"He's at the end of the road." At that moment, Kerrigan spoke to Augustus over her private direct-link channel: "I can't sense Edmund Duke's mind, but I can probe his soldiers'. Duke is among them, and they're planning to flee. A transport from the capital district's spaceport is coming to pick them up."
"Be careful, they have two Ghost operatives."
"Advance." Augustus spoke on the command channel: "They have psionics, prepare EMP weapons."
"Don't spare the ammo. Fire off all our grenades and rockets."
Augustus's troops immediately spread out through the canyon, advancing while firing.
Kerrigan's immense psionic power unfolded before Augustus and the Revolutionary soldiers at the front, forming an invisible wall. All bullets aimed their way froze midair and clattered to the ground.
At the same time, another Revolutionary force under a staff lieutenant colonel rushed in from a different direction. Surrounded, Alpha Squadron now had to contend with a two-pronged assault from enemies outnumbering them ten to one.
Even Duke's elite guards had already been locked in a brutal fight against Raynor's Revolutionary main force for over ten hours in the desolate canyon. The ammunition stored in their power armor shoulder packs was long since exhausted, leaving them at a clear firepower disadvantage. Many soldiers were blown to pieces by rockets powerful enough to shred Kel-Morian heavy tanks, blood spraying everywhere.
As the firefight dragged on, Alpha Squadron's numbers dwindled, while Augustus's forces steadily tightened the encirclement.
"Edmund Duke, I'm giving you a chance to surrender." As Alpha Squadron's firing points visibly thinned out, Augustus used the loudspeaker on his power armor to call out.
"But you must cease fire first." Only after several seconds did a reply come from Alpha Squadron.
"I'll give you three seconds to prepare—we'll stop fire simultaneously." By now Augustus was only four to five hundred yards from Alpha Squadron, close enough to see many of their soldiers' power armor torn open, lying in pools of their own blood.
Augustus's side, however, suffered almost no casualties; all bullets were blocked by Kerrigan's overwhelming psionics.
"I will only surrender to your highest commander—none of those fake, self-styled generals." Only about half a minute after the true ceasefire did a rough bellow finally come, dragging its feet.
"For God's sake, I'm a general. I will only surrender to your rebel leader. Have Augustus Mengsk come see me!" Even at the brink, the voice was still unbearably arrogant. He did not recognize Augustus's voice, because he simply did not believe the other man would be here in person.
"When did he get promoted?" Kerrigan's voice sounded in Augustus's ear. "How did he become a general in less than a day?"
"Don't expose him on that. Colonel Duke cares a lot about saving face," Augustus replied.
"I am Augustus Mengsk." As Augustus spoke, Sergeant Faraday waved a hand and, together with a dozen soldiers from the Guard Battalion, moved to shield him against any possible Ghost operatives.
"You don't get to name your terms."
Augustus knew that the way to handle someone like Duke was to never go along with him—leave him fuming in his own world.
"Your troops are spent, while my reinforcements keep coming. Before today, you were a colonel of the Confederacy, but right now you are nothing." He spoke.
"I'll give you two choices: join us, or die for the Confederacy's rotten government. If you order the remaining Alpha Squadron personnel and your fleet to surrender, I can grant you a Cabinet post."
"I'd have to be insane to join the rebels." Duke's voice wavered—Augustus had moved him.
He did not want to die.
"Fine, I will surrender."
...
At this moment the Desolate Gorge was still cloaked in night, but in the east a faint whiteness had begun to rise—dawn was about to arrive.
Duke had kept his word when it came to surrender. The more than one hundred remaining Alpha Elite Guard soldiers had thrown all their weapons to the ground and raised their hands.
Most of them were resocialized soldiers, utterly obedient to their highest-ranking commander. Here the drawbacks of mass resocialization became apparent: once a senior commander defected, he could immediately order his subordinates to disarm or cease fire.
Even if someone was aiming a gun at a resocialized soldier's head, as long as his officer ordered him to put down his weapon and stop resisting, he would do so without hesitation.
Their brains had been imprinted with absolute loyalty to the Confederacy, but they didn't truly understand what loyalty meant—after all, shelling the Hall of Reason where the Confederacy's parliament once sat could also be called a kind of loyalty.
"Don't try any tricks on me. I know you still have two Ghost operatives." Augustus strode forward toward the Alpha squad soldiers who had already surrendered their weapons, speaking as he went, his own troops flanking him.
A few seconds later, two Ghosts carrying heavy sniper rifles revealed themselves. After a moment's hesitation, they too laid down their arms.
From among the dejected Alpha squad soldiers emerged Edmund Duke in his white commander's armor. He was burly, his armor marked with the emblem of a golden eagle.
"I hope your promise is worth this price." Duke did not remove his helmet. He simply walked up to Augustus and tossed his sidearm, holster and all, at his feet.
"I've issued a surrender order to all channels under my command, but the Marines may not heed it. If the Marine Corps refuses to surrender, then I won't object if you wipe them out."
"My promises always hold." Augustus looked toward Sergeant Faraday, who immediately ordered the Revolutionary Army soldiers to collect Alpha squad's weapons and command them to remove their power armor.
"Today, I made a grave mistake," Duke said in his muffled voice. "I walked right into your trap."
"And that trap wasn't even hard to spot." Augustus met Duke's gaze. He didn't care to make a victor's long speech. "In the end, you always treated the Revolutionary Army as nothing more than a band of peasants with no fighting strength."
With that, Augustus ordered the Revolutionary Army soldiers to reboard the transport ship, while Duke was escorted aboard by Sergeant Faraday.
The transport lifted off from the flat sand, thrusters kicking up clouds of dust. As it rose higher, the horizon shrouded in white light gradually curved into a line. This place lay less than 3 km from the Bottleneck, and it wasn't long before Augustus could see the main battlefield still flickering with light.
Duke hadn't lied. Aside from sporadic skirmishes, the main battlefield of the Desolate Gorge had fallen quiet once again.
From the reports sent back by Raynor, Lundstein, and others, the Confederacy's troops had either mindlessly laid down their arms, or surrendered under the lead of their officers. Only a few Marine brigade remnants still resisted in desperation. At present, Raynor and the other forces were concentrating their superior strength to wipe out those Confederate holdouts who refused to surrender.
The Revolutionary Army defenders at the Bottleneck position recognized the transport's identity and did not open fire. Even so, the ship carrying Augustus could not find a single intact spot to land, forced instead to set down near what remained of a command center—reduced to nothing but a steel framework.
Wherever the transport's lights reached, blasted bunkers and modular prefab structures lay in ruins. Each destroyed bunker resembled half a charred eggshell, its supposedly indestructible alloy plating already shattered beyond recognition.
Scattered everywhere were discarded weapons, copper-plated casings, fragments of railgun shells buried in the rust-red sandy soil, and limb remnants that made Augustus avert his gaze. These remains were still clad in searing pieces of power armor—some white from Alpha Squad, some red from the Revolutionary Army. Blood seeped into Mar Sara's red soil, as if returning to its true body.
In bunkers and shell craters gouged by heavy artillery, heaps of corpses were piled together. Their power armor was riddled with holes, protection proving useless against heavy machine guns and large-caliber railguns that shredded them to pieces. Alpha Squad and Revolutionary Army soldiers had died locked in grotesque, almost embracing poses, though in truth their muzzles and bayonets had been pressed against each other. The dead were beyond counting.
Augustus knew that a soldier tempered by fire might long have grown numb to such scenes. He had witnessed countless deaths; death had already taken away comrades and tens of thousands of fighters from his hands. All he could do was bury them.
It was Augustus who had led these young men away from their families. They had believed that following the Marshal would bring light and hope, yet in the end they perished on some fringe world they had never even heard of before—nothing like their warm, beautiful home of Korhal IV.
When Augustus stepped off the transport, Duke had already been stripped of his power armor, his hands tightly bound with rope. He wore only a thin Terran Navy combat uniform of pliable fabric, draped with a dark-gray Revolutionary Army greatcoat, shivering in the cold wind.
Revolutionary Army soldiers immediately surged out of the ship into the near-ruined stronghold, searching the collapsed bunkers and shattered fortifications for possible survivors.
Augustus heard not a single cry or wail. Wherever the transport's lights reached, there was only death.
"There! Someone's still alive down there!" At that moment, Kerrigan uncloaked, guiding Revolutionary Army soldiers toward a collapsed ruin. Her psionic sense allowed her to detect survivors buried beneath the rubble. For her, even the unconscious activity of a brain was something she could perceive.
The Revolutionary Army Engineering Corps' SCVs who had rushed to the battle immediately began rescue work in the field they excelled at. They used the space construction vehicles' thermal lances to cut open the bunkers' metal, then used powered clamps to extract survivors buried in the ruins. The Engineering Corps' SCV operators were all highly skilled workers, most of them between 30 and 40 years old, with few young men among them.
Whether in the Confederacy Marines or the Revolutionary Army, the Engineering Corps' SCVs who could erect modular buildings on any battlefield and weld tanks in the shops were praised as "the fathers who bring diapers for the Marines."
"Breaking through this damned fortress cost me a lot of time. The rebels here were far more tenacious than I imagined." Duke, standing behind Augustus, spoke up at this moment. "Before this, I could hardly imagine any army's morale matching that of resocialized soldiers—enough that even after being nearly destroyed they could still keep fighting with such stubborn resolve."
"Unheard of."
"My soldiers have a firm faith." When Augustus saw the Revolutionary Army soldier who had just been rescued with both legs blown off, sorrow surged in his heart. Even if this soldier survived the pain, blood loss, and infection, he would have to rely on prosthetic limbs for the rest of his life.
What Augustus could do was send more warriors maimed by war back to Umoja. In the barracks and military academies of New Styrling, these soldiers would train new recruits and future officers.
"Moreover, every Korhalan who has lost his home is a lonely, vengeful ghost," Augustus said. "That's something you will never understand."
"Even if you were ordered to destroy Tarsonis, the world that raised you, you wouldn't hesitate in the slightest."
Baffled, Duke had just opened his mouth to retort when Tychus, clad in red armor, and Harnack arrived before Augustus with several Revolutionary Army soldiers whose armor was covered in scars and scorch marks.
"We burned through fourteen battalions." Harnack was by nature a high-spirited man, but he could not hide his grief now. His tone was fierce, roaring like a lion.
"But I swear those Alpha Squad bastards died in greater numbers than we did."
"We've already won, Hank," Augustus told him.
"Yo, Colonel Duke." Even after brushing past the gates of hell, Tychus still looked rather cheerful. The moment he saw Duke he beamed and offered a friendly greeting.
"Good to see you again, you venomous snake. What a fucking honor."
At this moment, Mar Sara's sun rose slowly, and the morning glow reddened the sky.
A tattered red flag, blackened by smoke and fire, fluttered in the breeze that swept the gorge at dawn, emblazoned with a strong arm encircled by a whip.
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