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.”
“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. “Well … 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 all—we all—did the rest.”
She regarded him for a few seconds, then shook her dark head. “Wow” was all she said, but it was heartfelt.
“Yeah,” Jake replied, his monosyllabic comment equally 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 hell, 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 rolled 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 all proportion to what she was thinking, but
