Shadow Hunters by Christie Golden Page 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 well be watching their last chance of survival shatter before his eyes as well.
    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 mindto know that she was swallowing her anger. “Well, 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 carefully 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 intelligence, and a woman who despised them both were all 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 telltale 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 towardsunset 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 illumination. 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 still 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 smelled better,” she said.
    It was an exaggeration, but only just. Jake peeredat the goop, trying to ascertain its true color in the off-white illumination provided by the EmergeLite. “Is it Beef Stroganoff or Chicken Supreme?”
    “All I care about is if it’s got peach cobbler.” Rosemary began to peel away the