Sons of Korhal Base, New Gettysburg, Tarsonis – 1600

Private Doug Kershaw took a long pull of his cigarette, and breathed out a cloud of smoke into the face of his companion, Pat Winston. Winston took an appreciative sniff.

"Say, you don't have any more of those, do ya?"

Doug grinned at him. "Maybe I do, and maybe I don't." He chuckled at his friend's grumbling, and took a long glance around the twisted wreckage and smashed buildings in front of them. Their squad had been holding a line against a small group of Protoss, who seemed to have been trying to fight the Zerg.

"Damned if I know why we're here," Winston said thoughtfully, unknowingly echoing his friend's sentiments. "Seems to me them Protoss wanna kill the Zerg... I say let 'em."

"I hear ya, man." Doug methodically stubbed out his cigarette on the knee joint of his armor, and spat a wad of brown tobacco juice, which slapped on the steel partition in front of them, and dribbled down into the dirt. He coughed when Pat suddenly elbowed him in the chest.

"Hey, lookit that," Winston said, pointing. "Is that who I think it is?"

Doug turned to peer over his shoulder, and shifted heavily to turn the bulk of his armor. Stalking along the lines, just behind the rifle-pits, a lanky, but feminine figure in a Ghost's uniform peered out across the waste. "Hey, no shit! That is her!"

Winston sighed. "Man, lookit those legs... hey!" Kershaw had just punched him in the arm. "What's the deal?"

"She's an officer dipshit, and a teep." Doug waited a moment for the implications to sink in. "She hears you thinkin that, and you'll be on KP duty for the rest of the war." Lieutenant Kerrigan was known to do exactly that.

"Oh." Pat Winston paused for a moment. "I bet she ain't that good anyway." This time he managed to duck the incoming fist, and laughed aloud.

Several other marines within earshot of the exchange chortled.

Down the line, their unit leader, First Sargeant Osbourne, leaned out of the top hatch of his Siege Tank, which was stationed just behind the rifle pits. "Shaddap girls!" he bellowed. "You pukes keep it quiet on the line!"

Winston grumbled a few choice words under his breath, but Doug shushed him. "Now what d'you make of that?" Doug pointed back towards the Sargeant's tank, where Kerrigan had stopped, and was explaining something to the assembled squad leaders.

When she finished talking, several of the non-coms turned away, visibly sagging. One corporal from another unit limply sank to the ground, staring at nothing. His eyes were the eyes of a dead man.

Winston shuddered. "Shit man, that does not look good at all."

Doug agreed. He glanced down the trench-line where a whisper was racing towards them. Leaning over, he caught the rumor as it spread down the lines like wildfire, and his blood turned to ice. We've been abandoned! No way, Doug though rationally. There were over five hundred soldiers down here, there's no way we'd just be left behind. But one glance at Kerrigan, slumped miserably against the side of Sargeant Osbourne's tank, confimed the worst.

Up and down the lines, a glum silence fell, the dopey jokes and comments of a moment ago choked off. Even the officers were quiet, merely standing around, staring out across the battlefield as if waiting for the end. It was is if no one knew what to say... but then, who does know what to say in the face of inevitable death?

Kerrigan, seated in the shade of the big tank, slumped, defeated, and managed only a half-hearted oath at Arcturus's and Raynor's betrayal. Of all people, she though she could have at least counted on Jim.

Suddenly, to the north, the steady chatter of automatic fire reached them. The Zerg were making another big push from their colonies. Kerrigan stood wearily, and shouldered her canister rifle. If they were all dead, so be it. She at least would die on her feet.

All was still quiet on this front, when Winston suddenly elbowed Doug in the gut. "Hey, you see that out there?" He was pointing out across the battlefield, between and through smashed building faces, and twisted wreckage.

Doug stared hard into the debris. With the sun beginning to go down behind them, the glare off the broken glass and shredded metal that littered the field made it difficult to see, and Doug's eyes were watering despite his sun visor when he finally saw what Winston was pointing to. There was clear movement out there, only a few hundred yards in front of them, and he could see the glimmer of a Protoss shield, and the blue glow of dozens of psionic blades in the gathering twilight.

"Oh hell," Winston muttered. Before he could add to that, Sargeant Osbourne, who had apparently also seen the incoming aliens, leaped to his feet, towering over the men in the rifle pits from the hatch of his tank.

"Here they come boys, pour it on!" There was no cheering and shouting as there had been during earlier attacks. This time, they all knew there would be no last minute evacuation, and they were all here to stay, no matter what happened.

In scattered pockets along the line, as the marines caught sight of the Protoss, firing began in fits and spurts, finally swelling into a steady roar of unleashed firepower. A deep throated pounding behind them signaled the big siege guns going to work, and small geysers of earth were hurled skyward with each impact.

A number of the Protoss warriors sucumbed to the massed fire, their shields flickering a brilliant electric blue before the wasp-like buzzing of the bullets found their lightly armored torsoes, causing them to drop, pouring out their lifeblood in equally vibrant azure into the strange soil of a planet alien to them. But onward they pressed, seemingly heedless of casualties, and then the bulky spider-like Dragoon mechs were returning the fire of the humans.

A few feet from where Doug Kershaw and Pat Winston were crouched behind a firing slit, a marine started to scream, but it was cut off just as quickly when a crackling energy sphere slammed into him, flinging him limply into the back of the trench. He didn't move again.

All along the line, the noise grew worse. Dying screams and groans mixed with cries of "Medic!" and harsh swearing by those only lightly wounded. It was an unholy cachophany of noise, and the soldiers still fighting simply shut it out of their minds.

In one section of trech, a Protoss footsoldier, all of seven feet tall and looking as alien as they came, leaped the rifle parapet and landed with surprising grace in the midst of several marines, beheading one off-hand with a swipe of the sizziling energy blades on it's wrists. Another nearby human hit the Protoss Zealot with a round of cussing that would have blistered paint when one of the blades neatly took his right arm off at the shoulder. The cursing cut off suddenly when the Protoss's other blade punched through the soldier's torso, just as the zealot itself was blown into bloody blue gobbets by a full autocannon barrage from a staggering Goliath mech.

The Terran line swayed and strained under the relentless assault, and one piece of trenchline changed hands five times in as many minutes. A flare lit the Terran rifle pits for a brief moment, as Sargeant Osbourne's tank brewed up, plasma rounds cooking off inside the hull, as it's killer, a heavy, crawling Protoss creation inched into view across the field. The center of the Terran lines were only seconds from utter route, as the Protoss reformed and began a second wave of charging footsoldiers.

Then all hell broke loose.

Blazing energy blades held high, dozens of Protoss footsoldiers broke cover and charged directly at the Terran line. There were too many of them, and the Protoss, screeching a victory howl, rushed the rifle pits, where the Terran soldiers grimly waited for death. Some of the Protoss fell, replaced by still more, and within a hundred yards of the humans, began sprinting, heedless into the fire.

An inhuman scream forcefully and suddenly drowned out all the clamor of pitched battle, and the earth beneath the Protoss simply erupted.

When the rumbling ceased, the humans who had instinctively hit the dirt cautiously peered over the field pits. Doug's ears were ringing despite his helmet's noise buffers, and beside him, he vaugely heard Winston stand up, and shout, "Holyshitholyshitholyshit!"

Driven by a stiff evening breeze, the pall of dust and smoke drifted away, revealing the battlefield. Marines who had their fingers ready on the trigger suddenly went slack jawed, and the sight drew a collective gasp of surprise from every unwounded soldier.

The ground over which the Protoss had been running was a decimated, cratered hell on earth. Fires burned in places, consuming Protoss bodies, and in other places, boiling mud simmered at the bottoms of craters twenty yards across, or more. The Protoss attackers were gone as surely as if they'd never existed. After the tumult of combat, the sudden silence was unnerving as the humans surveyed the carnage.

A few of the more adventerous souls left the trench to explore the wreck, no sooner had they left than they spotted shadows streaking along the ground. As they threw themselves flat, Doug looked up, and momentarily saw a wing of black shapes streak overhead. An instant later a pressure wave sucked the air from their lungs. Whatever they were, they were going rediculously fast. Amid a flutter of shouts, a second wing of aircraft appeared. These however, were cruising at a sedate subsonic velocity, and as they overflew the trenches, the marines spotted Wraiths in formation with strange delta-wing craft. As they passed overhead, one of the delta-wings waggled it's wings at them.

Cheering broke out all along the lines, and in the distance they could hear similar cheers from the men to the north fighting the Zerg. This time, the officers, including to the surprise of many, Kerrigan, joined in on the celebrations.

Behind the front lines, Terran standard model dropships touched down, disgorging fresh marines and equipment. One of the newly arrived Vultures raced bolted towards the front lines. Engines screaming as it swerved wildly around craters, it skidded to a stop right behind the trenches, only a few feet from where Kerrigan and several dazed looking non-coms were gathered. The top hatch hissed open, and in one fluid motion, Jim Raynor vaulted from the cockpit and covered the distance in one stride, slamming into Kerrigan with all the grace of a steamroller.

Kerrigan was bowled backwards a few feet by the force of the impact, but immediately pushed away from Raynor's rough embrace. "Jimmy? What the hell are you doing here? Arcturus said you were abandoning us!"

Raynor scowled now. "That bastard did try to leave you behind," he said, starting on a lengthly explanation.

Sitting on the lip of the trench, Doug pointed at the pair. "With the temperment of them two," he said learnedly, "it's hard to say whether they're gonna jump on each other like wild animals, or tear each others' heads off." He grinned. "Either way, it should be fun to watch, right?"

Winston didn't respond. Doug glanced over at his friend, and found Winston staring straight up, slack jawed and wide-eyed. Frowning, Doug glanced up, and up. He shoved back his sun visor and gaped. Around him other soldiers were doing the same.

Hovering over their heads, tinged gold and red with the last rays of the setting sun, was a ship. It was decorated with a symbol, the same symbol, Doug remembered, as were on the wings of the strange delta-wings that had gone over earlier, and while blocky and functional looking, carried two dozen obvious hatches on it's underside. And it blotted out the sky.