Chapter 1: A Childhood Lost
I sit here on a rocky outcropping outside my headquarters for a brief respite from battle. My troops battle valiantly and I must return soon. But I allow myself a small rest, surrounded by the sounds of the waves crashing beneath me to write this tale, this memoir of myself. I have no name, nor do I deserve one for all the blood I've spilt. I am Death's apprentice, and I am called Death if you must call me something, for it fits. I am a Psi-Gifted ghost, trained by the Terran Confederacy of man to be anything but human, an assassin, one of many but one apart from the rest. My innocence was lost long ago, and it is in this tale that I share my decency, the last vestige of humanity that resides within my battered and twisted soul. And so, like so many tales, I shall start at the beginning, and work from there.
I remember my training facilities so very clearly, that righteously cleaned hellhole rests deep inside my memory. From its urine stained sleeping quarters to its blood stained training rooms. Years of marine that I'd much rather forget, but cannot. A disguised hell hid from the rest of the world in a human controlled mountain range.
One's first surgery is usually a horrific experience, one of dread and pain. Mine was worse. I remember, and it is one I hate to remember, but it is here that I shall start my tale.
I walked up to the smiling man with fear, my three year old mind did not yet understand the concept of strangers, and I was too concerned with where my parents were and why couldn't they find me to give him any of my limited trail of thought. And so I walked forward, like a good little boy, as the grinning man set me up and laid me down on metal of such cold that I was instantly numb. Most likely to save the Confederacy valuable credits in anesthetics. His assistant hurried back and forth behind, attaching lines and wires to my head, assuring me in a broken man's tone that nothing would be wrong, and had I been older I would have ran immediately, but I was young and naïve.
I don't remember the exact details of that horrific surgery, only that I was looking at the doctor's broken assistant's face when I felt a searing pain raced across my body, and I slipped slowly into unconsciousness to the sound of a surgeon's saw.
I woke up that night in a cold bunk, my hands clammy and my left arm, my right leg and my chest swathed in bandages. My head hurt like hell. All around me were the whispered words of fear and the flashing thoughts of pain from the other children who'd had the same operation. I later learned that they had put psychic dampners all over my body, blocking and controlling 30% of my psionic potential, and letting them keep me under control. And like the frightened child that I was, I fell into sleep, dreaming fitfully of the smiling doctor, and of my parents. And then came the first of tests.
The first training session was the one I remember clearest, and it is the one that is designed to frighten us into submission and to numb our minds from the pain of suffering that we would inflict as our tests grew. For now, I walked with the guards, and I remember it being the worst test those bastards could ever hope to throw at me.
My 5 year old mind was filled with uncertainty and confusion as the young guard led me into a brightly lit room, round in shape and filled with people that I did not know. They handed me a knife, brought one of the victims over and showed me how to use it, and left me with it. Closing the door, they told me over speakers that one person in the room had the key, and I was to kill each person in a different way with the knife until I found the key. When I had the key, the doors would open and I would be allowed to leave. I didn't know the extent of ways I could, or even why I was doing it. But as fresh blood stained the floor from the first of my victim's throats, my mind connected with his. And as I lay in bed that night, I still did not understand what I had done. All that I knew was that it was wrong, ripping that man's life away from him. Just so very wrong…
From then on killing became routine, treated as nothing more than standard law in the twisted lives we lived. I remember wondering so many nights as I lay in bed how they found so many people for us to practice our sick arts on, and I was sure that it couldn't possibly get any worse. How very wrong I was.
Cloaking was next on our list of required skills, and I knew from the start that if I were to understand why I was here and what I was doing, I would have to master it, completely and without blemish. It would be my skill, the thing that set me apart from the other trainees, and the fact that I was only one who mastered it completely gave me a sick sort of satisfaction.
We spent endless hours in the classroom with demonstrators, telling us how long it would last before charging was required, how to check how much energy we had left, what could reveal us, and what could kill us. And it was because I paid attention with raptness unseen in my squad that I have survived as long as I did.
We had really only one lesson and time to try out our skills learned in the classroom. A dropship dropped us off at a rocky outcropping, and a mile away was where it stood waiting. Across this miniature hell was the last thing that many of my classmates would ever see, for the terrain was filled with turrets and bunkers spread across the terrain. Our task was to get to the dropship by using our cloaking devices, and not getting ourselves killed in the process.
I believe it was my particular gift of seeing past the problem that saved me. I looked at my surroundings while my friends cloaked, and I noticed a flat plateau that was about 50 feet up and scalable, outside of all the bunkers ranges. I climbed up this hill, turned my cloaking field on and ran the mile. No one ever saw me. And so many of us would have survived that test if they had seen me, for of the 50 that they dropped off at the starting point, only eight of us made it to the end. I was ten at the time.
Late that night, after I'd dealt with the little horrors etched into my mind from that experienced, I looked at the cloaking device I'd stolen. I knew I had to escape somehow, but that I couldn't do it with its limited supply of energy. So instead I turned to my own psionic skills, and the blocks in my mind that I could feel so very clearly. And I resolved that I would never feel those blocks again.
Three nights I spent cloaked, watching and searching for the key to deactivating the damned things. On the fourth night I found it, and I deactivated them. But their deactivation, and the feeling that came directly after was nothing I had ever felt before.
It felt as if a great burden had suddenly been lifted from my shoulders. But my feeling of enlightenment did not last long, and the pain came. Images flooded my mind from every person in the room, their thoughts and feelings filling my head to the breaking point. I almost went mad with the sheer overload. I bit my lip until the blood ran to keep from screaming out, to beat my pillow in fear and pain. I shared every dream of every person in that room, the good and the bad. And it was pure hell dealing with that every night until I could deal with it, and control the thoughts I heard but did not want to hear. And so began the development of my psionic powers.
Two more years of intense training followed, from Lockdown and its principles to survival skills on the battleground. But by far, nuking was the strangest thing I ever learned, and I was always amazed that when I had ran far enough and chosen my hiding place, squeezed in among the rocks and crevices with my eyes shut tight that the world was as bright as day…
As I walked down that dreaded hallway that I'd been down so many times in my young life, its screams of pain from each room often controlled the shapes of my dreams. I quaked in fear despite the guards chastisements, I'd already read his mind and I knew what was in store for me.
The steel covered doors closed heavily behind me, the lone guard in the room striding purposefully towards me, pistol held loosely in his left hand. And as he slowly raised it to my head, the full horror on my test came to me. My task was that once it was resting against my head, I had to kill him before he pulled the trigger, by any means necessary.
When the cold steel of the muzzle touched my skull, I instinctively reacted, the Confederate killing instincts inside me reacting instantly to their master's command. Connecting with his mind was easy enough, and I clouded his mind, and he didn't pull the trigger. My hand shot out, and in his stupor he did not try to move as I knocked the gun into the air. Leaping up I caught the gun in mid-air and fired three quick shots to the transfixed guard's head, his brain splattering the back wall in a sea of Crimson. The door's slowly opened to the technician's smiling faces, as if killing him was something to be celebrated. Walking slowly to my bunk, my hands unclenched and I remember the dull thud the gun made when it hit the ground. It was an incredibly traumatic experience for a 12 year old, and I swear those sadistic bastards enjoyed every minute of it.
After that I was officially a Confederate ghost, trained and owned solely by them. I went through the standard pledges to humanity, knowing they were full of shit and not meaning any of it. After that I spent 6 more years of relentless training while I waited for my assignment, slowly making my way from private to corporal. And then came the Chau Sara incident, and the beginning of the madness.
I remember sitting in the communications room, my eyes and the eyes of the other two graduates glued to the screen in front of us as we watched the blue and yellow ships of the protoss descend from space. The defenseless planet didn't stand a chance, and it was cooked past its molten core, eruptions of red filling the screen on every monitor. The Korhal incident with it's ceaseless nuking was nothing compared to this, for while Korhal would eventually be habitable again, Chau Sara would never see life on its surface again. And it was only the first.
Later talk turned to the Zerg, a word and a species that would change my life forever. And it was then that we received our assignments, and mine was much worse than even I had imagined. I was to be assigned to the legendary Alpha Squadron, and I that I was being sent to the frontlines to fight a war for a government I knew absolutely nothing about…