The Star Reflection
Chapter I – The Red Morons
Maeltras dashed for cover as he heard the sound of a firing siege tank.
"How many seconds was that? Five or si…" – and the brave terran lost his thought as the ground behind him exploded, throwing bits of gravel and sand into to the air.
"Five"
Maeltras was lucky enough; he wasn't struck by the actual shell (which would have surely ripped him apart). However, his 'borrowed' Dominion powered armor got a little damaged in the back, or so the indicators said. He stumbled for a moment, but run on. Now he had plenty of time to get to the factory, which could shelter him from the Arclite's shock canon attacks for a while. Suddenly, he felt that someone wants to communicate with him. He recognized the telepathic image of his protoss comrade, Tashara.
"Maeltras, where are you?" a rather tired and as always creepy voice asked in his mind.
"I am entering the factory Tashara. It is south east of the base complex. Oh, you are in there. Excuse my foolishness, I am exhausted. Michelle is with you as well I see. Where is Fenris? " Maeltras replied, surprised at the effort that he used for such a short answer. The psi attack he had unleashed on that bunch of Dominion Goliath walkers drained much of his energy.
"He is trying to sneak near the tank in order to dispatch it. We found four vultures in the factory's hangars. They could be useful in helping us to escape from this place, before the bomb goes off", said Tashara, livening up a little.
"Good idea", thought Maeltras as he entered the factory. He didn't have time to look for doors so he had to use the ramp, on which the vehicles left the building. The tall terran noticed that the plant was clearly in a b a d state. It was a little bumped on the outside alright, but the inside was disastrous. White smoke was coming out of the silver robotic arms, which constructed machines. Some looked as if precisely sliced by a sword, with one part lying on the steel floor and the other hanging uselessly like a creeper in a jungle. Metal parts were scattered on the floor as if an Ultralisk went through the hall. Wheels, bits of a caterpillar mounting, huge legs of Goliaths: basically everything that a terran ground unit could have, inside or outside. All the control panels were down and the screens that accompanied them were flashing blood red. Maeltras spotted one that still showed the Terran Dominion logo, the hated arm with a whip. He took out a pistol he found before in the barracks and pulled the trigger, aiming at the screen.
"This is nothing in compare to the beautiful icon which represents the Sargas tribe!" he snapped as the monitor broke into a million pieces. Maeltras left the main hall of the factory and followed corridors which lead to the hangars of the building. As he drew closer, he felt the presence of Michelle and Tashara more and more distinctly. Soon he halted as two female figures emerged before him at the other end of the hangar. Michelle, with her long dark hair lying loose on her special, gray, ghost-like suit and Tashara, were both standing at the end of the corridor. As the distance between the terran guy and the protoss girl shrunk, their sparkling blue eyes went dark gold. The two of them always felt a certain ecstasy when they saw each other, ever since they met for the first time, on Auir. However, what Maeltras felt was more as if someone opened his chest with a blade and poured balsam inside it, while Tashara thought that her senses drowned in the calming power of a Khydarian crystal. Nevertheless, the fact that they kept deep feelings for each other was self-evident.
"Good to see you, Maeltras! Look what we've found!" Michelle greeted him warmly, glancing at the neatly parked vulture hover bikes and clapping her hands like a little girl from kindergarten. The man smiled to her politely, an emotion he didn't fully understand and learnt from the terran girl herself.
"Now we just have to wait for Fenris then" said Maeltras, closing his eyes and trying to sense his protoss in a telepathic link. He was supposed to be near the siege tank, but… Maeltras couldn't feel him. He focused, more intensively this time, to get a clearer image.
"A group of Dominion marines…five of these…three people making up the crew of the…
The tank.
It is still there."
"And it is not shooting at us" said Tashara, who followed Maeltras' thoughts and included Michelle in the telepathic link.
"You're talkin' about the Arclite? Well, I think it's quite obvious why it's not aiming the factory. These Dominion soldiers don't know that that dumb ass their commander ran away and doomed this base by activating the demo charge" broke in the terran girl.
"Michelle is correct," muttered Maeltras, getting more and more worried about his, a little weird, but loyal and courageous friend. He swallowed nervously and continued, "Anyway, we have to get Fenris out of there. Tashara, you mind the vultures. I and Michelle are going to look for him."
"OK. Good luck."
Michelle's dark gray combat suit made a screeching noise, as always when she transformed herself. She was not a normal terran, although she used to be. Since her birth, she possessed inactive abilities to change form, deriving probably from her high psi index. When Emperor Mengsk the First of the Terran Dominion and his temporary allies lost the battle on the infested platform over Char, he knew that he's going to need different sorts of super weapons to fight his enemies when the time comes. He created a secret laboratory complex on Chau Sara, the first planet that fell to the Zerg (and to the Protoss, shortly afterwards). No one really knew how did his scientists acquire Michelle, but it's certain that she spent at least two years in the labs. That's where her skills for changing form were discovered and developed. Of course, the first step was neural resocialization. After that she had a lot of major operations, many of which she survived only accidentally. One of them, however, was a breakthrough; the scientists placed some genes from a scorpion like creature called scantid in the most psionicly developed part of her brain. It was just an experiment. However, after the operation, Michelle's brain put her in a short, one day coma. During that coma her entire body was altered, the genes of a scantid spread all over her. When she woke up the next day, the first thing she did was a transformation into the famous Korhal IV's scorpion. It was just like an instinct for her. The same way that a predator hunts, she has to change form.
The metamorphosis was not perfect though. Her hands changed into pincers, more legs came out of her torso, she got a long tail, her skin got tough and black and her posture altered to fully resemble that of a scantid. Her eyes went evilly red and her snowy teeth were replaced by two brass-colored fangs. However, her face kept some features which gave it the look similar to that of her 'natural' face. Sometimes it was her long but slender nose, sometimes the s-shaped scar she bore on her chin. That rule applied to all her later mutations as well.
Mengsk's scientists, content of their discovery, supplied Michelle's body with genes of every other creature they could get, and so she was soon able to transform herself into a huge Ursadon, a panther-like Bengalaas and the peaceful Kakaru. The more the psionic woman metamorphosed and trained as a particular critter, the more her abilities as each evolved. Speed, agility and strength were some of these aspects. As an Ursadon she was stronger than the gigantic Ultralisk and the mutalisk would be a piece of cake for her Kakaru form.
Obviously, she was not the only experiment of that kind in the complex. The Dominion possessed a protoss prisoner of war, whom they received as a gift from some minor mercenary group. Experimentations carried on him were not as sophisticated as the ones Michelle had, though. In the beginning he was simply drugged and neurally resocialised. The poor alien lost nearly all his pride, creativity and moral decency he was once probably full of.
After Kerrigan's ascension, Mengsk's 'doctors' got the idea of producing a cyborg out of the protoss. His build was ideal for that; the blue-skinned templar with flashing golden eyes was enormously muscled. Mechanics equipped him with a mini shock canon instead of his right arm, while his left hand was replaced by a robotic, three-fingered one. A special piece of armor was also crafted for him. It consisted of just a few metal bands, a rather huge bag pack for ammunition and adamant underpants. Each grayish band was supplied with a defensive matrix generator, secretly powered by the psionic abilities of the protoss. Two were placed on his forearms, one on his torso (around the area where the terrans would have a belly button), two on his legs (just above his knees) and one on his forehead, placed like a tiara on the head of a queen. On each piece you could find five small, convex circles and tiny, blue balls of energy, whirling constantly inside the round shapes. There was also a mounted, C-18 Heavy Impaler gun on the tiara-like band, parallel to the left temple of the extraterrestrial being. In order to aim the weapon he received a sight, which hanged from the band and covered his left eye. The glassy material inside it was flaming red and gave the muscular protoss a really tough look. Of course, the device was not only there to look good, but provided essential information for training the cyborg's weapons on enemy targets.
And so when the cyborg was finished, he was sent on a few missions. Most of them consisted of killing dangerous animals and learning to cooperate with the brain-panned marines. The latter was very hard in the beginning. The brain-washed alien needed a competent ghost to teach him how to communicate. Fortunately for the Dominion, he learnt it quite quickly. However, he wasn't able to use the comm. unit because the protoss simply couldn't speak. He had to send thoughts to all soldiers near him simultaneously. This way his ability to 'whisper' thoughts to a particular being was lost forever. Neither Tashara nor Maeltras could later restore Fenris' skills. Yes, that robotized protoss was Fenris, having received the codename after he single-handily dispatched a lost Torrasque, which hailed from the Zerg brood of Fenris. Both he and Michelle were rescued from the laboratory by Maeltras and Tashara. The muscular, bionic man spent three years there, counting from the year when the Zerg defeated the three fleets over Char. The terran woman was caught a year after the war ended, and so she has been in the complex for 'just' two years.
The story of their leader, Maeltras, is also an intriguing one. Although his name suggests that he is a pure protoss, a true defender of Auir and the Khala…
He was in fact a terran.
TBC
