Note that this fan fiction is set upon to separate but closely linked alternative realities. The first ‘Now’ is set in the supposed future, while ‘Then’ is set just after the events of Starcraft, and prior to those of Brood War. Neither reality is designed to closely match Brood War story line. The dependency of one reality to the other will grow more apparent with each chapter.
***
NOW. 1. PENELOPE
Jim Raynor awoke to the smell of frying eggs and the sound of frying bacon; and, as usual, was paradoxically reluctant to get up. As usual, instead he rolled over, groping around in the bed for the naked body of his beautiful young wife.
As usual in the mornings (though not, to his exceeding good fortune, in the evenings) she was absent. Jim grunted in annoyance.
'Jimmy!' called out a clear, singsong voice from the kitchen, 'your breakfast's ready! Come and get it!'
Looking forward to seeing it and her, Jimmy donned a kimono and followed the voice.
Her slender form, clad in a matching kimono reaching to mid-thigh, was stood with her back to him, facing the range. As always, his heart thumped painfully at the sight of her; both because he thanked God for every second that they were together, and because he truly knew what it was to have lost her with no hope of her ever returning. A feeling he would rather die than experience again.
Jimmy padded up behind his wife and kissed her neck. She smiled, and arched her head back like a stroked cat. She kissed his ear.
'Good morning, darling,' said Sarah Kerrigan.
Jimmy had been dreaming about a face and body, heart and soul like hers since he reached puberty. With red dreadlocks, a light smattering of freckles, large green eyes and full lips, hers may not have been the face that launched a thousand ships, but she turned heads in the street. Tall, slim and athletic with legs that went on forever, her body was more like that of a dancer than the hardened space warrior she, like him, once had been. Finally, she was the best partner, honourable and full of life, that he had ever had in a life spent too long in warfare.
She laid off their smooching and returned to pushing wonderful-smelling greasy slop around a pan with a spatula. 'Did you sleep well? You seemed to have a rough night. Is anything the matter?'
Jimmy cleared his throat. He was strangely reluctant to talk about it. He sat down at the table, and picked up his early morning copy of the New Mar Sara Chronicle, failing entirely to read the first page.
Sarah turned round, faced him, leaning back against the cooker. The pan sizzled away to itself. 'Darling?'
Raynor sighed. 'It's nothing.'
'Did you have that dream again?'
'Yes,' the man muttered like a young boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Sarah frowned, turning back to the range with rather too much emphasis. 'You shouldn't be getting these recurring dreams.' she said, rather cooler than might have been considered sympathetic. 'I've told you, you should let me take you into the center, use one of the total-immersion tanks, and deep hypnosis. You'd be a lot better.'
Both Raynor and Kerrigan were exceedingly glad to live in an age that had no further use for them -- as warrior or assassin, at least. Instead, Raynor had gone back to being a Marshall -- a law enforcer in a mainly law-abiding community. Whereas Kerrigan had turned her phenomenal psionic abilities and knowledge of psychology to treatment rather than destruction, helping the veterans who made up the vast majority of the male population of the re-founded colony to get over the horrors of the war they had all lived through. While most of her prospective patients were troubled by her dread -- though forever unmentioned -- past, they soon got over it, for she was phenomenal at her job. And, while the Terran Dominion and the remnants of the Protoss Empire were happy to keep themselves to themselves, and leave the re-founded colony alone, and with the Zerg scattered and useless without a clear leader, Raynor and Kerrigan were happy to remain peaceful members of a peaceful society, save for shooting the odd Zergling with the weapons they both retained.
'I told you, I don't want to do that,' muttered Raynor, shuffling his paper importantly.
'Why, James?' said the girl, turning round and looking hurt. 'Don't you trust me?'
Jim felt contrite. 'No, darling, it's not that. It's just... I don't want anyone messing with my head.'
She looked even more hurt, pouting like a little girl, despite approaching 30. 'But it wouldn't be just anyone. It'd be me. And I know your head better than anyone.' She smiled weakly. 'Remember when we first met?'
'Yeah...'
'I called you a pig, remember?'
Yeah...' Raynor muttered. This had been repeated rather too often for his attention span.
'But I was really flattered. Nobody had seen me that way before.'
'Yeah...' he muttered.
'I'm boring you, aren't I?'
No darling, of course not,' he muttered automatically.
She folded her arms across her full breasts. 'Okay, that's very amusing, but you must know James, these recurring dreams aren't healthy. Who was it, Zeratul again?'
'Tassadar,' Jim whispered. A man -- a Protoss -- they both knew to be dead.
'Tassadar,' said Sarah quietly. 'I'm not sure but I think that may be worse. And Zeratul gave me the creeps!'
'Yes, but darling...' said Raynor, getting up and taking her by the wrists. She stared up at him, bright green eyes showing her love and concern. 'These dreams... they're necessary, I think. Look around you. Look at these people. How many of them know who Tassadar is? What he did? They think that if anyone saved humanity from the Zerg, it was us.'
She looked puzzled, and more worried.
'One day nobody'll remember Tassadar at all, and -- short of you -- he was the greatest warrior who I ever fought with. And he sacrificed himself for all of us. Who here remembers that?'
She frowned. 'But Tassadar is remembered. He's a hero amongst his own people. Like you! What more do you want?'
'True, he's a hero,' Raynor agreed, 'but his people condemned him in their time, and who knows how long he will be remembered in the future? History is written by the winners -- and by the survivors. But I hope that as long as people like me are alive and remember Tassadar as he was, we will tell it like it is.'
Sarah frowned. 'Okay,' she muttered, and turned back to her cooking. Raynor smiled, glad to have avoided a difficult situation so easily, and sat back down. 'But don't think that I'm entirely convinced. I'm just sure you'll come round to my way of thinking eventually...'
Raynor glanced up sharply, shocked by the edge of his wife's voice, but she was turned away from him. His imagination, he guessed.
It was entirely possible, he surmised; for despite the brave face he put on for his wife, the dreams were truly terrifying. It was forever fighting, duels with Tassadar, who was once his friend, or Zeratul, the Dark Templar who he'd only briefly met, but felt like he'd known for much longer... Protoss charisma, he imagined. The duels were fought in darkness, and he wielded a strange sword of dark blue with a transparent blade that rippled like a streamer in the wind. And his opponents, though they seemed more like training duels than fights to the death, were forever shouting at him. The voices were the worst. They seemed to come across the depths of airless space, or through miles of cotton wool, or from under stormy seas, or, at best, backwards.
He'd had the same dream for months now, it seemed, and as yet he had managed to decipher only one of the words. Remember... had been the word most often from Tassadar, amongst seemingly endless harangues. What did Tassadar mean? He was dead, surely, and even so, his deeds were remembered. For all that he had said to his wife, Raynor did not think Tassadar could ever be forgotten.
The fights exhausted him, left him weary throughout the day, save for making love to his beautiful wife of which he thought he could never tire. Yet it seemed Zeratul had been focusing his efforts on one phrase recently. Raynor struggled to remember...
...and succeeded all too well.
Awake, awake! You are in grave danger!
Raynor shuddered like a horse, and a sideways twitch of his wrist, like the one employed so often in his endless fights with the unfamiliar weapon, sent the coffee pot flying off the table to shatter on the floor. It sounded unbelievably loud.
Sarah let out a shrill scream too loud for a human throat and leapt about a foot in the air. Her bare feet came down on the glass shards, and she let out a much more human wail of pain.
'Jimmy!' she wailed in rage and pain, tears swelling from her eyes, blood starting to flow from her feet. 'You goddamn idiot! Look what you've done to my feet!'
'Sorry! I'm really sorry!' Raynor gasped, and rushed to the bedroom, stepping into a pair of slippers and grabbing a first aid kit. For a moment he thought he glimpsed something dark in the mirror, but no phantasm, real or imagined, could keep him from his wife's need. God knew, he'd already done her enough damage.
He returned to find that she'd limped over to his chair and was sitting with her poor feet up on the table. The dressing gown had fallen over her thighs almost to her hips, but Raynor had eyes only for her soles, which were festooned with tiny glass shards. Blood was pooling over the table.
'Is it bad?' said Sarah tearfully. Though she'd taken frightful wounds in battle without a murmur, her face was covered with tears now.
'It looks fine, dear. It's bleeding a lot, but it isn't deep,' lied Raynor tremulously through his teeth. It looked really bad, in point of fact. Zeratul's warning, scarcely an easily accessible memory at the best of times, was forgotten.
And on the face of Sarah Kerrigan, while her husband wasn't looking, was a twisted, triumphant smile.
***
THEN. 1. THE RISE OF AENEAS
The Terran psionic covert operatives and espionage agents known as Ghosts did, in fact, have more in common with the Dark Templar than Zeratul had imagined when he wrote of them in his propaganda leaflet. Not only did they tap into the fundamental entropy of the universe, and wield many of the same powers... but they had been disenfranchised, abandoned by their own people, and now had nobody left but each other.
There was no place for them in Emperor Arcturus's new Terran Dominion. They, he had quite publicly stated, were a holdover to the bad old oppressive days of the Confederacy, and could be useful only for sowing the seeds of chaos and destruction. Also, he had not stated publicly, but had implied, that their psionic abilities had been responsible for summoning the Zerg -- deliberately or not, it made no difference. And, of course, he didn't trust them -- people who could read minds would be entirely able to divine many of the uncomfortable truths about the legality or otherwise of Arcturus's regime. Thus, all Ghosts were declared outlaw; a status, which meant that they had no rights of any kind, and any citizen who killed them would not only not face retribution, but would be actively lauded and given a bounty.
People had always hated and feared the Ghosts, for their covert lives and careers, for the nuclear weapons they alone wielded, and most of all, because who could be comfortable knowing that the person before them was capable of divining their most secret thoughts? The natural tendency of the Ghosts to view themselves as the ubermensch did not help matters. Thus the public were extremely eager to latch on to Arcturus's scapeghost policy. It was also publicly known that Kerrigan, Queen of the Zerg and without doubt the most hated woman in the history of humanity, who was assigned new atrocities on a daily basis despite the fact that she had not been reported to have moved off Char since the Overmind’s demise, had been a Ghost before she joined the Zerg (Arcturus had of course buried the facts about her betrayal -- another thing he didn't want nosy telepaths picking up on) and the state-fostered rumour was that she had crossed over and betrayed humanity willingly.
The Terran Dominion was united by a rod of iron, and the only dissident faction was the outlawed Jim Raynor (who had a price on his head so high he couldn't set foot near a Dominion world for the rest of his life) and his Colonial Militia, who had originally been redneck hicks from some backwater planet. They were essentially peasants in armor and had received only the most basic of training; so of course, they didn't number telepathic covert operatives within their original ranks. The Ghosts might have been quite happy to try to seek acceptance from him -- they didn't owe Arcturus any favours -- except for the fact that nobody knew where he was; and with the strict no-communication policy adopted for all aliens, the fact that he and his men were resting after the final battle on the smouldering ruin of Auir (which no other human had ever found) was not known.
Thus, the Ghosts were outsiders, wanted by no-one, feared and hunted by all. Some became bounty hunters or assassins, more often than not concealing their powers and true nature to give them that extra edge. But many, also, decided that the authorship of their woes could be attributed to one man... and they didn’t mean James Raynor. They decided also that that hatred was worth more to them than new careers hunting men for money.
The Ghosts did not hate the Confederate regime that had created them as much as might have been imagined. Not all of them were like Sarah Kerrigan, left traumatized and withdrawn by the conditioning that had turned them into Ghosts. Many, in fact, were quite grateful to have become that which they believed themselves to be -- superhuman -- and many were sufficiently desensitized or just evil enough to enjoy the work of assassination and mass destruction they were given. These Ghosts did not like at all the new ruler who had made them redundant. At once, a sizeable cabal of them had decided that they would stay loyal to the old regime, find a base, and decide how it might be restored and Arcturus Mengsk displaced -- though they’d be happy to settle for the latter. And that base was the place many of these evil, desensitized men and women remembered more fondly than Kerrigan did, who even as the Zerg Queen still had nightmares of her training.
The Ghost Training Compound on the blasted, abandoned world of Tarsonis.
When the Zerg had been lured to Tarsonis by Psi Emitters planted by General Duke on Arcturus Mengsk's command (the official line being, of course, that Kerrigan had turned traitor and summoned them there) naturally they all headed for the next most psionically active place, this one. However, it had mostly been used to house Cerebrates and protect them from the Protoss, who had attacked subsequently, so it escaped most of the destruction which covered most of Tarsonis' surface. Thus, when the Zerg and subsequently the Protoss had abandoned the blasted world, most of the buildings had been left standing.
Thus, they now were called home by the Cabal, as they had called themselves, and the nuclear weapons they had brought with them which, to a Ghost, were mother, lover and killer combined.
The Cabal was currently having a meeting. They had been angry when they came here, and they were angry still. They had found their new world barren, the only food left by the alien invaders being inaccessible or frequently inedible. Many of their scavenged dropships had been cannibalized for life support. And, while they were agreed on the hatred of Arcturus Mengsk, there was little else on which they were agreed. Those few Ghosts who did not believe they were supermen believed they were gods -- or angels of death at the very least. And this level of arrogance did not lead to the best cooperation. Thus they used to grind to a halt in heated discussions of the relative merits of restoring a Confederate government, points of the Nietzschean ideology of the new society they would create, and so forth.
But amongst them was a man who didn't care about that. A man named Conor.
Conor was a powerful telepath, a superb assassin and a consummate hand-to-hand fighter. More importantly, he was not drawn to the community of outcasts out of ideology, love of the Confederates or even hatred of Arcturus. He was drawn to them by one thing and one thing only. The desire to gain more power.
A desire he was about to fulfil.
Conor was a tall, powerful man with icy blue eyes and long, platinum blonde hair, and so, when he wanted to get people's attention, he got it. During a discussion about what level of elite status psionicists should be granted in the Ghost Utopia he stood up and banged his fist against the desk. The room went quiet.
'Friends,' he lied, 'what are we doing?'
'Planning our new soceity,' said a young woman with blonde hair and icy blue eyes. She was Conor’s younger sister, in fact, though they rarely acknowledged their relationship. Unlike him she cared passionately about the ideology and was the closest thing the Cabal currently had to a leader.
'True enough,' he agreed, 'but what happens when Arcturus is gone?'
Vague mutterings.
'Another evil dictator appears and takes his place. It's always the way it goes. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'
General mutterings of agreement.
'What I say to you, fellow Ghosts,' said Conor, thinking how gullible they all were, 'is that our goal should not be to kill Arcturus... but to replace him.'
More mutters. 'But how do we do that, Conor?' sneered one unbeliever. 'The public would never stand for a Ghost-sponsored leader, nor would they take kindly to us assassinating him. They practically think we gave birth to the Zerg!'
Conor noted the face of his heckler for a quick knife in the back. 'That may be so,' he gritted, 'but the way to replace Arcturus is not to replace him with an obvious Ghost puppet. Arcturus should be replaced... with Arcturus.'
General gasps of astonishment.
'Or at least,' Conor continued, 'someone who looks like him. I read a book recently -- so old it was printed on paper -- and in this book there was a king, who had a twin brother. So he would be no threat to the throne, he was kept locked up... with an iron mask over his face.'
Awed silence.
'So what do we do? We find someone who looks like Arcturus, or give someone plastic surgery to look like him, or clone him.' Cloning, discovered by the Terrans in the late twentieth century, had been outlawed on pain of execution in the early twenty-first, but it could be done.
'But then what, Conor?' said a new recruit, a young girl called Belinda with neck length blonde hair and light eyes of indeterminate colour. 'We can't control people's minds, our conditioning prevents us.'
Actually, Conor was working on that little problem, but he had no intention of letting that on. 'Maybe not, but we can still use post-hypnotic suggestions, or possibly borg implants like our ocular enhancers. All we have to do is find -- or make -- another Arcturus.
'And there is the problem. We don't have anywhere near like enough people on this world to find a lookalike, and we don't have the scientific equipment to make a clone. We will have to wait until one or other comes to light...'
'But all of us are agreed that your idea is a fine one,' said the voice of the nominal chairman who hadn't spoken throughout Conor's speech, and had been marked down for backstabbing by five separate Ghosts. 'Motion carried!' And he banged his gavel on the table.
