Shadow Hunters (10 page)

It was an exaggeration, but only just. Jake peered at the goop, trying to ascertain its true color in the off-white ilumination provided by the EmergeLite. “Is it Beef Stroganoff or Chicken Supreme?”

“Al I care about is if it’s got peach cobbler.” Rosemary began to peel away the foil that covered the dessert compartment. Hopeful despite everything, Jake watched with interest.

The first warning they had was the horrible tearing sound of trees crashing down and the now-familiar, blood-freezing chittering.

Zerg.

IN ONE SWIFT MOVEMENT, ROSEMARY SPRANG for the gun and dove out of the shelter. Jake went for the smal box of grenades and folowed. He was not a second too soon, for the moment he was clear of the shelter something large and snakelike crashed down on it with a large crack: the tail of a hydralisk, which now lifted its monstrous, cobralike head and reared back, poised to strike.

Without conscious thought, Jake drew his arm back and tossed a grenade at it. It was a lucky throw and went right down the creature’s open gulet. A heartbeat later, Jake was showered by smal bits of pulpy, reeking flesh.

He heard Rosemary shouting curses and the rapid fire of the gun and turned again to see her mowing down two zerglings. They screamed as their limbs flailed, not halting their approach until their lives were completely and thoroughly ended. Done with those two, Rosemary looked around, searching for the next wave of zerg. Jake could hear chittering, in the distance now, but coming closer.

There were too many of them.

He stared at Rosemary, his eyes wide with horror, grief, and guilt. Their gazes locked for a second, then she flashed a grin and turned to the sounds of their approaching doom.

Jake reached for Zamara, wondering if she could somehow pul another rabbit of her protoss hat, but she was silent inside him.

Zamara?

The sound of death came closer, but Zamara was not speaking to him. Somehow he thought she’d have last words or something, but apparently—

The by now too-familiar clacking, buzzing, angry insectlike sounds could stil be heard, but the noises were now joined by a sound Jake had never heard before and could not put a name to. Groping for similarities, to make the unknown known and less horrific, Jake’s mind incongruously went back to his childhood. When he was a kid, he used to love going to summer festivals on his homeworld of Tarsonis. They would often end with fireworks displays. Jake’s mother always winced and covered her ears, but Jake, his little sister Kirsten, and their dad loved the high-pitched shriek of the fireworks racing up to the skies before exploding with a bone-shaking boom rather too much like that of the grenade Rosemary had just lobbed. The sounds outside sounded like those fireworks.

Now that odd screaming noise was joined by squeals and shrieks of zerg in torment.

Confused, Jake risked a glance at Rosemary. She stood beside him, rifle at the ready. Every part of her petite, perfectly formed body was taut, frozen, except for her chest, which moved up and down rapidly as she drew in air, and the vein that beat wildly in her throat.

There was a sudden silence.

Jake didn’t dare speak.

The moments ticked on.

Zamara was abruptly there, as if she had returned home to his mind after stepping outside. And she’d brought company.

Over a dozen voices suddenly began speaking in his head. They overlapped and echoed and their feelings caressed and assaulted him both. Jake cried out, dropping to his knees and letting the grenades spil to the earth, clutching his head as pain blossomed brightly. At once, Zamara put up a buffer between him and the—

“Protoss,” Jake gasped. “There are stil protoss left here!”

Rosemary lowered the rifle. Relief and irritation were both plain on her beautiful face.

“Why didn’t Zamara say anything?”

After that one excruciating moment, the pain began to ebb. Jake sat up cautiously and looked at the pile of dead zerg. His stomach roiled and this time he wasn’t able to stop it. He got to his hands and knees and began to vomit, the contents of his stomach merging with the foul purplish-black blood and flesh of the dead zerg. He sat down, wiped his hand across his mouth, and stared up into the curious eyes of several protoss as they stepped out of concealment among the huge trees.

Great. This is how I get to meet my first live protoss. Covered in zerg gore and
puking my guts out.

He felt a rumble of amusement from Zamara.
They are much more interested in
how I came to be inside your body than in said body’s functions.

Jake was not at al certain he found that reassuring.

“Hey, Zamara, tel them not to get in my head. Tel them that humans find it realy offensive,” R. M. said.

And again,
and Jake could tel that this time Zamara was annoyed,
there are more
important things my people have to worry about. Such as retreating before the
zerg return with stronger numbers. They wish to aid us. We must hurry.

“They want to help us,” Jake told his traveling companion. “But there are more zerg out there.”

Even in this moment of dire necessity and need for urgency, Jake knew a hint of wonder as he watched hands with two thumbs and two fingers reach toward him, helping him to his feet; saw large but also somehow slender bodies move in a way that was deeply familiar after “living” as Temlaa. One of them met his gaze, and though Zamara’s barrier prevented the female from making telepathic contact, Jake knew from her body language that she was curious and pleased and intrigued, just as he was. In a species that had no voice, it seemed that telepathy was far from the only method of communication.

R. M. had darted back to the now-ruined shelter and retrieved their packs. She tossed one to a nearby protoss and shouldered the other one. “I hope these protoss have some way to get us off the planet.”

They do not.

I’m not telling her that right now.

That is a wise decision.

Thirty seconds later, Jake, Zamara, Rosemary, and their rescuers and new best friends were hastening off toward safety.

If it hadn’t been for the direness of the meeting and their current situation, Jake thought he might never have been happier. To finaly meet a protoss! Because of the connection to Zamara, and the memories she had shared and was continuing to share, he felt a kinship with them. At the same time he was painfuly reminded of how different they were from him, how … wel … how alien.

He felt their presence skimming his consciousness and for the first time since joining with Zamara, Jake wanted to feel another’s thoughts. But such a thing would have to be gradual. The pain he’d experienced the first time they’d al tried to talk to him without Zamara’s intervention had been unbearable. It was even worse than when he’d attempted to read the minds of the drug addicts he and Rosemary had run across while in Paradise.

Therefore Zamara was acting as a translator. Even with the speed of thought it felt cumbersome to Jake, and he realized he was growing accustomed to communicating this way.

Maybe I won’t make such a bad preserver after all.

… Perhaps not.

Her lack of enthusiasm stung a bit, but he pushed it aside.

At first, Jake had thought the protoss simply appeared as if by a miracle or the happiest of coincidences. After a few moments, though, when he caught glimpses of something metalic and gold glinting between the dark green fronds of the foliage, he realized that the protoss had a vessel. In his head, Zamara chuckled slightly.

We are far from divine beings, Jacob. We were detected long before I was even
close enough to be in telepathic contact with them. But it is fortunate that they
arrived when they did.

Rosemary looked at the ship admiringly. “I wouldn’t want acid on that either,” she said, acknowledging the reason the protoss had landed the ship here rather than closer to their shelter. It was a beautiful thing, even though Jake knew it was a simple atmospheric craft. Nothing, it seemed to him, was too simple or functional to not be beautiful as wel. He wondered, not for the first time, how it was the khalai craftsmen managed to make things curve so effortlessly.

The door opened soundlessly and a smal ramp was extended. Jake went in immediately. Rosemary hesitated for a second, then folowed suit. The pro-toss swiftly entered once the two terrans had come aboard.

“Hey,” Rosemary said, pointing at a pile of blankets, weapons, and other items,

“that’s our stuff!”

The protoss saw our vessel come under attack,
Zamara explained.
By the time
they reached it, we had moved on. They salvaged what they could—

“—and then set out to find us,” Jake said, relaying what Zamara had told him.

“I see. Hope they brought my tool kit—I might be able to fix the Pig.”

“I hope so, too. Let’s take a seat and get out of here before more zerg start sniffing around.”

There were eight individual seats and a curved bench for the pilots. Jake and Rosemary eased into the chairs and Jake found his comfortable, if a bit large for his smaler human frame. Two protoss moved to the front bench and the rest took their seats, eerily motionless once they were settled. Jake knew that their minds were as perfectly stil as their bodies. He wondered if this was part of the military training the templar underwent, that deep, profound stilness.

Most of those you see here are khalai, not templar. The only “training” they
have had has been that which was necessitated by their situation here on Aiur,
Zamara answered him.
Think of what you know of us already, Jake. The
discipline that enables us to stay unstirring, in mind and in body, and then leap
from that place into swift motion and thought kept us alive for many eons.

In poetic contrast to the others, the two protoss pilots exchanged glances and gestures, although they kept their thoughts from Jake. Rosemary watched them keenly, as their long, four-fingered hands moved fluidly over a console. They did not actualy touch anything; it seemed the motions alone were sufficient.

“Wonder if terrans could learn how to pilot these things,” R. M. said softly. “This is one sweet little vessel.”

Jake grimaced slightly. In the midst of al this awesome discovery, and, he admitted, sheer terror, Rosemary was thinking only about herself and what plunder she could take. Even as the thought brushed his mind, he chastised himself for it. He’d known Rosemary Dahl in the most intimate way possible—for a few brief moments, he’d been her. He knew why she was the way she was, what had shaped her. Like the ancient weapons Valerian so loved, she’d been tempered by the fires of experience.

The anger dissipated, and al he could do was feel sorry for her that she was missing the real heart of what was happening around her.

There were no windows in the golden vessel except for the single large circular one in front of the pilots. Through this, Jake watched as the vessel climbed skyward so he could barely even feel it. The ship skimmed smoothly over first the thick, green canopy of the rain forest and then blackened, burned, and dead earth, heading toward a blackened, burned, and dead husk of a city. As they traveled, Zamara told Jake what had transpired here four short years ago. The preserver had relayed R.

M.’s desire to keep her thoughts to herself and the other protoss had agreed, so Jake had to tel R. M. the old-fashoined way—with verbal speech.

“When the zerg attacked Aiur four years ago,” Jake told Rosemary, “it was absolute chaos. Hundreds of thousands were kiled as al tried to get to the warp gate on the surface. The zerg were everywhere. You saw what they did to the planet.”

“Yeah, that’s why when Zamara said there weren’t any protoss here I believed her.

No offense or anything, but I figured that anyone who didn’t make it off-planet didn’t make it at al.” Rosemary gestured to the ugly landscape over which they were flying.

He smiled a bit, at her, at Zamara, at the protoss who’d just saved their skins. “You underestimate them. They are survivors. Even the ones who aren’t trained to be.”

She scowled at him. “I don’t know why you’re so happy, Jake. This is a nice little ship, granted, but unless there’s a nice
big
ship tucked away somewhere, we’re stranded on this zerg-infested rock.”

“We’re alive. We’ve got friends. We’l be al right. Anyway, some of them weren’t able to make it through the warp gate before the protoss disabled it.”

She threw him a sharp glance. “Why the hel would they want to disable it?”

“Because it would take the zerg straight to the only haven the protoss realy had left.

And if enough zerg came through there, that would be the end of the pro-toss. Al of them. Not just their world, and not those who had the bad luck to get left behind.”

He gestured to the protoss, who sat statuelike around them. “They understand that.

Any of them—al of them—would gladly have died to protect their race.”

The words were true, so far as they went, but Jake knew how inadequate those words were to the task of describing the protoss’s love for their homeland and their people. It made any kind of terran nationalism seem trivial and petty. His head started aching again.

Zamara, this translating from thoughts to speech and back is getting tiresome.

If I can convince Rosemary that the conversation will only go one way, can we
let the protoss talk to us?

She hesitated.

Come on, I’m not
that
bad at this.

Very well.