"Sometimes The Line Breaks"

- Jim Raynor and the Protoss -

By SuperMudz

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CHAPTER ONE

JIM RAYNOR

Two years ago.

He adjusted his feet in the suit against the servos, preparing for a quick turn. The reaper pilot angled his thrusters and quickly disappeared behind some brush, and Jim lost sight of him. He lowered the perfect, clean line of the gauss rifle – a new model and untarnished or even nicked in the single day he'd possessed it. Didn't do to be nostalgic when your life was on the life. But one day, he and his revolver had a date to keep.

He gritted his teeth.

"Damn."

That was just an advance scout – if Jim had been lucky he might have got him before he thought to radio in. Too late now.

"Alright, that's torn it," he commed over the line, to general broadwave channel directly to all his troops he had waiting.

This time the Dominion was waiting for him. But they needed those supplies.

A continent away, his allies were defending a temporary military colony against sporadic Zerg attacks. The fighting had lessened enough that Jim had decided this was a good time for an incursion – but he decided just to do this with his trusted assault team, let the protoss keep their defenders.

He still occasionally felt like he had something to prove to them – that terrans could hang in the fight just as well as any protoss. He knew the protoss had nothing but a great deal of respect for him and his boys – but he supposed that was the ego that kept him sharp.

He felt like he had proved himself, but you didn't truly do that unless you kept trying.

If only Nova was more amenable to diplomacy, that girl could have saved them all a lot of trouble, and a few lives while they were at it. Raynor was only very rarely able to save the lives of the Dominon he fought, although he contained his fighting very strategically for that reason.

He chuckled to himself. He still remembered the time a big bunch of protoss had beamed down to see if he needed assistance quashing the resistance. The Dominion marines had just surrendered immediately.

Wished he could pull the same stunt here, but they were pretty entrenched – chances were they'd fire off some kind of emergency signal, or even weapon built especially for them. Wasn't polite to involve your allies in personal business.

He remembered Fenix's warriors. They had been a gift. In the metaphorical sense, not strictly speaking. Fenix was probably one of the best friends he had ever had, although he never said that in so many words. He liked him, he was among the best of what he liked about the protoss.

A soldier who could carve his way through walls with psi blades and shrug off automatic fire was certainly handy. They had been interesting to have around as well – although Raynor had been side by side with many protoss by that time. He learned a little more about them in that time.

Fenix was gone now. He felt sad. He missed his buoyant spirit. Nothing seemed to faze him. If he were here right now, doubtless he would clap him on the shoulder (or whatever the protoss did – he couldn't say, since Fenix didn't really have arms in that shell), and say there was more to see and do, and to have faith.

He was told, or inferred, really, with their damned mystique, that the protoss didn't truly die – they just passed on – but it was much the same difference to him.

You didn't use to see the Protoss deploy their ground troops very often – they preferred to just sit up in their big ships and eradicate everything in sight. But times had changed a little, and the Protoss had been forced back. They now fought hand-to-hand, not because they chose to, but because they had little other choice. Their homes and bases themselves were being threatened at every turn by the Zerg.

Kerrigan had lost none of her insatiable appetite for combat, nor her cunning. The protoss, who had practised war for centuries and millenia, found themselves surrounded at every turn. The Zerg were slowly but surely tightening their grip. Even on those powerful starships and warships, the protoss did not seem able, or willing, to escape the Zerg.

(*)

Now.

This station had been kept off all the maps, but rumour was they were hiding something valuable here. If it was a Psi Emitter, or even just a new weapons tech, he could use it. Mengsk hadn't been the sharing type.

Too self-interested to be trusted. Jim felt oddly sorry that he was gone, in a way, but it lifted a huge burden. His son was a little green, a little rough, but he seemed made of good stuff. Perhaps he'd finally go right where Raynor's previous hopes had gone wrong. He knew Valerian certainly wanted to prove it.

His mood darkened. Mengsk had been that way once, too. So furious in his drive to bring down the Confederacy and expose it for the corrupt regime it was – fired to do something about it – Jim had thought maybe he was someone who could turn things around… And then he had turned around and become ten times worse than they ever were.

There was something to be said for those Confederate experiments, they weren't peace and love – but Mengsk had brought down a crushing iron grip that had scarificed and annihiliated colonial worlds purely to his own grandiose ego.

Maybe he was afraid to believe what he had become – Jim never knew.

It was the one good deed Kerrigan and he had left in them, together. Then she was gone again. Floating into the wind like – he laughed - a damned angel.

He had never really got to have those final words with Kerrigan. Just the pained look on her face, as she stood there, once again the monster she had become, and become again.

But that time it had been her choice. As was the final one. It seemed she had found her destiny after all. So why didn't he feel glad about it? She had survived. What of the girl he had known? Was that what bothered him?

Wherever she was going, he could not follow – that, he knew. He didn't have the courage to believe that he could, although nothing had ever made him afraid before.

He lit up a cigarette. He could barely taste it, the wind had already been so bitter in his open helmet. That last image of her – so vivid – fire burned into his retina, and he didn't understand what she had become… but he had… felt… how she felt.

He exhaled, and the sulphur drifted into the wind in rapidly shifting threads – as if designed to pattern his thoughts. He stared out at it. Flames and ash of ruins across the entire world. And this time, he hadn't been a spectator – he had been a part of it. Killed his fair share himself just to keep them off Kerrigan's back.

He remembered the scientists in the power station, right before he had shut off the emergency back-up defences. And he wondered for a moment… had he become like Mengsk? Justifying that he was doing the right thing, even when it was ugly?

Wherever she was – maybe Kerrigan knew. The hollowness he felt at this moment was strange and unbearable, but there was nowhere to go. He had faced pain before – although sometimes he longed for the simpler times. Danger and dirt, sure, serve it up – he could deal with that. This was something else. The danger overtaking the universe seemed to want to take some of his soul with it. And that was just one damned thing it couldn't have.

Not unless Kerrigan had taken it with her. Would that leave him half a man?

He sighed. At least Valerian had evacuated the civilians. But soldiers were human, too – the only difference was Mengsk had brainwashed them and put rifles in their hands.

Maybe you couldn't think about that when you were fighting – you made sure you thought of them as the enemy, otherwise you'd be dead and the whole point was moot – but afterward… there was plenty of time to think. That was the time to figure out if maybe something had to change.

(*)

"Deploy a few of our zealots to protect the Stalkers," Artanis ordered. "There may be ambushes upon the way."

The judicar nodded, and Artanis felt his psionic pulse go out – tightly directed, a concentration of energy that would be received by the templar only. Even Artanis himself would not sense the specific nature of the impulse, if he had not given it himself.

If he closed his eyes, he would sense the powerful ley-lines patterned so carefully through the ship, until the psi crystals achieved perfect resonation. Their light would grow and dim, as if moments of life passed through them. As if the ship itself were truly alive, and not simply a part of him, as surely as his nerve cords were attached.

Those who were closest to him were among the greatest of their rank and training – he had surrounded himself with worthy individuals to carry this war out. The thought was amusing. Individual. But for the greater whole.

Perhaps they were testing, they and the Zerg whose Khala was greater. – for the Zerg had an abominable hive-link of their own, where each of their kind was truly subsumed to an over-riding will. Their gleeful self-destruction was a mockery of all that the enlightened path of the Khalai stood for. Reduced to claws and weapons – nevertheless they were effective, and harried the protoss.

He reclined back into the interface device, and felt the power tickle around his nerve cords as he joined with the vessel, seeking out the nodes to serve its warp engine. He would give it the command to jump. There was a target more than a thousand light-years away, and their fleet would be needed.

Many were lost, but there were faint glimmers of hope, signals, of those that had strayed and could be gathered back into the fold.

Even the Zerg would quail against the mighty Armada they had assembled, for truly, nothing could have stood against it, or prevented it from where it wanted to go – even if the entirety of the Swarm came against it.

There was still power in the protoss, still a bastion of hope in this darkening galaxy.

(*)

"Whatever it was, it's gone now," Jim told them. "Maybe for a while, those boys were mostly here for us, not the labs. Can't tell what it was, either. I think it might have been something that belonged to your people, though – Stetmann had a look at the set-up. But either it was moved or someone beat us to it. Not a psi emitter at least."

Jim Raynor had survived the foray well, the protoss noted with approval. His warriors looked tired, but successful. Truly, he accounted himself in battle like a true warrior. The terran had been instrumental in their defense many times, and Artanis found he had come to respect him, human or no, as he had once blithely dismissed in his pride. Which he could ill afford these days in the war against the Zerg – they had a way of testing such weaknesses and finding them wanting.

The humans risked so much, they were so vulnerable, stripped of the protections of the protoss – but they endured, they fought, they struggled, and they survived. They were remarkably doughty in that way. He would not be surprised if soon their names would be honoured in protoss war archives. Already they had esteemed themselves in the protoss' most important conflicts, it was not the way of the Templar to deny them their honour, even if they were not protoss.

Artanis seemed to recognise what was on the human's mind.

"Your soul has been deeply tested and scarred, my friend," Artanis put a clawed hand on his shoulder in a gesture of friendship and respect. "Allow yourself time to heal."

From anyone else, it would have seemed a strange thing to say – but not from a protoss.

For a moment, Jim had felt like giving up. There was nothing left for him to damn do anymore. He had seen this cosmic war through Hell and more. But it had passed, and he knew, he remembered, he had to hold onto himself.

He suddenly realised how he felt. Alone.

(*)