What happened to Teel V was just the beginning. With lightning speed, the infested took over half a dozen more colonies, killing and infesting everyone on those planets. Local Umojan garrisons were wiped out. Some barely had time to send out a cry for help before being overrun.

The Umojans reacted as swiftly as possible. The Umojan Fleet, roughly three hundred battlecruisers, was sent on its path to cleanse the infestation. While their numbers were fewer than the Dominion Fleet, the Umojans had absolute technical advantage. For one thing, a dozen of the newest ravens were among the battlecruisers. For another, a brand new type of vessel, the liberators, were added to the fleet.

Liberators had Lexington rockets that were brilliant in dealing with a group of smaller flyers, but what really made them menacing was their ability to bombard enemy ground targets from orbit with their concord plasma cannons. This way, all the Umojans had to do was hold the orbit, and their liberators could take out the infested one by one in a completely secured environment. Everyone knew the infested lacked the ability to challenge the terran capital ships.

As the Umojan Fleet reached the first planet that was attacked, Teel V, everyone thought this would be an easy fight. They were wrong.

The infested didn’t even attempt to fight the entirety of the fleet. Instead, all the infested units burrowed themselves as deep underground as possible.

This made it much more difficult on the Umojan part. At first, they tried to combine the power of orbital scans and liberator concord cannons. It wasn’t a bad idea. Orbital scans could identify all the burrowed infested, no matter how deep they were, while concord cannons could obliterate any infested with a single shot. But after ten minutes, the Umojan commander had no choice but to call off the attack.

Why? This was way too expensive.

There were hundreds of thousands of infested on Teel V alone. Concord cannons were designed to take down single targets. A single shot could obliterate a siege tank. But it wasn’t good at doing explosive damage. Perhaps a single round could take down a couple infested that were clumped up together, but that was it. In other words, the liberators needed to fire at least one hundred thousand rounds to cleanse the infestation on this planet alone.

Concord cannons were basically plasma cannons. They took a lot of energy to be fired. The Umojans weren’t as wealthy as the Dominion. One hundred thousand rounds of plasma cannons could make them bankrupt. Just the concord cannons was something the Umojan Fleet couldn’t afford, and that was not counting the resources and energy needed for continuous orbital scans to identify the location of the infested.

If the Umojans tried this, a couple planets of infested could drag the Umojan Fleet to its destruction. That was a major problem of the terran way of combat. Every round fired needed money, and without the supply, terran ships were practically crippled.

The Umojans tried out another way of approach. Medivacs of marines and marauders were unloaded on a few areas of Teel V that was already scanned and cleared. A few ravens descended from orbit and provided passive detection support. Their computers identified the infested and passed their locations to the men on the ground, who moved forward and gunned the infested down. This was a much cheaper mean of cleansing the infestation.

Stukov, upon seeing the situation through the zerg psionic network, developed countermeasures. As a former UED general, he was a great tactician. He was well aware that all he needed to do was keep his units alive. He didn’t need to take down the fleet. All he needed to do was exist, and his ally could do the rest.

As the Umojan strike team moved across the creep covered surface of the planet, the raven pilot suddenly frowned as she noticed that the infested went even deeper into the planet.

“Sir, the zerg are getting deeper.” She immediately reported to her superior.

“Why?” The Umojan Fleet commander didn’t understand the zerg’s decision. Terran ravens could notice infested units no matter how deep they were. Of course, it was possible the zerg commander didn’t know this, but…

But the marines on the ground quickly realized the answer to the commander’s question. One of them fired at a burrowed infested, glanced at the real time data the raven sent him, and frowned.

“Sir, our guns can’t seem to kill those zerg.”

Gauss rifles had terrific penetration capabilities, but even they couldn’t accurately hit their target after going through dozens of meters of ground. Infested units had zerg characteristics, and the things with zerg was that they were tough to kill. Usually, for gauss rifles, only a shot to the head could take them out. The marines still had some scores, but their efficiency sharply dropped.

Marauders were even worse as their explosive shells went off on the ground itself.

The fleet commander frowned and mentally went through the terran arsenal, but he couldn’t think of anything that could take out the zerg efficiently. He could always nuke the entire planet to ashes, but that would be pointless. The terran would have spent countless credits and resources in exchange for a half melted planet and a field of dead zerg. The minerals and vespene gas on the planet would be destroyed, and the planets would barely be inhabitable.

“Sir?” The ground team was still waiting for orders.

“Pull back our ground teams. We need an alternate approach.”

In the end, the Umojans had little real counter to the almost cheating tactic. They left a planetary fortress at the area where the richest minerals of the planet were. Three liberators and one battlecruiser towered from high orbit, ready to provide fire support in case of an infested attack. A garrison of marines, along with heavy mech support like siege tanks, was in the fortress. The whole purpose of this settlement was not to terminate the infested on the planet but rather to keep them from leaving. The Umojans couldn’t kill all the infested on the planet, but they could make sure they never see the light of day.

After leaving these forces, the Umojan Fleet went for another infested planet. They would need to repeat this process at least a dozen times, if not more.

It was a good plan. Normally, the infested could never gather enough power to break through all the firepower the planetary fortress was packed with, especially if the terran had absolute air dominance, and any zerg movement could be scouted by the terran forces. Unfortunately, the Umojans’ plan of isolation didn’t work. As good as it sounded, the plan didn’t take Jean and her ships into consideration.

There were countless infested on the planets, but they were mainly made up of infested civilians and infested colonists. In reality, Jean had most of Stukov’s forces, most of the infested marines and all of the infested mech, on her battlecruisers. With the element of surprise, the amount of damage they could potentially do was unimaginable.

The Umojan Protectorate was shaken by recent reports of zerg infestation. For years the Umojans have remained relatively neutral in the sector. They were hostile against the Terran Dominion and were no friend with the Queen of Blades, but they were able to fend for themselves well enough. This sudden infested invasion and the fall of dozens of planets in just days was enough to send all the senators into a frenzy inside the Umojan Ruling Council, demanding something to be done to protect the lives of the people. The general public, with much less restrictions than those of the Terran Dominion, spoke freely on this matter.

When the Umojan Fleet was mobilized and deployed, both the senators and the public calmed down a bit. A few of them even complimented the fleet commander after he informed them that the infestation has been controlled.

This changed during an incident at the heart of the Protectorate.

Three days after the Umojan Fleet was sent out, just when the Umojan people returned to their peaceful way of life, a civilian ship landed at one of the docks of the capital planet of Umoja. The ship went through the inspection just fine, but when the doors opened, what came out weren’t human.

Armies of infested charged out and slaughtered everyone in their way. This caught the Umojans by complete surprise. The port the infested attacked was a civilian one, and the hundred or so security guards, hired by the corporation that owned the port, simply fled the scene along with the rest of the occupants. Even if they stayed, there would be nothing that they could do.

When Umojan security forces arrived and put down the attacking forces, half of the port’s population was gone. Some of them died from the infested, but most died by accident while trying to run to safety. Just the stampedes killed hundreds.

Despite all the casualties, the attack itself did little damage. There were hundreds of ports like the one that was attacked and the Umojans could easily rebuild these destroyed ports, but this attack told the Umojan people one thing, and that was that the Umojan Fleet couldn’t protect its people. If the capital of the Protectorate, the most heavily defended inside the Umojan Protectorate, allowed the zerg to come and go as they wish...

At first the Umojan people were united. Umojan Fleet Commander Thorn promised to the world that a similar attack wouldn’t happen again, but it did. More importantly, it happened just the following day of the attack on Umoja and Thorn’s announcement.

This time the target of the attack was one of the most populated colonies of the Protectorate. Over ten million people populated that planet, and when tens of thousands of infested marines and hundreds of infested vehicles descended from orbit, this huge population merely meant more units for the army of the dead.

The local garrison made a desperate stand to buy time for help to arrive. Marines kept their fingers on the trigger even as their own bodies were ripped apart by the sea of infested. Siege tank pilots reloaded and fired their rounds as their positions were overwhelmed and their own vehicles were turned to metal coffins. Even as infested started going through the vehicle’s plating, the brave men and women worked to reload another round and fire it into the enemy mass. With any luck, this might save the lives of countless human beings on the planet.

Squads of white vikings entered fighter mode and flew across the infested sea and dropped torpedo after torpedo into the center. Every explosion killed dozens and the vikings dashed away before the infested marines could fire enough shots to pierce the advanced Umojan plating. But the vikings didn’t have much time to smile. Scattered around hundreds of infested civilians, a dozen infested goliaths enabled their hellfire missile systems and launched the projectiles at the fighters.

The first wave took the Umojans by surprise and took down three vikings. The wreckages fell into the infested lines and paved three roads of flesh and bones through the formation before exploding.

“Circle around. Take them out!” The viking captain ordered as the squads of vikings turned around for another dive, but this time, as they faced the goliaths and locked their torpedoes onto these zerg vehicles, one of the viking pilots suddenly saw all the infested around the goliaths turning around, revealing their hidden gauss rifles.

They were infested marines all the time, but they posed as infested civilians for an opportunity like this, and they got it.

“Fall back!” The captain shouted. Too late.

A storm of infested gauss rounds penetrated the glass and armor of all the vikings and ravaged through the cockpit, killing the pilots and sending their bodies twitching inside their seats. The viking wreckages slammed into the goliaths and marines and killed some, but the fact was all of the Umojan air forces on the planet were gone.

All across the planet the battle turned more and more brutal. The infested tossed themselves at the enemy fire. To them, the orders of Stukov meant everything. The Umojans didn’t budge an inch until every single one of them was dead. While the Dominion troopers fought because of fear, the Umojans fought because it was their duty. Every single one of these men knew millions of innocent people were counting on them. If they fell back and fled, those innocent would be killed or worse. Not a single man budged.

The situation turned even worse as the squad of five battlecruisers in high orbit, previously unloading on the infested, suddenly went quiet. They were what kept the infested back, and now they were gone. Without the sufficient firepower, the Umojans were swarmed over.

By the time the majority of the Umojan Fleet warped in, the planet’s defenses were already in pieces. Umojan strike teams were immediately deployed via drop pods and Umojan ships immediately started unloading on the enemy mass, but it was too late. When the last infested fell with its skin melted by a round of laser, half of the planet’s population has already been massacred. Even worse, the Umojans found the bodies standing back up as infested units...

This tragedy shocked the world. Most importantly, it was a slap to the face to General Thorn. The Umojan people protested in hundreds of thousands, wondering how their armed forces could keep them safe and prevent tragedies like this one from happening again.

Unfortunately for the Umojan Ruling Council, the Umojan Protectorate was more of an alliance than an empire. Minister Jorgenson, the leader of the Protectorate and the commander in chief of the armed forces, could neither put down the protests and complaints with force like Mengsk did nor turn the weapon of the media to his advantage. He had no choice but to watch as more and more of the Umojans grew dissent toward the government.

That was when Jean stepped in.