But still, as the meeting ended, he sighed to himself. Kind of like wishing you were ten years younger again, there were some things no amount of willpower in the universe could change. Not unless those protoss had something up their sleeves, or, he chuckled, he signed himself up to get diced and sliced by Dominion medics. He shuddered. He didn't think that was the kind of price a man wanted to pay, or a risk an outlaw wanted to take.
Still, hang out with the protoss enough, and it made little enough difference.
And Tychus was a good friend. They had never looked down on each other – they had pitched each other out of a hole too many times to be anything but good friends.
'Man has more fight in him than alla you slackers an' a herd of rhynadons,' he heard Tychus say once, and he'd never forgiven him for such a good compliment. Nice to know when your work was appreciated. Maybe that's why Tychus wanted to rastle with him – probably hard to find a good fight when you towered a good foot above everyone else. He could understand that. Just as well for them both that there was enough zerg for everyone, then.
'Jim never saw a fight he didn't want,' Tychus also used to say. And though things might have changed a bit, Jim was a bit wiser and more level-headed than the rapscallion he had been, he supposed some things stuck with ya.
Which made it all the darker to Raynor, thinking about Tychus in that hole. He didn't say anything about it – what was there to say? But he had been thinking about it, wondering about the words, wondering about what he should have done.
Could he have bailed Tychus out earlier? The man was in cryo-sleep, the years passed by in a blink for him. Strange, right? It could have been a hundred years, and it would have been nothing to Tychus, he had all the time in the universe – while Raynor was out here fighting the Zerg. He thought, sometimes, that it was almost better that Tychus was in that cell.
But he knew Tychus wouldn't see it that way. He wouldn't, either.
You couldn't really tell – what did years matter to a man? But Tychus was a mite older than Jim. Not that anybody remembered it – probably obvious enough from sight, but who was to say what the reason was a man looked the way he did after years of fighting one battle after the other? Jim himself had noticed the toll the last six years or more had taken on him. Such a short amount of time for such a change.
Tychus was older than Jim, but he hadn't aged in that time – Raynor had caught up just a little bit in the years. Yet it was like no time had passed between them at all, like it was always supposed to be that way. Jim certainly wasn't a junior now.
Horner met him in the engineering bay, which was really just a glorified corner of the Hangar bay.
"You been on your feet a while, Commander, you need to swap over a shift? I can hold down the fort."
Raynor gestured a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the large tubular engine that was now mounting the back of his torso. "Enhanced power pack – Swann jammed it into my suit a couple of days ago. I could do this for weeks."
"You sure do like your engines," he reminisced. Man had been with Raynor since Mar Sara, and he had been the commanding officer. Funny how things changed. Not that he had ever been the overbearing type – they learned to work well together.
"Hell, don't be mad if you can't make one fly like I do," Raynor folded his arms slyly. "But I gotta admit, it's hard to top the work Swann does – that man's a genius. An hour in the bay with him is worth a full education."
The commander put a massive gauntleted hand on the table, for no apparent reason but emphasis. "This old wreck would be bust a hundred times over without him keeping her together – even a floating palace like this."
So which is she – an old wreck or floating palace? Matt wondered briefly – but he understood. Not that the terran government, the defunct Confederacy or the new Dominion would have accepted shoddy work in their capital ships let alone flag-ships of the fleet. But the Hyperion had seen more wars than Matt had years, and he had seen his share of wars now himself.
"So, ready to get to work?"
"Fighters are primed. Just waiting on your signal, sir."