Shadow Of The Xel Naga

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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This one is forScott Moesta, for his expert advice in the StarCraftarena (we couldn't have done it without you). All those long, hard hours of playing games finally paid off!

And for his wife, Tina Moesta, for understanding that sometimes a guy has to go kick some alien butt.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Chris Metzen and Bill Roper at Blizzard for their valuable input; Rob Simpson and MarcoPalmieri at Pocket Books for their support and for insisting on having us do the project; Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, without whom Gabriel Moesta wouldn't exist; Matt Bialer of the Trident Media Group for his encouragement on this project; Debra Ray at AnderZone for cheering us on; Catherine Sidor, Diane E. Jones, and Sarah L. Jones at WordFire, Inc., for keeping things running smoothly; andJonathan Cowan, Kiernan Maletsky, Nick Jacobs, Gregor Myhren, and Wes Cronk for being ourStarCraft“tour guides” and for their unquenchable enthusiasm for the game.

SHADOW OF THE XEL'NAGA

CHAPTER 1
AS A SMOTHERING BLANKET OF DARKNESS descended over the town of Free Haven, the rugged settlers scrambled to avoid the storm. Night came quickly on the colony planet of Bhekar Ro, with plenty of windbut no stars. Pitch-black clouds swirled over the horizon, caught on the sharp mountainous ridge surrounding the broad valley that formed the heart of the struggling agricultural colony. Already, explosive thunder crackled over the ridge like a poorly aimed artillery barrage. Each blast was powerful enough to be detected on several still-functioning seismographs planted around the explored areas.Atmospheric conditions created thunder slams with sonic-boom intensity. The roar itself was sometimes sufficient to cause destruction. And what the sonic thunder left unharmed, the laser-lightning tore to pieces. Forty years earlier, when the first colonists had fled the oppressive government of the Terran Confederacy, they had been duped into believing that this place could be made into a newEden. After three generations, the stubborn settlers refused to give up. Riding in the shotgun seat beside her brother Lars, Octavia Bren looked through the streaked windshield of the giant robo-harvester as they hurriedly trundled back to town. The rumble of the mechanical treads and the roar of the engine almost drowned out the sonic thunder. Almost. Laser-lightning blasts seared down from theclouds like luminous spears, straight-line lances of static discharge that left glassy pockmarks on the terrain. The laser-lightning reminded Octavia of library images she had seen of a big Yamato gun fired from a Battle-cruiser in orbit. “Why in the galaxy did our grandparents ever choose to move here?” she asked rhetorically. More laser-lightning burned craters into the countryside.

“For thescenery, of course,” Lars joked. While the bombardment of hail would clear the air of the ever-present dust and grit, it would also damage the crops of triticale-wheat and salad-moss that barely clung to the rocky soil. The Free Haven settlers had few emergency provisions to help them withstand any severe harvest failure, and it had been a long time since they had asked for outside help. But they...