Here's a video game tie-in novel from one of my favorite games, StarCraft. Written by Keith A. DeCandido. (Pocket Star Books, 2006, 304 pages) This novel was written before StarCraft II came out. It's very dated, to a great era of StarCraft before it had been too cleaned up.
Her last name is Terra, and she comes from a rich family of the old Terran Confederacy. Her family is murdered at her 15th birthday party, unleashing her telekinetic power upon the 300+ guests and killing everybody there. This all has something to do with a group of radicals, Nova's parents, her father's mistress, and her mother's jig having disagreements. In any case the family's death is blamed on Mengsk, as his group the Sons of Korhal have caused other groups to follow such courses. Nova's only remaining family member claims on the news that she is dead.
After fleeing the scene of her mass murder, she finds herself in a slum area of Tarsonis called The Gutter. Here she tries to survive on her own for a while, living on the streets, with nobody but a stray cat she named Pip. She prefers being around animals to people, as their thoughts are simpler and easier to block out. Nova is constantly having to block out what she hears people thinking to themselves around her.
She ends up being hunted by Fagin, a local ganglord. He uses a Psi Screen to block her telepathy and forces her to be his hit girl, killing over 70 people for him in The Gutter. However, he wears the Psi Screen for far too long; he keeps it on for 6 months straight, when it is meant to be used for seven hours at a time. This makes him aggressive and agitated, so he keeps telling Nova to kill others for him.
Meanwhile, Agent Malcom Kelerchian is searching for her. He is a Wrangler, a special agent sent to hunt down telepaths for the Ghost Program. He seems to have some trouble finding her until he is given a troop of Marines to help him. In what you might call the battle, a building is brought down by the Marines. Fagin and many others die in the wreckage.
Between this time and when Malcom wakes up in the hospital from the wreckage, a lot has changed. The Terran Confederacy has been overthrown, replaced now by Mengsk's Terran Dominion. Malcom had heard Mengsk's fleet was threatening Tarsonis, yet when he awakes, the attack is blamed on the Zerg. Here is where the timeline syncs up with the games; not much else from most of the novel has to do with the game. The Zerg and Protoss aren't even believed to be real by many characters in the novel; The Gutter is a universe of its own.
Malcom tells Nova that Mengsk wants him dead for some reason, yet Malcom has found his place for him within the Wranglers. Nova is determined to to finish the Ghost program because she wants her memory erased. She doesn't want to remember killing her family, she doesn't want to remember the thoughts of over 300 people as they died. But she seems to have the highest skill and Psi Index of anyone in the program at the time.
The book closes with her final mission before getting her memory wiped. She is sent to kill the leader of the rebel group that killed her parents. It's a good way to end the novel. I expected something a little more military, but it was a great backstory to the character I'd never known about.
There's a few more StarCraft related novels I have that I may read soon, including a sequel to this one- we'll see when I can get through them. Until next!
