups had been among the first to be outlawed by the United Powers League on Earth back in ’31. It was not a new story to Saints and Martyrs. Throughout humanity’s history, those who did not understand the faithful had driven them from place to place and home to home. That they should be driven from planet to planet, then star to star, was beginning to sound painfully repetitious in their Heritage classes. Now, exiles once more, families of the faithful were scattered among the ill-fated transports of the ATLAS project, and when that mission ended in such cataclysmic failure, those families who survived searched desperately for their brothers and sisters. When communication was finally established between worlds, the Patriarchs chose an outlying region on a world they called Bountiful for their new home. Soon, Orbital Dropships were landing at the Zarahemla Starport daily. The newly arrived families would then make their way to the outlying settlements as best they could. Arthur and Keti Bradlaw, with their wide-eyed daughter, were one of five families that arrived that day. Ardo had joined his father as the entire township came out to welcome the new families and get them settled.

  Ardo could not remember much about Melani then, although he had been vaguely aware of the stick of a girl who seemed awkward, lonely, and shy. He first took real notice of her when her fourteenth year brought some rather remarkable changes. The “stick girl” seemed to burst into his awareness like a butterfly unfolding from its chrysalis. Her features held a natural beauty—body painting and makeup were frowned upon by the Patriarchs of the township—and it had been Ardo’s great good fortune to have been the first to approach her. His heart and soul fell into her large, luminescent blue eyes.

  The nimbus of her long, shining hair played softly in the warm breeze drifting over the wheat fields. The wind carried the distant hum of the mill and the faint scent of the bread at the bakery.

  Golden.

  “I may be off dreaming, but I’ll never
leave you behind,” he said to her, smiling. The wheat rustled about the blanket where they lay. “Tell me where you want to go. I’ll take you there!”

  “Right now?” Her laugh was sunshine. “In your dreams?”

  “Sure!” Ardo pulled himself up to kneel on the heavy blanket he had spread out for them. “Anywhere in the stars!”

  “I can’t go anywhere.” She smiled. “I have a test in Sister Johnson’s Hydroponics class this afternoon! Besides,” she said more earnestly. “Why would I want to go anywhere else at all? Everything I want is right here.”

  Golden. Who could ever leave on such a golden day?

  “Then let’s not go anywhere,” he said eagerly. “Let’s stay here . . . and get married.”

  “Married?” She looked at him, half bemused and half questioning. “I told you, I have Hydroponics class this afternoon.”

  “No, I mean it.” Ardo had been working himself up for this for some time. “I’ve graduated, and things are working out really well on Dad’s agraplots. He said he was thinking of giving me forty acres at the far end of the homestead. It’s the sweetest place, right up near the base of the canyon. There’s a spot there next to the river where . . . where . . . Melani?”

  The girl with the golden hair did not hear him. She sat up, her blue eyes squinting toward the township. “The siren, Ardo!”

  Then he heard it, too. The distant wail, rising and falling across the fields.

  Ardo shook his head. “They always sound it at noon . . .”

  “But it isn’t noon, Ardo.”

  The sun was eclipsed in that instant. Ardo leaped up, wheeling around toward the darkened sky. His mouth fell open as the lengthening shadow surged across the yellowed fields of wheat. Ardo’s eyes went wide with the rush of fear. Adrenaline roared into his veins.

  Enormous plumes of smoke trailed behind fireballs roaring directly toward him from the western end of the broad valley. Ardo quickly reached down and pulled Melani to her feet. His mind raced. They had to run, find shelter . . . But where could they go? Melani screamed, and he realized that there was nowhere to go and noplace safe to hide.

  The fireballs seemed so close that both of them ducked. The flames arched over them, the thunderous sound of their fury quickly drowning the distant warning siren. The shadow of their wake covered the entire valley. Five enormous columns crossed overhead, their fingers reaching over Ardo and Melani toward the clustered buildings of Helaman Township. Then the fireballs wheeled as one, lifted over the township, and descended in roiling flames into Segard Yohansen’s instantly ruined fields, about a mile past the center of Helaman.

  Ardo shook—whether from fear or excitement he could not tell—but at least his stupor had ended. He clasped Melani’s arm and began pulling at her. “Come on! We’ve got to get into the town before they shut the gates! Come on!”

  She needed no further urging.

  They ran.

  He could not remember how they got into town.

  The golden day had turned a muddy brown fading to gray from the smoke that still coated the sky overhead. It was an oppressive color, slate and cold. It seemed so out of place here.

  “We’ve got to find my Uncle Dez,” he heard himself say. “He has a shop in the compound! Come on! Come on!”

  Ardo and Melani struggled to move through the center of the township, now crowded with refugees. Helaman originally had been nothing but an outpost in the far reaches of Bountiful. Its town center was the original fortress compound with the defensive wall encompassing the main buildings. Since then, the town had grown well beyond those central walls. Now more than ten thousand people called Helaman their home—and nearly all of them had poured into the safety of the old fortress compound.

  He could just see the sign “Dez Hardwarez” across the packed central square.

  The rattle of automatic weapons clattered suddenly from the perimeter wall. Two dull explosive thuds resounded, followed by even more chattering machine guns.

  A cry arose from the crowd in the square. Ardo felt more than heard the fear in the seething mob. Shouts rang out, some strident and others calming. The smoke overhead cast an oppressive veil over the surging mob.

  “Please, Ardo!” Melani said, “I . . . Where do we go? What do we do?”

  Ardo glanced around. He could taste the panic in the air.

  “We just need to get across the square,” he choked out, then, seeing the look in her eyes. “We’ve done it hundreds of times.”

  “But, Ardo—”

  “It isn’t any farther than it was before. Just a little more crowded, that’s all.” Ardo looked at the tears welling up in those beautiful blue eyes. He squeezed her hand tightly. “Don’t worry. I’ll be right here with you.”

  Somehow, they were halfway across the square when it came.

  A sheet of flame erupted beyond the fortress’s outer wall. Its crimson light flashed against the blanket of smoke that hung oppressively over the town. The blood-red hue electrified the panicked crowd in the square. Screams, shouts, and cries all tumbled into a cacophony of sound, but several disembodied voices penetrated Ardo’s thoughts clearly.

  “Where are the Confederacy forces? Where are the Marines?”

  “Don’t argue with me! Get the children! Stay together!”

  “It can’t be the Zerg! They couldn’t have penetrated so far into the Confederacy . . .”

  Zerg? Ardo had heard rumors about them. Nightmares, so he thought, to scare children or keep outsiders from settling in the Outer Colonies. He could not remember all the whispered tales, but the nightmare was here now, and very real.

  Another voice penetrated his thoughts. He turned toward her.

  “Ardo, I’m frightened!” Melani’s eyes were wide and liquid. “What is it? What’s going on?”

  Ardo opened his mouth. He could not answer her question. No words came out. There were so many words he wanted to say to her in that moment—so many words that he would regret never having said for uncounted years to come. But no words came out.

  A light flared. He felt the heat on his back. He turned, holding Melani behind him.

  The eastern wall had been breached. The old rampart was being pulled down from the other side, dismantled before Ardo’s eyes. It seemed as though a dark wave was breaking against the breach, an undulating silhouette. Then details lodged in his mind: a gleaming purple carapace, red-streaked ivory claws sliding from a colonist’s limp body, the arching, snakelike bodies writhing across the broken stone.

  It was unthinkable. . . . The nightmare had come to Bountiful.

  The shoulder-to-shoulder crowd in the square roared their deep fear and turned to run from the breach. There was nowhere to go. Zerg Hydralisks had already crested the opposite wall, cascading into the street like black drops from a greasy spill. Within moments, hideous cobralike hoods had unfolded above their razor-sharp talons. They arched their tails upward. Armored spikes exploded from their serrated shoulder sockets and darted with deadly effect into the western edge of the crowd.

  Those facing the new threat suddenly tried to reverse direction, crushing back into the surging crowd behind them.

  Ardo heard Melani gasp behind him. “I can’t . . . I can’t breathe . . .”

  The mob was crushing them. Ardo looked desperately around him, trying to find a way out.

  Movement overhead caught his eye. A bloated, bulbous form like a disembodied brain drifted over the colony wall. Tendrils hung like viscera beneath it, quivering with activity. It was reaching down for the center of the crowd. Ardo had heard tales in which the Zerg had captured colonists and taken them alive to a fate that could only be worse than death.

  Tears flooded Ardo’s eyes. There was nowhere to go and nothing left to do.

  Suddenly the Zerg Overlord drifting above the colony shuddered and slid sideways. Several explosions erupted from the side of the hideous beast. The Overlord exploded in an enormous fireball. The Zerg Hydralisks entering the compound suddenly hesitated.
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  A wing of five Confederacy Wraith fighters ripped through the smoke overhead, the scream of their engines nearly drowning out the cries of the terrified crowd below. Twenty-five-millimeter burst lasers pulsed repeatedly as the Wraiths wheeled through the air, the bolts slamming against targets on the far side of the crumbling fortress wall.

  One of the Wraiths wavered suddenly, then exploded under a hail of ground fire from the outraged Zerg.

  The Zerg who had entered the compound were pressing their attack, killing some and dragging others off without apparent distinction. They had corralled the humans; now all they had to do was harvest them from the edges of the crowd inward.

  A second flight of Wraiths tore through the smoke-blackened sky. Then a single Confederacy Dropship ripped through the air, spinning in a rapid breaking maneuver and descending toward the square. The downblast from the engines created an instant hurricane on the ground. Trees bent over nearly double. It was impossible to hear anything over the roar of the engines. People all about Ardo tumbled to the ground, shielding themselves from the gale.

  Ardo blinked through the dust. The Dropship continued to hover but managed somehow to lower its transport ramp into the square. He could see the silhouetted figure of a Confederacy Marine beckoning to them.

  Everyone else in the square saw the Marine also. Mindlessly they charged the ramp. A human tide pulled Ardo along.

  He lost Melani’s hand.

  “Melani!” he screamed. He tried to fight against the crushing press of the panicked crowd. His words were lost in the roar of the Dropship’s engines. “Melani!”

  He saw her behind him. The Zerg were pressing their attack with anger now. The Dropship was depriving them of their prize. Ardo was appalled at how quickly the large crowd had been sundered—harvested like blood-red wheat in the field. The Zerg were already nearly at Melani’s side.