Shadow Hunters (4 page)

His head suddenly hurt again.

“Yeah,” Rosemary said. “Go on.”

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

“No kidding,” R. M. snorted. “Five Wraiths and a Valkyrie from Val plus whatever Ethan wanted to throw at us.”

Rosemary’s voice was completely calm as she mentioned Ethan Stewart’s name. It was as if he were a stranger to her, and after Ethan had betrayed R. M. so badly, Jake supposed she thought of him that way. Nevertheless, even if someone had betrayed him—as indeed, the woman lying in front of him busily rerouting wiring had

—he couldn’t have done what Rosemary had—fired a rifle at point-blank range into the chest of a former lover. Ethan had dropped like a stone, blood blossoming like a crimson flower across his white shirt.

Jake looked away. He was grateful for Rosemary’s coldheartedness in a way. It’d saved his life and Zamara’s more than once.

I told you we would need her,
Zamara reminded him.

Yes. You did.

“So?” Rosemary prompted, her eyes on her work.

Jake continued. “Wel … I knew what had happened to the protoss when they first were exposed to the Khala. And I thought, what if I shared that feeling with everyone in the surrounding area?”

Rosemary fixed him with intense blue eyes. As always, Jake felt something flutter inside him at that gaze. “You linked everyone in the Khala, Jake?” Anger and a hint of fear flitted across her face. He didn’t have to read her thoughts to know what she was thinking—was she going to have her brain rewired, as his had been?

“No, no,” he said. “That’s not possible. We’re not protoss, for one thing. Our brains can’t handle something like that directly. And even the protoss needed to touch the khaydarin crystals to experience it, at least at first. Not sure about it now; Zamara hasn’t taken me that far yet. What I did was share the memory of how it felt, and for a brief moment I opened your minds to each other. You al—we al—did the rest.”

She regarded him for a few seconds, then shook her dark head. “Wow” was al she said, but it was heartfelt.

“Yeah,” Jake replied, his monosylabic comment equaly sincere. He wondered, as he had right before they had made the jump, if something more lasting than his immediate escape would come of that instant when, for the first time, nearly a thousand humans had had the briefest, palest hint of what it was like to have minds and hearts joined as one.

He hoped so.

Rosemary swore. “I thought as much. Rot in hel, Ethan.”

“What’s wrong?” Jake asked worriedly.

“He’s got a tracking device integrated into the navigation system. He—”

—sticks it in there, a tiny little thing, easy to miss if you didn’t know what you
were looking for and if you didn’t know the bastard’s little trick of—

“Hey!” Rosemary’s voice cracked like a whip, and the anger that roled off her was a one-two punch. Jake blinked. She was out from under the console and jabbing a finger in his face so fast he’d barely seen her move. “Get the
hell
out of my head!

Don’t you dare do that again without asking me. Do you understand?”

She was angry out of al proportion to what she was thinking, but Jake knew that wasn’t the point. She had very recently been through a profound experience that she was stil trying to integrate. And besides, although he was getting used to the idea of his thoughts being known by another as they popped into his mind, Jake wel remembered the outrage he himself had felt when it started to happen.

The color was high in her cheeks, and her blue eyes sparkled. Jake winced. “Sorry,”

he said. “I just was anxious to know what had happened and I didn’t even think about it. It won’t happen again.”

That is not a safe promise to make, Jacob,
came Zamara’s warning voice.
There
may be a time when we need to violate it.

She’s proven herself amply, in my opinion. You’re so used to doing this casually,
as part of who you are. For humans, it’s much more an invasion of privacy.

Rosemary does have difficulty trusting others,
Zamara agreed.

That’s the understatement of the year.

Rosemary searched his gaze and then nodded. She took a deep breath, composed herself, and returned to her task. “This is an old trick of Ethan’s. He integrates the tracking device completely into the navigation system, so that every adjustment and every coordinate goes right back to the source. You don’t just know where this ship is, you know where it’s been. It’s also impossible to remove.”

Jake blanched, and he felt Zamara’s concern as wel. “What does that mean?”

“It means we need to get an entirely new nav system.”

He stared at her. “How are we going to do that? We’re on the run in case you haven’t noticed.”

“I have a good idea where we can start looking safely. But first, I want to have a look at the damage. I’l suit up and check it out. You and Zamara … don’t touch anything.”

She scooted out from under the console and got lithely to her feet. Purposefuly, she strode toward the locker and began to suit up for a space walk.

She is deliberately withholding information. She will not tell us where she
intends to go.

Let her cool off,
Jake replied to Zamara.
She’s mad, and I don’t blame her a bit.

That was a stupid thing to do. I guess that bump on the head rattled me more
than I thought.

If an alien consciousness inside one’s mind could sigh, Zamara did.
When this is all
taken care of and the vessel is repaired, our destination must be Aiur.

Jake thought about the homeworld of the protoss. Lush, verdant, tropical. Rich with vegetation and animal life, dotted with heart-stoppingly gorgeous relics of the xel’naga in their strange, twining, mysterious beauty. He smiled softly.

Rosemary, now encased in a suit that would enable her to move around in the cold darkness of space, threw him a glance and scowled a little. “See that light?” She pointed to the console. He looked where she indicated and saw a smal button, currently dark. He nodded. “Once I get outside and the doors seal shut again, it’s going to turn green. It’l stay green the whole time I’m out there. If it turns red and an alarm starts sounding, I’m in trouble. At that point I wil give you permission to read my mind so that you can get me safely back inside. Got that?”

“Yes,” he said. He understood what she was saying. She was putting her life in his hands.

“Okay then.” She moved to the back of the cabin and touched a button. A door irised open and she stepped through without a backward glance. A few seconds later, the button came to life, glowing green just as R. M. had said. He sighed. His head was stil hurting.

We will head for the underground chambers that Temlaa and Savassan
discovered. There is great technology there. It will help me to complete my
mission and keep my people safe.

Jake asked excitedly, “The chambers? That underground city?” Zamara had given him only the briefest tantalizing glimpse of the vastness that comprised the hidden city of the xel’naga. Most of Temlaa’s memories concerned a few very specific places, one of which was a chamber in which the desiccated protoss bodies had been stored.

He wanted to close his eyes and relive that memory, now that Zamara had informed him that was their destination, but he had a duty. Rosemary had entrusted him with her safety.

I will watch over her. You may revisit the chambers if you wish.

Jake nodded, trusting Zamara, and closed his eyes.

There was the memory, first Temlaa’s, then Zamara’s, and now his: as pure and perfect as if it were actualy unfolding before him rather than being recolected.

In the center, hovering and slowly moving up and down as it had no doubt done
for millennia, was the largest, most perfect crystal Jake had ever seen. It
pulsated as it moved languidly, and Jake realized that this was the source of the
heartbeat sound he and Savassan had been hearing for some time now. For a
long moment he forgot his fear and simply gazed raptly at the object, seduced
by its radiant beauty and perfection of form.

In all the memories I hold,
Zamara said,
all the things I have beheld and touched
and known—there is nothing like this crystal, Jacob. Nothing.

He sensed her awe and shared it. He thought he caught a fleeting tinge of hope so intense that he might even have caled it “desperate.” Jake began to query Zamara, but at that moment the door irised opened and Hurricane Rosemary stormed in. He blinked, suddenly realizing that about twenty minutes had passed without his even being aware of it.

“This is why you never jump without proper preparation,” she said as she removed her helmet. “We’d have had to replace quite a bit even without Ethan’s little tracking device.”

“Al right,” Jake said. “If we have to, we have to. But we need to do it quickly. I’ve been talking with Zamara, and she thinks we need to get to Aiur.”

Shedding the rest of her suit and hanging it back up in the locker, Rosemary turned to him. “Aiur? Why?”

“Remember those caverns beneath the surface I told you about?”

“Yeah … some kind of underground city.” Rosemary’s anger was now directed at the damage the ship had taken rather than at Jake. She actualy looked interested in his comments. “We’re going to get to see that place then?”

“Looks like. Zamara thinks there’s some technology there that can help her. Help us.”

Rosemary was regarding him thoughtfuly. “You know, Professor, if there actualy is ancient, advanced technology sitting quietly forgotten beneath the surface of Aiur …

that realy
could
help us.”

“Rosemary—”

“Jake, listen. We’re being hunted by the son of the
emperor,
for God’s sake. We had to fight our way to get where we are right this minute and we’l have to keep fighting unless we do something about that. Look—I’ve cast my lot in with you.

We’ve got to trust each other. I’m not going to rat you out, but this is a big net that’s been cast for us. We might be able to make a trade with Valerian: our lives for whatever technology we can give him.”

Out of the question.

I’m not telling her that, Zamara. She makes a good point.

This is my people’s heritage we are discussing, Jacob. Our legacy. Protoss
knowledge belongs to the protoss, not a terran emperor who will exploit it and
use it for harm.

You killed a lot of terrans for protoss knowledge. And now Rosemary and I are
on the line for it too. If this gets Rosemary and me out of danger, I’m all for it.

There was silence from the alien inside his head, and Jake realized that Rosemary was looking at him expectantly.

“Wel?”

“Uh—wel, Zamara’s not too keen on the idea,” Jake said truthfuly. “But we can talk about it when we get there.”

R. M. nodded. “We’re not going to get there at al unless we haul ass and effect repairs pronto.” She moved past him and slid into the seat. He took the chair beside her, although he knew nothing about the dozens of lights, buttons, and switches in front of him.

“Now let me see…. Good! I was right in my hunch about where we are. So that means that …” She punched a few more buttons and a star chart came up. Rosemary nodded, pleased. “Excelent.” She laid in a course.

“So where are we going?”

She gave him a grin. “Back in time, Jake. Back in time.”

IN THE DARKNESS, THERE WAS HARMONY.

Unified, single-minded of purpose, seven beings were one. Each contributed to the whole, was present and yet subsumed, the magnificent, powerful, deadly
one
greater than the individuals who comprised it.

It …
he
… moved languidly now, but could move almost at the speed of thought when roused to action. Radiant at his center, his glow was shadow.

He stirred as the ripples of something brushed his mind. Something familiar.

Something he wanted destroyed. Something that threatened him and his task.

Preserver,
a part of him named the loathed quarry.

How can this be? A preserver, in such a place?
wondered another part.

And there is something else. It is not pure protoss mental energy. It has been
tainted—or augmented. It is difficult to know which.

How and why, tainted or pure, it does not matter. It must be found and stopped.

Like all preservers.
Other parts, once individuals, now fractions of the whole, murmured their discontent.

Preservers were a dire threat, perhaps the only true one this being, naming itself in his multiple consciousness Ulrezaj after the most powerful individual that comprised him, had ever discovered. Preservers knew too much. And so Ulrezaj had been attentive to any signs of them, tracking them down one by one and snuffing out their fragile little lives until soon there would be none left. There were only a handful as it were, and they had never been many. It was a foolish way to carry information, inside a mortal shel that was so easily crushed.

The seven-who-were-one turned their formidable mental powers toward this strange sensation, this ripple in a dark, stil pond.

Ulrezaj would find the renegade preserver. He would find it, he would destroy it, and the threat the protoss posed would be no more.

And then Ulrezaj would continue in his glorious work.

Valerian wielded his sword like al the demons of hel were attacking him.

Parry, stroke, whirl, slice, impale—the imaginary foes attacking him from al sides at once fel before him. He leaped up as a nonexistent sword sliced at his knees, lunged forward, turned, and blocked a fictitious attack. Tucking his sword, he ducked, roled forward, and came up fighting. Sweat plastered his fair hair to his forehead, dappled his upper lip, slicked his chest. His heart thundered in his ears and despite al his training his breath was coming in little gasps. He had never practiced with such focused intensity before in his life, and he craved the peace he knew would come after such exertion.