You Kid Are Truly a Genius

The broad holographic display on the bridge dimmed for an instant, then lit up again with vector diagrams in every color, special symbols, and long strings of numbers.

Matt Horner, Artanis, and Alarak had all left the communications channel, replaced by a tactical map of the battle in space. Centered on Aiur's ecliptic plane and extending to the edge of the Oort Cloud, it encompassed the entire star system.

When Augustus looked at it, the star map was filled with sprawling clusters of multicolored lights, as though all the paints on a palette had been mixed together. Protoss, humans, Zerg, and Void creatures were attacking one another, while every region embroiled in large-scale war was prominently marked in glaring red—a tangled, complex, chaotic, ever-changing mess.

What offered some temporary reassurance was that the space between Aiur and its moon remained under their control. Half of the Imperial combined fleet and most of the Daelaam fleet were still there, locked in an increasingly fierce battle against the Conclave fleet and the Aiur Swarm.

Thirty-two degrees above the ecliptic plane, thirty astronomical units from Aiur, lay tens of billions of Overmind Zerg. An entire Purifier fleet stood between them and Aiur.

On this battlefield, the mechanical fleet and the biological fleet slaughtered each other with attack methods no human or Protoss fleet would ever employ, as if they cared nothing for either their own losses or those of their enemy.

Countless wrecks of unmanned warships and Zerg corpses lay scattered throughout the void, forming an unprecedented interstellar graveyard. The vast resources strewn within it would be enough to keep Scavengers digging day and night for centuries.

In contrast, on the distant other side of the Aiur system, Amon's corrupted Golden Armada was eighty astronomical units away. At its forefront were no fewer