Shadow Hunters

by Christie Golden

  Go. She’d been about to say “go.” But go where? The ship was damaged beyond repair. What—

  We must get to the chambers.

  We’re still miles away. We don’t know—

  The mental surge Zamara sent was the equivalent of a smack across the face. Panic will serve nothing. We will take tools and supplies and weapons. It is the only choice we have, Jacob.

  “Yeah,” he said aloud, both to Rosemary and to Zamara. “The chambers. We’ve still got to get there and, like you said, we’ve gotta get out of here fast. Might as well run toward something as away from something.”

  Rosemary nodded her head in acknowledgment and ducked back into the reeking charnel house that was the ruined system runner. He followed, fighting back nausea. With an efficiency he could only mutely admire, she searched quickly through the lockers. “We need to travel light and travel smart,” she said. “Here.” She tossed him a standard marine-issue pack and he quickly stuffed it full of whatever she threw toward him, doing his best not to drop food, weapons, or life-saving tools, including one of a pair of walkie-talkies, into the pools of zerg guts on the floor. Within five minutes both packs were loaded. He shouldered his and caught the rifle she tossed him.

  “Ever seen one of these?” she asked, as she examined a small rectangular device with a screen in the center and a keypad running along the bottom. He shook his head and half jumped, half slid out of the ruined ship. “It’s called a Handheld Personal Information-Gathering and Navigation Unit. HPIGNU—“Pig” for short. It’ll look for pretty much anything you need—where your enemies are, how far away your destination is and how to get there, what the terrain is like, stuff like that.”

  “Wow, that’s useful.”

  “No kidding. No life of any notable size within scanning range.” She touched the pad again. “And we’re a mere five hundred and thirty-two kilometers from the chambers. Walk in the park.”

  “Rosemary—I’m sorry, Zamara had no idea—”

  Rosemary waved off whatever he was about to say. “The Pig suggests two routes. One is circuitous and takes us through the rain forest. The other is a straight line, but it’s over a stretch of blackened earth and we’ll be totally exposed to the sun and any zerg that might be flying overhead. I vote for the jungle. Slower going for sure, but we’re much more likely to get there alive. We’d have cover, water, and a better chance of getting food to supplement our rations.”

  “The zerg might be thinking the same thing.”

  “They might indeed. But it’s still the smartest choice.”

  Into the rain forest they went. Jake was in pretty good shape, but they had landed in the morning and the day grew increasingly hotter and, with the moisture of the rain forest, steamier. They were soon both bright red and sweating, but Rosemary had been right: Water was plentiful and tested safe enough to drink, and the thick canopy protected them from the worst of the sun’s rays. But the undergrowth was not insubstantial, and they had to forge a path through huge tree roots slick with moss, ferns bigger than the two of them, and vines as thick as Jake’s arm. Jake’s headache, which seemed ever-present these days, worsened as the day wore on. The loss of the ship, the slow going, and the perpetual tension of having to stay alert and ready to defend himself against everything from insects and snakes on the ground in front of him to gargantuan versions of the same that might pounce on them from the sky at any moment was wearing him down.

  They stopped to rest beside a waterfall that under any other circumstances would have demanded his attention for its beauty and now demanded it because it was wet. Rosemary scanned the pool with the Pig and determined it was safe to drink from. Jake gulped down water along with a handful of pills from the medkit. Rosemary watched him.

  “I’m told that two work as well as six,” she said.

  “Not when the headache’s this bad,” he muttered. “You think we can jump in for a minute? I’m so hot.” He also reeked of vomit and zerg insides, the scent of which was not growing any pleasanter as the time passed. Rosemary glanced at the Pig and nodded.

  “No sizeable water creatures. Some smaller things like leeches and so on, I would imagine, but nothing too harmful.”

  “Thank God.” Jake removed his boots, pack, weapon, and nothing else and strode in. He heard Rosemary chuckle, and she emulated him. The water was not cold, but it was cooler than the air around him, and he sighed in pleasure as he scrubbed at his stained clothing.

  And then he felt a small hand on his head pushing down with surprising strength and he was underwater.

  He came up sputtering to see Rosemary grinning at him, and the splashing battle began. It felt good, to do something silly and stupid and playful that had nothing to do with life or death or protoss or secrets. He’d just drawn his hand back, preparing to execute a particularly large splash, when the look on Rosemary’s face stopped him.

  “Damn it!” She surged out of the water and slogged up the slippery, muddy bank. Jake turned to see what had gotten her so agitated.

  A small primate with red stripes peered at them with yellow eyes from its perch a good ten meters above them. For a second, all Jake knew was a surge of pleasure and recognition. It was a kwah-kai—“Little Hands” in the Khalani language—and for an instant Jake was again Temlaa, sitting with Savassan, regarding this same little creature and smiling at its curiosity and mischief.

  Jake’s smile faded. For in its little hands, the kwahkai clutched the Pig.

  Rosemary had seized a pistol and turned, dripping, to fire. But Little Hands was smart and fast, and before she could take aim it had chattered at her and fled, surrendering its prize and using all four limbs and tail to make good its escape.

  The Pig tumbled down, seemingly in slow motion. Jake watched Rosemary scramble to catch it and knew she would be too late, knew that it would strike one of the gnarled and mossy roots and not soft earth; and as it did so with a sharp crack and bits and pieces of metal and plastic flew upward and twirled glinting in the few shafts of light that penetrated the canopy, Jake realized he might very well be watching their last chance of survival shatter before his eyes as well.

  Rosemary’s string of cursing would have impressed a marine, and sent several birds whirring away in flight. Jake stood in the water, sick with shock, as Rosemary picked up the pieces of the Pig and stared at them for a long moment.

  “Do … you think you can fix it?”

  She didn’t answer at once. “Maybe. If I had the right tools. Right now, I don’t.”

  Jake slogged out of the water. His headache was back, ten times as bad.

  Jacob … the tool is useful, but I know how to navigate by the sun and the stars. And to a degree, I can sense the presence of the zerg.

  Wearily, Jake told Rosemary what Zamara had said. She merely nodded. He didn’t need to read her mind to know that she was swallowing her anger. “Well, that’s better than nothing, I guess. You done with your swim, Professor?”

  Jake thought about how good the water had felt when he’d plunged in. How pleasant it had been to just forget about their life-and-death struggle and simply play in the water and laugh for a bit. Now the wet clothing felt clammy and unpleasant, Rosemary’s carefully composed face looked like it had never known a smile in her entire life, and a wave of hopelessness washed over him. He, an alien intelligence, and a woman who despised them both were all stuck on a hostile planet infested with hungry zerg, hundreds of kilometers from where they needed to be.

  Do not despair, Jacob.

  “Yeah,” he said in answer to both Rosemary and Zamara. “Let’s keep going.”

  Zamara was as good as her word. This was her world. She knew exactly where to take them, what was safe to walk through and what wasn’t, where dangerous creatures, both tiny and toxic and large and threatening, lurked and how to avoid them. By the time they made camp, they’d learned how to expertly remove leeches and to recognize the telltale croon emitted by the poisonous mai-lur lizard, and had constructed and ridden a r
aft to take them miles down a swift-flowing river toward their goal.

  Rosemary had remained dangerously silent throughout most of the seemingly interminable day, but toward sunset had seemed to relax slightly. When she said, “You know, we might make it to sunrise outside of a zerg’s stomach,” he was greatly cheered.

  The rain that started in the late afternoon, however, did not do anything to keep that cheerfulness going. They created a makeshift shelter, propping several of the large ferns over the knobby roots of the enormous trees and flicking on an EmergeLite for illumination. The packs were watertight, but they rearranged some items so weapons were within easy reach if they were needed. The ferns were better than nothing, but unlike the packs were not watertight, so Jake and Rosemary were still soaked. The temperature was warm, even at night, so there was no risk of freezing. Just extreme discomfort.

  Any sign of zerg, omhara, or anything else that might consider us a nice snack, Zamara?

  I sense nothing, Jacob.

  “I used to like rain,” Rosemary said. “I don’t think I like it much now.”

  “I spent three years in a desert,” Jake said. Inside him, Zamara subsided, letting the two humans talk. “I can’t bring myself to hate rain even tonight.”

  Rosemary grunted in an approximation of a chuckle and opened one of their rations. Cold, it was even more unappealing than it had been on the escape pod, sludgy and congealed. Rosemary sniffed at it.

  “I think the zerg guts smelled better,” she said.

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

  “All 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.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IN ONE SWIFT MOVEMENT, ROSEMARY SPRANG for the gun and dove out of the shelter. Jake went for the small box of grenades and followed. 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 gullet. A heartbeat later, Jake was showered by small 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 pull 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 still 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 spill 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 still 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 all certain he found that reassuring.

  “Hey, Zamara, tell them not to get in my head. Tell them that humans find it really offensive,” R. M. said.

  And again, and Jake could tell 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 finally 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 painfully reminded of how different they were from him, how … well … 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 all 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 metallic 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 well. 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 small ramp was extended. Jake went in immediately. Rosemary hesitated for a second, then followed 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—