Shadow Hunters (3 page)

“Hit the damn override!” she yelled, and this time the assistant obeyed. The sound of the Klaxons dimmed and the light returned to normal. Howard gritted her teeth, calmed herself, and returned to the delicate job at hand. She was almost done. A few moments later, she’d finished stitching up her
employer like a cloth mannequin and let out a long sigh.

“Someone find out what’s going on,” she said. Samuels nodded and began trying to raise someone from security. She wasn’t overly worried for her personal safety or that of her team; the compound was complex and well guarded and the medical wing was located deep inside. Of more concern to her were the casualties elsewhere on the base. They’d already weathered one attack today; she wondered how many people they’d have to stitch up when it was all over.

She stepped back, peeling off her bloody gloves and disposing of them while her assistants cut away the rest of Ethan Stewart’s bloodstained clothing.

“Can’t raise anyone,” Samuels said. “Everything’s down.”

“Keep trying,” Howard ordered, fighting back a little flutter of panic.

“Huh … this is weird,” Sean Kirby said. Howard turned to look at him and her eyes fell to Ethan’s left wrist.

The clothing on the right arm had been cut away so they could insert the IV, but they’d ignored his left arm until now. The wrist was encircled by a small bracelet which had been taped to his skin. No, not a bracelet, a collection of wires and hardware—

“Shit,” moaned Howard, darting forward, blood still on her upper arms. She grabbed at Ethan’s hair, knowing now that it wasn’t hair at all, hoping she
wouldn’t find what she knew she would, and tugged off the hairpiece.

A delicate netting of fine, luminous wires was wrapped around Ethan’s bald pate, held in place by small pieces of tape.

Damn it! There’d been no time to check for such things, he’d been within minutes of death when they’d found him and the surgery had begun almost immediately. It’d taken six hours. How long had he been wearing this thing before then? What kind of damage had it done? Why was he wearing it anyway, Ethan was no telepath—

Gunfire rattled in the corridor. All heads turned toward the doorway. All heads but Janice Howard’s.

“We’re medical staff; they won’t kill us, whoever they are,” said Howard, hoping to calm them. Howard did not look at the doorway, instead bending over Ethan and starting to remove the tape that fastened the softly glowing wires to his cleanly shaven scalp. She didn’t know much about these things. Every instinct told her to just rip it off, but she feared that might damage him further.

More gunfire, and screams. Horrible, shrill, agonized screams. And a strange, chittering sound, a sort of clacking.

“What the … ,” whispered Samuels, his eyes wide.

Howard thought she knew what it was. She was pretty sure everyone else in the room had guessed as well. But there was nothing to be done, except their jobs. There were no weapons in an operating room;
no one had ever expected they would need them. And if the sound came from the source Howard thought it did, it was unlikely that any weapon any of the doctors and assistants could wield would do anything but make them die slower. They had a patient. He came first. With hands that did not shake, she continued to unfasten the tape.

The screaming stopped. The silence that followed was worse. Howard removed the last piece of tape and gently disengaged the psi-screen.

A bubbling, liquid sound came from the door and a harsh, acrid odor assaulted her nostrils. Coughing violently and holding the psi-screen net in her hands, Howard turned. The door was melting into a steaming puddle, the acid that had dissolved it now starting to eat through the floor. Framed in the hole that was now the doorway to the operating room were creatures straight out of nightmares.

Zerg.

Her team stood frozen in place. The zerg, strangely enough, also did not advance. There were three of them that she could see, standing almost motionless. Two of them were smallish; she’d heard the term “doglike” used in training to describe zerglings, but now that she beheld them, they were nothing so pleasant. They waited, incisors clicking, red human blood shiny on their carapaces. Above them, its sinuous neck undulating slightly, towered something that looked like a deranged cross between a cobra and an insect. Scythelike arms, glinting in the antiseptic light
of the operating room, waited, presumably for the order to slice off heads.

The zerglings drooled, fidgeting a little, moving slightly into the room so as not to be standing in the puddle of acid. The medical team backed up as if the creatures were indeed dogs, sheepdogs from old Earth, herding them into the corner. They went, terrified into obedience, confused that the creatures they were told would rip them to pieces on sight were not doing so. Thinking that maybe they might be deemed unimportant, and live to talk about the encounter over a beer somewhere someday.

Howard hoped that too. But she knew in her gut she was wrong.

The zergling in the lead was staring at her intently, and Howard knew without knowing how she knew that someone other than the creature was looking through its eyes. Those black eyes, flat and emotionless, went from her face to her hands to the prone form of Ethan Stewart on the bed.

The cobralike thing—hydralisk, that was the name; somehow it was important to Howard to use the proper term for things, even now when the properly named hydralisk was about to kill her and the thought made hysteria bubble up inside her—reared back and spat something on Ethan. It was a strange gooey substance, and as she watched, it spread, rapidly encasing him in some kind of webbing or cocoon.

Attacking her patient.

“No!” Howard cried, the paralysis broken. A saver
of lives to the last, she sprang forward. The zergling whirled on her, chittering with excitement, happy to be freed from its command to sit, to stay; by God it really was like a dog, wasn’t it—

She heard the screams around her as she hit the ground, and after that, heard nothing more.

IN THE DARKNESS, THERE WAS PAIN.

Jake Ramsey swam unwillingly back to consciousness and the dull throbbing ache that had awakened him. Eyes still closed, he lifted a hand to his forehead and probed gingerly at the crusted blood that covered a good-sized lump, then hissed as the pain went from dull and throbbing to knife-sharp.

“You hit your head when we jumped,” came a cool female voice.

For a long, confusing moment, Jake didn’t remember any of it. Then it all came tumbling down on him.

He was on a stolen ship, fleeing from Valerian Mengsk, son of the emperor. Valerian wanted him … wanted him because …

Because you have the memories of a protoss preserver in your mind,
came Zamara’s cool voice inside his head.

Oh yeah, thanks for reminding me,
Jake thought sarcastically.

He sat up slowly. His head spun and he made no further movement for a few minutes, fighting back nausea. It was all coming back to him now. The offer that Valerian had made, hiring a “crackpot” archeologist like Jake to explore a dark temple of unknown alien origin. Full funding, full support, state-of-theart equipment—it had seemed too good to be true. And of course, like most things that seem too good to be true, it had been. There’d been this one little catch.

Jake had been ordered to get inside the “temple,” as Valerian was fond of calling the construct. Jake had done so, deciphering the riddle that had blocked entrance to the innermost chamber of a labyrinthine creation. And inside that chamber … inside, Zamara had been waiting. Waiting for someone to figure out the secret, waiting for someone to whom she could deliver the precious burden of an entire race’s memories.

He’d almost gone mad. She’d had to rewire his brain. It had been too much for him to handle, an onslaught of memories of a time known now as the Aeon of Strife, when the protoss had been violent and ruthless and seemingly lived to slaughter one another. Even now, those first few flashes of memories, exploding into his brain without context or explanation, made him break out into a cold sweat.

It was necessary. And you are … undamaged.

Tell that to the lump on my head,
he thought back.

Suddenly Jake had gone from an expendable crackpot to someone—hell, call it for what it was, some “thing”—of great value to Valerian and the Dominion. Rosemary “R. M.” Dahl, the woman who had supposedly been appointed to keep him safe, had turned on him and his entire team. The marines who had delivered the archeologists to the planet with friendly well wishes and affable smiles now came back for them, but this time the team were prisoners, not guests. It had been the coldest of comforts when, unexpectedly, the marines had included Rosemary and her team as their prisoners as well.

It was Rosemary who had spoken to him a minute ago, Rosemary who was piloting this stolen vessel. Jake got to his feet, gripping onto the back of a chair for support. His head hurt like mad, but he tried to ignore it, and he turned to face the woman who had once been betrayer and was now comrade.

She had been strapped into her seat when they made the jump, and so, unlike Jake, had escaped injury. Strapped in and lost in a place of complete and total union with every mind in the vicinity. Jake had instigated the melding, shocking and upsetting the protoss inside him. As part of this process of integrating the memories she carried into his brain, Zamara had guided him to and through one of the most pivotal moments in protoss history—the creation and discovery, for it was both, of something called the Khala. It was a union not just of the minds but of the hearts and emotions of the protoss. Within this space,
they did not simply understand one another, they almost became one another. It had been profound and beautiful, and it was only Jake’s desperate need to save himself, Zamara, and Rosemary that had enabled him to pull out of the link and hit the button that would allow them to elude their pursuers by leaping blindly around the sector.

Jake, however, had
not
been safely strapped in, and he winced as he looked at the blood on the panel where he’d banged his head.

Rosemary’s blue eyes flitted over to him, then down to the panel. “Panel’s fine,” she said. Doubtless it was meant as a reassurance. Even if it wasn’t, he decided he’d take it that way.

“Well, that’s good.”

Rosemary grimaced. “It’s about the only thing that is. That was a very rough entry. We’re going to have to land somewhere and repair shortly—where, I have no idea, as I don’t even know exactly where we are yet. I woke up to life support on the fritz and got that taken care of. Navigation’s iffy and one of the engines has been damaged.”

She looked up at him. “You don’t look so good either. Go … do something about that.”

“Your concern is appreciated,” he said.

“Medkit’s in the back, on the top shelf in the locker,” Rosemary called. Jake made his way to the back of the vessel, opened the locker, and found the kit. He poured some sanitizing cleanser onto a pad and, peering into the small and barely adequate mirror fastened to the
locker door, dabbed at his face. A nanosecond later he fought the urge to leap to the ceiling and scream—the cleanser stung like hell. The cut was, of course, not nearly as bad as the mask of blood on his face indicated. Head wounds bled a lot. The lump was still tender but it, too, was not too bad. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he swabbed at the cut, soiling pad after pad.

“How long have I been out?” he called up to Rosemary.

“Not that long. Maybe five, ten minutes.”

That was good. Minor concussion then, nothing too severe.

How are you doing in there, Zamara?

He caught a brush of amusement, but Zamara seemed a bit distracted.
Well enough, Jacob. Thank you for inquiring.

Everything okay?

I am simply considering what to do next.

“So Jake,” Rosemary continued as he fished around for a bandage. “That … experience … before we jumped—what the hell did Zamara do to all of us? I’ve done a lot of drugs in my day and that was, by far, the strangest and best trip I’ve ever been on.”

There was a time when both Jake and Zamara would have bridled at the thought of something as profound and sacred as union within the Khala being compared to a drug trip. But now that both of their minds had blended, even briefly, with Rosemary’s, now that both had had a hint of what it had been like
to
be
her, the condemnation was cursory and halfhearted. R. M. was using terms she knew to try to describe something far beyond what any human had ever experienced. No disrespect was intended.

“I’ve told you about the Khala, the Path of Ascension,” he said. He found a bottle of plastiscab and gingerly applied a layer over the cut. It warmed up almost immediately, and he winced a little. He disliked the stuff, but it worked. The layer of plastic that would form in a few seconds would protect the cut quite efficiently, although sometimes removal of the plastic bandage led to reopening the wound; someone hadn’t thought things through very well. He replaced the bottle and put the kit back on the shelf. Making his way to the cockpit, he continued. “It’s how the protoss were able to come together again and rebuild their society after the Aeon of Strife.”

R. M. had found a tool kit and was now lying underneath the console, unscrewing a panel. A cluster of wires dropped down a few centimeters, and there was a soft glow of chips in their tangled center. Briefly, Jake had a flash of another memory Zamara had shared with him—that of a strange chamber created by beings known as the xel’naga, the benefactors and teachers of the protoss. Jake had relived the memories of a protoss named Temlaa. Temlaa had beheld the bizarre and terrifying sight of writhing cables emerging from walls to fasten onto his friend Savassan. Though the outcome had been wholly positive, it had deeply disturbed Temlaa and, through
that long-ago protoss, Jacob Jefferson Ramsey in the here and now.

His head suddenly hurt again.

“Yeah,” Rosemary said. “Go on.”

“Well … it didn’t look like we were going to be able to escape Valerian and Ethan’s ships.”