StarCraft: Brain Damage
Chapter 20: One Probe and an Assassination
Jim batted the crystal out of his face with one swing of his neo-steel gauntlet, causing it to impact Jax in the ear. The thickheaded redneck, however, didn't even seem to notice as he took aim at a loyalist Zealot and fired. Jim looked around and saw the thing that had thrown the crystal: a small enemy Probe hovering just above the ground three yards in front of him.
A D18 charge came out of nowhere and flew straight towards the Probe. Jim had seen Nick throw a hundred-plus of these explosives and he knew that the next step was the charge latching on, beeping twice, and exploding.
But to his surprise, that didn't happen.
Instead, the Probe activated its grav field normally used for activating warp gates and carrying mineral chunks like the one that had nearly hit him earlier. The D18 charge was caught in the field and the Probe threw it at a Loyalist Zealot. The charge latched onto the Zealot's chest plate and beeped once.
"There's no way-" Jim muttered.
The charge exploded, blowing golden armor pieces and blue blood all across the snowy ground.
"What the hell?" Nick asked, astounded.
"Quick! Give it another!" Jim shouted.
Nick activated and threw another D18 charge, which the Probe caught and launched up into the sky. Both Jim and Nick watched as the charge smacked onto the bottom of a Scout. Tracking the fast aircraft across the sky, they saw a small explosion occur on the bottom of it that then set off the fuel supply.
The scout vanished in a cloud of blue fire, debris scattering over the battleground below it. The Probe beeped happily and hovered across the snow to the Terran squad where it stopped up next to Ayanami's white-armored leg. It bumped up against her like a dog wanting a pat on the head.
"What the hell is this thing?" she asked, taking time away from keeping a Zealot pinned down behind a rock.
"It's a Probe," Jim answered.
"And it kicks huge amounts of ass," Nick added.
"I think it-"
"We don't care Jax!" Ayanami, Nick and Jim said at once.
Jax made a sad face and turned back around away from them, hurt to the core.
"What's it want?" Ayanami asked.
"Poon," Nick offered, "Everything else we've met seems to want it."
Just before Jim could retort with a comment about Nick being disappointed that he hadn't got any the Zealot that Ayanami had been keeping pinned hopped up from behind its rock and charged. It jumped towards her, activating its psi blades in mid air. The Probe quickly activated its grav field and pulled on Ayanami's leg, causing her to fall onto her back.
The Zealot missed because of this and his right psi blade got stuck in the rocky ground beneath the snow. Immediately, he started pulling on his own gauntlet to get the appendage unstuck.
"Yoo hoo," Jim called.
Looking up, the Zealot saw the barrels of an Impaler and two Scythe pistols. Then his brain turned into a layer covering a considerably large area of snow.
Standing back up, Ayanami turned to the little waist-high Probe in front of her.
"You're okay little guy," she said, then looked to Jim, "Think we can keep him?"
"I don't see why not," he replied.
"Better than fucking marshmallow head over there," Nick commented, gesturing to Jax in the process.
"We've secured the landing zone!" Artanix declared, "Let us take the rest of the area! En taro Adun!"
"En taro Adun!" shouted the rest of the Zealots in the landing party.
"Suck my dick," Jim said in a fake, sarcastic cheer as they moved out in their predetermined formation, now with their little Probe friend right next to Ayanami.
Many, many billions of miles away, Shinji was sitting in his Thor cockpit slurping a cup of coffee. His machine was positioned on the edge of the ridge designated their base of operations for the refitting process. The plan was for him to sit there for ten hour shifts with two hour breaks in between them for three weeks while Raynor made an ass load of phone calls and got more equipment and men in to help them.
After one day, Shinji counted one dropship of semi-autistic people as reinforcements. He had made a call into the Hyperion to make sure none of those new recruits came near his walker's legs. The last thing he needed was to have a Siege Tank driver-in-training knock him off balance and into the lava ten feet away from his feet.
He slurped another bit of his beverage, savoring its taste, when he saw something on his sixth screen. Magnifying the image with his free hand, he identified it as a lone Zerg, specifically a Hydralisk with a wounded arm. Calmly, he sat down his mug and slid his arms into the recoil straps on his chair. Grabbing the targeting joystick, he clicked the safety off on the array of 250mm bombardment cannons on his Thor's back.
Adjusting slightly for wind and the ashworld's Coriolos effect, Shinji slowly applied pressure to the trigger.
"Thor firing," he said into the mic in front of his mouth, alerting the base via loudspeakers and personal radio that there was about to be a bang and not to freak out.
With a mighty wham, one of the cannons belched a shell down range and directly onto the Hydralisk, promptly making it vanish into a cloud of black dirt and flame. As the smoke cleared and Shinji picked his coffee back up, he briefly wondered why it had been wounded…
Twelve miles away, the reason was quite obvious.
"I thought we were in love!" Samir Duran shouted both verbally and psionically to the woman many light-years away on Tarsonis.
"No we weren't!" Kerrigan shouted back, "You were a pawn. And getting angry about Traz's status and staging a rebellion with your Brood doesn't help anything at all!"
"You're just denying our love!" Duran whined, not wanting to face the truth.
"Will you stop making delusions!" Kerrigan commanded.
"But don't you remember that night? The night where we-" Duran started.
"What the hell did I just say?" she asked.
"-where we made sweet-"
"Traz," Kerrigan said, "Shut him up."
Suddenly, a C10 canister rifle shot implanted itself at the base of Duran's skull from a trajectory below Duran himself, blowing his head up off of his shoulders and into the gooey ceiling of the subterranean Hive. As the former head of the Char Brood's body fell to the ground, Kerrigan transferred command to Traz.
"Thank you, Queen," Traz said and bowed, even though she wasn't anywhere near him.
"Just get it done," she replied.
"Right away," he said and got to work sending out scouts to get a look at the Raiders position.