Shadow Hunters (9 page)

Not al, but some. She was familiar with what overusage of a psi-screen did to a person. She’d been given a graphic demonstration during her training. She’d seen the loss of control, the rage, the cunning, the paranoia. Had quailed as her instructors had let the poor shattered ghost hurl herself against padded wals and scream epithets.

Because he was not a psi, Ethan would have suffered less injury. But he’d stil be damaged. Maybe even a bit insane.

She could work with that.

She had created him, in a sense; right now he was helpless, in agony, entirely dependent on her for his survival. She had put others through this process before, a matter of trial and error, learning more with each failure or mild success. Ethan would, she hoped, be the culmination of al she had learned through those experiments. If al went as she anticipated, he would be magnificent, though of course not as perfect as she herself. She had no intention of creating a rival. She hoped to create an aly, a general, a warrior.

She hoped to create a consort.

There was no time to suit up. There was no time to do anything but hit the switch, watch the door iris open, and fire point blank at the two four-legged monstrosities who charged at them. Bits of shattered chitin, blood, and flesh sprayed al over the cargo bay door, sprayed al over Rosemary and Jake.

“Hold them off!” Rosemary shouted to Jake. He obeyed, his wil and Zamara’s completely one and the same. He was almost numb with horror but kept the rifle leveled, squeezing it so hard his hand cramped. Another, smaler zerg came at him, mandibles snapping, chittering madly, its eyes black and shiny and focused on him. It crawled without hesitating over the stil-twitching bodies of the falen. Jake trained the rifle on it and blasted it to a pulp, hyperaware that more would be out there. He tried franticaly to remember what he knew about zerg. It wasn’t much that was helpful.

Rosemary dove for the lockers and emerged with a handful of smal round things.

“Get down!” she cried as she lobbed one toward the door.

Jake dropped, lying on his side, stil somehow gripping the rifle, stil firing. The third thing was dead. There was quite the nasty, foul-smeling pile accumulating. The puddle of sludgy blood was oozing toward him.

“Cover your head!”

He did so, and heard a terrible
boom.
Bits of dead zerg spattered his body with soft plopping sounds. The stench was appaling as the liquids started to seep into his shirt.

Inside him, Zamara sent calm to his brain and nervous system. It helped, a little. For about a second the door was clear of zerg—living ones, anyway. But he could hear their awful sounds, and knew they were there. He propped himself on his elbows and prepared to resume firing. Sure enough, four zerglings began swarming in. They died like the rest of them had. Jake began to hope they might make it.

“How many are there?” he yeled to Rosemary over the din.

“No clue!” she shot back. Then she did something that appeared to be totaly insane.

She gathered up an armload of grenades and raced for the open door, leaping out gracefuly.

“Rosemary!”

She’d never looked more beautiful to him than now, when he was suddenly convinced he was about to lose her. She stood with her feet planted firmly on Aiur soil, tendrils of short black hair clinging to her sweaty face, one arm cradling death conveniently packaged in handy fist-sized grenades, lobbing them one after another at something he could not see.

Explosions, four of them, hard on the heels of one another, shook the earth. He tried to get to his feet but slipped in the disgusting stew of zerg body parts. By the time he made it outside, ready to help, it was over. Rosemary shot him a triumphant grin.

“You did good, Professor.”

He gave her a feeble smile. “I’m afraid you did most of it.”

“Nah, you did fine.”

“We get them al?”

“For the moment. But from what I remember about zerg, they don’t act alone.

Reinforcements’l be in any minute. Take what we can carry and let’s—”

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 stil got to get there and, like you said, we’ve gotta get out of here fast. Might as wel 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 folowed, 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 ful 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 smal 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 caled a Handheld Personal Information-Gathering and Navigation Unit. HPIGNU—“Pig” for short. It’l 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’l be totaly 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 stil 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 waterfal 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 pils from the medkit. Rosemary watched him.

“I’m told that two work as wel 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 smaler 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 smal 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 sily 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 smal primate with red stripes peered at them with yelow eyes from its perch a good ten meters above them. For a second, al 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 al 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 wel be watching their last chance of survival shatter before his eyes as wel.

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 swalowing her anger. “Wel, 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 carefuly 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 inteligence, and a woman who despised them both were al 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 teltale croon emitted by the poisonous
mai-lur
lizard, and had constructed and ridden a raft 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 ilumination. 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 stil 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 smeled better,” she said.