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.
CHAPTER TWO
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 remem-ber 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-the-art 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
