I do not own, in any aspect that entitles dominion (not the Mengsk kind at least) of any variation, Naruto nor Starcraft.
Wish I did though...
Warning: Contains swearing.
They call me a Spectre
Chapter 4: To know a stubborn patient
(Flashback!)
Barrack Bunker, Mina de Oro
There was a strict disadvantage to immediate deployment most soldiers could agree on, after some debate of course. There was little time to pack. Of course by the design of the Ghost Academy, there wasn't much to pack other than the clothes worn on ones back and whatever was decreed fit to send their trainees/operatives with. In other words, the latest member of the Squad Omega had to borrow the adult sized clothing of his teammates till the requisition order came through. As such, the team ghost was locked in a room as he battled oversized garments that was to be his till he got his suit and equipment back from the triplets who confiscated it almost immediately when said ghost abandoned them to take a shower.
"So what do we got?" Frankfurt half demanded as he sat hunched forward in a chair with a half missing cigar in hand.
"Crappy hardware all around and a flimsy suit to boot," one triplet reported.
"The rifle is A-okay."
"I may have voided the warranty on the night vision mode!"
"That may be a good thing- I've seen wrecked SCVs more useful than this!"
"Judgment?" The cigar was further diminished by a calculative drag from the sergeant as he awaited conclusion from the privates, with their deceptively savvy understanding of hardware both official and unofficial alike (to which he never asked how they knew of such things), as they carefully inspected the ghost gear of their latest teammate.
"He was given substandard gear."
"The rifle is the reliable mass production model alright."
"I'm surprised he was even able to use the equipment at all."
"Can you fix it?" Frankfurt queried. "Yep," all three responded at once.
"Time frame?"
"Couple of weeks anyway we do it."
"Can't do anything about the suit short of a requisition order."
"Get bacon in that too!"
"Ooooh!" Before the inevitable piling onto the supposed supply request was voiced, Sergeant Jones already made off like a bandit to the depths of the underground bunker with nothing more than dulled yells of various foodstuffs to be ordered following him. In his retreat he only stopped once by a door where numerous grunts and mild curses escaped from. Bringing a calloused knuckle to bear, he rapped on the door a handful of times to both announce his presence outside it as well as grab the attention of the room's occupant.
"The trio is working on your suit to make it more friendly to ya. However we're going to be doing easy missions I can get our squad assigned to until we can get our hands on better equipment for ya." Stark silence permeated the air for a lengthy moment that warranted the curious raising of a brow on the sergeant's part. "Thank you..." With ado the grunting and mild cursing of failed bids to garb himself sufficiently continued. A mild shake of the head and roll of the eyes was all that was given on Frankfurt's part as he delved ever deeper into their current abode.
(End Flashback!)
XVX
Hyperion
Under a visor, closed eyes groggily opened upon sensing a presence that made itself known to him for the past few days since the mission to Agria... which grew ever more annoyed with him by his daily obstinate refusal to do one simple thing in that person's view: Go get a checkup.
His current record in avoiding the med bay, as for as this doctor was concerned, was ten days, eight hours, twenty-nine minutes and counting. His actual record in avoiding a voluntary visit to the place however was closer to the very beginning of Raynor's Raiders. Apparantly she never got Stetmann's memo about his aversion to clinics...
Of course it may have helped if Stetmann was remotely qualified as a bare necessities medic to convince this woman now that he thought about it.
Regardless, one Ariel Hanson was greeted by a pressurized air horn when that door opened for her...
XVX
Cantina
"AAAAAH!" Ariel had yet to be known to be subtle in her overall disappointment as of late regarding her wayward "patient," provided that he could be called that of course. Being easily startled by pranks did not help her case in the least either.
"Chalk up another one." From behind the bar, the aptly named tender absent mindedly picked up a piece of chalk and marked another tally amongst a growing horde of now thirty-seven "Failed attempts" as the board was so boldly dubbed as such. Next to it on the wall behind the bar sat a grease board with a more detailed listing compared to its chalk based brother: On it was a varied listing of a number of days of a predicted failure on the ghost's part in his seemingly eternal bid to stay out of a recognized clinic under his own volition, or forced volition for the matter outside of combat related injuries or the occasional accident absolutely requiring medical attention. Zero to ten days, twenty to thirty days, thirty to forty, months, years, with the only exception to the lengths of time being a box at the bottom of the improvised chart labeled "Never." It was a betting game as to how long the ghost could stay out of Doctor Hanson's clutches, and so far only three out of the entire crew participating in the gamble dared to favor her at all in regards of being successful...
Unfortunately the bet indicating the earliest point of plausible capture was as close as two months from the original starting date of the current 'battle' between the two whereas the other two hypothesized it being years later.
XVX
Laboratory, day seventeen of the "war"
A finely manicured nail sternly tapped on a small desk as its owner intently stared at the official registration of the Raider's roster containing her one and only prey to a mandatory check up given the Raider's had no official doctor for a considerable length of time. An auto-doc (autonomous doctor) can only do so much, not to mention its intended purpose was to patch up wounds and administer necessary antibiotics to avoid infections after the procedure... While she was thankful enough for their assistance where the Dominion not only failed but outright abandoned them on their world, there was little she could do to not snap at those who dared question the necessity of a medical checkup as well as a official record of their health and their quirks regarding it.
Yet with an cooled head, tapered temper, the brown haired doctor and leader of the now fallen colony world of Agria managed to compose a working and up to date list of the crew's current health and all that it entailed through examinations as well as physicals. Well, she the crew's list save one who only had a registration to act as anything remotely resembling a medical record and even then it was filled with what was that could be passed off as the essentials minus a name.
Had she not only one pair of prescription glasses, she would've head butted the desk a long time ago upon learning this.
With a small, irritated growl she all but jabbed the monitor's power button before rising from her seat, donning her lab coat, and briskly storming off to the door for yet another day of chasing a difficult solider who did nothing but consume her time and jolt her with childish-
With the opening of the door, she was 'greeted' by a certain ghost using the redundancy of wearing a mask over a mask... the mask in question was that of a hydralisk's head.
"OOGA BOOGA BOO!"
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" Her own screamed cancelled out the opposing cackle emitted from the brat of a ghost who disappeared thanks to his camouflaging suit after abandoning the mask as a souvenir to only egg her on further.
"WAIT TILL I GET MY HANDS ON YOU!" she howled as she struggled to stand up and give chase.
XVX
Cantina
Forty-eight tallies now decorated the chalkboard by the end of the perceived day.
XVX
Hallway, day twenty-four
While normally sweet, even Ariel Hanson had limits when in pursuit of her professional duty as a doctor. In hindsight however, the pursuit of her professional duty had bordered close to obsession more than once when provoked.
The bait, an discreetly placed bag of nacho flavored chips on a crate, was set. Her small flotilla of commandeered janitorial robots outfitted with knockout gasses and armor piercing tranquilizer darts stowed away in normally functional brushes and pipes, after some heated negotiations with Swann in not only seizing the A.I hardware and repurposing them, patrolled the hallway dutifully while awaiting for the ghost to come by and become distracted by the abandoned snack. Even A.I. needed something to trigger them after all, such as reaching for the snack bag for example.
With the trap set, all she had to do was wait in the nearby maintenance closet and overhear the telltale signs of a ghost finally being defeated by a small squad of robot 'janitors.'
Crinkle.
"What the- Ow! OW! WHAT THE HELL!"
"YES!" In a flash, Ariel escaped her closet and rushed to the down form... of Milo Kachinsky, one of the Hyperion's technicians, laying face first in a growing puddle of his own drool while several hypodermic darts of dispensable tranquilizer containers were sticking out of various places of his body while said body twitched between mild seizures and an actual urge to resist the suppressants now dominating his body. Immediately Ariel dove back into the closet and retrieved a small case, one of many in the event of an emergency, of the appropriate countermeasures to counteract the potentially lethal dosage Kachinsky now faced.
From the corner of the other end of the hallway, a certain ghost was idly opening a bag of chips while lazily eying the patrolling robots and the frantic doctor trying to save a hapless victim, lured in by the promise of the now stolen nacho flavored chips.
XVX
Cantina
Sixty-five tallies now adorned the blackboard.
XVX
Hanger Twelve, day twenty-seven
The people of Agria who supplemented the ranks of the Raiders were not exactly warriors of any kind by nature, hence the reason Agria had so little defenses to offer to stall the Zerg when the Dominion abandoned the planet to its fate. As such there was really only one person she could turn to when the Hyperion's crew and commander exhibited so little interest and reigning in a rogue element for his own good: Tychus Findlay; a man whom rumor and speculation seemed interwoven into his very personality that only gave credence to his willingness to hunt down an ally with a shock lance, essentially a rifle sized taser meant to take down marines in hardskins, for the sum of a thousand credits...
In any event, that ghost was going to get his physical whether he liked it or not.
"Come out, come out wherever you are," Tychus drawled as he carefully swept the darkened improvised corridors of the hangar with a rifle, pronged to three points where the barrel would be and split to an incomplete rectangle of sorts with a side complete missing on top, that crackled electricity along its split slabs of metal just waiting to be discharged into whatever victim to be caught by the bolts. Not far behind him was a hassled Ariel Hanson with a bag in hand equipped with every sedative agent that could be employed on another human being to ensure the capture.
XVX
Cantina
"Think he'll go psionic on them?"
"Doubt it, I'm saying sniper rifle with darts as the ammo."
"No, no. Somehow he'll steal that shock lance and turn it on them."
"Way too easy man. Oh! Maybe he'll steal that bag, fashion a slingshot, and snipe them with it!"
Rolling his eyes and shaking his head, Jim Raynor took a swig of his glass of bourbon as various people hypothesized how Tychus and Ariel were going to be defeated in this scenario since being lured to hangar twelve, a storage hangar containing spare parts and the like, with the power cut off at the breaker. The television screen was diverted from its normal function to relay the live feed from the cameras in the hanger, which in all actuality wasn't much since the only thing illuminated in the darkness was Tychus by the glow of the shock lance and whatever the floodlights hardwired into his suit picked up as he continued his search.
In a mild thought, the cantina would probably be much fuller in patrons and observers if a decent measure of the Raiders hadn't went planet side to Redstone III (3) for a contract.
"Someone's going to get killed eventually," he mused as he took another sip of his beverage of choice, for the moment at least. Though in truth it was more of a rhetorical statement, the escalation that had been going on for the past month did not bode well...
An intervention was going to be needed before someone was seriously hurt.
XVX
Hangar Twelve
"Hmph!" The set of lights snapped to where Doctor Hanson stood a moment after the bag she held slammed into the floor. Floodlights searched the corridor of containers followed shortly by searching along the edges of said corridor when the doctor's muffled screeching permeated the air alongside the dispensing, and application, of duct tape.
"Told her this was a one man job," Tychus mumbled as Ariel continued to shout in indignity with a hand over her mouth that was freed for but a second before the duct tape muted her. "Now how we gonna do this?" he lowly asked as he slowly back up to a more open space, all the while trying to ignore Doctor Hanson as she struggled against her sticky bonds in the dark.
The resounding 'clack' of one the lights coming to life jolted the marine to twisting around with his stun rifle at the ready to find a halo of light illuminating a pedestal holding aloft a can of beer. "Oh I ain't falling for that junior," he grumbled aloud. By the time he noticed the horn part of an air horn peeking through the corner of his open visor, it was too late.
BRRRRRRRRRRRT!
"GAAAAH!" In his fright he fell to his back while his hand involuntary pulled the trigger to the rifle that in turn let loose a bolt of the pre-charged gun and depriving it of its ammo till it returned to its set power. "Aw damn it, real funny kid!" Tychus growled as he got back up. When on his feet again he immediately checked the LED display for the estimated time for the next shot to be ready to be used: An estimate of eighty-two seconds before he could knock out the ghost teen Raynor had for a comrade.
However from the fresh crackle of what sounded like another shock lance, it would seem those eighty-plus seconds were a bit too long for the war veteran's tastes. Without a second to be wasted, the convict broke into a strafe without bothering to look where he was going in a bid to escape.
Yet even Tychus with all his experiences, both confirmed and unconfirmed by those around him, knew he wouldn't be a match for a ghost in the dark...
"Agh!" Not to mention that unlike his own lance, the ghost's armament wasn't powered down for a precaution given the lack of a hardskin for protection. "Ah, damn it..." he weakly grumbled while crashing into the floor and having his shock lance confiscated by the teenager. "Can you at least hand me that beer before you go? A bendy straw while you're at it?"
"No straws available," the ghost rasped as he planted the bait beer within Tychus' sight as it was dully illuminated by the glancing indirect glow of a floodlight. "Feh..."
Now all Tychus had to do was await the eventual return of his control over his body after being robbed of it by the overloading of not only his suit but his nerves too.
XVX
Lab, forty-four minutes later
"You know, I wouldn't be too suprised if one of you two will end up killing the other by accident if this keeps up," Raynor commented as he peeled off the tape keeping Ariel from speaking.
"Ah!" she gasped in mild pain as she worked her jaw about to ensure her lips were still attached to her face. "Well we wouldn't be doing this if he was considerate enough to come up and take his exam!" she defended herself just short of a growl while the commander of the Raiders worked on the rest of her bindings as she sat in a chair. Her hands were quickly freed next.
"Oh I know, just its more likely to see Char have a sudden ice age than to see the kid go for a checkup," Jim replied in a small chuckle.
"I hardly find it amusing Commander," Ariel admonished with a slight narrowing of her eyes.
"Be that as it may, it's true. Even..." Raynor suddenly seized himself slightly in a slight grimace before he continued. "People he was close to found that task monumental Doc." He almost chuckled once more once the exasperated, yet restrained in its tired nature, sigh escaped Doctor Hanson. "Is there a particular reason he's so... infuriated in this regard then?" she queried. "None that I know of," Raynor replied once more as he freed her duct tape bound feet. Once more a sigh exhausted sigh left the woman as she leaned back into the chair and closed her eyes.
They only opened once more when the commander took her hand and planted what felt like a USB device in her palm. "What's this?" she asked as she confirmed what she felt. It was a small device, obviously an older model of the data storage device if its bulky and weathered nature was to be an indicator. "The only way to end this little war between you two," Raynor smoothly replied as he got up and leans against the wall, a hand dug into his pocket for a cigarette and a lighter. "Look in the Lost Colony section, should be the second to last from the bottom."
With a confused frown, the doctor plugged in the device into a nearby computer and swiveled to directly look at a revived screen as it acknowledged the newest addition to the mainframe. In the psan of a few seconds, a small screen appeared on the screen bearing the colors of the old Confederacy that the Dominion now occupied in its position as a government and power in the sector. Immediately after a moment of rest the whites, reds, and blues of the page gave way to a deep orange rectangular screen with a black background with various listings of notes, psychological evaluations that were years out of date, code names of various experiments, and several tabs for... candidates and their histories, both personal and medical, for what was labeled as "Project Phantom." Her frowned only deepened as she acquiesced to Raynor's suggestion and dove into the candidate area marked as "Lost Colony."
"You know I heard about these "Lost Colonies," but frankly I always thought there were just... theories at best regarding the missing carrier."
"They're real," Jim calmly replied as he lit his current vice. "The only reason the Dominion hadn't try to exploit them as well was when Phantom had to be terminated and its data eliminated to hide the evidence. In other words the Dominion have no idea where they are other than rumors and speculation, neither of which they can freely pursue with all that's been going on before now."
With an even deeper frown she scrolled down the list, idly noting a a name here and there andnwhat planet they came from that surely wasn't registered by either the Dominion nor the Confederacy when it was in power. But then again, if her growing dread was correct...
"Why was the project shut down?" A pause ensued between the two of them as the Raider's commander took a drag from the cigarette. "Depends on who you ask. All I know about the project other than its purpose to incite the ability to yield psionic powers in people that weren't born that way, they couldn't handle the kids they kidnapped through their more standard means of control. I imagine that after so many went off the rails between their experiments to enforce loyalty, they deemed the project too dangerous to continue. Of course..." Immediately Raynor quieted down as he grimaced as he tried to make a... fact known to her despite his distaste.
A darker grimace crossed the features of Hanson as she slowed down her scrolling to take a more detailed look at some of the 'candidates.' "It also seemed to produce a high mortality rate among those they experimented on..."
"Yeah..." he said somberly.
Finally she reached the bottom and peered at the second to last image and its name. "That smile's forced," she noted quietly.
"You found it then... think it would be enough to suit your needs for his medical history?"
"Yes..." she replied shyly. Giving her a heavy nod in return, James Raynor departed his spot on the wall and made to leave the laboratory.
"One question though." Stopping short of the now opened doorway, he peered over his shoulder at the brown haired doctor. "How did you come across this?"
With a sigh, he took another drag before removing the unhealthy vice from his lips before giving her his full attention. "Believe it or not," he started, "he was much more introverted than he is today to the point where he could only open himself up to one person... Fearing for him in the event that she died, she entrusted that USB to me so I can look after him to the best of my ability."
Reluctantly Doctor Hanson returned her to the screen within a screen with ever disheartened motives where a sense of zealously once possessed her. "Seven years old..." she quietly mumbled.
A/N: And now, for something not entirely different.
Monkeybandit2, making off with your attention! No refunds.
Extra! Supercarriers and Rory Swann
Armory, Hyperion
"If I may ask sir, what are you looking at?" Looking over his shoulder, Rory Swann spotted the same newbie from before and sighed in mild exasperation. "Aren't you suppose to be taking inventory for Kachinsky?"
"All done sir!" she answered with an all too cheery smile for his tastes as she handed him the datapad used for the task. He could only mildly shake his head at that as he accepted the tablet before returning his attention to his roost's console and all its glory. "Still, I'm curious as to what you're interested in." With a drawn out sigh he finally relented after jabbing a few buttons.
"I've been trying to find a use for them Hercules cargo ships we have lying around in the other bays that almost never see any action at all, and in hopes of finding inspiration I been poking around the records for older model ships for ideas." Peering past him, the technician managed to sneak a good look at the screen. "The Supercarriers? Don't you think that's a bit too far back to look, sir?"
A snort escaped the chief engineer as he returned to his attention to what passed off as blueprints to the colossal relics of the past. "I wouldn't be the first person in history to find something useful by looking into the past," he countered as he perused the material available to the masses. "Would help me out a lot more if we were able to find one of these titans intact. Hell, just point me to an actual blueprint and I'd probably do a jig while singin' in the girliest voice I have in my repertoire."
"With all due respect sir, weren't they all repurposed after the Long Sleep? Or rather scrapped to build the foundations of society as we know it?" A snort escape Rory once again as his mood became more dour. "Yeah... save for one at least."
"Pardon?"
With revived spirits, the console was repurposed to list the names of the original carriers. "The Reagan drifted off to Umoja. The Argo built Moria. And the Nagglfar was the foundation of Tarsonis. However there were four carriers that arrived here in the Koprulu Sector, and no one has an idea as to where the Sarengo went while the others settled down. Hell, it was the disappearance of the Sarengo that originally gave birth to the rumors of the Lost Colonies."
A disgruntled sigh escaped the younger technician with a slight hanging of her head. "I heard of them too... my little brother won't shut up about finding those myths-"
"They're real," Rory interjected with the same attitude as discussing the weather with an acquaintance.
"Huh?"
"I'll admit, I thought they were a load of crock too when I heard it but some people from them somehow find their way into the sector by some means. Mostly prisoners from pirate raids or some kind of curious adventurer finding a working crashed ship are the ones that end up here. When I first met one I thought I was dealing with some sort of nut job caught up in role-playing or something..."
"What happened?"
"Well," he started as he turned around to face her with his only good hand scratching the back of his head. "One day, back on Meinhoff, before the commander showed up and our... revolution, some weirdo came bursting into our operation and caused a commotion about dragons and the like. In hopes of pacifying the guy I snuck up behind him with a wrench and took a whack at him before he or someone ended up callin' them Kel-Morians down on us. Didn't work. Now pissed off, this guy starts waving a stick about chanting some sort of nonsense and the next thing I know there's some sort of rock-men climbing out of the woodwork, smashing our equipment, and attacking everyone they could get their hands on while the guy somehow starts firing fireballs at us! Frankly, that was the only time I had ever felt relieved to have those Kel-Morian thugs storming into the place with guns blazing."
"You're kidding me," she deadpanned.
"Nope. In any event, I found out there were other terrans living outside of the sector. The only question remains is that are they from the Sarengo, whose location is unknown amongst other things, or if our ancestor's home wasn't the only place terrans originated from. Of course if these guys did come from the Sarengo, then I'm curious as to how they got these abilities."
"If there are... adventurer's, how come I never heard of them?"
A scoff left Rory. "Like my guy's case, most don't tend to survive long thanks to the big adjustments they have to go through from small planet lacking technology to a galaxy full of things that can make your head spin off your neck if you let it. I've seen it happen enough times to form that theory at least."
"Anything else you'd like to know, rookie?" he suddenly asked.
"Uh... no. Not at the moment anyway."
"Good, Now get to Hangar Twelve. Apparently the breaker in there been fried in that mix up between Tychus and the kid."
"Aw..." she groaned as she trudged away to get the nearest toolbox.
(Round 2) A/N: I would like to note that I have no real understanding of the medicinal field, so if by rights Kachinsky should've died or not after having several tranquilizer darts shoved into him then I have no clue.
As for the Lost Colonies, basically this came from my own interpretation of a precursory read on the Supercarriers of the StarCraft universe which brought the humans to the Koprulu sector to begin with. I'll admit, my original understanding of it lead me to believe that one carrier went missing where in truth it actually crashed into Umoja and killed off its original occupants. Might as well repurpose that!
Monkeybandit2, (once again) making off with your attention! No refunds.