The Man Who Was a Dark Templar
Whether through the intense subjections of the chemical and surgical procedures done to the Ghost soldiers, or through sheer lack of technique, or a combination of the two, no one knew the true extent of their telepathic brains.
This is the story of Alex Reeve, a telepathic terran who was saved from the inhuman procedures done to other telepaths. A man who would be raised by an alien, and who would learn abilities that others could only dream of.
(Note: My logic is that since when Kerrigan undid the tampering to her mind, she could almost instantly use psionic storms, I supposed that a telepath who started training at a young age would be even more powerful. I hope that doesn't sound too stupid.)
Chapter 1: Escape from the Confederacy
(Note: This first part of the story takes place approximately fifteen or so years before the discovery of the Zerg and Protoss races.)
Maggie Reeve woke up especially early on her small military issue bed with an intense feeling of sickness in her stomach. The twenty six year old ghost soldier was a medium sized, well-toned athletic girl with dark brown hair. She jerked out of bed and ran straight into her small bathroom and vomited into the toilet. It was a strange feeling for her, considering that she had not been sick since she was five years old.
As a ghost, she had received every available inoculation for disease in existence, as well as receiving immune system boosters, and a controlled diet of specially engineered food. She had learned early on that the military put a lot of extra effort into their most elite and valuable soldiers.
After she was finished vomiting she still felt a little sick, but it wasn't nearly as bad as when she had gotten up. She stoop up in the tiny metallic bathroom and looked into the mirror at her reflection. She noticed that her face was a little white. Seeing with the ocular implants rather than her original human eyes gave her the ability to detect such changes to an incredible degree of precision.
"Sick," she said to herself, "How the hell did you get yourself sick Maggie?" She thought for a minute, and considered that it probably wouldn't be disease or food poisoning. She took a deep breath and then shut her eyes and chanted, "A ghost's mind and body must be one, mind and body as one." She attempted to relieve the feeling of sickness with her limited psionic connection to her own body.
After about thirty seconds she grunted, "Screw this, I'll just call the damn infirmary." She walked the ten feet across her entire metallic quarters minus the bathroom, to the telescreen. She spoke aloud her standard information, "Reeve, Maggie, Ghost number 8714, personal code: 91287614B12." When she finished, the telescreen beeped on and the goofy looking silver face of an animated man said, "Good morning Miss Reeve, what can I do for you today?"
Maggie was about to answer when something stopped her, a strong feeling from deep down inside. She didn't know what it was, only that some part of her subconscious mind didn't want to contact the infirmary. She struggled with the feeling, trying to tell herself that it was stupid and that sick people need to go to the doctor, but the feeling over road all logic. In the end, she said, "Computer, end session." The silver face said, "Goodbye Miss Reeve," and the screen blinked off.
She walked around for a minute or so trying to go over what the hell was wrong with her. "Maggie, you dumb girl," she said, "If you wake up sick in the morning then you've…." She stopped short in her sentence. Her eyes widened and she exclaimed very slowly, "Morning sickness." She ran across to her medicine cabinet where she had her standard military issue med kit. For some reason, the military had made it their policy in the last few years to issue pregnancy tests to female soldiers.
Even as she began to open the packaging and read the instructions, her mind was racing through all of her leave times. About a month ago on Mar Sara, she had been pretty high that night and didn't quite remember what she had done. That was the only time it could have been, she knew that for a certainty.
The pregnancy tester was a small palm computer with a tube sticking out of the side that she read was for taking blood. She stuck the small device up to her arm and pressed the button, and she felt a small prick in her skin. Then she held it in front of her face, desperately hoping that it would read out negative. She heard three beeps, and then the small black screen read, "Congratulations, you are going to be a mother."
"FUCKING SHIT!" she shouted as she flung the small device across the room, breaking it into five or six pieces. It was so easy to take the small pill; they were practically as common as napkins these days. Just one pill anytime within thirty-six hours before or after intercourse would guarantee that a pregnancy would not occur. She didn't remember taking one, but then again, she didn't remember sleeping with anyone either.
"Damn DL13," she exclaimed. DL13 was the common euphoric drug used by nearly every soldier, as well as some civilians. It was good stuff, a great high without any side effects or addictive properties. It was even sanctioned by the military, and could be bought legally from the trading posts. In the last few decades it and its sister drugs had more or less replaced alcohol, as they were considered to be safer, and their effects could be countered in seconds with antidotes.
And DL3 was safer than alcohol, but you could still do incredibly stupid things if you took too much, which of course she did. And here she was now, stuck with the consequences of a stupid mistake.
When she was done scolding herself, she started thinking about the standard procedure for ghost pregnancies. If the telepathic traits were passed on, and they almost always were, then the child would be taken from its mother from the time of birth. It would then be raised in a laboratory along with others, and the military training would begin around the age of seven or eight. All of the forced chemical and surgical tampering to the child's brain would begin shortly after. Hell, they might even remove the child's eyes and replace them with the ocular implants by thirteen. It always made for superior sniper capabilities.
And then she thought of that part as well. Aside from the incredibly harsh upbringing, the ghost soldier's career was the real worry. Although in the public eye ghosts were proclaimed to be the greatest and most elite soldiers of peace in the universe, the real fact was that they were mostly assassins. There weren't any real enemies to fight, save a few groups here and there whose political ideals were outside the government's range of tolerance. Maggie herself had gone in with a cloaking suit more times than she could stand and, under orders, executed unarmed men and women without even being seen.
Maggie sighed, "Those bastards aren't going to get their hands on any child of mine." Then she thought over her options. She hesitated to consider abortion, though it probably would be a far kinder thing to do than subject a child to the life of a ghost soldier.
But as she thought about abortion, another intense feeling came over her. For all of her life, she had been a soldier, and that was it. As she looked back over her life, there was nothing to be proud of, no real close friendships, no family, and no accomplishments that she would want to brag about. She was nothing but a killing machine, plain and simple. But this, this child, it might be something to change all of that. It was a beautiful life that she had created, an offspring, a baby.
She tried very hard to push these feelings aside, both for her own good, and for the baby's. An escape from the military was an incredibly dangerous thing to try, and it meant certain death for her if she failed. And even if she somehow could, where the hell could she go, she thought. A person couldn't go anywhere without an access code, and the minute she tried to use a civilian one, and the computer's scan for retina signature came up with ocular implants, a light would go on somewhere, and a hundred soldiers would be on her tail in minutes.
Then she thought of the stories she had heard, about the political and religious groups who had retreated to other distant planets capable of supporting life. Maybe they were only stories, she thought, but she knew that there were other inhabitable planets out there, having been to several of them herself on military surveys.
Her heart began to race and she told herself, "Stop it Maggie! This is ridiculous! They'll kill you." She tried to think over all the reports of soldier's attempts to go AWAL that she had read about. Every single one had resulted in either death, or apprehension followed by public execution. But then a smirk came across her face, as she realized that not one of those unsuccessful attempts had been made by a ghost.
Again her heart raced and she began to try to reason with herself, saying, "This is insane Maggie! You have a life to think about." Then she paused and said, "What life? What the hell do I have to lose anyway?" She sat down and thought how many people would cry over her death, and it was a very short list, and she wasn't even sure about the people on it. Finally she said to herself, "Fuck, I'll do it!"
She strapped on a handgun under her shoulder before putting on her jacket, (That was the only weapon that any soldier was aloud to have in their personal quarters so close to an intelligence installation.)
She guessed that her best strategy would be to get to the ghost gear, which would be in the large cement building across the base. She believed that with her wet wear, she might have a very slim chance of escaping with her life.
She ran across the base as fast as she could, wanting to be on her way before the morning sunlight shined in. She got to the door and saw only one guard on duty, and she knew exactly who it was, Johnny Wilkes. Johnny wasn't a ghost; he was just a normal marine who happened to be working for intelligence at the moment. He was a tall stocky man with a shaven head and half shaven beard.
She walked up casually to him and said, "Hey Johnny, I thought they got you off of the graveyard shift." He grunted, "Nah, those assholes caught me doing some DL13 on my shift and this is my damn punishment." She smiled and said, "Yeah, I hear yah. Sometimes this sort of duty is just too boring to stand. Yah got to do something to get by." They both shared a few laughs while talking about things they did while on ten-hour guard shifts.
As they were laughing and talking, she slowly moved in closer and closer to him, with her hand secretly on the handle of her concealed gun. By and by Johnny asked, "Hey Maggie, why are you out here anyway? Ghosts don't usually associate with us lowly marine dogs. And I know you're not out here for the view." She smiled and said, "Oh, I just couldn't sleep so I decided to go for a little walk, and then I saw you standing here, so I decided that you needed company."
Johnny smiled back and said, "Well, I'm always glad to see a pretty lady." Just then she saw her opening, he fully relaxed and was only loosely handling his gun. She jerked her own handgun out and whacked the handle of it into his forehead, knocking him out cold. She caught him before his head hit the ground, so as to prevent any further damage to his skull. She gently laid him down and took his gun and snatched his communicator. Then she looked down at him and said, "Sorry Johnny, I hope you don't get in too much trouble for this."
With that she ran into the warehouse and started searching through the gear. She selected a suite in good condition that had a moebius reactor in it. "Wow," she said to herself, "I'll bet I could get an extra two or three minutes of personal cloaking out of every charge with this baby." Then she ran over to the rifles, and found one with lockdown capability. She loaded it up with the highest grade of ammo, and then loaded as many extra clips into her bag as she could fit. It was strange to her, the first time she had fully top of the line gear was when she was going AWAL.
Finally, when she had all the gear she could think of needing, she strapped up and ran out. Johnny was still unconscious, and she was glad of that. She was prepared to kill for this child, but she wanted to try to avoid it. She had dealt out enough death in her life, and finding out that she was a mother was somehow putting all of that into perspective for her.
She moved through the darkness with great stealth, constantly scanning with her ocular implants for any other guards. She didn't want to use her personal cloaking field just yet, for it might become necessary to use it later, and she didn't want the reactor to be recharging then.
She managed to get about half way to the starport before the first signs of morning light began to shine in. That was the danger; the majority of soldiers would be getting up very soon for either breakfast or morning exercises. She could already see the group of cooks working through the window of the mess hall on her left.
She wandered if her little escape attempt really should have been more planned out. But still, there was no turning back now, not with Johnny lying unconscious and a bunch of stolen gear on her back. Nope, she was going to have to deal or die.
She looked desperately for a solution to her problem, and eventually, she found one that might suite her. It was a vulture, zipping around the base with a speed that could only come from ion thrusters. It pulled up next to a SCV that was just starting his duty for the day. The driver of the vulture said, "Yo! I need some damn repairs done boy! Now get off your sorry ass and do it so I can have this baby running before the general wakes up."
If there was one group of people in the military that didn't sit well with Maggie, it was those damn obnoxious vulture drivers. For whatever reason, they seemed to yell rather than talk almost whenever they opened their mouths.
She peered at the ion thrusters on the vulture and realized that they could take her across the rest of the huge installation to the starport in probably less than a minute. And it might not even look suspicious to any of the guards. Or at least, it wouldn't look suspicious enough that they would want to question a vulture rider and get a ten minute barrage of cursing from them for being bothered.
Maggie turned on the personal cloaking field and moved in quietly. She hit the rider in the back of the head very hard, perhaps a little harder than she had intended to. The SCV worker had his back turned, and didn't seem to have noticed anything. Maggie used her psionically-enhanced strength to quickly drag the rider behind a supply depot. There, she took off his jacket and bandanna and put them on so that she could pass as a rider, at least from a distance.
Then she went visible and walked up to the SCV and said in a very authoritative voice, "Hey pal, we're going to be constructing a few Behemoth Battlecruisers, and we need at least six more supply depots. Why don't you get started on that right now and I'll mention your extra initiative to the general." The SCV worker nodded and finished up on the bike quickly, and then headed over to begin working. She knew that any SCV worker wouldn't bother to question orders, they would just do as they were told.
She jumped on the vulture bike, trying very hard to remember the basic operation of a vehicle of that type. She had ridden one a few years before, and hadn't really been all that good at it. These controls were somewhat different than the model that she had rode, and she was having a small bit of difficulty.
After about five or six minutes she still wasn't sure, but the adrenaline rush she got from seeing the soldiers beginning to walk out of their bunkers forced her to go anyway. She pressed a few buttons hopefully and then twisted the throttle.
The bike lunged ahead at such a speed that her head slammed into the back of her seat. It went furiously fast, much faster than she wanted to go. The damn ion thrusters were moving the bike faster than a plane. It was about a ten second gap between the time that the great starport was a blur in the horizon, and when she came to a screeching halt right in front of it. Her heart hadn't raced like that since the first time she had gone into battle.
Just as she was stepping off of the bike, she heard the alert sound around the base. "Crap!" she said to herself. She sat back down on the bike and moved her hands to the weapon controls. There, she dropped every spider mine in the bike right out in front of the starport, incase they tried to get to her before she got a ship. She tried to be careful to spread them out enough so that they wouldn't all set off the first time someone came, but she didn't really know what she was doing in the first place.
When she was finished, she ran into the metallic elevator on the side of the starport and took it up to the ship storage level. She looked around; there were three wraiths on standby, one-drop ship, and a science vessel. She picked one of the wraiths, and jumped in.
Luckily for her, Maggie had played with the flight simulators as a hobby long ago, at least as much as the military would allow her to do so. She had always wanted to be a pilot, but she had learned that because of confederate policy, telepathic humans had two choices in life: become ghosts, or commit suicide.
The wraith's controls system wasn't that different than those in the simulator. The weapons systems were of course foreign to her, but as she looked at them she realized that they were pretty obvious.
Just then she heard another siren and a computerized voice said, "All soldiers are ordered to search the base for Maggie Reeve. She is a ghost and is considered armed and dangerous. Orders are shoot to kill." Maggie's heart began to race and she turned on the wraith's engines and started to pull out of the starport. But then her soldier's training kicked in, and instead of panicking, she thought about her situation logically. The wraith that she was in had been equipped with a cloaking device, and she knew that the only mobile unite that could track a cloaked wraith in space would be a science vessel. And there one was, on the ready to track her.
Her fingers danced around the controls until she got to the weapons systems and started firing at the science vessel. It took six or seven hits to demolish the thing, and in that time the enemy had probably figured out where she was based on the noise. When she was finished she flipped on the cloaking device and zipped out of the starport as fast as the ship would go.
She knew that everyone below would see a blur, but not a single targeting system in the terran military would allow a shot to be fired without a verified target. Not even the marines could fire their guns without one. She almost laughed at the stupid computers that the confederacy was using, for the ridiculous technology was saving her life.
Just then she felt a violent jerk that made her think she had spoken too soon. She looked down out of the window and saw a missile turret already firing a second shot at her. She exclaimed, "You're a ghost Maggie! You're supposed to know that those damn things can see cloaked units!"
She swerved to the side, but she took two more hits before she was clear, and the damage report on the wraith's computer was pretty serious. She wanted to just fly straight up, away from danger, but she knew that the wraith had to be in space flight mode before it would do that. She flipped a few switches and selected deep space mode on the screen, and there was a loud hissing noise. The cabin fully pressurized and the propulsion system changed for zero oxygen.
Then things started to get bumpy, as the new propulsion configuration seemed to be having trouble in the oxygen rich environment. It donned on her just how little she really knew about wraiths, and that she just might have done something horribly wrong. But suddenly the wraith went vertical and zoomed up into the sky.
She was out in space about three minutes after that, looking out into the clarity of the stars, and back at the planet she had just left, which was only a sphere in space now. She kept looking back, and didn't see anyone following her. She began to wander just how real the stories of all the unsuccessful escape attempts were. She had escaped using her personal cloaking field only once, and she was somewhat confident that she could have found a way to get by without it. Surely, she thought, there are many marines who could escape, and probably have. She began to feel hope that she really would find other people out there. She felt so stupid for letting the confederacy manipulate her so much into fearing them.
Right about then the Apollo reactor that was powering the wraith's cloaking field ran out and shut down to recharge. And just as the ship went visible, she saw the tactical screen go on and flash that there were two other wraiths, which had locked on to her and were in pursuit. She knew immediately that they were the two that she had left back at the starport. They didn't have their cloaking fields up, which made her nervous, considering that theirs were fully charged and on the ready, while hers was only beginning to charge. Still, they weren't in firing range, and weren't so much gaining on her as keeping pace with her, so she wasn't in any immediate danger that she could see.
She quickly focused on the controls again, and found the warp drive controls. She brought up the menu on the screen and selected a habitable but uninhabited planet called Vhas about eight light years away. She knew that the others could tail her through hyperspace, but she decided that she would worry about that when it happened. For the time being, she was doing great, and in truth, she hadn't genuinely expected get as far as she was.
She gave the computer it's final confirmation and it's warp drives engaged. The space around her turned to a swirling blue, and for a few seconds, the temperature inside of the wraith heated up before the environmental system adjusted for it.
She looked at the screen and the computer read that the warp trip was estimated to take seven hours and seventeen minutes. She sighed and looked down at her stomach, saying, "Well kid, maybe we've got a shot."
Maggie programmed the wraith's computer to give off an alert about ten minutes before dropping out of warp, and then she began to talk to her stomach. She didn't really feel crazy doing it, considering that she already talked to herself. She told her unborn child all about the things she wanted for it, and how much of a good mother she was going to try to be. And so many other pointless one-sided conversations that sprang up purely out of boredom. After about an hour though, she stopped talking, and just sat back watching the timer.
For the first few hours, she still felt very nervous, but at some point in there it faded away. She decided that for the first time in her life she had fought for something good and pure instead of just following orders. And she decided that even if she died at this point, she actually had something to be proud of in her life: That she had given up everything for her child.
Indeed, she even felt calm, but as the computer beeped that they were nearing the end of the warp, the adrenaline set right back in. She looked back through the hyperspace field. She of course knew that she couldn't have seen the other ships inside of it, but she couldn't help it anyhow.
The seconds now counted down like needles in her skin, each one seemed to make her almost jump. As a ghost soldier, this nervousness was not normal, but as a mother, she didn't really know what to think. The worry was not for her own life, but for her child's, and it was an intense feeling.
Finally she dropped out of warp into normal space, and the bright blue turned into black with white dots. The temperature dropped to freezing inside of the cabin for a few seconds before the ship's heaters automatically kicked in. And there she saw it, the beautiful blue and green world of Vhas. It was so richly strewn with plant and animal life. "If there really are other terrans who have escaped," she said to herself, "Then surely they must have gone to a place like this." She looked down at her stomach and said, "Maybe we'll find friends here."
Just then the two wraiths dropped out of warp, and she flipped on the cloaking device just in time to avoid their fire. She desperately worked with her ship's controls and maneuvered down into the planet's atmosphere. She was trying desperately to hurry, for if she did, they might lose sight of her blurry image and then she could lose them and land and ditch the ship, and then they might never find her.
She looked back at the two other wraiths, which still didn't have their cloaking devices on. She wandered why. And then, she saw something else drop out of warp, a science vessel. She saw the face of a nerdy little man come onto her communications screen. He seemed to be smirking at her. He said, "You messed up my vessel pretty bad you stupid girl, but how long do you think it takes twenty SCV's to put one of these things back together?"
She didn't respond, knowing that if she did it would probably give her position away. But it didn't matter, because a second after that an EMP shockwave was fired in her direction and all of the power in the Apollo reactor drained to nothing instantly. The wraiths cloaking field dissolved and she was now visible to her enemies even outside of the range of the science vessel. Even the Moebius reactor inside of her ghost suit was drained to zero.
"SHIT!" she shouted. She knew that her wraith was already badly damaged, and one hit would probably blow the damn thing up. She desperately plunged towards the planet, not having any idea how to survive much longer.
Just then, in the madness, she felt something very strange, it was a telepathic sensation. A connection to another telepath, but it was intense, and unlike connecting with any ghost that she knew. It was so very different. The danger that she was in momentarily went out of her mind as she realized that whatever being she was sensing, was not human.
-To be continued