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The Fightin' SceeVees is a StarCraft II short story written by Kal-El Bogdanove, designed to tie-in with Heart of the Swarm. It focuses on the SCV, and is the last of the Heart of the Swarm cycle of StarCraft short stories. The work was later collected in StarCraft II: War Stories.

Description[]

When “Pearly” Bousquette signed on with Raynor's Raiders, he knew his life was about to become much harder and infinitely more dangerous. But when he and his crew of SCV pilots are sent on a simple strip-and-rip mission, things quickly turn sour... and it'll take all of Pearly's ingenuity to get his crew back home alive.

Synopsis[]

Aboard the Hyperion, Bill Bousquette, or "Pearly", and his SCV crew, the SceeVee Special Engineering Corps of Raynor's Raiders, debated over the construction of a collapsible bridge that could hold up siege tanks yet be ferried by dropship. The group complained it was an impossible task, but Pearly insisted that they could do it and told them to put their heads together. He reflected on the past of his SceeVee Special Engineering Corps, that they were all older engineers who could work under pressure, and that they had been under a lot of strain lately. He met with Rory Swann, chief engineer of Raynor's Raiders, and asked if the group could have some shore leave to see their families and ease the strain. Swann and Pearly were close, but Swann said that wasn't his call, and he'd have to ask Jim Raynor, the Raider's leader.

He approached Raynor, who flat out refused, saying he couldn't spare them. He then immediately gave them a mission which stated would be easy. Pearly briefed his squad; a valuable mineral vein had just been discovered on the moon Gurdlac. His squad would extract them, and be out, but have no marine support.

The group dropped on Gurdlac, and established a command center. Mining began, but at 16:00 they tripped a zerg trap. Petty Officer Wolfe had the ground collapse under him and vanished. Zerglings began to pour out of the crack, and the SCVs formed up around Chewitel Wsoro. They held a defensive line, but began losing forces. Vigo Czark then used his fusion cutter to detonate a large pack of explosives, killing himself but buying the squad time. The remaining SCVs retreated to a canyon in the northwest.

The squad reformed, but were rattled by the zerg tripwire they had struck. Pearly rallied his men, and asked for ideas on how they could use the cliffs to their advantage. They devised a plan to collapse some of the canyon walls on top of the incoming zerglings, but needed a plan on how to get the zerglings to come to them. Pearly volunteered to lure them into the canyon, being the fastest SCV driver among them. He went to the entrance of the canyon, and dug down. Zerglings exploded from the ground, and he lured them in.

Pearly cut the first group that came toward him with his fusion cutter, but that had lose him some time. He used the first round of explosives to slow them, not large enough to make them give up the chase but not small enough to where they'd be ineffective. He tried to use a concussive grenade to deter them further, but that only drove the zerglings into a further frenzy. A second blast went off, but that was working less effectively than the first. Zerglings began to run up the walls, forcing Pearly to peel them off of himself. He fired his last concussive grenade, forcing them off. Pearly was knocked to the ground, but still alive. He saw the horde coming for him, and forced his damaged SCV up. The SceeVee Corps sprung their traps, and explosions, sandtraps, and spikes all slaughtered the incoming zerglings.

Later, Lieutenant Hathaway came down with a dropship to pick up the SeeVee Corps members, and found the entire camp ringed with zergling corpses and skulls as well as SCVs jury rigged into working order. He asked what happened, and Wsoro told them they had zerg trouble. When he asked if they had mined the four hundred loads, they said they didn't. At first Hathaway was dismayed, but Wsoro told them they had managed to mine eight hundred loads.

Pearly later met with Raynor, and gave him a new schedule of how he could manage rotating out his SCVs while they still could work. He said that if Raynor did not sign it, he would resign his post. Raynor agreed to it, and told him of a mission that could use his new bridge project: the planned invasion of the planet Char.

Characters[]

SceeVee Special Engineering Corps[]

Supporting[]

Mentioned[]

Trivia[]

The name of the short story is a possible reference to the 1944 World War II film The Fighting Seabees.

References[]

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