Starcraft: Raynor's Raiders
A Continuation of Raynor's Raiders (2006-2007)
RELENTLESS
Stanford University School of Medicine
Genome Institute of Singapore
About the Author and the Series
The author, Relentless, was formerly a Fan Fiction Moderator at SCO, where under the pseudonym of "X9", he wrote the popular "Raynor's Raiders" series from 2006-2007. The work contained within is a spiritual continuation of the former series, but entirely redesigned, taking into account various elements from Starcraft II, and with an entirely different plot and cast of characters. In-universe, the story is set in 2504 – four years after the Brood War and chronologically at the same time that Starcraft II begins, albeit with a plot divergent from the game.
Critical critiques would be much appreciated. The author is presently at the Genome Institute of Singapore and has been accepted as a PhD student to Stanford University School of Medicine. His personal research interests regard embryonic stem cells and lineage reprogramming.
CHAPTER ONE
THE BEND SINISTER
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness … it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…"
Charles Dickens (1859), A Tale of Two Cities, Dominion Archives for Significant Holographic, Cinematic, and Written Terran Works
Logistical Support Area Chenoweth, Terran Dominion Fifth Fleet Expeditionary Logistics Command
Bountiful, 36 Aegis System, Korprulu Sector
THE antediluvian wooden doors came apart to admit a towering figure standing in the doorway. What little he could discern through the sudden ejecta of wooden shrapnel struck him as obscene, inhuman.
There stood a massive mechanical automaton of imposing stature—cinematically highlighted by the brilliance of the hallway beyond. Though the juggernaut was of humanoid shape and proportion, its analog to a head—a half sphere of polarized glassine armor inscribed with a leering skull—made it bereft of any lingering traces of humanity. Its oversized forearms were fused to its shoulders with obvious mechanical articulations. Metallic vertebrae ran from its armored midsection to its waist.
Four penetrating neon lights burned brilliantly on its chest, projecting forward vanes of brilliant austere light that pierced the darkness. As the figure shifted forward, he saw the massive mechanical vices that the automaton had for hands—clutching an oversized weapon that had a trill of greasy smoke running from its tip. The weapon seemed to tremor with its own feral glee, an unconcealed bloodlust.
The juggernaut bounded forward two steps, clearing whatever filigree remained of the door, then focused its chest-mounted spotlights and weapon sight on the curled, fetal figure writhing on the floor.
"Doc?"
The voice was flat, mechanical, bereft of all human intonation.
A fortissimo of machine gun fire rattled outside, providing a bass beat that pulsated within the room, dislodging flakes of chipped paint from the walls.
His trembling eyes met the juggernaut's fearsome visage—the massive figure readied his weapon acutely on him, as if assigning all its attention and powers of observation upon the emaciated man that huddled before it.
His own voice was thin—reedy, atrophied from months of disuse. It emerged as a croak.
"Yes."
There was an abrupt mechanical rattle—he flinched, hugging his face against his legs and awaiting the last brilliant flash that would herald the end.
One—
Three—
Finally ten frantic heartbeats passed; his pulse still swam, and he still perceived acutely the nauseous odor of greasy oil and the distant thunderclaps.
He raised his unkempt head from his fetal ball to see what had prompted the original noise.
A polarized visor had lifted; the juggernaut now had a face—the face of the most notorious outlaw in the Outer Rim. As the suit's internal lighting defined and illuminated the face—the chiseled brown eyes, the satisfactory smile, the sweat-bound, ragged black hair—he could hardly contain his surprise.
"Jim Raynor?"
Crimson sheets of lightning pulsed outside—capital ship battery fire—intermittingly lighting the renegade's face as the man withdrew a cigarette from one of his ammo pouches and slotted it between the lips before the chit self-lit itself.
"Yeah."
He took a deep breath, and then exhaled into the hyperborean air of the saferoom.
"I'm back."
The new half hour was so peculiar—after being imprisoned for four years in this sepulchral Dominion gulag, everything had atrophied; his body, his musculature, his lungs, his intellect—his pride. Even now, he still hung his head; used to being treated no better than a mangy stray at the hands of the resocialized psychopaths and serial offenders that the Dominion had indoctrinated into running this prison.
As his hearing began to recover, he caught phrases from the background hum of military communications chatter that permeated the now-liberated prison. Raynor's Raiders—the freedom fighters or terrorists (depending on whose opinion you sought)—were back. Though his scholarly background had prepared him little to understand the military verbiage and codewords that slid through the radio, he now understood that the Raiders had staged an obviously successful attack against LSA Chenoweth, and from the exultant vulgarities and rejoicings that came through the comm, he surmised that the raid had gone very well and that the Dominion troops had been almost completely been dispatched.
Once or twice, he thought he heard pleas from some Dominion commanders to surrender—these were unconditionally met by chatters of automatic fire in the background. Clearly, the insurgents had little mercy to tender for the peons of the police state that had attempted to exterminate them for the past four years. Raynor's Raiders appeared to have little acquaintance with the rules of humane warfare that the terrans had once established a long time ago on Earth … Ironically, "humane" warfare was tossed out the window upon the entrance of two xenophobic races to the Korprulu Sector—the protoss and the zerg—who had announced their presence by vaporizing a dozen terran worlds and then proceeded to systematically slaughter whatever few survivors were left.
This was all four years ago … before the Maginot Line encircling the Inner Colonies had been burst apart, before the military police had arrested everybody at the University—before Tarsonis fell and the Terran Dominion rose from the ashes of the Terran Confederacy to subjugate the few terran survivors in the Korprulu Sector.
Too much had changed—the terror as the floodgates of the sky burst and alien warships were flung down the heavens, the pregnant cry he had released as Dominion troops discovered his hiding place at the University, the shrill screams as the prison wardens drilled into his spine the tracking bug to eternally prevent his escape.
And now, suddenly, the doors of the prison were flung open; victorious rebels in Marine power armor now paraded in the exercise courts and parade grounds as aircraft touched down and the unmistakable silhouette of a rebel battlecruiser stood in the sky astride the clouds.
After their surprise meeting, Raynor had rushed off to coordinate the ongoing assault elsewhere in the prison—a security detail of Marines had been assigned to guard Gardner while the rest of the Dominion troops were exterminated.
Gardner's gaze was drifting over the prison airfield, where dropships marked in rebel colors were offloading ponderous SCVs—undoubtedly to steal the prison's bountiful supplies—as the heavy clank of footsteps sounded, and he turned crisply to find Raynor's prominent figure, striding through his troops.
Raynor was largely how he had looked scarcely half an hour ago, except the holographic ammo counter on his gauss rifle read several hundred less rounds, more smoke bristled from the tip of his rifle, and several new neosteel welts had been impressed upon his armor.
He jabbed a massive mechanical figure at Gardner.
"Well rested, Doc?"
"Yes."
"They fried the spine bug?"
"Yes, thank you."
Raynor indicated a room—the prison commandant's former office, and jerked a thumb.
"Let's talk."
Gardner had been admitted to the commandant's office many times in the course of these past four tortuous years. Being one of the most "dangerous enemies of the state"—that is, he was an intellectual—the Dominion tyrants had paid great expense to ensure that his acumen and spirit would be forever shattered in this prison, such that he could never think coherently again or utter another word against the Dominion.
He had been very close to breaking—perhaps in a few months; if the Raiders had arrived just a bit later, they would have found a brain-dead vegetable. But now, his mind was still functioning, and the past half hour was enough to absolve himself of the past four years and for him to reassume whatever tatters of intellectualism and intellect that he had left at his hand.
The commandant's office had some prominent changes—an oily, almost black, bloodstain was still dripping its way down the wall, there were some brass casings on the carpet, and the Dominion flag on the flagstand had been hastily exchanged for a new flag—a three-pronged trident intercepting a shield. Undoubtedly the colors of the Raiders.
Raynor made his way over to the commandant's former chair, then promptly collapsed in his power armor, the chair sagging audibly under the man's mechanical bulk.
"Doc … Austin Gardner? University of Brontes?"
"Yes", he said testily, "Professor Gardner, not just 'Doc', if you please, sir."
"I came all this way just to save ya", said the revolutionary.
"If you came here just to save me, I'd expect you know my name better."
Raynor raised an eyebrow.
"Not sure why you're so … testy—expected ya to be damned grateful that we busted ya outta here. 'Neways, Professor. To save a lot of time, I'm here for one reason."
"Okay."
"We need your help", said Raynor, leaning forward on the table and giving his most sincere look, with that cigarette still stuck between his lips.
Gardner waited for some kind of punctuating remark—when Raynor offered none, Gardner looked at him quizzically.
"Despite what my CV would lead you to think, I'm not some kind of biological warfare whiz."
"What's a CV?" asked Raynor absently.
"Never mind", said Gardner firmly. "Yes, my research was in biology; proteins. I don't have any know-how to whip some kind of biological weapon of mass destruction out of my ass. I can't understand why you'd want me."
"Didn't those proteins—uhh, prions or som'thing, be used as weapons once?"
"Yes, on Earth, when spongiform encephalopathy was used as a discreet biological warfare weapon in 2080 in Africa, when it ended up killing a fifth of the continent's population in twenty years. And no, I don't work on prions. My work is strictly academic. No biological weapons or anything. To be frank, not to sound rude, I'd much rather prefer to leave this place right away and find my family."
If they're still alive.
"Yeah, yeah, all in good time", said Raynor slowly.
Gardner's temper flared at the thought of his family and this impudent rebel standing before him. "Your attitude is starting to piss me off—sir."
Raynor's expression hardened—he chucked out the cigarette onto the carpet.
"Okay, enough with the games, 'Professor'. I didn't come all this way for nothing or to ask ya for some biological weapons. I'm here because I read what you wrote four years ago about the Dominion."
Gardner remembered with crystalline clarity those words—those words that had ended in the complete shutdown of the University by the Dominion and his own abduction and torture.
"I don't really want to talk about that now", he admitted.
"Hey", said Raynor firmly. The rebel pounded the table—the mechanical strength afforded by his articulated armor made spider cracks flutter through the wooden table. He leveled an armored finger at Gardner.
"I lost thirty-one good men and women fetching your ass outta this goddamn place. The least you can do is pay some respect and look me in the eye when I talk."
Gardner met the rebel's incendiary stare.
Raynor began.
"Four years ago, you wrote on a supposedly-private diary your thoughts about the Dominion and the regime change after Mengsk took over. A student hacker browsing the secure University cyberspace found your diary … put 'em online."
Gardner squeezed shut his eyes—four years of solitary desolation had afforded thousands of chances to consider everything from every perspective. If he was right, wrong. If he had damned himself to this hellish fate or if it was the Dominion that had. As they said, when everyone around you is insane, then you might be the last sane person alive. In the end, manacled to the walls, he had admitted to himself his own complicity—he only had himself to blame for his own virtual death in this prison and the overthrow of the entire University.
"Millions of citizens read your words in days, and agreed with you. When Dominion Domestic Intelligence traced the source of that traffic and found you, they invaded your campus, put you and every other faculty member, staff, and student in jail. Your life was over, and the lives of tens of thousands of others."
"I'm not into politics", whispered Gardner; recalling the very words he screamed at the Dominion marines as they dragged him into the awaiting dropship.
"Clearly, you knew something", said Raynor sharply. "Now, listen to me—Everyone knows that you knew something on the inside. They still talk about it on the 'net to this very day. How a university professor like you knew so much that you posted in your diary."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Don't play stupid, doc", said Raynor bluntly. "In the first few months after 'His Majesty' took power, he began purges just as bad as the 'ethnic cleansing' that the UED did back on Old Terra. Killed off Korhalian politicians that he was allied with—Mengsk used them to boost up the Sons of Korhal, and when he didn't need them anymore in the Dominion, got rid of 'em. Killed ex-Confederates that surrendered to him but he didn't like. Imprisoned every which advocate of free speech, intellectual, and even semi-noteworthy political figure that might one day oppose him. Abducted every child with psionic potential. A preemptive strike to consolidate his empire."
"You knew what was going on. You wrote about planets and places that were gonna be 'cleansed' a week before it actually happened. Predicted which Dominion politicians and military commanders were gonna be stabbed in the back by Mengsk… you did it way in advance."
"I'm a scientist. It's my job to be predictive" defended Gardner.
"Bullshit, 'Doc'. You science types just gaze into fuckin' crystal balls all day in your ivory tower."
Gardner's calloused fingers clenched.
"Now, Doc. There's two hypotheses that everyone's talkin' about. Either you are a teep", said Raynor, referring to the vernacular descriptor for a telepath, "or else you got an inside source in the Dominion."
A smile creased Raynor's lips.
"Either one is good for me. But for goddarn sure you're not a teep."
"And how do you know that?"
"I … have experience in conversations dealing with teeps. And you sure as hell aren't one. Indeed, Doc, if you were a teep, I wouldn't be talkin' to you right now. You'd either be in the Ghost Program now or else be one of those corpses lying outside the Academy; one of the ones that didn't make the meat grinder."
"So—all I gotta know is the name of your source. Then you can go."
"What do you mean … 'then' I can go?"
"I want the name of your fuckin' source!" spat Raynor acridly. He leveled a finger at the emaciated doctor apposed to him. "You have no fuckin' idea what the past four years have been! You've been sitting here in your goddamn prison, working out everyday and watching the 'Net, getting to feel sorry for yourself. I've been to hell and back. You have no fuckin' idea—"
Raynor began to tick off the worlds on fingers. "Mar Sara. Antiga Prime. Tarsonis. Char. Aiur. Korhal. Urona Sigma. Left, right, up, down. Zerg, Protoss, Dominion, Confederates, UED. Day, night. Livin', dying. Good, bad."
"I gotta kill Mengsk", muttered Raynor under his breath.
Gardner eyed the rebel leader curiously; something within the volatile man had clearly snapped.
"I gotta kill Mengsk!" burst Raynor, leveling a trembling finger at Gardner. "And you're gonna tell me the source ya got. I've lost one thousand, three hundred and fifty hour men in these last fuckin' four years… I know they'll follow me, but things are stretchin' thin."
Gardner's sigh was like one he proffered to the many shortsighted students who failed to appreciate his classes.
"If I may ask, 'sir'. What're you fighting for?"
"To fuckin' kill Mengsk! He took everything! From me. From us. From every man, woman, and child in the Korprulu" ranted the firebrand.
Gardner asked, "Are you familiar with Guevara? Marcos?"
"No. Should I be?"
The academic shook his head crossly.
"These were revolutionary leaders on Old Earth, five hundred years ago. Not just fighters—at heart, they were intellectuals. Academics, writers, political theorists."
Raynor's laugh was bitter.
"Pansy ass types. You think Mengsk's Dominion is going to fall just by organizing some rallies?"
"Ignorant", spat Gardner.
Raynor's expression hardened.
"Go fuck yourself, Professor", he said callously. "I know your kind very well. All talk, but nothing happens. You'll cry out all day that the Dominion is terrible but don't even have the heart to pull the trigger. I regret rescuing you from Chenoweth. It's clear you're fuckin' useless."
"I thank you for rescuing me", replied Gardner. "I'm truly thankful."
"But what I see disgusts me to the core. These people—Guevara, Marcos—liberated entire countries on Old Earth. They fought because the government ostracized the people, left them bereft of resources and land until the capitalist corporations extracted extravagant sums from the people for just a few drops of water. Guevara, Marcos, and all the others of their generation were not fighters at heart. They were intellectuals—abhorred by what they saw until they were compelled by their conscience to engineer an entirely new way of life."
"I know the 'Raiders' from before I went into the gulag", admitted Gardner. "When I was writing that diary, I was following all the revolutionary groups in the Sector in the hopes that somehow, someway that someone was reading and would be motivated to fight. When I looked into the Raiders, all I saw was that they were led by a firebrand who carelessly threw the lives of his troops away on Char in the blind pursuit of a girl he once knew—and then afterwards, continued to cast aside his troops in reckless rage to kill a man who had once wronged him long ago."
"You're outta your fuckin' mind if you think Mengsk is a saint", snarled Raynor. Nevertheless, Gardner saw the veins of madness pulse through Raynor's face; the rebel was livid.
"Mengsk is no saint, but neither are you. He's bent on killing you, and you're bent on killing him, no matter the cost. He'd trade away a thousand men in a farfetched attempt to kill you, and you'd just do the same. You're both as terrible—coldhearted chauvinists who care nothing for the lives of your fellow man and who have made their point of existence just to kill other people."
"No plans for even what'll you do after you overthrow Mengk. What, you'll replace the government of the Dominion with the command infrastructure of a ragtag rebel group?"
Raynor snapped, "A democracy, of course."
"You don't know the first thing about setting up a democracy. You didn't even go to college. Whatever's left of your mental acumen is bent on inventing new ways to kill other people and blindly lusting after some girl. Don't lie to yourself, 'General'. You're an assassin bent on killing Mengsk. You have no plans to transform the Korpulu into a better place."
"And of course, you, the brilliant university professor, have some fantastic scheme for this fuckin' place?"
"You read my diary. I have theoretical articulations of what could happen. But if the Dominion is overthrown by a revolutionary group of criminals, maniacs, and mercenaries I surely know that whatever comes will be even worse than what we have today. Overthrowing an empire just to replace it with even more despotic regime that in ten years' time will fall apart again and lead to even more bloodshed."
"I wanted to help a long time ago, when I wrote that diary. I really did. Every night I'd think about the things I wrote—and when they actually happened days later, I could never stop seeing those people. Maybe I could have done something to warn them instead of keeping my diary private."
"But that was a long time ago, Raynor. Four years have been a long time. What little help I did back then translated into the imprisonment or deaths of tens of thousands at the University—everybody I knew in my life, everyone that I didn't know. Change's gonna come one day, but I'm not going to be the one bringing it about, and neither are you."
Gardner paused.
"My time is better spent elsewhere than advising some guerillas. You've given me a new life, Raynor—but I'm going to use it differently. Unless you intend to keep me with you against your will?"
Raynor stood up.
"Thirty soldiers gave their lives gladly to save you in the hopes that you'd bring us a better future. All we needed was your source."
"I hope that you die slowly, Professor."
Raynor's screed was interrupted by the keen wail of the base's alarm klaxons—almost immediately, two marines swept into the room. Raynor turned his back on the threadbare professor entirely.
"General! Hyperion is on comm one, priority alert."
"Matt, this is Jimmy. Go."
"Bandit Six, this is Hyperion. Multiple orbital contacts—Dominion warships."
Raynor bounded upwards from the chair in a single, fluid motion—Gardner had no idea how, entombed within such ponderous power armor—that the man could move with such agility.
"How many?"
"A full carrier battle group, Bandit; twelve contacts in total of various classifications."
"Shit! How'd they respond so fast? We're in the Fringes, for god's sake."
"No clue, Bandit. We gotta get you and all the prisoners outta there. Snatch and grab—can't stay here for long. But we're pinned in the gravity well. Unless we make a move soon, we're gonna be pinned."
"Where's Perry's group?"
"Too far away."
"Gimme a moment, Matt."
There was a pause. "Bandit, Tactical advises me that if we don't reach in orbit in three minutes that we're going to be intercepted before we can reach FTL."
Though superficially sounding like another of the other countless Dominion traps that he'd cleverly sprung himself out of since Tarsonis, Raynor felt a nauseating wave slide down his esophagus—the Raiders had always assigned Raynor an aura of invincibility for all the deus ex machina-esque tricks he'd pulled from his sleeve or how extraordinary contingencies always seemed to rescue them. On Char, the Protoss had been there to save him. When the UED came and were chasing him through the warp gate, the Protoss once again interceded on his behalf. Always at the last moment had brilliant beams fallen from the skies to vaporize all the aggressors and save the day. Raynor was no officer—he was a former marshal. Each time he'd devised a clever stratagem to outwit pursuing Dominion forces, and was greeted by a cheer of laughter from his crew and a round of drinks at the Hyperion's cantina, he knew sickly within him that it was going to be his last. His bag of seemingly bottomless tricks had been running thin—
And now—the tricks had run out. He had four hundred men in the "Task Force Bandit" that had stormed LSA Chenoweth, plus a multitude of liberated political prisoners that was so vast that they hadn't even tallied the numbers yet. There was no way that the dropships could make enough serial flights to bring them aboard in the next hour—much less the next three minutes. Even organizing only the Raiders at the designated LZs and arranging the dropship serials would take far longer than a few minutes.
With an uncommon clarity, Raynor had always knew that the end would be anticlimactic—only a small flame being snuffed out without significance. No last, valiant battle to punctuate the end of his betroubled existence. In the past four years, he had thought about his death many times—had never believed it would actually happen. A numbing pulse ran down him—though the thought of death brought him immaculate precision and his veins were thundering with adrenaline, he knew there was nothing else to be done.
When his mouth moved, his words were reflexive, disconnected from his brain; speaking the words of one who was already dead. He was just going through the motions.
"How long will it take you to reach orbit?"
Raynor knew the answer already—certainly around three minutes, for a planet with a gravity well such as Bountiful's own. There wasn't even any time to collect even a single flight of dropship ferries; it they didn't take off now, the dozen Dominion warships would close in, pin Hyperion against the curvature of Bountiful's planet, and then consume them all.
"Matt, take off now, ya hear me? Take Nike and Sprite with you", ordered Raynor, referring to the two frigates that they'd retrofitted as troopships to help carry the soldiers needed for the prison attack. "We can take care of ourselves."
Raynor already knew the certain reply.
"No. Not without you."
Part of him railed at Horner for his blind idealism—another was simply too drained of the fight to care anymore; after Tarsonis—after Kerrigan—and now, this; rescuing a professor just to have him snidely turn his back against him with Dominion forces rushing down upon him—what remained was only a mortal shell with no more heart.
"Horner, you have to lift off. This isn't like the other times—listen to Tactical and get the hell outta dodge. We'll slip away and regroup with you at the rendezvous later, OK?"
"Negative. We're going to collect one pass of dropships, then haul out of here. Get on right away, sir."
Raynor's temper—frayed by Gardner's snide impudence and now the obvious fatality of the situation—was now unleashed.
"Matt! Don't fuck with me here, buddy. We're not gonna fuckin' make it, OK? We're as good as fuckin' dead. Everyone that's not onboard that cruiser is already dead."
The two Marines next to Raynor stared at him with empty, horrified expressions, but he had little care for them.
"If you don't go now, not only we're gonna die, but everyone aboard Hyperion is gonna fuckin' die too. Now, go!"
Raynor severed the channel, turning to a third Marine that had now entered the room, completely ignoring Gardner and the two stunned Raiders.
"Major Pereira."
"General, sir."
"We're not gonna make this easy for them. Rally the task force. Prepare to defend the installation."
Gardner laid there limply in his chair in the commandant's office, unmoving, as the gauss rifle fire blazed all around him. Corybantic, depraved cries filled the air—metallic hypersonic shrieks heralding the entrance of Dominion fighter craft, strafing the rebel-held prison. Brilliant flashes overwhelmed the day, blotting out all the sunlight for brief moments as pyrotechnics consumed the scattered Raiders attempting to hold their position against the descending waves of fighters and dropships. The Dominion vessels advanced downwards in steadfast lockstep, undeterred by the muzzle flashes from the ground—seraphim with judgment and retribution in hand, cauterizing all before them.
The Hyperion, its massive angular silhouette interrupting the clouds, ceaselessly engaged the Dominion craft decanting from orbit. Sheets of crimson laser fire engaged pirouetting fighter craft and supported the few surviving Raiders that were still fighting at the crenellations of the prison. Spectacular floral displays of tangerine fire burst in the air as anti-air weapons flared and discharged their volleys into the skies.
It was a technological orgy of mass destruction, executed with precision and lethal efficiency. Mangled screams filled the air, piercing the relentless pounding of gauss rifle fire. Fighters vaporized in fiery displays, rocketing shrapnel all over the prison grounds. Nevertheless, the bulbous prows of the Dominion dropships descended to the ground, copulating their lethal armored loads as the Marines advanced into the darkness of the prison.
Later, there was not much left. The rifle fire had all but ceased—and peculiarly, Hyperion's batteries were slowly becoming dormant, as if a lethal disease had afflicted the mechanical behemoth that stood sentinel in the skies.
There was the unmistakable double flash of a thermonuclear eruption in the skies—Hyperion's visage flickered. Blue-white incandescence erupted forward, geysers of fire erupting from within the vessel and piercing the armored epidermis of the warship. Then, a blood red irregular billow—an apocalyptic ugly bloodstain etched in the skies.
Gardner hoped that Raynor had found his peace—his own last thoughts were for his wife and daughter.
Notes Added in Proof: In these "notes added in proof" sections (publication vocabulary for text added to a scientific paper that is not in the original paper but rather is added on in response to other miscellaneous events or updates), in the tradition of other authors on this site, I will be adding additional details regarding points of the backstory that are unclear, notes on the military vocabulary employed here, etc...
Richard Gardner's name is a portmanteau (of sorts) of Austin Smith and Richard Gardner: look up who these remarkable people are! (The former is from Cambridge, the latter is from Oxford).
The title of the chapter, "Bend Sinister", is in homage to the eponymous semiclassic novel written by Vladimir Nabokov. While "Bend Sinister" is a heraldic device, here (as in Nabokov's novel), sinister is also an obvious plot reference.
Regarding "Bandit Six"; in military vernacular at the platoon level and upwards, "Six" refers to the commanding officer of a unit, and at higher levels, "Five" may also refer to the second-in-command of a unit. "Bandit" refers to Task Force Bandit, the battalion-size element that Raynor's Raiders used on the Chenoweth assault. (The callsign "Bandit Six" is thus assigned to Raynor when he uses the task force-wide command net).
The dialogue between Gardner and Raynor is inspired by some of my favorite authors, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (you should look them up too!) Hardt and Negri have authored some very brilliant works on revolution and democracy (the revolutionaries of the modern day).
In the list of worlds that Raynor is ranting about, "Urona Sigma" may have been unfamiliar. It is a major plot location in the Starcraft comics that Raynor's Raiders encounter in their travels.