The Eighth Movement

Coded Transmission Intercepted from Alpha Quadrant 1-12-01 Message begins: The next Starcraft patch, version 1.08, is almost complete. The patch will contain balance changes to the game, as well as fixing several bugs and adding some interesting new features. We are eager to get this new version into our customer's hands and current estimates place the release of this patch at the end of January or in early February. While we can make internal estimates on when we believe the patch will be completed, we cannot with 100% certainly predict when it will truly be ready. Consult our Blizzard FAQ for more questions on Patches. http://www.blizzard.com/inblizz/genfaq.shtml#patch GFraizer(Shlonglor) Web Designer Brood War Campaign Commando

"Shut up already, I'm sick of your whining."

"Wait, just listen will you? Our valks need serious improvement. Do you notice how armor completely negates the explosion effects of their missiles, and how the missiles don't even home in on individual targets? They're worthless, I hear we once lost 12 valkyries to 18 corsairs, only killing ONE corsair. Do you know that for some mysterious reason, sometimes valkyries can't even fire their missiles? It seems oddly dependant upon the number of other valkyries that are firing, like they interfere with each other."

"Bah, valkyries are awesome, I don't care what your theory garbage tells you. Let ME tell you something: War is won by sweat, blood, and skill, not because any race is just stronger than another."

"Even back in the beginning when hatcheries were able to produce units at alarming rates and science vessels cost an enormous amount of gas?"

"Look, Dillan, boy, there will always be your kind who complain about imbalance and sit on your rear hoping things will change, but the rest of us will go fight knowing that skill is what makes the difference."

"Alright privates," Captain Stager interrupted, "frankly I don't care what either of you think, your bickering isn't going to win us the war, so quiet." Dillan and Hart broke off into sullen silence, both their minds probably still filled with retorts.

Stager sighed inwardly. War was depressing enough without having to bear the incessant arguing between the different balance camps. Stager mused that he'd probably rather be eaten by a zergling than bear up with much more of this. Recently even conversation in the mess halls had started degenerating into flaming about whether the Terrans were just outright inferior to other races. Valkyrie this, carrier that, blah blah, the only thing worse was the flaming over the neck-to-neck presidential election on Cearth, which ended up with nuclear war destroying the whole planet (good riddance).

And the whole Eighth Movement thing was obviously garbage. It began back when folks noticed a strange recurring symbol appearing in random places -- etched in trees, in bowl of spaghetti. Viewed one way, it looked like a symbol for infinity. Rotated, it somewhat resembled an "8", leading crazed prophecies that this was a sign of another Movement. Stager for the life of him couldn't even count when came the first seven movements -- global changes in technology that swept through all the races near simultaneously and without warning, each causing the tacticians to throw away their old strategy theorems in disgust and start working on new ones. Now the radicals were warning about how the "Eight Movement is near!" Bah, Stager hadn't heard such nonsense since people started prophecying that flaming demons were going to fall from the skies.

Stager's kid back on the homeworld, before he disowned his father and started calling himself "Shockwave", had told him that people had even started talking about the war and Movements on so-called discussion forums. His kid would gloat about having the "best wartime forum on this side of the galaxy!", Stager was so humiliated he told his marines that his son had died in an accident long ago.

Each Movement brought a flurry of activity to the forums, enough that Stager wondered if the more obsessed forumers knew more about how to fight the war than the admirals doing it. He could imagine them now -- slightly overweight, no real social life, male or pretending to be female, hunched over their terminals frantically typing away with their pudgy fingers or trying to conjure clever remarks to outwit others doing the same. "I say, give them a gun and let them do something useful," Stager would tell anyone who cared.

"Captain, we're near the destination point of our patrol," Hart said, surprising Stager back to his senses. "I don't see anything here, can we head back now?"

Stager stopped for a moment to absorb his surroundings. Lush grass expanded out from the valley, meeting in dense forest in the near distance. Faint footprints were still visible in the ground, being all the evidence remaining from the last smaller patrol that disappeared here. Stager didn't particularly want to know what happened to them, didn't enjoy being assigned to find out either.

He radioed command through his headseat while his weary marines and medics ambled past him. "There's nothing here, no signs of what happened to the last guyseither. Request permission to head--"

The earth below him shifted violently, causing Stager to fumble his footing. Thinking he had been caught in an earthquake, he started to call out to his marines, but was cut off by a shrill cry as one of them lurched backward with blood exploding from of his back. A bony horn had thrust from the ground through his stomach, lifting him from the ground and then leaving him writhing after it snapped back into the grass.

As the ground undulated, a series of spikes sprang up in succession. One tore through through Hart's leg and severed it cleanly from the knee down. Stager could only watch helpless as Hart screamed and collapsed forward, the leg then lazily teetering to the ground with him. Two more marines fell as another wave of spikes ripped from the ground, the others stumbled for balance. Hart ripped his hands into the grass and start hauling himself away on the ground when another spike skewered through his neck. For an instant, it gleamed erect against the sun, an obscene monument streaming with Hart's blood.

"Man down!" "Help us!" "Agh!" the shouts seemed a distant echo. Stager stood watching stupified, the ground at his feet alive with tremors.

The sound of gunfire finally shook him from his paralysis. His marines were firing wildly into the ground, at the spikes, even at their dead comrades in panick. One lost his footing and fell hard, bullets spewing as his rifle arm flailed. There was an unearthly roar as several of the wild shots hit an area in front of the marines. Stager snapped to alertness. Something was down there.

"Comsat, my position, NOW!" Stager cried into his headset. There was an agonizing delay, marines running away madly, dying madly, or tumbling on the ground madly, then a soft blue light washed over the grass from above. A representation of a large foreign mass was projected on Stager's visor.

"Fire, fire!" he commanded at nobody in particular, as those marines who were still in their senses awkwardly pointed their rifles at the same spot and unloaded a barrage of bullets. There was a muffled roar of pain, Stager was emboldened and dashed recklessly forward to join in the fray. Then the earth suddenly erupted under him and a spike thrust toward him, broadsiding his chest. The force of it toppled Stager to the ground, and he was met with a bright flash as his the back of his head crashed into the earth. Then darkness.

"...And these lurker things are just way too powerful and are way too difficult to engage because of our mobile detection, and science vessels are available way too late to be useful," Dillan was saying.

"Yeah, I used to read the forums and Admiral Shockwave told us that tech should work on getting us science vessels right out of the starport even before they're ready with the sci facilities to manufacture the support spells."

"You know Shockwave? I hear he's like 8 feet tall and lead the Zerg repulsion in the First Zone. They say he's never lost a battle."

"Ha, 'admiral', you're kidding me. Someone told me he's just a kid with too much time on his hands--"

"How dare you!"

Stager raised his head weakly. The other marines had apparently left him to wake up on his own, and Dillan was giving Hart's lifeless body a sad glance almost as if longing that Hart was still alive to at least argue with him. His medics, or at least the two that were still alive, were busy healing his group's wounds and repairing their armor. One of the medics was quietly sobbing as she reattached an arm back onto an unconscious marine. A quick check at his display showed him he'd been out for more than an hour.

A hole had been dug into the ground where the thing they called the lurker once lay, and the bullet-ridden monstrocity was now prostate upside down like a killed spider for all the marines to gape at. "I can't believe this used to be a hydra," Dillan said. "And I can't believe how quickly the hydras develop the capability to morph into these things." Dillan looked heavenward, maybe hoping that the powers to be would take sympathy on his plight.

There was a buzzing in Stager's ear, and he wondered if he'd banged his ears too hard. No luck, his comm instead came to life. "Command has new orders. We were unaware of a Zerg presence on this world and must investigate. Continue in your present direction and see if you can ascertain the location of the hive. Command believes it must be nearby given the position of the hostile."

Stager's head was pounding, but his retort was sharp. "Tell command that I just lost NINE of my party to ONE of these things and only have a dozen marines and a few medics left. They're all near exhaustion by the way. Why don't you use comsat to recon or at least send me a science vessel for escort in case there's more of these things out here?!"

"Comsat station is near exhausted from the last scan you required and needs to be saved in case there are more lurker encounters. We will try to send a science vessel as soon as possible, but the infrastructure needed to construct it is not yet available although our engineers have been working as quickly as possible. You have your orders."

"Well why didn't you USE COMSAT IN THE FIRST PLACE to recon this spot instead of sending us out here to DIE?!" Stager forced off his helmet and slammed it to the ground. He suddenly had an image of a teenage kid sitting in the command chair issuing orders. Back on earth, forumers had a word for these incompetent commanders: "newbies."

"You know, if starports could build science vessels like Admiral Shockwave proposed, we could have--"

"Shut UP, Dillan, or I'll 'shockwave' you myself!"

Dillan shutted up.

The march was excruciatingly fatiguing but at least mercifully short. Few of the marines had been unscathed, and they were all muttering about what Zerg do to humans that they capture. Stager could think of few things worse except possibly living in Detroit. That sent a cold chill up his spine, encouraged him to stay alert.

And creep is nauseating. The fetid stuff smothered through the valley, and the stench of decaying vegetation absorbed by the stuff assaulted the senses. Stager ordered his men to a halt and dropped to his knees on first sight of the pulsing mass, hoping that none of the bloated gasbags bobbing through the skies had seem them. He was at least eternally grateful that he had not encountered any lurkers on the way to the hatch; his men were constantly on ease and jumped at every real or imagined sound on the way.

"Command, you seeing this?" Stager whispered through his mic. "Can we go home now?"

"AFFIRMATIVE, we're getting your feed," communications blared in his ear. "Rally back 400 meters and hold position while we send a containment contingent to reinforce your location."

"You've gotta be kidding, my men are in no position to hold if there's another engagement," Stager protested. The comm was silent in return.

The marines exchanged looks of disbelief and began to back up cautiously. Soon they reached the rally point and collapsed onto the ground, some even looked ready to drift off. Danger was right in the horizon, but at this point Stager could care less. He wearily fell on his back and gazed spread-eagle at the warm sun.

He was thus the first to notice a dark shadow blot out the sun. A set of lumbering creatures lazily bobbed towards them, each with several insect-like appendages drooping by its side. Some unexplainable force suspended them in the air as they drifted forward.

Something thick and glossy plummeted from the sky towards Dillan. Strager instantly sat up to scream a warning.

Then the world stopped.

"Oh look, it says there's a new patch available. Do I have to quit the game to install it?" Rapser asked the empty room. He rubbed his chin, musing for a moment. "Let's pause and see if I can just update it on the fly."

The blob remained frozen in the air. Strager's gazed was locked on it in horrific fascination. He could see the burning green acid and the smaller droplets that trailed it. He could see Dillan with his eyes peacefully closed, his helmet off, oblivious of the fate that was moments away. Strager tried to scream, whisper, anything, but time froze him still.

"Wait how is this supposed to work? Let me find the right directory. Darn it, this patch procedure is archaic, how in the world did games did like this sell?"

Five minutes of real time must have passed already. Strager wondered if this was the end of the world, if maybe he was doomed to stare at the imbalance-flaming marine for eternity, to see him alive yet hopelessly inches from death. Was this hell? He couldn't breath, a nauseating feeling consumed him, was this what it felt like to kiss Tmac?

"Aha, finally, now where's that 'unpause' button..."