they were lavish and opulent, set with crystals, inlaid with precious metals, and of a form pleasing to the eye, they were not very comfortable.
“We can either show you this information in a link or tell you,” Kortanul continued. “It is your choice, Adun. Though I will advise you that if this is merely told, you may find it hard to believe.”
“Speak,” Adun said. “If this is as portentous as you say, I would hear reasoned thoughts about it, not the emotions you feel toward it.”
Kortanul inclined his head. “As you wish, Executor.” Despite his words, he seemed deeply reluctant to speak. Adun and Jake waited patiently.
“Impossible as it may seem, there are those among us who would destroy everything we have sought to build over the last millennium. They—”
“We’re finally here,” Rosemary said, shaking Jake awake. “But boy, Professor, I’d talk to your travel agent of a protoss. This place doesn’t look at all like you described it to me.”
Jake woke up with a start. He’d slept wrong and had a terrible headache. He went to rub his temples and winced; he’d forgotten about the bump on the head he’d taken not that long ago. It took a second for Rosemary’s words to register. He threw off the blanket and got to his feet, sitting down heavily and looking through the screen as Rosemary guided the ship into orbit around the homeworld of the protoss.
“Oh my God,” he breathed.
He had come expecting the verdant lands of Temlaa and Savassan, a world of lush rain forests and oceans, of gleaming cities and mysterious temples. But the planet that filled the screen had been horribly brutalized. With a sickening feeling, Jake beheld mammoth patches of blackened, charred earth. Here and there were what struck him as being pathetically small patches of green rain forest, although his rational mind realized they must stretch for hundreds of kilometers. What lakes there were looked brown and unhealthy. The oceans alone seemed to have escaped….
Jake’s mind flashed back to the dinner conversation he had had with Rosemary and the late Ethan Stewart. Ethan had said something about Aiur—but Jake had been more than a little the worse (or better) for the alcohol and focused on the sorbet.
The sorbet is indeed made from the juice of the sammuro fruit of Aiur, Ethan had said. Damned hard to find, even on the black market. This may be the only taste any terran may ever have of it.
“So that’s what Ethan meant,” he said, grief closing his throat. It was not Temlaa’s grief or Zamara’s he felt now, but his own—a nauseous sensation of loss and anger and disappointment.
Zamara—what happened?
The zerg found our homeland. You can see the ramains of their infestation from here.
So that was what that somewhat shiny, crusty gray material that covered huge clumps of what had once been a fertile planet was. Zerg “creep,” humans called it. Jake thought he might throw up.
Why did you not tell me?
It was not necessary. Zamara seemed genuinely puzzled at his anger. We were not coming here to behold my world’s beauty. We came here because we need to enter the underground chambers to recover the lost technology.
But I didn’t understand this had happened…. I wasn’t prepared to see this!
He realized that she would never understand why humans needed to be braced for something like this. It was yet another thing that reminded him just how alien Zamara was, even though they had grown to be fairly close. She was much more rational and logical than he, and doled out information on a “need to know” basis.
I share your pain, she said unexpectedly. I was witness to much of this unfolding. That … I hope I do not have to share with you, but it might be necessary.
Rosemary was looking at him with a hint of sympathy on her face. “Why didn’t she tell you?”
“She didn’t think I needed to know,” he said, embarrassed at how bitter and angry he sounded.
Rosemary shrugged. “Whatever. I don’t much like the idea of landing down there. I’ve heard a little bit about what happened, but not a lot. So are the zerg and the protoss all gone or what?”
My people were evacuated through a warp gate to a safe place.
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