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  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Acknowledgments

  Starcraft Timeline

  About Christie Golden

  This book is gratefully dedicated to those who have been so supportive of me during a very difficult time. You all are my Raiders.

  CHAPTER ONE

  2504

  “We all got our choices to make.”

  Those were the last words Tychus Findlay—criminal, former marine, and traitor—would ever hear from his old friend James Raynor.

  Tychus had made his choice first—to betray Jim’s trust and friendship by attempting to murder Sarah Kerrigan, the former Queen of Blades, who now sprawled shivering and vulnerable in a red-black cavern inside the planet Char.

  Jim had chosen not to let him.

  “I made a deal with the Devil, Jimmy.”

  And for that deal, Sarah lay limp and trembling and alive, and Tychus Findlay lay stiffening in the armor that had turned out to be first a prison and then a metal coffin.

  Jim lowered his pistol. Smoke still drifted upward from its muzzle, mingling with the steam that curled and coiled at his feet. The bullet meant for Arcturus Mengsk, the man he hated above all others, had instead ended the life of the man Jim had once called his best friend.

  What have I just done?

  Jim fought back the tidal wave of emotions that threatened to overwhelm him. This was no time for rejoicing that the artifact to restore Kerrigan had worked, for berating his own lack of judgment regarding Tychus, for mourning the giant of a man whose rumbling voice would never again utter either jokes or threats.

  They needed to get out of this murky, hellish cavern, off this world, and fast.

  With Sarah Kerrigan.

  His men moved forward as their commander holstered his weapon, clearly intending to bring Tychus’s body with them. Jim barked sharply, “Leave him!”

  “Sir?” Cam Fraser asked, confused. “We don’t leave no one behind.”

  “We’re leaving him. I ain’t gonna risk any of your lives for the sake of carrying the corpse of a traitor,” Jim snarled. It was a valid argument. But even as he spoke the words, Jim knew it wasn’t the only reason for his decision.

  He wanted to leave Tychus behind. Findlay had cut a deal with Arcturus Mengsk. He would have traded Kerrigan’s life for his freedom. Now Sarah Kerrigan lived, and Tychus would rot inside his suit. There was a brutal justice about it that Jim suspected would rack his soul if he thought about it too much. But, perhaps mercifully, there was no time for thinking.

  They had come here, to the zerg base world of Char, to do what no doubt seemed like madness: to make the Queen of Blades human again. They had found her deep inside the volcanic, ashy planet. She seemed completely stripped of her zerg-given abilities and appearance. Gone were the bony wings, the scaly skin that had once covered her toned body. But her hair was still—

  It looked like it had worked. And “looked like” was close enough for Raynor, for now.

  “We need a dropship, Matt,” Raynor said into his comm.

  Matt Horner, captain of the battlecruiser Hyperion, sounded stunned. “It . . . it worked? That alien thing Valerian had us go find for him . . . it really worked?”

  Raynor knelt and, as gently as possible in the giant metal suit, slid his arms beneath Sarah and lifted her. She whimpered, once, and his heart broke.

  “Looks like,” he said. He didn’t voice his concern about her to Matt as his gaze was drawn again to what crowned her head.

  The long red, silky tresses Raynor had once run his hands through were still only things of memory. This part of the Queen of Blades had not changed; instead of soft tendrils, what looked like a hideous cross between tentacles, sectioned insect legs, and quills adorned her skull. Maybe, like a tail that wasn’t needed anymore, it was just a vestigial relic left behind after the artifact worked its voodoo.

  Maybe it wasn’t.

  “I . . . really can’t believe it, sir.” Matt was still stuck in astonishment.

  “I said we need a dropship, unless we’ve gone to all this trouble to free Sarah only to have her die along with the rest of us, Matt,” Raynor said. He rose. Sarah’s form, naked as any newborn’s, shifted with the gesture, rolling closer to him.

  If only he were really holding her in his arms, not just carrying her in his armor, he thought fleetingly. If only he could feel her against him, as he had once, a few years ago, a lifetime ago.

  Sarah . . . I’m gonna keep you safe.

  “Of course, sir,” said Matt, snapping to attention again. “The zerg are going crazy without Kerri—without the Queen of Blades to direct them. Some of them are fleeing, but a whole mess of them are apparently just interested in suicide runs. It’s going to be tough getting something down to you, but we’ll do it.”

  “Attaboy,” Raynor said. He headed back toward the entrance, carrying Sarah carefully. “Now listen up: We’ve got a little complication. Your dropship needs to wait for two groups, not just one. I had to split up my team. My group went to find out what the xel’naga artifact did to Kerrigan, and Lisle and Haynes stayed behind to protect it. Once you’ve figured out where you’re going to land that dropship, they’ll bring it with them and meet us there.”

  There was no way they were leaving the artifact behind. Jim could see it in his mind’s eye: sleek and black, slightly longer than a man was tall, with blue luminescent lines that revealed where five separate pieces had come together to create a single astonishing device. Raynor knew that although they had only begun to understand what it was capable of, he would always remember it and be grateful for what it had done for Sarah.

  “I’ll start analyzing the terrain for the safest place to park one, sir,” Matt said.

  “You do that.” Jim ended the conversation and switched to another channel. They stepped out of the cavern—

  —I killed my best friend and left him to rot in there—

  —into the red glow of what passed for sunlight on Char. It was an ugly and unpredictable world. The surface was rocky and black, or gray with ash, or simply just liquid fire. The atmosphere was survivable without hardskins . . . barely. It was Hell, pure and simple, and a fitting place for the zerg to call their home.

  “Jim?” The voice was weak, but it was hers. Human. And she knew who he was.

  “It’s okay; I gotcha.” And that was all he needed to say. He walked slowly, carefully, then, feeling her gaze, met her eyes. He did not give her a reassuring smile. His feelings ran too deep for that. He looked at her for a moment, then returned his atten
tion to the ugly world around him. Words could come later. Right now, he needed to get her to safety.

  “Hey, boys,” he said into his comm, “it worked. You kept that xel’naga thing safe for me like I asked?”

  “Yes, sir!” came Lisle’s voice. “Had to fight back a bunch of ’em when it first started, but they’ve steered clear of it for a while. Was the damnedest thing—critters just started attacking each other.”

  “And I bet you ain’t complaining.”

  “No, sir, not one damn bit!”

  “I’ll let you know the rendezvous point as soon as we know ourselves.” Jim glanced up at the red sky. He could see that the battle was still raging above the planet; here and there were explosions, appearing as small puffs from this distance. He could even see the tiny shapes of mutalisks closer to the surface. “We—”

  Kerrigan’s body suddenly spasmed, and she began to cough. Jim swore. He should have thought of this. They still didn’t know what, exactly, had happened to Kerrigan—it could be that the transition back to human had weakened her more than they thought.

  “Medic!” he called as he placed Kerrigan on the ground, kneeling beside her. Lily Preston hurried up to him, striding swiftly in her medic’s hardskin while pulling out a respiratory unit from her pack. She too knelt beside Kerrigan, fastening the unit over the gasping woman’s mouth and nose. A thin blanket, featherlight but made of a material known as insulweave that would ensure that the patient’s body heat stayed at a steady 37 degrees Celsius, was gently wrapped around Kerrigan. She whimpered softly as her limbs were lifted and tucked in like a doll’s, but the coughing and spasming stopped.

  Preston peered at Jim. “We don’t know what she is anymore, Jim,” she said. “I’m treating her like a human, but—”

  “She is human, dammit!” Jim snapped, insisting on it even though he himself was gripped with a cold fear that Kerrigan really wasn’t. “She has trouble breathing the air just like we do. Her body temperature—”

  The ground on which the two knelt suddenly pitched like a wild animal, and there was a huge, reverberating sound that seemed to go on forever. Several other Raiders were knocked clean off their feet. Jim held Sarah close, trying to keep her stable. Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed a huge red glow, and he whirled to see what had happened.

  A gigantic chunk of what had once been a battlecruiser was now nothing more than blazing wreckage, burning sullenly in the crater it had made. Things out of nightmares were swarming all over it. They were zerglings, the smallest package in which zerg hell came. Hydralisks were a maglev train-wreck combination of insects with scythelike arms, snake bodies, teeth that never ended, and neosteel-penetrating spines they fired from their backs. Mutalisks were monsters that brought the ability to fly in atmosphere and in deep space, acidic blood, and parasitic glave wurms into the mix. What the zerglings lacked in size and unique attacks compared to their brothers, they made up for in numbers. Seemingly composed entirely of teeth and claws and carapaces, the zerglings threw themselves on the wreckage, attracted like insects to the brightness and the heat, and screamed horribly as their bodies were burned to a crisp. Jim glanced skyward and shouted, “Brace for impact!” as the rest of the battlecruiser, in fiery chunks as small as a helmet and as large as a house, followed, slamming into the surface of Char like an armored fist into an unprotected face.

  Despite Jim’s warning and the stability the hardskins provided, the ground trembled so violently that more than one of them fell. Jim hung on tightly to Sarah, swaying and fighting to remain steady out of sheer cussedness.

  Many of the remaining zerglings were suddenly silenced, but others continued to scramble and shriek. Any second now the hideous things, utterly undirected, would no doubt turn and come for Jim and his team. Not because they were bearing away the zerg Queen of Blades, who had once controlled and directed them completely, but simply because the terrans were moving, and thus they were prey.

  In his head, Jim suddenly saw the image that had haunted him for four years: the disturbed, broken fantasy of what Sarah’s last moments as a human woman had been like.

  He heard again her request for aid, heard Arcturus’s despicable words: “Belay that order. We’re moving out.” Arcturus Mengsk—he who used people until he had used them up, then threw them away once they were of no more use or had become too dangerous. Jim heard himself screaming, “What? You’re not just gonna leave them?” The disbelief—it had still been a question then. Jim had still somehow thought he had misunderstood, that Arcturus wasn’t really doing what it looked like.

  But that ice-hearted bastard had intended to do exactly that. Sarah’s voice had come again, a slight tremor of worry in its normally cool tones: “Uh, boys . . . ? How about that evac?”

  “Damn you, Arcturus! Don’t do this.”

  And you are damned. You are . . .

  “Commander . . . ?”

  Pause.

  “ . . . Jim? What the hell’s going on up there?”

  And then nothing. Jim had imagined her looking in all directions as they came, endless wave after wave of horror, chittering and shrieking in triumph. And after that? The Queen of Blades, part psionic human but more monstrous zerg, had been born.

  He had tormented himself with wondering how she had faced what should have been her death: Firing till her ammunition ran out, then leaping on them? Standing quietly and letting them take her? Attempting to kill herself first?

  I thought they’d killed you. There were times—a lot of ’em—that I wished they had.

  And now, even with all you’ve done, even with so many dead—I’m so glad you’re alive.

  He heard the sounds of weapons being fired in the distance, and then the inevitable high-pitched chittering and screaming of the zerg. Jim rose and reached for his pistol, taking a huge step so that he stood protectively over Sarah. They would get her only over his dead body—literally. Except he would take the precious second to kill her before they got him. Sarah Kerrigan would never again be their creation.

  And today was not a good day to die. Not when his life had a chance of restarting after hurtling to a heart-shattering stop four years ago.

  Fraser glanced at him quickly, then away as he too took a defensive stance. “I kinda feel sorry for the zerg right now, tackling you, Jim.”

  “Me too.”

  Jim looked upward, relieved to see that, for now at least, the mutalisks were busying themselves attacking the Dominion vessels in the air, which were better prepared to fight them off. Of more immediate concern to him was the cloud of ashy gray dust stirred up from the enemy’s approach. Jim could distinguish the shapes of multijawed, scythe-armed monstrosities slithering on their tail-torsos. He counted four hydralisks. Swallowed by the powdery dust were lumps that had to be several more zerglings racing forward like a pack of wild dogs, only infinitely more lethal and terrifying.

  Jim took aim as the cloud drew closer and ordered, “On my mark—fire!”

  His soldiers were good. Jim felt sweat trickling into his own eyes and blinked it back, ignoring the sting. He waited until that sweet second, when the attack would have the most effect but not be so late that they would be overrun. In some distant part of his mind, he lamented that he had become so familiar with how best to slaughter zerg that the timing was almost second nature.

  Still they came, crying out for blood and death, crazed with the lack of guidance from their missing queen.

  Jim waited.

  “Mark!” he shouted. The clacking, gleeful screams of triumph and lust to kill changed abruptly into sharp keening sounds as the zerg were blasted to bloody chunks. Pieces of the insectoid horrors flew wildly into the air. A chunk of carapace thunked on Jim’s helmet before sliding off. He didn’t change his pace. He kept firing, moving the pistol with a steady sweeping motion back and forth, mowing them down as they came. He had never seen independent thought in their actions or movements, but he had often seen intelligence. Kerrigan’s intelligence, directing and mane
uvering them. Now, he saw only chaos and insanity glinting in their tiny, bright eyes, erratic choppiness in their movements.

  He blew off the last one’s head. It dropped six paces from him, spewing blood and ichor, twitched, and lay still.

  At once Jim knelt beside Sarah. She was curled up in a ball, clutching the blanket about her. Oddly enough, the gesture reassured Jim. It was . . . very human.

  “Matt, where is that dropship?” Raynor shouted into his comm.

  “Sir, it just launched.” Matt’s voice was sharp with anxiety. Judging by what remained of the battlecruiser still smoldering nearby, Jim could make a good guess as to what he was dealing with up there. But there was no time for sympathy. They had to get Sarah aboard, and then they had to get the fekk away from this hellhole.

  “Tell them I’ll double their pay if they get here in five minutes.”

  “Sir, you haven’t paid them in weeks.”

  “Well, if I’m dead by the time they get here, that ain’t gonna change, now, is it?”

  Matt’s faint chuckle was heartening. “There’s truth in that, sir. I’ll let them know, but there’s no guarantee when they’ll get there. Rendezvous coordinates are bearing eight four seven mark eight.”

  “Good. We’re not far from that plateau.”

  “Sir,” said Fraser, “readings indicate that it’s crawling with zerg.”

  “Of course it is,” said Jim. “Whole damn planet is. We just got to get there and hold them off till the ship comes.”

  He gathered Kerrigan in his arms. Her eyes opened. They were now back to their normal shade of green, no longer glowing and terrifying. She gave him a small smile, the pale lips of her too-wide mouth curving slightly. Her hand lifted to touch his chest, then fell back limply as her head rolled and her eyes closed, her body exhausted by that simple effort.

  Oh yes. He’d hold them off. He’d hold them off forever.

  * * *

  Jim had notified Lisle and Haynes where the dropship would be landing and had to simply hope that the two soldiers would be able to hold off the zerg on their own. The plateau where rescue would come loomed ahead, only a few kilometers and yet a world away. Even as they ran steadily, their hardskins carrying them gracefully and easily, Jim heard a distant, low sound. He was incongruously reminded of the hot summers he had experienced, growing up on Shiloh, of the descent of twilight accompanied by the droning music of insects.