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.
THEN. 9. THE LONE SPARTAN
As Raynor rocketed towards Tarsonis’s terminator, the line between the sunshine and dark of the planet, on his Vulture hover bike, he tried not to think about what he was doing. Which is not to say he had no plan and was rushing into danger like a militarily-minded lemming. He had a very clear and well-defined plan. He just didn’t want to think about what was, and could only be, the final outcome.
One of the many new additions to his customised, ultra-souped up chariot was a map connected, via Magellan’s science vessel (and in all probability, Magellan himself) to planet-wide sensors, detectors and relays, along with those of all friendly vessels. He could now key up an up-to-the-minute tactical display of the area he was now hurtling into. It wasn’t good, showing as it did point-guard Wraiths approaching, and behind them, deploying from an englobing orbit to the planet’s airspace, a force so dense as to be opaque on the readout.
The vectors of the Wraiths suggested they would be over him in seconds.
James concentrated, so hard he felt his brains would leak out of his ears. To the best of his knowledge, no Ghost had ever done this before. Yet he had to, or it would result in his extinction. His face contorted in agony, his thoughts seethed, until what could only have been a sub-second later – though it felt like hours – some muscle seemed to permanently pop out of alignment in his brain. He felt his psionic cloaking field extend to cover the whole of his hoverbike.
The Wraiths screamed overhead, almost immediately afterward cloaking as he himself had been. Screamed to attack his men.
James’s head hurt already, from only the initial effort of holding his bike-wide obfuscational field, and he had to hold it for a while yet. And he could not allow himself to think what it seemed his men all knew – that the whole thing was hopeless. The Dominion fleet, outside the atmosphere, had the whole planet surrounded; and inside the atmosphere they were currently deploying a force which would overwhelm his own before long. With those odds, what difference did it make what he did? Even if he succeeded in detonating one nuke – several – several dozen – the Dominion had more than enough units to take such a loss easily, and there were by no means that many nukes available. And he knew that the chances of him successfully launching one were slim. If he was spotted and killed while targeting one, it would be wasted, and that was more than likely. Also, more than half the Ghosts perished in the radius of their own directed blasts, unable to successfully gauge where it would spread to on uneven terrain, or unable to target from a sufficient distance away. So his chances of causing one ground zero were low; and the chance of a second, minimal.
Yet he had to try.
It was not just the old campaigner do-or-die mentality, though he had acquired more than enough of that during his apprenticeships in the armies of the universe. Instead, something was nagging at his brain again. Something that suggested that once more, there was more to this than met the eye. The impulse that had directed him to become a Ghost? Certainly.
But now was no time to think about it; the map indicated that the first heavy troop concentration was coming up just over the horizon.
Concentrating on his cloaking subroutines more than ever – though whatever muscle it was in his brain felt like it would never fit right again – Raynor put on a burst of speed and roared towards the enemy.
This had been an industrial area of Tarsonis, but like the rest of the world, was now uniformly blasted by nuclear weapons and the rampaging Zerg. The Dominion had chosen a huge area of asphalt for a battalion landing site, now blasted and potholed, surrounded by Vespene refineries and chemical processing plants. Raynor could see, coming rapidly closer, a slowly descending Command Center surrounded by wildly circling Wraiths, ponderously patrolling Battlecruisers and other, smaller buildings coming in to land.
Raynor had to admit, they couldn’t have picked a better position for him personally than if they had tried. Under the cover of invisibility, he blasted his bike up to the perimeter of the deployment field and screeched it to a halt behind a supply depot. Shadowed sufficiently, he mercifully relaxed his psyche, dropping his cloak.
Raynor could well comprehend the tactics of deploying here, of course. The huge area of asphalt was ideal for setting up a whole mobile base – landing its buildings and surrounding them by the appropriate defenses. It was sufficiently far away from the defending forces – whom they knew were grossly outnumbered – so that they would be unlikely to reach this base, even if they had the resources. Meanwhile, it was an admirable supply and launch station for the full might of their forces.
However, Raynor was pretty sure they didn’t expect the Colonial Militia to have any Ghosts. Even if, in a worst-case scenario, the betrayers had told the Dominion that Raynor had become one himself, they would no doubt assume that he would never consider fighting on the front line and instead lead from the rear. Just as Raynor could assume that within the Command Center before him, the ranking officer was no higher than major. Some things never changed.
Raynor’s other big gamble was that they would have neither the time nor the inclination to deploy Missile Turrets. There was no threat from the air, and the dominion would be over confident. A Missile Turret, lacking a mind, would be unaffected by his telepathic invisibility and call the attention of those who could easily destroy him.
He peered cautiously round the side of the supply depot, taking care to keep well under the cover of shadow. This side of the planet was still nightbound, and the only light came from the stars, filtered through the radioactive fallout dust which choked the planet’s air, and the powerful arc headlamps of the buildings and vehicles deploying in swarms. However, in the dark penumbra sharply delineated by everything above ground level, they only served to illuminate themselves a lot better than they illuminated him.
Everything was going precisely as he had expected. In the centre was the Command Centre, surrounded by Factories, Starports, and Barracks and Supply Depots further out. Patrols of Marines rushed from place to place, everywhere, while on the far perimeter of the camp Siege Tanks were, one after another, rolling slowly into place and transforming into Siege Mode. In the air, Battlecruisers had taken up stationary defensive positions while Wraiths screamed around the outer edges, keeping the air safe for hypocrisy.
Raynor activated his personal cloak again, amazed at how easy it had become. It seemed that whatever had forever sprained in his mind was going to stay that way. It felt less wrong by the minute.
He checked the nuclear targeting device, strapped to his left wrist. Soon would be the optimum time to activate it.
For a moment, he felt a pang of guilt. These people weren’t responsible for Arcturus’s power-mad dreams of conquest. They were grunts, like his own men. Just people doing a job.
Every army he’d ever fought in, he’d always had the same thought, and he’d always gone on to fight and kill with the best of them.
Ours not to reason why, eh soldier?
Ah, crap.
Wobbling into view over the roof of the Command Center was the egg-shaped hull of a Science Vessel. Raynor cursed. Like the Turret, it too had too many sensors that could reveal his presence. If it cam any nearer, he was finished.
He had no idea why they were being used here. No doubt to aid in blasting out of the sky what few Wraiths he had got.
The black egg lurched through the sky, following seemingly idiosyncratic vectors and looking about to crash into Battlecruisers or other vessels with every movement. Jim watched it like as a mouse would watch an owl. If it came anywhere near him… But as it pitched about, it seemed to be operating at random. Jim wondered if it had been hooked up to a director-by-chance. The likelihood of it coming near him, one man in this whole theatre of war, was reassuringly small.
Yet in direct contradiction of all his hopes, the belighted egg wheeled in a small radius in space and came directly towards him.
‘Shit!’ Raynor swore, one hand going automatically to his belt as the other sought to unsling the canister rifle from his back. It took him a few seconds to realize what he was doing.
As the Science Vessel floated swiftly nearer, lights flashing in mind-bending patterns, Raynor selected a Lockdown canister by feel and rammed it into the breech of the rifle. Of course – this was bound to work. The Ghosts’ subliminal training was obviously more complete than even he had realized. But at what cost…
If it got to him before he got to it, that would be the end; but it seemed unlikely as, fully cloaked, Raynor leapt out into full light and fired the Lockdown shell at the Science Vessel at maximum range. His mark was true. Just as it would have got into detection range of him, the shell cracked against its hull and the vessel stopped its mad flight immediately. A translucent screen of energy shone around it as it hung, all systems locked and inoperative, in the sky.
Shocked yells and frantic orders echoes across the base, people milled out of the buildings like an agitated beehive. For Raynor, there was no more time to think. It was now or never.
Still in his position on open ground, he reached over to his left arm and tapped the controls on the instrument there with utter, programmed precision. Ignoring the increasing hubbub surrounding the locked-down vessel, he sighted along his arm at the distant Command Center and triggered the final activation sequence.
Hundreds of metros ahead of him, he knew a tiny, winking red laser light had just come into being on the wall of the building.
‘Nuclear launch detected,’ calmly stated his hoverbike, to the side of him.
No doubt it said the same in every other vehicle or communicator throughout the whole of the camp ahead of him, but its very calmness gave the lie to the reaction. All hell broke loose. All Marines immediately started running like blazes towards any available exits, before the panicked and yelled orders from their sergeants were reinforced through their neural implants and brought them to a shuddering halt. Wraiths started to scream in every direction – most by preference away from the camp. Siege Tanks started a ponderous transformation to their mobile forms.
It was all futile, Raynor thought. He doubted they’d have any time left to escape. Concentrating with all his will on keeping his cloak activated, he trained his arm on the distant target as steady as a rock. He was now able to calculate, thanks to his indoctrination, the precise length of time it would take the nuke to get here. It was only a few seconds, but he was well aware that it would last forever. For some that day, it would be the last few seconds of their lives.
By now the Dominion officers had connected the lockdown of the Science Vessel with the activation of a Ghost attack and Marines and Wraiths were flooding into the area from all sides. They were, however, helpless against an enemy they could not see. There had been, neither time nor inclination on the part of the Dominion to take time in building a Comsat Station. The only hope might have been that such was the press of Marines, one might have simply ran into him. But with a power Raynor didn’t know he had, he found the strength from somewhere to reach out and direct their minds to search behind some other building. He shocked even himself.
And then there was no more time for anything else.
There was a light in the sky, a roaring, and then something rocketed overhead at supersonic speed. Jim abandoned all other tasks, including aiming and maintaining his cloak, and hurled himself bodily into the open canopy of his Vulture – still parked behind the Supply Depot at the very edge of the camp. He collapsed into it painfully, precisely the wrong way around, but still managed to slam the switch that closed the front panel.
He didn’t see the blast, but he saw the sudden explosion of light all around which made the pale dawn – for night had come to an end – brighter than a thousand suns. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut. The ground shook beneath his chariot and outside the soundproofed hull, there was a blast and a roar that seemed fit to shatter the steel.
And then Raynor’s mind, already taxed and somehow altered by the psionic exertions of continual cloaking and mental suggestion, seemed to open up and encompass the whole of the ground zero explosion beyond him. He felt, for the briefest of moments that lasted for every lifetime it contained, every mind that perished in that nuclear holocaust. He knew their every dying thought, their every first memory. He knew the sum totality of every one of those souls, and his mind reeled.
Is this what the Ghosts feel as they do this? he wondered calmly, as the forces of the apocalypse were unleashed on the very planet around him. No wonder they are as they are. To know the power to snuff out so many beings, of such a phenomenal individual complexity, is to no longer feel human.
Above all else, he knew the true nature and power of entropy.
As the sound and fury of the nuclear explosion faded, he opened his eyes, and found himself somehow sitting upright in the saddle of his Vulture. He did not need to look around to know that all life in the vicinity of the explosion, save for a few pathetic Marines cowering behind the perimeter of the camp, had been extinguished. He knew it as clearly as he knew his own intelligence. Somehow, he realized that he knew all things. He was aware that he, himself, was the Universe.
Still on this transcendental plateau, he wondered calmly where to carry out the next nuclear attack on the Dominion forces. Equally calmly, he realized from somewhere that this would not be necessary. He had won.
He was proven right.
At that moment, the early dawn turned dark again. Raynor looked up in surprise – jolted down to purely human consciousness, to know the eternal pain of loss – to see what was blocking out the light.
The sky was filling with the characteristic yellow metal of the Protoss, as a whole fleet of their vessels materialized seemingly out of nowhere. On Raynor’s dashboard, a frantic communicator light began to blink, indicating that someone back at his own base wanted to speak to him, urgently. He could guess what it was about. He could only stare up at the appearing fleet in shock.
Greetings, Raynor of the Terrans, came into Raynor’s mind in aged, dry, weary tones.
‘Zeratul!’ gasped Raynor, speaking aloud in his surprise. ‘What are you doing here?’
Rescuing one of my new brethren, responded the Protoss psionically. Along, of course, with his subordinate armies. We all need those.
‘Rescuing one of your new brethren?’ Raynor could only splutter helplessly, even as a Protoss transport detached from the fleet and came heading towards his bike. ‘Who? What are you talking about?’
Zeratul laughed, a ghostly, lungless laugh that only existed on the telepathic plane and felt like icy water and dry leaves. Welcome to the ranks of the Dark Templar, Raynor, was all he said as the transport took Raynor’s bike into its belly.
After that, nothing was ever the same again.
NOW. 9. DEMETER’S SEARCH Despite his wife’s pregnancy, Raynor was still heavy of heart as he headed for home at the end of the day. Apart from the day’s routine business of low-level and quite possibly redundant law enforcement, he had carried out his promises to the young Wraith pilot. He’d had Tom Kazansky, the finest pilot of his generation, carry out a low-level scouting mission over as large an area as had seemed sensible. He’d spotted nothing. He’d had Magellan, the finest scientific mind of the Dominion and past master of detection technology carry out a sensor sweep searching for the unique serotonin-enhanced biological signatures of the Ghosts. Apart from a couple of other Ghosts in the colony, Kerrigan, and very oddly, Raynor himself – which Magellan at a loss to explain except as a glitch in the equipment – there had been no reading for the girl. All was blank.
Now Raynor had to go home and ask his wife to do a psi-sweep for other psionically active beings. And for some reason, he felt quite apprehensive about the prospect.
There had always been the tacit fear, on Raynor’s part, that any exertion of her inhuman powers might reverse her genetic cleansing and start a mutation back into an Infested form. However, he knew this to be false. For one thing, he’d had private discussions about it with Magellan, who assured him it was impossible. Also, Kerrigan had been psionically active since long before she was a Zerg, and her powers had been within recognizable human limits.
Raynor sensed guiltily on some level that his fears were borne out of prejudice. Telepaths had long since been viewed with hatred and suspicion by the other Terrans, and their almost global recruitment into the ranks of the murderous Ghosts had not improved their reputation. He himself had always prided himself on being open minded, but had been in the unenviable position of having a lover who could read his mind. He’d always hoped he’d gotten over it, but perhaps…
In any case, he had to ask. His duty as Marshall demanded it.
‘Hello, sweetheart,’ said Sarah as he walked through the front door of their home and hung up his hat. She was dressed in a tight black T-shirt and shorts, her red dreadlocks tied back except for a few wisps at the front, her long legs ending in huge military boots, looking enormously attractive. She leaned back to kiss him on the mouth as he walked up behind her. They shared a moment in which the food could be left unattended.
‘What’s cooking?’ he asked after they broke off.
‘I thought I might try making home-made gnocchi with pesto,’ she said.
‘Sounds great,’ said Raynor in utter incomprehension, and wandered off to shower and change.
When he returned, the food was ready. It was, as was usual with the food they cooked (both had found a certain unexpected talent) delicious.
‘So what did you do today?’ asked Sarah offhandedly between forkfulls, yellow eyes gleaming out from under the falling-forward orange mane.
Raynor swallowed. ‘Well. I had to handle this missing person case.’
‘Really?’ said Sarah in studied casualness, staring at him fixedly. Raynor felt oddly uncomfortable. ‘Who was it?’
‘It was Belinda Lister. One of the Ghosts.’
If Sarah knew who this was she didn’t react. ‘Oh. That’s… worrying.’
In a nervous pause, Raynor plunged on ahead. ‘She’s young, living with this guy. She disappeared a couple of days ago. Nobody’s seen her since then.’
‘Maybe she got fed up with Mr. Right, decided to take off and leave him,’ shrugged Kerrigan, toying with her food with a fork.
Raynor felt oddly incensed by this. ‘I don’t think so! They seemed perfectly happy together. And usually someone finds out about that kind of thing. I think it’s more likely she had an accident – maybe Zerg.’
Kerrigan looked up. ‘Zerg?’ she said questioningly.
‘Zerg,’ responded Raynor emphatically.
‘Isn’t the colony well-defended?’
‘It would seem not. The other day, me and Kazansky found…‘ Raynor realized what he was saying, and too late, shut himself up by abrupt force.
‘What? What did you and Kazansky find?’ asked Kerrigan coldly.
‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’ Raynor muttered.
Kerrigan looked away in anger. ‘Fine.’ She laid into her dinner, forcefully.
After a substantial and uneasy silence, Raynor resumed. ‘Anyway, I had Kazansky and Magellan sweep the area. They didn’t find her. I did suggest to her boyfriend that there was one more thing I could try.’
‘Oh? And what might that be?’
‘That you could do a psi-scan of the area and try to sense her.’
Kerrigan looked up, stared out of the window into the freezing ashworld night. ‘You thought I could do that, then did you?’
Raynor felt an uncharacteristic and rootless frustration well up deep within him. For some reason, he was reminded of Zeratul, and Tassadar. He could almost see their shouting faces…
‘Look, it was just a suggestion. I don’t know how your psionic stuff works. I just thought it most likely you could detect a fellow Ghost, if anyone.’
‘That may be so,’ she muttered. ‘But what gives you the impression I would want to?’
Raynor was dumbfounded. ‘Why shouldn’t you? Aren’t you the colony counselor?’
‘Hmm. And yet contact with a fellow Ghost would likely not be healthy for both of us. You know exactly what I’m talking about.’ She stared at him pointedly.
No, Raynor did not. ‘Well, what? How can it be so terrible? All you have to do is see if you can make contact, see if you can find where this woman is. She may be dying out there.’
‘What gives you the impression that this thing of which you speak is even possible? What do you know about the status and the powers of being a Ghost? What makes you such an expert on parapsychological phenomena, all of a sudden?’ She glared at him, eyes blazing.
James was taken aback, but it rapidly took the form of righteous anger rather than retreat. He’d had no idea that his wife – despite her status as the devastator of races, and conqueror of worlds – could be so selfish. ‘Look, why can’t you at least try this simple thing?’ he raged. ‘That’s all I’m asking. This is one of my people out there, who may be dying in agony. One of my people who’ve stuck with me through thick and thin, on Tarsonis and Shakuras and in the attack on this blasted world!’
Kerrigan stared at him, and as she did so it seemed that both their anger drained away. Under that neutral stare, Raynor felt confused somehow. He felt sorry for shouting, but didn’t say it. Something told him to stand his ground.
‘Very well then James,’ she said quietly. ‘I will do what you ask. But understand, what I look for may already be a phantom, and what I find may well not be what you wanted.’
‘Okay. As long as you try. That’s all I’m asking,’ Raynor muttered, lowering his gaze to his food.
