Disclaimer: Ah, this just says that I never made or owned the rights to Starcraft. Basically a waste of time. Just go on to the story.

Chapter 2: Recovery

Jake felt a hard slap to his face. "Auhh! Uhg... where am I?" He finally opened his eyes and saw Kerrigan staring him right in the face. Her face all mutated into being a Zerg was as horrifying as to make him scream. "AHHHHHHH!"

Kerrigan slapped him again. "SHUT UP!" she growled. "You're lucky I don't eat you right here and now, so shut up!"

"Ugh," Jake moaned wearily. "Wha...?" He slipped back into unconsciousness.

Jake felt a sharp pain in his head. He jolted awake with a surprised and shocked look on his face.

"Now stay awake." Kerrigan was still in front of him trying to wake him up. She had just pinched his skull with her claws, something that nobody would feel at all comfortable with.

"Now that I have your attention, I need you to give me some information about your people."

"People," he asked. "Who...?"

"Do you have any Ghosts that have a stronger psychic ability than normal?"

"No..." he said, not really listening. He quickly realized what she said and answered more effectively, "Oh, yeah, we do... Jones..." his head flopped down to his chest.

"Hmm. Special agent Jones... he's in it deep if he's already here...." She broke into annoying guttural hyena laughs that almost woke up the other soldiers.

Jones looked around, suddenly startled by the sudden absence of any hostile encounters. Something was obviously amiss. Something was also blocking any kind of telepathy that he could possibly use other than his "super-cloaking." He came to a door which read, "Control Room." He pressed the button, but the door seemed to make it obvious that nothing was going to get through there without sort of passcode.

"ACCESS DENIED."

There seemed to be only five buttons that he had to press to get in. Normally, Command Centers had a certain code built into them that only the SCVs and people that ran the main system knew. It looked pretty easy to decipher. If this were a normal Command Center, as opposed to an infested one, there might be some people here to catch anyone trying to break in and arrest them, but since this was not the case....

Jones looked at the five-button lock. "Triangle, Star, Circle, Infinity, and Diamond... but what order?"

He looked at the panel for a moment then thought, "Ah, to hell with it!" He took out his C-10 Blaster Rifle and tried to use his mental ability to muffle the sound of the shot. He fired off a round at the panel.

A loud sound (it sounded like a gunshot) startled several Zerglings, a couple pairs of Hydralisks and an Ultralisk in a large room in the command center. Their first instinct was to go check it out, but one of the Hydralisks reminded them that Kerrigan had told all of them to stay here until she said to come out. The others all sank back onto the floor with boredom.

Jones used his mental ability to make himself stick to the ceiling. He looked through all the corridors and listened for the sound of stampeding Zerg units, but when he heard none, he hovered slowly back to the ground. When he got to the floor, he looked at the busted controls of the panel. The lights began to flash and they slowly formed the words, "ACCESS APPROVED," and the door opened. Looking inside, Jones found nothing except a few computer systems that didn't look like they'd be of much help at all... wait... there was something... He went over to a panel of buttons and keyboards and started hacking into the system. Pretty soon, he found a scale map of the entire building. However, only half of it was left there. It seemed to him that if he were to find all those cadets, set a bomb to the core of the nuclear generator and bring the cadets back safely, he would certainly receive a heavy promotion. But modesty told him that he had best just use the map to at least try to find the cadets in the first place before he began thinking about ding-dongs and ho-hos.

Jones downloaded the map of the base to his wrist navigation system. Opening the door to the room, he carefully peered through the door and looked around the hallway. He didn't see any Zerg, as he had expected he would. The door closed behind him as he sidestepped through the hallway. Using the map he loaded into his wrist gadget, he tried to predict where the cadets were. The most logical place to hold 37 people was in the storage closet located on the west wing, but he dropped the idea for the sole reason that the cadets needed to be kept alive. Realizing that he wasn't thinking correctly, he just chose a section at random an hurried there.

Kerrigan watched the blip on the monitor get closer and closer to where she was. He smiled to herself and let out a soft growl as she saw the blip stop at the entrance to the room. Another shot rang out, much like the one before, and the door opened. She stood up as she watched Jones enter the room.

Jones was mentally exhausted, but he still tried to keep his "super cloaking" at its maximum.
"Jones, is it," Kerrigan asked him.

"What?! You can see me?"

"Of course I can see you. You didn't think your cloaking technique would work THIS long, did you?"

Jones uncloaked himself, giving himself a well-deserved rest. "You knew the whole time?"

"And now you DIE!!"

Kerrigan began to bare her claws up in a move to strike, but Jones got there faster and fired a shot right into her face. The smoke was too thick for a moment, and Jones could not see. After it cleared, Kerrigan was still there, but she just had a large whelt on her face.

Kerrigan clutched her face. "AUGH!! Damn you!"

Jones reloaded and pointed the gun at her head again. "Care to try again?"

Kerrigan closed her eyes and was about to summon the rest of her hordes, but another shot rang out and interrupted her.

Jones had just shot Kerrigan point-blank in the neck, and as a result, she was having trouble breathing. That was to say the least, because now her neck was nearly gone. What tissue and muscle that was left was showing, and Kerrigan fell to her knees.

"Up... yours... you... bastard!" Kerrigan dropped face first into a pool of her own blood.

After a few minutes of trying to contact Kerrigan, Terrasque decided that Kerrigan had been killed by the enemy. He sounded the alarm with a gut-wrenching guttural squeal. "UUUUAHHEEEEEE!!!"

Troy felt a light tapping on his cheek. He started to open his eyes.

"Now that you're awake," a voice said, "you can help he get the others up.

"Where am I," he asked. "The last thing I remember is being dragged off by the Zerg."

"That's right." the voice sounded quite comforting. "You were dragged off...."

Troy jolted awake, getting an idea of what might be happening to him. But seeing a human like him eased him

up a bit. Looking around the room, he saw several Marines and Firebats laying on the ground. He also noticed

bits of tentacle-like rope littering the floor.

"...But you're safe now, so don't worry."

"Oh, that's good," Troy said, his attention now directed to the Ghost in

front of him. "Where's my brother?"

"Your brother?"

"Mitch."

"Oh, yeah, I remember you ran after him, didn't you?"

"Yeah, that was me."

"I think that's him over there, isn't it?"

"MITCH!" Troy jumped up and ran in the direction the Ghost pointed. He knelt down beside his brother and began to shake him a little."

"Mitch, are you OK?!"

"Uhh..." Mitch started to wake up. "Troy?"

"Thank god you're alive!"

"Don't... be melo...dramatic."

Troy chuckled a bit to himself. "Back to your old self, eh?"

A pounding on the door of the room they were in interrupted their emotional performance.

Jones said, "I hate to knock on an emotional brotherly moment but-"
A Zerg claw that had just began tearing through the door made a loud screeching sound that woke everyone else up.

As soon as everyone was awake, Jones said, "Get your guns! They're over there." He pointed to a small pile of machine guns and disconnected flame throwers.

Everyone wearily stood up and stumbled a little over to their weapons. The Firebats re-connected their flamethrowers, the Marines reloaded their guns, and Jones threw a grenade through the cleft in the door.

The tiny Zergling watched curiously as a small object came out through the gash in the door and bounced with several pings on the floor. It went over to see what exactly it was when the thing exploded, tearing the Zergling to shreds and coating the hallways with blood. In the aftermath of the blast, the Zerg units that did survive were met with pounding shots to their already bloodied bodies. They returned fire with shots of their spines, but it wasn't enough. They were mowed down with attack after attack of strafing Marines.

Slowly but surely, the 37 cadets made their way to the front door of Command Center and carefully looked through the window. They didn't see anything there that would get them just yet, but just to be sure, he pulled out a special bomb made just for the occasion. Engineers called it the Super Coconut bomb after the explosive force it had in a game called "Grubs 2." Jones lobbed the bomb 30 feet from the door and made sure the door was closed securely. He looked out the window as the bomb sat there for a few seconds and exploded. The explosion was so powerful that a Spire was ripped from the ground, fifteen hovering Overlords exploded in mid-air, and three Drones disintegrated. Everything surrounding the bomb died except for the people in the Command Center.

"When I give the signal," Jones said to the cadets as his finger was hovering over the switch that would open the door, "you start firing at anything that isn't on our side."

The cadets all nodded and readied their weapons.

"Ready... GO!!"

Jones and the cadets walked through the doors and were immediately met by several Sunken Colonies trying to spear them from beneath the surface of the purplish ooze. Jones ripped a grenade attached to his vest off and lobbed it into the center of one Sunken Colony, following up by pulling two more and hurling them into two more. Dodging another spike, Jones turned to the other cadets and said, "DUCK!!"

The explosion of the grenades ripped through the flesh of the three Sunken Colonies, sending blood and muscle flying through the air. Jones saw it was safe to move on when he heard the sploshing sound of the bodily fluids and matter thereof slapping the purple goo, turning an absolutely sick color of maroon.

"LET'S GO!!"

Jones and their cadets began to retreat- Jones at the rear to make sure they got back safely. As the cadets were charging, a strong screech alerted them of Zerglings racing after them.

Jones stopped running and called to the cadets. "Keep running! We'll meet up at the base!!"

The cadets looked hesitant to leave one of their own men in the hands (claws) of the Zerg, but did as they were told and went on past the boundaries of the Zerg base.

(Later)

Jim Raynor met them at the outskirts of the base.

"Where's Jones?!"

One of the cadets said, "The fool stayed behind to let us get away from the Zerg!"

"What? Damn him!!"

One of the cadets glanced back for a moment, saw something, and did a double-take. "LOOK! THERE HE IS!!"

Everyone turned and looked behind them. Jones was coming towards them, limping on one leg and clutching his left arm tightly in an attempt to stop the bleeding that was being concealed. Blood was streaming down his face and most of his body, and nearly half of his armor had been ripped off; what was left of it was stained beyond recognition from his own blood. Flesh hung from seemingly random parts of his body, which were letting large amounts of blood slowly drain out.

"SHIT!!" Raynor pulled out a hand-held two-way radio. "MEDIC!"

Someone on the other end began to respond. "Yes?"

"Get a stretcher out front posthaste!!"

"Yes sir!"

Jones' mother showed up for his Award Ceremony. "JONES!! You're alright."

Jones was virtually bandaged up from head to toe. But the blood still soaked through, and you could see where his skin had been torn almost all the way off his body. "Yeah, mom, I'm alright."

Jones' mother was in tears. "Look what they did to you."

"Mom, can we not talk about it right now?"

The magistrate walked over. "But this is what this whole Award Ceremony is for! Had you died, we wouldn't have been able to hold this!"

At this dry humor the Magistrate had, they chuckled a bit to themselves. "Anyway," he said, "It's almost time." The Magistrate saluted, and Jones slowly did the same. Jones moved over to the stage and walked up the steps with a little trouble until Raynor lent a hand.

The Magistrate tapped on the mike a few times to see if it was on, then said, "Ladies and gentlemen, we are all gathered here today to commemorate Kelvin Jones for his outstanding bravery and leadership beyond what was necessary in helping the 37 cadets, standing right here beside me," he gestured to his right where the 37 cadets were indeed standing, "from almost certain doom in the hands of the Zerg. It brings me great honor to award Lieutenant Jones with the purple heart and the Congressional Medal of Honor." He then turned to Jones, and said, "Jones... how do you feel?"

"I'll tell you all just how I feel," Jones said. "Terrible! I was nearly completely eviscerated by a team of Zerglings! I have twenty-five puncture wounds all over my body, my right leg's totally shattered, and to show for it, I got a Purple Heart and a Medal of Honor.Yeah, these are all good things to give someone of my physical condition, but in any case, I'll probably die at an early age from this serious trauma I've been through, and you want to know how I feel? I'm going to bed right now. Please try not to wake me up too early." Jones started in the direction of the double doors. The path the doors was very silent. Nobody said a word. Nobody even coughed. As soon as Jones got through the doors, he could hear a muffled cheer from inside the room. My, but this war stuff was a very tiring profession. Jones finally got to his bed and tried to get into the bed as softly and as painlessly as possible. He rolled onto his back, covered himself up and closed his eyes.