STARCRAFT
The Reformation
Chapter 1: New Gettysburg
The sign should have read 'Welcome to New Gettysburg.' Jagged holes blown through by supersonic gauss rifle fire had almost annihilated the words of the city, a pale reflection of the violence now raging around the grounds where it lay. The sign clanged as an invisible foot stomped across it. There was a flash of neon-blue light and a lithe red-haired woman in silver environment suit leapt over a low wall and crouched behind it. Sarah Kerrigan activated her comm-link and said, "Commander, we've had more trouble with the Protoss than we anticipated. We need backup if we want to hold them off."
"Roger that Kerrigan." The voice of the Commander crackled in her ears, "I'm going to try and re-direct some assets here, this damn planet's a mess… wait…"
During the pause, a group of her soldiers came barreling around a corner.
"El-tee! We got problems! BIG problems!" bellowed the lead marine.
"What happened," Kerrigan tersely asked.
"It's the Zerg! They're swarmin' all over the place! Our base is overrun!" Kerrigan stared at the soldier for a moment, reading the man's terror, feeling her own begin to rise up within her. With practiced ease, she squelched the unwanted emotion and called the ship again as more of her soldiers began to gather around her.
"Dammit Commander! Where are you? Where's Jim?" she muttered.
"Protoss!" bellowed a Firebat. Kerrigan glanced over the wall and saw a group of the protoss warriors known as zealots running towards them, the spidery walkers called Dragoons right behind them. She could feel their rage like a hot wind inside her mind.
"Zerg!" shouted a Vulture rider. Kerrigan turned and saw in the distance, the horrifying forms of the Zerg coming at them from the opposite direction.
"Uh, boys, our sit-rep just went red down here. We are stuck between the Protoss, the Zerg and a hard place. We need immediate evac. Now." Her radio crackled, but no response came through.
"Commander? Jim? Arcturus? How about that evac?"
"…Dammit Arcturus, don't do this…" the voice of Jim Raynor crackled, and then the line went dead. Sarah frowned. What didn't Jim want Arcturus to do? Surely they weren't going to be left here. Arcturus would move heaven and earth to help her right? Right? Jim and the Commander and Mike Liberty wouldn't leave her here like this…
"They're comin'!" bellowed a marine. Sarah looked again and saw that the Protoss were almost on top of them.
"Orders el-tee?" asked the lead marine. Sarah paused, then whipped around, raised her C-10 rifle and opened fire on the golden-armored aliens. The others took this as the order to cut loose and cut loose they did. Then the strangest thing happened. The Protoss, despite running straight into their fire, went straight through their lines. Not one Protoss lifted so much as a finger at the Terrans who had been doing their level best to kill them. As Kerrigan watched them run past she saw what was going on. The Protoss didn't care about the Terrans; they were after the Zerg as always. Suddenly she grunted as a particularly large protoss warrior shouldered her aside. The warrior, whose armor was much more elaborate than the others, turned and looked at her briefly. Kerrigan's eyes fastened on the aliens' blazing blue eyes and she had the disturbing feeling that the sum total of her existence had just been evaluated with a single glance. The warrior continued onward, conjuring a bright ball of pure psionic energy in his hands and hurled it at the oncoming Zerg.
"What the hell just happened?" asked a marine confusedly.
"Never mind, just kill anything Zerg!" bellowed Kerrigan. Maybe if they helped the Protoss, they would be less likely to turn around and kill her and the others after they were done with the Zerg. Her marines turned about and began to lay into the zerg alongside their somewhat-allies. Kerrigan cloaked and began to snipe any zerg she could get her sights on. After blasting a hydralisk that had skewered one of her marines she turned to fire at another, but spotted the big Protoss from earlier, who seemed not to notice the mutalisk diving towards him from above. She cocked her rifle and fired a Lockdown round at the zerg flyer. The round would not really work on an organic target but it distracted the mutalisk enough to have it turn towards her, its acidic glave wurms spraying towards her. She dived to the side, barely avoiding the attack. A flash of blue light and a noise like lightning crackled around her. Panting, Kerrigan looked up to see that the big protoss had dispatched the mutalisk. It nodded at her, a strangely human gesture and then it's eyes flared and a voice in her head, the voice of the Protoss she assumed, cried, "Behind you!" But it was too late.
Kerrigan gasped in shock. To her it felt as if she'd been punched simultaneously in the front and back. Numbly she gazed down and saw, to her horror, a pair of hydralisk claws sprouting from her torso, one over her left breast the other just to the right of her stomach.
It doesn't hurt, she thought distractedly. The hydralisk who had impaled her hissed evilly and began to lift her into the air and then it did hurt, by all the gods of old Earth did it hurt! She opened her mouth to scream, but the breath had been robbed from her. Instead all she did was make a weak gurgling, a sure sign of internal bleeding.
No! It can't end like this! I won't be torn apart by some mindless zerg beast! I WON'T!
With a last burst of psi-fueled strength, she drew her knife and swung it behind her. She felt it stick and the hydralisk shrieked. There was a strange buzzing noise and then she felt herself falling. She landed hard on her back, the scythe-like claws being shoved through her more by the impact, magnifying her pain. She coughed, bloody phlegm spattering out of her mouth. Her vision began to grow dim but she wasn't about to give up. Sarah Kerrigan was not going to go out quietly or without a fight. As she struggled for breath and her mind and body screamed for oxygen she concentrated on her closest comrades. Jim Raynor, the tough former Marshall whom she'd called a pig when they first met. The Commander, former Magistrate of the doomed colony of Mar Sara. Mike Liberty, renegade reporter, formerly reporting for the UNN. She could almost see them in her mind's eye and she reached up with her left arm, trying to somehow touch them and let them know what was happening. Instead, the face of that Protoss came into view, its strange, glowing blue eyes staring down at her, brows drawn in an expression of… regret? Curiosity? Kerrigan didn't care anymore. As the darkness closed in, she cried out one last time in her mind.
Jimmy!
A/N: Well there we are, the first chapter of Reformation! As you can already tell, things are a lot different, poor Sarah is dead. :(
Or is she? And if she's not, what's going to happen to her? Well, you'll have to find that out next time.