Shattered Earth

A Shamans & Shifters

Space Opera

Jenny Schwartz

The scum of the galaxy are using Earth as a nuclear winter death camp. It outrages pirate captain Kohia Jekyll’s sense of justice. No one deserves to die agonizingly of radiation poisoning, especially not on the planet humanity had to evacuate seven generations ago. So Kohia intends to close the prison camp down.

She didn’t count on an infuriating shaman healer hitching a ride aboard her starship.

Nairo Bloodstone isn’t going to Earth to be a hero. He learned the hard way that when you’re a healer, doing your best for people is never enough. One miracle leads them to demand another and another. Heroes die exhausted and alone, and the galaxy continues with billions of people still clamoring for a miracle-worker to save them.

No, Nairo isn’t going to Earth to be a hero. He intends to change what it means to be human.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Want More?

Chapter 1

Pirate captain Kohia Jekyll stood in the doorway of her starship, the Stealth, and fumed at fate. Specifically, she fumed at the two men striding toward her: both so different; both so unwanted aboard.

The difficulty was that her uncle, who was also her boss and the owner of the Stealth, had made the presence of the two men a condition of permission to travel to Earth on her self-appointed mission of mercy and justice.

The first man met her glare with a pleased smile. Aaron of House Cardinal was a Freel, the newest allies of her planet’s government. In fact, House Cardinal was more than an ally. It had been accepted as a shifter clan; an equal to the other shifter clans that inhabited the planet Corsairs, formed its pirate fleet, and supplied representatives to the Conclave government. The problem was that until very recently, as in up until two weeks ago, the pirate fleet had been fighting the blue-skinned, humanoid Freels. They still were. It was only House Cardinal that had transformed itself into an ally.

Politically, Kohia saw the sense of the alliance for both Corsairs and House Cardinal. She even liked the House’s leaders, Rjee and Djarl. But Aaron…Aaron was a problem.

He stopped on the space dock in front of her and saluted. The gesture flashed the talons at the tips of his ultramarine-blue fingers. He was taller than her, thickly muscled as befitted a Freel warrior, and already wore the sage-green utility suit that was the Stealth’s crew uniform. The color didn’t flatter him.

“Navigator Aaron reporting for duty.” He smirked, purple lips curving in challenge and pleasure at getting his way.

She really hadn’t wanted him aboard, but the Conclave had been adamant. The fastest way to ensure Corsairs’ citizens’ acceptance of their new clan members was to integrate some of House Cardinal’s Freels into the pirate fleet. Sure, there’d be fighting within the crews, but pirate captains and their bosuns could deal with the violence and bloodletting. They were, sadly, used to it.

When Aaron had learned of the Stealth’s mission, he’d immediately volunteered.

Since Kohia’s usual navigator had already been reassigned to a cruiser to be nearer her mate, Kohia hadn’t had grounds to refuse Aaron’s assignment to her starship. She’d tried.

“I don’t want him,” she’d told her uncle bluntly.

“Why not?” Rick Jekyll had been juggling a thousand and one responsibilities in his office that day. Plus, he’d been worried about his newly discovered daughter and her latest assignment.

His daughter, Jaya Romanov, was half-shifter and all-shaman. Humanity had few shamans—sha energy users—and the rest of Galaxy Proper member species had none at all. They were valuable, powerful and, in Jaya’s case, had just been appointed the second of two Shaman Justices answering directly to the Galactic Court and serving its needs. Jaya’s orders were sending her to the notoriously perilous Ceph Sector to learn more about the recent revelation that a second sha energy using species existed, but had been locked in stasis and hidden for forty two millennia, which was a mind-boggling length of time. What would happen when the Ceph awoke, as apparently would happen in a few decades unless Jaya intervened?

Kohia hadn’t had a reason to deny Aaron his temporary position as navigator on the Stealth beyond the fact that she preferred the small crew of her corvette to be people she knew and trusted. House Cardinal wouldn’t have allowed his request unless they rated his navigational skills. Rjee and Djarl had as much, or more, to lose on Corsairs as anyone if their people failed to integrate with the pirate fleet. It wasn’t Aaron’s navigational abilities that were in doubt. It was the likelihood that he’d get on her last nerve.

“Navigator Aaron,” Kohia acknowledge him coolly. “Get on, get your gear stowed. You’ll find Bosun Hami is expecting you.”

Aaron’s grin widened as he passed her in the doorway, his body ostentatiously not touching hers as he sidled past.

They both knew that he was attracted to her. She’d already turned him down, and he wasn’t stupid enough to jeopardize his time aboard the Stealth, or his reputation, by trying again, not while he was crew. But he’d be daring her, taunting her, teasing her.

Hell, it’s been too long without someone, Kohia thought harshly as her body revved just a little. She was a shifter. She needed touch in her life. The problem was that she was old enough now to know that she needed more than casual pleasure. She wanted her mate. But mates didn’t appear merely for the wishing. A lot of shifters never found their mate and settled for an ordinary human relationship.

Kohia never settled.

Hami’s crisp voice barked from inside the Stealth’s cargo hold. “Navigator Aaron, your collar button is unfastened. Remedy it at once!”

Despite her sour mood, Kohia had to chew back a grin. Hami played at being a hard ass. In a fight, the woman was a bear—which was what she’d shift into, if she was capable of shifting. But in day to day life, Hami liked joking around. As Aaron would discover. Hami would give him hell until he woke up to her game and called her on it.

I wonder how long it’ll take him?

“Kohia.”

Just her name, said in Nairo Bloodstone’s smooth voice, and the low simmer of arousal in Kohia heated to real wanting. Damn him.

Nairo was the second man forced on the Stealth, and the one she’d known she’d have no chance of refusing. He’d invited himself aboard when he’d heard of her mission. “The chance for me to study Earth’s sha energy flows will be invaluable to my research, especially with shifters present.”

The Conclave had immediately agreed to his request. Hell, they’d have agreed if he’d asked for a harem of hundreds and all the gold on Corsairs. And with Corsairs main industry being piracy, that was a lot of gold.

“Is that all your luggage?” Kohia looked at the duffel bag Nairo carried, then frowned at his nod. The duffel bag was no larger than Aaron’s crew satchel. Kohia wasn’t used to civilians being so restrained. Then again, Nairo was the definition of control—which strummed all of Kohia’s instincts in the naughtiest of ways. Down, girl.

She hadn’t realized that she’d moved to block his access to the Stealth until he halted in front of her. She was tall. He was taller. Nairo matched Aaron for height, although he lacked the Freel’s heavily muscled build. Instead, Nairo had a lean, athletic body that suggested speed and endurance.

He waited. Without a word, simply by being there, he challenged her authority. Or perhaps it was more personal. He unnerved her.

She was captain of the Stealth, but she couldn’t deny him the right to board. So she stepped to the side and gestured extravagantly. “Welcome aboard, Shaman Bloodstone.” Her formality mocked him.

“Please introduce me to your crew as Nairo. Titles aren’t important to me, Captain Jekyll.” She’d been “Kohia” to him a minute before. Now he turned her formality back on her.

She leaned into the cargo hold. “Hami!”

“You bellowed?” But it wasn’t Hami who answered her shout. The Stealth’s engineer, Augustus Clarke, emerged wiping his hands on a greasy cloth. “Hami’s getting the new guy settled.” Clarke measured Nairo with a glance, and apparently the shaman passed. “Heard you out here. Nairo, I’m Clarke, engineer, and the only reasonable person aboard the Stealth. I’ll show you to the guest cabin.”

Nairo returned the handshake and followed the engineer.

Both men ignored Kohia.

She snorted. She’d feared her crew wouldn’t share her reservations about the shaman. To the shifters of Corsairs, he was their Big Hope.

A few weeks ago, Kohia’s newly discovered shaman cousin, Jaya, had triggered a shift in a wolf shifter. Vulf Trent hadn’t turned into an ordinary wolf, but into an inorganic robot wolf.

None of the shifters minded that Vulf had turned into a robot wolf. They just envied that he could shift and let his animal run free.

Since humanity had been forced to evacuate Earth seven generations ago, shifters had found themselves unable to shift form. Losing access to their primal selves hurt their souls in a profound way. They couldn’t realize their full potential, couldn’t be all that they were meant to be. That loss had shaped how the shifter clans established themselves in the galaxy.

The galactic government was known as Galaxy Proper and was a union of the galaxy’s sentient species. Humanity hadn’t been at a point to demonstrate sufficient technological and social aptitude to earn a place in the union. Humans hadn’t even known other sentient species existed. But when they’d hovered on the verge of self-destruction, Galaxy Proper had shown mercy and provided an emergency evacuation of humanity’s home world and the means for humanity’s survival. Kohia’s ancestors had left Earth as a cascade of technological failure and environmental upheaval pushed it into the horror of a nuclear winter.

Earth was unfit for life.

Jaya and Vulf hadn’t gone to Earth to try and trigger his shift into his wolf form. They’d been in pursuit of her grandfather, an unstable and obsessive shaman—or former shaman, these days. Ancient Ceph technology had stripped the old man of his shamanic talent. But while they’d been on Earth, dramatic events had led to Jaya somehow triggering Vulf’s first shift into an inorganic robot wolf form that had enabled him to survive the insane radiation levels on the planetary surface.

The problem was that no one knew exactly what Jaya had done to initiate Vulf’s shift. As she explained it, the first shift was the important one because it reset the way sha energy flowed through Vulf when he attempted to shift. It reset it so well that he now shifted at will, effortlessly.

Every shifter wanted that ability, and Jaya wanted to give it, but she was only one woman, untrained in medicine, and with the excessive demands of her position as a new Shaman Justice. Other shamans had to step up and fill her shoes.

Nairo had volunteered. More than that, he’d insisted on helping the shifters discover the process that would free their animal selves. He was the Star Guild Shaman Academy’s Chief Healer, but after what the Academy had been up to recently—and how shamefully they’d treated Jaya—he’d divorced himself from that institution, maybe forever.

Which was a decision Kohia could respect.

However, she was less thrilled by his conclusion that he needed to visit Earth as part of his effort to learn all he could of exactly what Jaya had done to initiate Vulf’s shift before he attempted a similar radical realignment of another shifter’s sha energy. There was no shortage of volunteers for the attempt, even if it was dangerous. Understanding more about the sha energy flows on Earth might make the difference between failure and success, which was the reason Kohia couldn’t refuse Nairo passage on the Stealth.

She worried, though.

If he misaligned a shifter’s sha energy flows, what would happen to the person? Would they shift into something monstrous and malformed? Would they go crazy? Would they die?

As a healer, Nairo had sworn an ancient oath to do no harm.

Jaya trusted him.

Kohia trusted her cousin, but Jaya was naïve. The ongoing situation on Earth was proof of her naivety.

Obviously, no one could have predicted that when Jaya and Vulf reached Earth they’d discover a secret prison camp. No, Jaya’s naivety showed later when she expected that reporting the camp’s existence to Galactic Police meant they’d close it down.

Kohia was not so ingenuous. For all anyone knew, the prison camp was an element of the police force’s covert operations.

The only way to guarantee that the camp was shut down and that no one else suffered the torture of radiation poisoning on humanity’s old home world was for an independent watchdog to check it out. Someone like Kohia. And if the camp was still running, she would shut it down.

Chapter 2

The journey from Corsairs to Earth would take a fortnight. Kohia could have saved some time if she’d authorized the use of the Stealth’s secret boost system, but with Aaron onboard she was happier keeping that under wraps. The shifters might have a new political alliance with the Freels, but commercial trust was something else again. Jekyll Industries couldn’t be giving away its secrets.

Not that Aaron seemed overly interested in the Stealth’s secrets. Hami was proving an irresistible distraction for the muscular Freel, and not merely because she was his new bosun and teasing tormenter.

Nairo spent most of his time in his cabin, emerging occasionally to eat. At which point he’d chat with Clarke and occasionally with Sean, the Stealth’s intelligence agent.

The Stealth was halfway into its journey when they encountered their second wormhole. Kohia took the pilot’s chair on the bridge. The autopilot was efficient, its design purchased from the Sidhe. But wormholes were uncanny. They tossed starships around like leaves in a fall storm. Yet the fact that they enabled the starships that entered them to cover distances that in real-time travel might take years to traverse meant that wormholes were vital to Galaxy Proper’s commercial, political and military existence.

Kohia never sent her ship into a wormhole without being at the helm. Like most humans, she suffered the nausea and sensory confusion caused by the ripples in the space-time continuum that was a wormhole, but she fought through them because if something went wrong, she had to be aware and capable of at least trying to fly the starship out.

“I’m not a starship shaman,” Nairo said from immediately behind her.

Kohia jumped and swore. “I didn’t hear you come in.” And she had shifter hearing. The outer edges of the wormhole had to be messing with her senses; although she could still see Nairo standing there, tall, dark and without permission to be on the bridge.

“I can’t guide the jump,” he continued. “But as a healer I can remove your physical symptoms of discomfort.”

Well, that was interesting. “Just mine or all of the crew’s?”

“The whole crew. I have memorized their healthy energy patterns. I can hold those against the sha energy storms of the wormhole.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You know, Jaya never explained just how sha energy acted in wormholes, but she seemed to suggest that it contributed to their instability.”

Nairo shrugged. Unlike everyone else onboard who wore the green utility suits that were the starship’s uniform, he wore a cream cotton shirt with its sleeves rolled to his elbows, khaki trousers, and boots. Around his throat was a leather cord, but whatever hung from it was hidden beneath his shirt. His black hair was long enough to be sexily unruly.

“Uh.” Kohia had forgotten what they’d been discussing. Wormholes, right? “Yes, go ahead. Everyone would be thankful not to get sick. Hami suffers badly. I’ll announce it so they don’t panic at feeling healthy.” That was a joke. The Stealth’s crew didn’t panic.

Nairo didn’t smile.

Kohia made the announcement and listened to muffled cheers. Then they entered the wormhole, and she and Nairo were alone on the bridge. Safety procedure demanded that everyone aboard stay where they were upon entering a wormhole until the starship exited it. She faced an hour or two alone with Nairo.

She studied the charts, saw the chaotic stream of readouts that characterized wormhole jumps, and turned back to the man who’d seated himself in the co-pilot’s chair.

He could have returned to his cabin or gone somewhere else before the jump started. He knew the procedure onboard the Stealth for wormholes, the starship having traversed one three days ago. That he was here with her suggested that he wanted to be.

Kohia squashed a flare of interest. “Can you talk while you steady the crew’s energy patterns?”

“Yes.”

Well, that was definite enough. Nairo exuded a confidence that verged on arrogance. He was very, very sure of himself and his capabilities.

She regarded him with curiosity. “What do you want to discuss?”

He met her gaze squarely, shadows seeming to dance in the dark brown, nearly black, brilliance of his eyes. “I want to talk about you, Kohia.”

Nairo observed the way sha energy coursed around and through the pirate captain. The dance of the energy stream was mesmerizing, and had been since the first time he met her. It took more discipline than anyone would guess for him not to simply surrender to the beauty of her sha energy pattern. But he’d taken responsibility for the health of those onboard the Stealth, and he kept his promises.

He’d almost ignored the opportunity the Stealth’s mission provided for him to visit Earth safely and swiftly merely so as to stay clear of Kohia’s entrancing aura.

The first time they’d met, he’d portalled in, uninvited, to her cousin Jaya’s in-laws’ home, and Kohia had met him with a blaster primed and ready to fire.

Blaster fire was a sure way to painfully, if temporarily, incapacitate a shaman. Kohia hadn’t actually fired on him, but the threat had been there, and he’d adored her violent protectiveness.

Nairo wasn’t a shifter, but he shared their fierce loyalty to family.

Flames of sha energy flared in Kohia’s aura. She was beautiful and distracting, not just as an aura body, but as a woman.

Starting a relationship with Kohia would be wildly inappropriate, Nairo reminded himself as being the focus of her attention set his senses blazing with sha-enhanced awareness and responsiveness. You cannot date a patient.

Of course, there was no guarantee that Kohia would agree to be his patient, or rather, his test subject.

“Why would you want to talk about me?” she demanded as the silence between them stretched out due to his distraction. There was sharp warning in her tone, but the sha energy in her aura flickered toward him more than away.

He forced himself to concentrate on her face, rather than her personal energy. “If I determine it’s safe to attempt to trigger a shift in a volunteer while we’re within Earth’s sha energy fields, I think you’d be the best test subject. I’ve studied Vulf’s aura—”

“Aura?” she interrupted.

“It’s a term from Earth that shamanic healers have adopted to refer to how sha energy winds around and through a person,” he explained. “Your aura has certain characteristics in common with Vulf’s, primarily a stronger flow of sha energy than that of other shifters—although my sample has been small, obviously, given my limited research time—and bright flares of sha energy, as if your aura accumulates an excess…although ‘excess’ is the wrong word. There is no strain in your aura to suggest that you’re burdened by the additional sha energy flowing through you. You’re healthy.”

“What a relief,” she said sarcastically.

“I only meant…I didn’t want you to worry.”

She stood and spun the pilot’s chair, before gripping the back of it. “Do you have any theories as to why I have extra sha energy?”

“It could be natural, something you’re born with. Or it could be due to exposure to some catalyst.”

Her fingers tightened briefly, pressing into the chair as claws might have done if she’d been in cat form. “You mean my cousin Jaya.”

“It’s possible. Jaya has demonstrated unusual shamanic abilities. Perhaps her manner of using sha energy stirs up latent shifter abilities.”

Kohia spun the chair again, and dropped into it. “You like her, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And she trusts you.”

He didn’t know where Kohia was going with her questions, but if it meant she’d agree to volunteer for him to study her, he’d answer them. “Yes. We’ve known each other since childhood.” His answer roused disturbing emotions. He’d known other shamans just as long, and recently discovered that a handful of them couldn’t be trusted. It had soured his trust in the Star Guild Shaman Academy and what it was meant to stand for: humanity’s service to Galaxy Proper, to all sentient species in the galaxy.

“So why didn’t you ever hook up?”

Nairo flinched back, appalled. “That would be wrong.”

“Why?” Kohia hooked a knee up, slouching in her chair, suddenly amused.

“Jaya…she…ugh. She could be my sister.”

Kohia straightened alertly. “Really? She doesn’t treat you that way…” She frowned.

He frowned even more. Her questions resurrected old guilt and anger at himself. “I’m four years older than Jaya. When her foster mother died, the Academy took her in as a boarding student. Most shamans are like me, and their talent doesn’t show itself until around twelve or thirteen. At that point, we’re brought to the Academy and taught how to use sha energy. Jaya was different.”

He paused.

“I know Jaya’s story,” Kohia said. “She was surrendered anonymously at the Academy as a toddler already capable of playing with sha energy. She was fostered out with the Ballantynes, which was fine as long as her foster mother was alive, but her foster father was a bastard who dumped her on the Academy so he could go off and be an all-important Shaman Justice.”

Nairo nodded. He agreed with her scorn. Alex Ballantyne was a bastard not just for what he’d done to Jaya two decades ago, but for his much more recent attack on her and her mate partner, Vulf Trent. “When Jaya started at the Academy, it was my first year there, too. But I was four years older than her. All of us were four or five years older than her.”

“That’s a huge gap when you’re kids.”

“Kids adjusting to new powers,” Nairo clarified. He understood why he’d failed Jaya years ago. That didn’t mean he’d forgiven himself. He was a healer. Caring for others ought to be at the core of his being. “The problem was exacerbated because Jaya was proficient in sha energy use, while the rest of us were still adjusting to even being able to perceive sha energy, let alone access it to do things. It made her seem capable, when she was really just a scared, grieving littlie. I was overwhelmed adjusting to my talent and…I failed to help Jaya deal with her grief and fear. She retreated from us, just withdrew into herself. The teachers ended up taking her out of class for private tutoring for a couple of years until the age gap lessened between her and other new students.”

He struck his fist into his open palm. “I should have been there for her as a big brother. You don’t need shamanic talent to provide someone with compassion and connection. After we failed her, she never opened up enough to give anyone at the Academy a chance to get close to her, but…you pegged it. I think of her as a younger sister. I kept an eye on her progress. She never seemed to need help.”

“But you were there in case she did.”

It wasn’t a question, but he nodded agreement anyway. “Not that I was able to help when it mattered. What Alex did, kidnapping her and threatening Vulf’s life, he should be jailed for—with a disrupter running.”

Kohia’s eyebrows rose. She smiled. “Vicious. I didn’t know you were capable of it.” A disrupter was a recent human invention that prevented a shaman from accessing sha energy. Given that Alex’s ego was tied up in his shamanic talent, using a disrupter on him was a fitting punishment.

“People have the wrong idea about healers.” It was a fundamental misconception that Nairo seldom bothered to correct. However, Kohia was a pirate captain. She wouldn’t hold that rank without having gained sufficient experience to understand his explanation. “A good healer has to be ruthless. Sometimes there are no good options, and damage has to be excised. Sha energy has its limits. In an emergency response situation, triage can mean leaving those hurt worst to die so that many can live.”

Unexpectedly, Kohia leaned forward and grabbed his wrists, holding them apart.

He flushed. He’d forgotten himself, and his agitation had shown in how he pounded one fist harder and harder into the palm of his other hand.

She kept hold of his hands, turning her grip into a firm clasp. “I thought you taught healing at the Academy.” Nice, safe and protected, her dismissive tone said.

His mouth twisted. Few understood the nature of his position with the Academy. He could hardly blame Kohia for being fooled by the deceit he himself had set up to protect himself from endless demands for his healing abilities. “You thought I was an academic, hands untouched by blood?”

“Now who’s being dramatic?” She gave his hands a shake, and released them.

He wished he hadn’t teased her. When she’d touched him, their auras had flickered against one another, merging delicately and arousingly. He stared at her eyes, and saw that her pupils had widened.

So she felt their connection, too.

Satisfaction surged through him. Mutual attraction opened up possibilities, even if they couldn’t act on them while she served as his test subject for shifting. He told her the truth of himself. “I serve as an emergency response healer in disaster relief operations. I can’t respond to every call—hence my public status as an academic, not an active healer—but when a shamanic healer can make a significant difference another shaman at the Academy will open a portal for me so that I can travel to the disaster area immediately. Using another shaman’s portal conserves my sha energy for healing,” he added the explanation for her benefit as a non-shaman. “The collected sha energy in the crystal around my neck is a portable resource that I utilize when and where it’s required. As a side project, I’m hoping to collect some of the sha energy flowing around Earth. Jaya reported an abundance of it.”

“That should be fine,” Kohia said absently. “What would you want me to do as your test subject?”

He regretted that she’d brought them back to the original topic, but that was his ego asserting itself. There was no reason for Kohia to be impressed that, despite his academic cover story, he did actually help people. Absently, he noticed that the aura for the Freel, Aaron, was juddering, and straightened the core flow of sha energy through the man’s chakra fields. Aaron’s aura steadied. The rest of the crew were stable, Kohia among them.

“What animal would you shift into, if you could shift?” he asked.

“A tiger.”

Powerful and dangerous. His gaze flicked to her red hair, the color of copper pots and pans reflecting firelight in an old-fashioned country kitchen.

“That’s not my natural hair color, which is black.” She picked up the end of her braid and flicked it. “This is tiger-red because I dye it.”

“An attempt to manifest your animal self.”

“Now you sound like an academic,” she snapped.

He frowned, aware that he’d offended her with the personal comment. He retreated to the safe ground of his shift-initiation research project. “As a test subject, I’d need you to attempt a shift onboard the Stealth, either while it’s on Earth’s surface or within its orbit.”

“In contact with the flows of sha energy around Earth.” Kohia demonstrated that she understood his project, and something of how sha energy worked.

“Yes. Will you?”

Absently, she wrapped her red braid around her hand and tugged on it.

Nairo felt that tug in his body, as if it was he who clutched her hair and they were having rough sex.

If she noticed his sudden arousal, no sign of that awareness crossed her face. She studied the readouts of the starship’s passage through the wormhole. She was obviously thinking. A second tug of her braid confirmed that. But whether she was thinking about the starship’s journey or the risks of attempting a shift was unclear.

“Vulf’s robot wolf form is significantly larger than a normal wolf. The safest place for me to attempt to shift is in the cargo hold. It’s empty at the moment, apart from our supplies. My tiger would have room there…if she emerges.”

Her wistful sadness, as if she didn’t dare hope for her shift, snagged Nairo’s heart. He had long ago learned to distance himself from people. A healer burned out if they connected with everyone. He had his family and a few close, old friends. It was a way of protecting himself from the continual demands people made, consciously and unconsciously, for healing. “I won’t ask you to attempt a shift until I’m confident it has a chance of success.”

Her green eyes narrowed. “Just how confident are you?”

“Do you know anything about terraforming a planet to support human life?”

She blinked at the apparent non sequitur. Like the predator she was, the blink indicated far more than mere surprise. She was considering whether to eat him now—in other words, push for a direct answer to her question—or allow a chase. She was a tiger shifter. Of course she chose the chase.

He’d known that she was a cat shifter, one of the feline clan, before he’d requested passage on the Stealth’s mission to Earth. He’d learned the clans of the other crew members as well before boarding. The more information he had, the less excuse there was for error. He’d spent the journey time so far studying the crew’s auras for differences and similarities that might be caused by their unrealized potential to shift into different animal forms.

Which still left open the question of why Vulf, the only shifter to successfully achieve his animal form, had done so as a robotic version. Had the desperation of surviving Earth’s nuclear winter driven an instinctive warping of the sha energy flow for the shift? But even then, that didn’t explain how the robotic form had so smoothly and efficiently formed. Vulf’s robot wolf form was a lethal predator. For a first attempt at something so radically new—and shifting from organic to inorganic form and back was the definition of radical—there ought to have been some stutters to the process. Some hiccups of function and form. Instead, Vulf’s aura held steady and vibrant in both forms.

If he could be confident that Kohia’s aura would hold in the same way, Nairo would risk her attempting to shift—especially now that he’d heard the longing in her voice for her animal form.

He watched her hands, steady on the controls, correct the Stealth’s headlong jump through the wormhole.

Then she checked the readouts, nodded fractionally, and looked at him again.

“Terraforming a planet is a rare specialization among shamans,” he began his sideways explanation of how he’d judge when it should be safe to attempt a shift. “But we’re all taught the basics of it. The starting point is to identify the existing flows of sha energy that engulf a planet. Some will flow like great rivers. Others are streams. Some are tiny and random, like snowflakes. Once the sha energy of a planet and its surrounding environment has been mapped, then the shaman who has accepted responsibility for terraforming the planet has a prioritized list of objectives. There are things that must be done, and in a particular order, for the planet to move in the direction of being capable of supporting human life. The shaman redirects the flow of sha energy to achieve those objectives. The first stage focuses on redirecting the most powerful sha energy forces, the rivers. They’re not really rivers.”

“I can recognize a metaphor,” Kohia drawled.

He nodded. “The shaman has to maintain these rivers in their new position, occasionally refining the route according to feedback, until the sha energy flow holds steady. Then the secondary streams are addressed. The process takes decades.”

“But it’s still significantly shorter than the centuries that were required prior to shamans joining Galaxy Proper. You know, shamans capable of terraforming a planet are incredibly valuable.”

He looked at her narrowly. “Obviously, I know that. Only, I suspect you have a different interpretation of just how to realize their value.”

Her teeth flashed. “Pirate, remember? A shaman midway through a terraforming project would make a great hostage. The corporation investing in the planet would be forced to pay a massive ransom.” She was heart-poundingly gorgeous as she contemplated the diabolical cleverness of the scheme.

“You wouldn’t…”

“Kidnap a shaman?” She laughed. “Well, it worked for Vulf.” The wolf shifter had kidnapped Jaya, and now, they were mate partners and obviously happy together. Kohia’s laughter faded into a low gurgle of wicked amusement. “Do you want me to kidnap you?”

Yes, please. Just him and her, alone. No responsibilities. No duty. Just honest desire.

He’d have sworn he hadn’t moved a muscle, but she leaned forward, undeniable interest sparking in her eyes. She slid off her chair and prowled to him; leaned in. “Is that a ‘yes’?” Her breath whispered against his ear, warm and as tantalizing as the hand petting his chest.

“No. I require you as a test subject for shifting on Earth. Kidnapping—or anything else.” He couldn’t resist adding that, not with her so close. “Personal wishes have to wait.”

“Wishes, or desires?”

How did the woman get a purring note into the last word, desires? He put a hand over hers on his chest, trapping the torment of her teasing caress.

“I wouldn’t kidnap a shaman,” she whispered the confidence in his ear. “I don’t like hostage taking. It gets messy and emotional.”

He turned his head to look at her directly, curious if he’d gotten her meaning correctly. “And you don’t do messy and emotional?” They weren’t talking about kidnapping anymore. They were talking about the attraction between them.

“I’m waiting to find my mate partner. Anyone else is nothing more than filling in time.”

The words were harsh. The desire in her eyes and pulsing in her aura was just as contradictorily fierce. She wanted him, even as she pushed him away and denied part of herself. She was setting boundaries before a relationship could develop.

Nairo’s healing included mental as well as physical health. Boundaries were important. If you couldn’t respect another person’s boundaries, then a relationship would struggle; perhaps shatter under the strain. However, with Kohia, more than his ego resented where she attempted to institute her boundaries.

“I hope you find your mate partner soon.” He spun the co-pilot’s chair to the left, enough to remove her mouth from proximity to his ear and her hand from his chest. He felt the loss of both, but not as much as he regretted the hope gone from somewhere inside him. He was not going to confess even to himself that his heart felt chilled.

For the first time, he saw Kohia bewildered. For an instant, her hand hovered in the air, no longer touching him, and her mouth parted.

Whatever she meant to say, if anything, or if she was dumbfounded that a man might refuse the emotional aridity of a purely physical relationship entered into knowing it would go nowhere—

Nairo hauled his flaring aura under control. Anger served no useful purpose. He should be relieved that by her response Kohia had removed the temptation he might have felt to confuse his personal attraction to her with his duty to all shifters. “If you agree to be the test subject for shifting on Earth, I will chart the flow of sha energy in you in the same way that a shaman plans the terraforming of a planet. I have a sketch of how sha energy flows through Vulf both during his shift and as an inorganic robot wolf. I will overlay it with your chart and develop a map that ought to trigger your shift. Do I have your agreement?”

She’d returned to her chair while he spoke. “I agree on the understanding that my mission to Earth comes first. I will attempt to shift only after I have confirmed that the prison camp there is closed. If I have to close it down myself, I won’t risk a mishap during my attempted shift interfering with my ability to do so.” Her voice was as cool as his.

“Very well. I will map Earth’s sha energy flows and collect excess sha, while you complete your mission.” He glanced at the readouts on the screen. They were gobbledygook to him, but he could feel the chaotic energy of the wormhole lessening. “We’re exiting the wormhole. I’ll leave you to your piloting.”

Kohia slumped back, fingernails tapping an irritated rhythm on her chair arm. The healer’s cold refusal of her offer to live a little annoyed and, yes, frustrated her. Why in seven hells would he think the two of them could have a relationship? And yet, his offence at her suggestion of something less than that was obvious. Couldn’t the man simply relax and have fun?

She certainly couldn’t relax. Over the next couple of days, it had to be her imagination that now that the man had refused her, she could scent him throughout the starship. But imagination or not, his scent made her cranky. And when she walked into the recreation cabin and he looked up from the charts he was studying and his gaze stripped her bare, yet showed no emotion, she stalked to the food dispenser, grabbed a coffee and donut, and stalked back out.

Sean, her intelligence officer, laughed under his breath.

Damn wolf. He found her sexual frustration funny, did he? She whirled and stabbed a finger in his direction. “You. Gym. Ten minutes.” Combat practice was part of the crew’s routine, but she had to admit, today she’d really enjoy beating the know-it-allness out of Sean.

It didn’t help.

Kohia showered and dressed, and decided to double-check the Stealth’s mission readiness.

The journey to Earth had sorted out one particular problem. Aaron, the Freel navigator, was no longer fascinated by Kohia’s beauty and propensity for violence.

“Hami, I need you to test the radiation—Oops!” Kohia backed out of the bosun’s office, closing the door behind her.

Hami’s desk hadn’t actually been designed for the test it was about to undergo, but it was sturdy enough to survive a bear shifter and a Freel’s energetic love-making. Fortunately, Kohia had interrupted before they’d gotten to the clothes-off, bump-and-grind.

Kohia had only sauntered halfway down the passage before the door opened, and Aaron emerged.

The heavily-muscled, blue-skinned Freel grinned at her as he finished rebuttoning his shirt. “Hami’s free now. Frustrated, though.”

“You, rat!” Hami shouted from inside the office.

“I’ll be back,” he called over his shoulder.

Kohia returned to the bosun’s office to find Hami straightening the objects on her desk. “And here I thought I’d be ducking Aaron’s attentions the entire journey. Instead, he’s been shanghaied by my bosun.”

Hami giggled, which was disconcerting. The woman had a reputation as a brawler and the scars to prove it. “Sorry, Kohia.”

Had there ever been a more insincere apology in the history of the galaxy? Hami positively sing-songed the words.

Kohia laughed and gave her friend a one-armed hug. “You’re happy.”

“I am.” Hami grew serious. “It’s unlikely to lead anywhere…” Her tone said otherwise. She had genuine feelings for the Freel navigator. “But I like him. He’s comfortable with my scars.”

Better yet, he obviously made Hami feel comfortable with them, too.

Kohia was glad for her friend; glad enough that she bit back the question she really wanted to ask.

How could Hami contemplate—as she obviously was—settling for a partner who wasn’t her mate?

Chapter 3

“I knew it.” Kohia kicked the base of the large table in the recreation cabin. “No one did anything. Gah! Sometimes I hate being right.”

“No, you don’t. You love being right,” Hami said, but her heart wasn’t in her teasing. Like the rest of the crew, and Nairo, gathered around the large table in the recreation cabin, she was watching the Stealth’s scanning of Earth and frowning.

Kohia had given Sean the coordinates, forwarded by Vulf, for the location of the prison camp he and Jaya had found on Earth. Even with a blizzard picking up, the intelligence officer had been able to direct the Stealth’s sensors to record a snapshot of the frozen surface for what had once been the banks of the Congo River. He’d also switched off the relay of the warning beacon that broadcast an alert that Earth was an abandoned planet, entered at a person’s own risk, and that removing anything from it was illegal.

The heap of spoil outside the mine entrance looked raw enough—that is, barely covered by snow—to suggest that the warning beacon’s message was being actively ignored by those on the ground. Beside the spoil heap, and partially sheltered by it and a second hillock that was likely an older spoil heap, squatted a trampship. Trampships were the backbone of commercial cargo hauling in the galaxy.

“Why wouldn’t they lift-off for space?” Aaron asked. “I’m no meteorologist and even I can tell this storm promises to be violent. They’d be safer in space.”

Hami sat close beside him on the bench seat, thighs and arms touching. “Maybe they left it too late?”

“Or the starship is grounded,” Clarke offered. “Can you enlarge the image?” the engineer asked Sean.

Dissatisfaction clipped Sean’s voice. “No. This is as good as it gets.”

Clarke blew out a breath and sat back, arms folded. “It could be that the prison guards are using the trampship as secure living quarters.”

“That wouldn’t prevent them lifting off, would it?” Kohia asked.

“It depends on how many modifications they’ve made to it.” Everyone waited, and Clarke got the message that more words were required from him. “Say, for instance, that they diverted power from the trampship’s engines to supply power to operations inside the mine, or…well they could have been truly reckless. The trampship is set down at an unusual angle, but one that would allow the service hatch to open into a hole tunneled up from below.”

Aaron shook his head. “Disabling your own starship would be stupid.”

“Stupid, if the guards did it,” Nairo said. “But if the owner wanted the guards to be as trapped as the prisoners…”

They stared at him.

Kohia tapped the image of the trampship on the screen. “I refuse to feel sorry for the guards, given what they’re doing, but that is a horrible thought.”

“They’ll be desperate if it’s true,” Sean said. “If we offered them a way off-planet, maybe we wouldn’t have to fight them.”

“Something to consider.” As much as she wanted justice for the people condemned to the agonizing death of this prison camp, she wanted her people safe more. A smart pirate captain only fought when necessary—and then, she fought ruthlessly. “We need more information. Are there other camps elsewhere on the planet, anything at all? Put the Stealth into concealed orbit around the planet. I want a complete scan of Earth. Also, watch for any transmissions or space traffic. We can’t take the shuttle in while that storm hovers over the camp, so we’ll learn what we can, now. When the blizzard passes, we’ll suit up.”

Nairo was the first to leave the table. He hooked his long legs up and over the bench seat, and returned to his former position by the viewscreen on the far side of the cabin. Currently, rather than displaying a digital image, the screen had cleared to one-way glass. Nairo could see out, and although Earth was incredibly distant to the naked human eye, the shaman seemed obsessed by what he could perceive.

He was sketching lines and occasionally scrawling notes. Evidently, the sha energy around Earth was fascinating.

Kohia kicked the table a second time.

Hami paused in getting up from it. “Talk to him,” she said under her breath.

“That’s what got me into trouble the first time. Besides, we’re preparing for a mission.”

“We’re prepared,” Hami said in her regular bosun’s voice. “Now, we’re just waiting for Sean to give us the word to go.”

Kohia glanced at Nairo. She saw the back of his head as he stared out the viewscreen.

His cotton shirt stretched across his shoulders. He sketched directly onto a digital tablet, his hand moving without his eyes following the stylus.

“What do you see when you look out there?” she asked.

He turned at her approach. As had been the case since they’d exited the wormhole, his eyes showed no emotion when he looked at her. He was as remote and shut off, as cold, as the nuclear winter on Earth.

No matter how carefully and silently she approached him, she never surprised him with her presence. Just how much did his shamanic vision show him? Could he track her and her crew via their auras?

“The sha energy circulating Earth is intense. I think it’s stable, but the patterns are strange.” He glanced down at the tablet’s screen and amended the sketch.

Kohia nudged his feet off the chair opposite him and sat down. She ignored her crew’s curiosity, although she was aware that they watched her. They’d never witnessed her fail to get her man.

Yet Nairo rebuffed her effectively. Even when she’d pushed his boots aside, he merely adjusted his posture and refocused on the one-way glass of the viewscreen.

“So, what? It’s everything or nothing with you?” she demanded. Hami was right, drat the woman. Kohia and Nairo had to talk, they had to clear the air, so that Kohia could focus when she led the incursion team planetside.

Except, Nairo wasn’t playing. “When our ancestors fled Earth, they left behind an uninhabitable planet. Tiny remnants of life survived in the deepest parts of the ocean or underground. Bacteria survived. But that wasn’t enough to balance the flows of sha energy. With life gone, the sha rivers tore loose of their usual pattern. Then Jaya recently exploded a huge amount of sha on Antarctica. The astonishing thing is that the current pattern seems stable.”

Evidently, he wasn’t going to discuss anything personal with her. She’d have taken issue with that, except that as both captain and potential test subject for shifting, he was right to update her on the sha energy status of Earth. “Does that mean you can’t siphon off sha energy here for your collection?”

“No. There are hints of a pool of sha energy proximate to the South Pole that would probably benefit Earth by being drained. I’ll check when the Stealth’s orbit brings it into view.” He shrugged one shoulder. “I could probably pull sha directly from the streams flowing around and through Earth without causing any instability. Planetary systems are robust. Either way, we’ll have enough to attempt to trigger your shift.” He looked at her then. “If you’re still willing to try?”

As if she ever backed down from a challenge. “Just as soon as we’ve closed down the prison camp and shamed the Galactic Police into picking up the prisoners—and potentially the guards,” she added, thinking of their discussion around the table. The guards, even if they’d voluntarily signed on for that cruel job, could be equally as stuck as those they guarded.

“All right. Be careful down there.” His mouth closed to a thin line, and he turned back to the viewscreen.

She hesitated. There were no more preparations to be made before the mission. She could drive Sean nuts by hanging over him as he analyzed the incoming data from the Stealth’s scans, but she trusted the intelligence officer.

What she wanted was a cuddle with Nairo. It didn’t have to be sexual. She craved the contact. Although why her tiger insisted the touch had to be with him, she didn’t know. But the animal was certain. It wanted his…forgiveness?

No, not forgiveness. That would imply that Kohia had been wrong to clearly state her boundaries, and she hadn’t been wrong. She wasn’t offering anything more than a temporary affair. She was waiting for her mate.

Inside her, her tiger snarled.

“Oh, shut up,” Kohia muttered.

“Pardon?” Nairo actually glanced at her.

“My tiger,” Kohia said, too accustomed to being with other shifters to censor her words. “She wants a cuddle, from you.”

“Uh.” His mouth opened, but no coherent words came out. He closed it. Then he very carefully laid aside his tablet and stylus, his gaze remaining locked on Kohia.

The intensity of his focus puzzled her. Nor did a subdued snicker from those at the table help matters. “What?”

“If your tiger needs a cuddle, from me…”

Now, why did he have to add that “from me” in his deliciously low voice?

“Then come here.” He actually patted his knee.

Kohia would have ignored him on principle, just for that patronizing knee pat, except that her tiger had other ideas. Kohia’s powerful leg muscles launched her up, and the next instant she was falling into Nairo’s lap.

He caught her with surprising deftness. Even more surprising was how the blank remoteness had vanished from his face. His eyes positively blazed with emotion.

Shocked to see such raw need in him, Kohia failed to protest his brazen arrangement of her body until she rested comfortably within his embrace. And by then it was too late. Her tiger had been right, the hussy. Cuddling with Nairo soothed the tension that had been making Kohia scratchy. For the sake of the mission and its smooth running, she snuggled closer. Yeah, that was her excuse, and she’d fight anyone who called her on it.

Nairo stared out the viewscreen, but the way his fingers caressed her stomach said he hadn’t forgotten her.

She stared out with him, not seeing the sha energy he studied, but content to inhale his scent and simply be with him.

“Storm’s clearing,” Sean called from the table.

Kohia snapped back to captain mode. “How long?”

“Forty minutes, maybe a bit longer.”

“Suit up,” she said. If Sean had detected any other data useful to their mission, he’d have mentioned it. “Plan A it is.”

Her crew ran out of the recreation cabin.

Nairo’s arms tightened a moment around her.

She could break the restraint easily. Instead, she glanced at him.

“Come home safe,” he said.

Now was not the time to kiss him. She nodded and he released her.

Sean and Clarke would stay aboard the Stealth. As their intelligence officer, Sean was more valuable feeding her information from here. Plus, he was her co-pilot. If the Stealth needed to move suddenly, say to evade an enemy, he could and would handle it. For a similar reason, Clarke remained aboard. The engineer was essential to the Stealth’s functioning. He was also a gunner with a high kill rating.

Clarke walked with her along the passage, heading for the engine room. “We’ll keep him safe.”

“Who?”

The middle-aged chief engineer punched her arm. “Your mate.”

Chapter 4

Her mate! Nairo couldn’t be her mate!

For a minute Kohia’s brain stuttered, while her tiger roared inside her, expressing frustration at Kohia’s doubt and slowness.

Then Kohia shut it all down.

The Stealth had a mission to complete and she had a duty to her crew to lead them safely into the frozen jaws of Hell and out again.

She suited up. The space combat suit had been designed by the Sidhe for their Star Marines and provided the most flexibility, without compromising protection, of any humanoid suit design that Kohia had encountered. It had been modified on Corsairs to interface with the Stealth’s systems, and her Uncle Rick’s Jekyll Industries had added a few shifter-specific weapons. Shifters were trained to fight in styles that suited their animal selves. As Kohia’s suit sealed, she zinged the diamond tipped claws on her gloves. They were deadly in close combat.

The trampship could be the main power source for the mine, the guards’ quarters, or simply planetside delivering cargo or loading the irradiated gold produced by the mine. Whatever its purpose on Earth, it wouldn’t be the incursion team’s first target.

From onboard the Stealth, Sean would block any transmission from the trampship or other communication systems within the mine. Clarke would fire a warning shot if the trampship attempted to launch. His second shot would disable it. The rules of piracy were simple: you limited the damage you inflicted on enemy starships because once you won the battle, they were your prize. So Clarke would place his shots carefully. For the same reason, the incursion team Kohia led wouldn’t attempt a hostile boarding of the trampship unless forced to, since breaching the hull would allow in Earth’s radioactive atmosphere, requiring a full and expensive decontamination.

So the incursion team was leaving Sean and Clarke to manage the trampship, and focusing their attack on the mine itself.

They strapped into the Stealth’s shuttle. Its concealment technology was not as comprehensive as the Stealth’s, but it was unlikely to be detected by anything the mine or trampship possessed. Kohia and her team would go in with the advantage of surprise.

Surprise, if brutal enough, could demoralize an enemy. If the guards could be persuaded to surrender, the mission would be over in hours; requiring only a monitoring role from the Stealth while they waited for the Galactic Police to recover the survivors of the mine.

That was the best case scenario.

Kohia prepared for the worst.

She set the shuttle down to the side of the mine, on the far side of the spoils heap that sheltered the trampship and out of direct firing line from the mine entrance.

“Clear.” Hami monitored the readouts from the shuttle’s sensors. “No ordinance, electronic or bio signatures detected between here and the mouth of the mine.”

Sean would stay silent unless he detected an emergency and the incursion team had to act.

“Go!”

Their space combat suits would protect them from Earth’s radioactive atmosphere. Returning to the Stealth, the entire shuttle as well as the suits would have to wait through decontamination procedures. The suits enabled their wearers to survive comfortably for seventy two hours, and uncomfortably for double that time. Kohia hoped that the decontamination process would be done in a day. For now, what mattered was ensuring they returned.

As they hit the snow-covered ground, their suits flashed warnings of the irradiated environment. Kohia acknowledged the warning absently. Her blaster remained ready as Hami took point and Aaron trailed her.

The remaining three crew members spread out, one monitoring the trampship and the other two guarding the team’s retreat to the shuttle. Their suits’ goggles would enable them to see in the darkness of the mine.

“Rail tracks,” Hami reported. All of their suits were linked. If one detected bio-signatures for life, they’d all know about it. The same went for any indication of weapons or electronics. So Hami reported what the suit wouldn’t. “Do we follow them?”

“Yes. We hit fast and hard. Aaron, fall back. Belinda, you’re up.”

Belinda Milne was Clarke’s back-up in engineering. She carried the tech and the knowledge to take out the mine’s surveillance system. There had to be one, didn’t there? How else would the guards monitor their prisoners?

But the rail track ran deeper and deeper without the suits registering any electronic equipment—until they did.

Belinda activated the signal blocker to ensure that if their presence had been detected, a warning couldn’t be shared. Then she directed her blaster at the exposed wiring to a surveillance box and fried it; as a bonus, taking out the mine’s electrical system.

In front, Hami had her suit’s audio-sensors on their highest setting. They picked up a distant, “Not again!”. Apparently, the mine’s electronics weren’t reliable. They ought to be. Electronics survived deep space, after all. But if the mine had been outfitted on the cheap…

All the better for us, Kohia thought.

The man’s muttered comment also gave them a sense of where he was located, especially as he kept swearing to himself as he tried to raise someone on his communication system, and couldn’t.

“Visual lock acquired,” Hami said. “One guard at the entrance to a side tunnel. He’s entering it now. Safe to approach.”

The team joined her.

An ore wagon, half-filled, waited by the entrance to the side tunnel. The rail tracks continued on past, going deeper. Starships weren’t built to be spacious, so Kohia had a decade of experience in living, working and fighting in confined spaces. Yet the narrow sides and low roof of the tunnel oppressed her. Perhaps it was the knowledge of how much dirt and rock lay over them. Fire a missile at the entrance and everyone inside the mine would be buried alive.

Shaking off the morbid thought, Kohia refocused. “Acquire the guard.”

Hami gestured to Phillip Song. The two worked well together. Phillip was a tough weasel-shifter who excelled at close-quarters fighting. They ducked into the side tunnel.

Aaron kept his attention directed ahead, deeper into the tunnel.

Kohia approved. On a mission, personal feelings couldn’t be allowed to interfere with its objectives, most especially, that of the team’s safety. “Belinda, scout ahead. Aaron, cover her.”

“Don’t shoot! Don’t tear the suit. The radiation here will kill me. I surrender.” The strange male voice was high and panicked, and echoed along the side tunnel to Kohia’s suit’s sensors. “I surrender.”

“You dirty bastard.” Phil’s voice surprised her. The man was usually so quiet that his nickname was the Phantom. For him to break silence with a personal comment on a mission was unprecedented. “You deserve to share their fate.”

Forty three bio-markers were reported from Phil and Hami’s suits. Whatever had caused the delay in transmitting the information, possibly some quirk of being in the tunnel, Kohia could guess the reason for Phil’s outburst. He and Hami had found some of the prisoners.

“Stay quiet and we’ll get you out of here.” Hami’s voice was strong and commanding. “Stay where you are, while we interrogate the guard. We’ll come back for you.”

“Too late for us.” A whisper so ragged it wheezed was transmitted via Hami and Phil’s suits. “Don’t trust what he says. There are four guards. All useless. It’s not weapons, but despair that keeps us under control. They have the food and water, but even they can’t leave Earth. Trapped with us. But not sick like us. You want to help us? Strip him of his suit.”

“Nooo!”

“No,” Kohia said sharply, in case Hami or Phil were tempted. “Tell them you’ll return with food and water, clothing, whatever they need, and that we’ll get them off planet.”

She heard Hami relay the message, and conclude. “First, we have to take the mine.”

The whisperer sounded exhausted, but determined. “End of the rail tracks, side tunnel leads to nuclear bunker. It has its own tunnel—elevator shaft—to a trampship on the surface that supplies the mine’s power. The guards like to stay in it.”

A second whisperer took over as the first subsided into racking coughs. “Between the guards’ bunker and the rail track, our quarters. Forty seven asleep. One guard on duty. Two shifts. Two guards in their bunker or on-ship.”

“So there are four guards in total?” Hami asked.

“Yes.”

“Any weapons beyond the blasters they carry?”

“Not that they’ve shown us.” A cautious man, that whisperer.

Kohia approved. “Thank them and get back here. Bring the captured guard.” Leaving him with his former prisoners would be inviting trouble.

“Any information you want to add?” Phil growled, presumably at the guard. “Remembering that we’re your ticket out of here. If this mission goes wrong, you die.”

“Sound carries in the tunnels. When you get to the bottom of the main one, Rhys is on duty. He won’t see you. He’ll be in the corner. There’s a chair there. If he doesn’t hear you, you can shoot him before he gets his blaster up. Our suits are old. Good enough to keep out the radiation, but not sustained blaster fire.”

Nice guy, Kohia thought wryly. He was more than willing to rat out his buddy.

“Rhys is a psycho. He gets off on the prisoners’ sickness. I reckon if it was possible, he’d be screwing their corpses.”

Hami, Phil and their prisoner emerged from the side tunnel in time for Kohia to see the man sharing that particular gem of information. The shabby spacesuit hid much of his face and form, but he shuffled along no taller than petite Hami.

“Knock him out,” Kohia ordered.

Blaster set to stun, Phil quickly obliged.

“Belinda, what do you see?” Kohia continued.

“We’re at the bottom of the tunnel.” Her low-voiced response would be contained by her suit. The guards and prisoners wouldn’t hear her. “The guard’s information seems possible.” Kohia had broadcast the abbreviated interview. “There’s a side tunnel. My suit’s sensors can’t get a clear numeric reading, but indicate multiple bio-signatures grouped inside it.”

“Wait for us to join you.”

They left the guard lying against the ore wagon. If any of the former prisoners disobeyed orders and ventured this way, they’d find him. Kohia could live with it if they exacted rough-and-ready justice.

The incursion team joined up at the base of the tunnel. Kohia kept Phil back and let Hami enter with Belinda. Even with her audio sensors tuned for it, Kohia barely heard them.

A faint crackle like fallen leaves crunching underfoot came through the audio.

“Guard down. Stunned. Prisoners waking up.”

“Aaron, Phil, guard the entrance to the side tunnel. I don’t want us trapped.” Kohia gestured the others in. “Hami, on your judgement, take out the guards in the bunker.”

“The door’s locked. Voice-scan required,” Hami reported evenly. “Do you want me to blast it open?”

Kohia ran along the tunnel, ignoring the prisoners staring at her from narrow bunks. “Belinda?”

“I’ve got it.” The woman sounded amused. Hami liked to blow her way through things. Belinda, on the other hand, was a mountain lion. She preferred sneakiness, and from her lessons with Sean, she could hack most things. She attached a gizmo to the scanner, spun it, and a second later, the door to the bunker opened.

Kohia went through with Hami falling in behind. “Belinda, mind the prisoners. I don’t want anyone getting ideas and messing things up.” The mission was going smoothly.

The bunker door opened into a shambolic decontamination chamber. Abandoned gear lay about. A flashing red light was dimly visible through a smeared interior door.

Fortunately, a manual override to the door existed. That didn’t seem like a wise feature, but it worked for Kohia and her team since they cared less about introducing radiation carried on their suits into the bunker than risking giving the two sleeping guards inside time to prepare a hostile welcome.

She strode through the interior door and fired a stunning blast at the man who raised himself up on an elbow and began a demand for an explanation. She stunned the second man while he was still blinking himself awake. “Belinda, grab any weapons. When the room is clear, retreat.” The men could likely recover from the level of radiation they’d been exposed to if they took their anti-radiation meds. The bottle sat on a shelf by the interior door. “Hami, Landon, check out the trampship above. If you can, exit directly through it to the outside of the mine and wait for us there.”

Her people moved.

Kohia returned to the prisoners’ tunnel.

Before pressing for permission to use the Stealth on this mission, Kohia had done her research. If the galactic market for irradiated gold was strong enough to warrant a mine on Earth—it wasn’t—then the investors should have brought in robotic mining equipment. People, of whatever species, couldn’t survive Earth’s levels of radiation. The fact that the mine used people in place of technology, meant that the gold was arguably the least of the mine’s money-making activities. It was the prisoners’ suffering and death that made the mine owner his or her money.

However immoral and ugly such a business plan was, it wasn’t until Kohia studied the condition of the prisoners that she truly grasped the evil of the mine, and sympathized with Phil’s desire to kill the four guards.

While the remaining guards were being dealt with, someone had found a battery-powered flashlight and a lantern. Kohia’s combat suit adjusted her goggles to match the new lighting level. For the prisoners, it meant that they could finally see their rescuers. As they stared, Kohia stared at them.

Radiation sickness had marked them all. With some it was emaciation, and shivering, pale skin, with drying evidence of nausea and vomiting. But others were much worse. They had ravaged mouths, eaten away by the sickness. Sores wept blood and pus over their bodies. The wonder was that those so badly suffering still clung to life.

Kohia sent Phil to retrieve the prisoners from the higher tunnel, while the prisoners in the bunks pointed out the location of supplies. Food interested a few of them, but all craved water, or better yet, the high energy drinks in a locked cupboard by the bunker door.

“It’ll be irradiated,” Belinda said, returning.

“Does it matter?” Kohia’s curt tone only barely hid her furious pity. She handed out the desired drinks, retrieving more for the prisoners who shuffled in with Phil’s escort. Even with everyone in place, there were empty bunks.

“We’re expecting a new batch.”

Kohia thought she recognized the harsh whisperer from the tunnel.

The man was skeletal, lips red and swollen, his hands…

Kohia forced herself not to turn away. Her suit’s helmet hid her expression. The suits were designed to scare the enemy with a faceless, nameless, remorseless super-soldier. Now, it hid her horrified sense of inadequacy. Then her mind processed the new information. “You’re expecting a delivery? When?”

“Any day now.”

Kohia swore silently. “Sean, did you hear that?”

“Yes.”

She relaxed fractionally. The Stealth was in orbit and her intelligence officer remained in contact with them even this far below ground. Such contact should have been guaranteed, but radiation and geology could combine to do strange things to transmissions. “This changes things. If a ship is inbound, I don’t want it receiving a warning and haring off. Chances are it would dump its prisoners in deep space.” Space hid a multitude of sins. “And if there is someone in the Galactic Police working in lock with these guys, then we can’t afford to warn them of the changed situation here by requesting a prisoner pick-up.”

“So we wait,” Sean said.

“Yeah.” She considered the situation. Mission plans had to be flexible, although objectives remained unchanged. “I’ll transmit photos of the prisoners. Some are barely recognizable, but others…see if you can identify them. I’ll ask for names.”

Maybe the prisoners were too cold, sick, brutalized and starved to feel any enthusiasm, but where Kohia had thought she’d receive messages for loved ones and demands for freedom and a return to normal life, the men merely gave their names. Some just grunted. Two ignored her, shut in their own misery.

As awful as she felt for them, she was aware of a clock ticking down to an unknown deadline. Their shuttle was too exposed by the mine entrance. Yes, Sean would give them warning when the delivery starship approached, but Kohia preferred to be away before then.

She had her team prepare to move out.

The prisoners lay on their bunks, very few of them even bothering to watch events. There had been extra blankets in the supplies cupboard. Why hadn’t the guards handed them out? But the answer was obvious. The blankets were for the expected new lot of prisoners.

Phil distributed the blankets and additional rations among the bunks, while Kohia and Belinda shoved the two guards from the tunnels into the decontamination unit inside the bunker, then closed the bunker door. Belinda had gotten the electrical system back online, and the security system locked the door. The guards and their former prisoners were now separated. The prisoners had food and water and weren’t being forced to work. For now, that was the best Kohia could achieve. She wanted her team back aboard the Stealth.

Hami and Landon waited by the shuttle. At the sight of the rest of the team, Hami opened the hatch. They boarded in silence. There was a volatile edge to it. Everyone would deal with the horror differently, but trapped in the shuttle wasn’t the time for it. The crew was professional. Mission discipline held.

The situation was tense. The decontamination procedure for the outside of the shuttle was swift and efficient. The internal process took much longer, including as it did, their suits. Just to be safe, they then each entered and exited the personal decontamination unit at the side of the cargo hold.

Meantime, Sean had detected the presence of a starship exiting the wormhole nearest Earth. It was later than the former prisoner, the whisperer, had indicated, but it was on a direct route to Earth. Sean’s insistence on leaving sensor drones along the path to prevent unannounced visitors now proved useful. The crew knew they had a day, arguably longer at the starship’s current rate of progress before it arrived in missile range.

It meant that they had a few valuable hours of downtime.

Clothes had been left for them outside the personal decontamination unit, so once dressed in their familiar uniform of sage-green utility suits, they headed for the recreation cabin and real food.

Nairo ambushed Kohia as soon as she entered the passage. He was as demanding as any shifter and as dominating, crowding her back against the bulkhead.

She wrapped her arms and legs around him, going with it. According to her tiger, he was her mate.

“It looked bad.” His rough sympathy gave her exactly what she needed: a brief acknowledgement of the emotional cost of this mission, which wasn’t yet complete.

“I’m still on active duty,” she warned him.

He leaned in harder, one hand framing her face. “I know.” His dark eyes devoured her. The skin beneath his eyes had the bruised look of too little sleep and his skin stretched taut over his cheekbones.

“Clarke reckons we’re mates, you and I.” Even if the mission was still active, she couldn’t hide from this crucial personal issue.

Nairo raked his hands through her hair. “What do you think?”

“I want you. My tiger likes you.” An understatement. “You’re not what I pictured as a mate.”

The muscles around his eyes flinched. It was the only sign she’d hurt him with the quasi-rejection. “Because I’m not a shifter,” he said evenly.

Her tiger snarled at her, furious at how Kohia’s maladroit honesty hurt their mate. She regretted it, too. Whether this man was her forever, or not, he didn’t deserve cruelty. How he held her, the fact that he’d been waiting for her, everything in him spoke that he cared for her. Even afraid for her own heart, Kohia should have been kinder than to return caring with self-protective defensiveness.

But Nairo’s hand caressed her face, again, his long fingers gentle. “Your eyes. Blazing green. Hello, there.” He looked through Kohia to her tiger.

And the trapped animal inside her, unable to experience the freedom of a shift, froze mid-snarl. Their mate saw her.

“Nairo,” Kohia said in a shaken voice, nuzzling her head into the caress of his hand.

“Why aren’t I enough for you?”

“It’s not that you’re not a shifter. That’s not the reason.” The passage was a stupid place to have a momentous personal discussion, but her crew had cleared out and were giving them privacy. “I need a mate who can dominate me.”

Nairo stilled.

“Not sexually.” Kohia tightened her arms and legs around him, her back hard against the wall. “Although I don’t mind playing games.” The man holding her up swore under his breath. She grinned faintly, but the impulse to tease faded quickly. “My mate has to be able to defeat me in a fight. I haven’t met a man who can yet. I thought my tiger felt the same…” Why had her tiger ceased to insist on a mate who could defeat her? She’d fought every other man who Kohia had hoped might be a potential mate. Yet, now, the tiger adored Nairo.

“You’ve forgotten to listen to your tiger’s instincts,” he chided her.

She’d have pulled back in offence, but with the wall at her back, she couldn’t.

Nor would Nairo let her go. “I am the deadliest person aboard this starship, on Earth, in this sector of the galaxy,” he whispered. “I told you that earlier. Every positive has its negative. That’s what balances the universe. That’s how sha energy remains creative and sustains life. The same shamanic talent that enables me to heal means that I can kill, with a thought, from a distance. Every living thing has an aura, a pattern of sha energy weaving through it. I can snuff out that aura in a heartbeat, simply tear it to pieces, and then, I can use that sha energy for my own purposes. Your tiger recognized me, Kohia. I am the apex predator in your life.”

He stepped back, releasing her.

She unwrapped herself from him, gaze unwavering. “But physically…”

“You think I can’t beat you in a fight?” His smile was thin and unamused.

Her muscles locked. She struggled to move. She couldn’t twitch a finger. Even her eyes wouldn’t roll to keep him in view.

He walked around her once, making a point. Then he leaned in, mouth against her ear. “I own you.”

He walked away.

Her muscles unlocked. Her body was her own again—or was it? “I own you,” he’d said. She shuddered under a flood of roaring, overwhelming desire. She’d challenged Nairo to prove his dominance over her, and he had.

Now, it took every ounce of control for her not to hunt him down and claim him as her mate.

Chapter 5

The crew ate quickly and separated. They needed to process what they’d seen in the mine. Some would hit the gym, others would compose messages to partners and family back on Corsairs, and Belinda would lose herself in an engineering project Clarke would have ready for her.

Kohia sat with Nairo and Sean at the table in the recreation cabin and planned their next move.

Sean had information for her. While the incursion team had been going through decontamination, he’d identified two thirds of the prisoners. “Half of them lied about their names.”

From studying the information he’d found on them, the reason was clear: the prisoners’ true identities were unlikely to incline anyone to help them.

“They’re all human, Freel and Sidhe criminals.” Kohia read the list of crimes for which they’d been imprisoned. She even recognized a couple of names, although their monikers were more familiar. “Butcher Verron. He was the whisperer, the one who informed me that a ship was due.”

“He was a clever guy in his day, and an evil bastard,” Sean said.

Kohia glanced at Nairo. He wasn’t studying the screen. “You’re not surprised?”

“Sean already shared the information with me, and with Clarke. We’ve spoken about what it means.”

Kohia included Sean in her scowl. “Enlighten me. Sorry.” She put a hand on Nairo’s knee. He sat beside her. “I’m upset, but not with you. We came all this way to close down the prison camp and rescue these guys, only to learn that if I’d known who they were, I’d have shot most of them on principle. We could still—”

“Kohia,” Nairo began.

“This one.” She stabbed at a face onscreen with its prison-photo profile. “What he did to those children on Station Ensign, he deserves the flames of an eternal hell.”

“Yes, he does,” Nairo agreed. “But there are innocent men in the mine.”

She got up, trying to walk off her fury; at least sufficiently that she could think through the blinding red haze. “If you mean the guards, you’re wrong.”

“He means Rajiv Henderson,” Sean said. “The environmental activist from humanity’s fourth planet, Gemini. The planet’s largest corporation had a contract to build housing on its rainforest islands.”

She hurried back to the table to lean over the screen. “That was him? He saved thousands of people, and the habitat on the islands. The area was geologically unstable, a fact the government of the nation that claimed the islands concealed from the public. Rajiv uncovered corruption and…oh no.” She sat and swung her legs over the bench seat, sliding in beside Nairo. “He went missing.”

“And turned up in a death camp,” Sean concluded. “That’s not coincidence. My guess is that someone paid to have him not just vanish, nor simply die, but to suffer first. Rajiv’s dedication to the cause and the activist group he created exposed the corporation on Gemini to a level of scrutiny they couldn’t survive. Three of their executives went to jail. The chairman escaped the planet.”

“Presumably with enough wealth stashed away that he could afford revenge,” Kohia growled.

Sean swiped the screen, and the information and photos vanished. The surface once more resembled wood grain. He stretched and yawned hugely. “If you cross-match the known mine prisoners with the economic status of their victims’ families, you’ll find that each had crossed paths with someone capable of buying revenge. The prisoners were all found guilty of the crimes they were charged with and sent to prison. But the prisons were Meitj-approved.”

Kohia groaned and cracked her neck. The Meitj were one of Galaxy Proper’s founding member species. They were also incredibly moral and fair, and held that all life had value and deserved respect. Prisons approved by Meitj inspectors would not satisfy any victim’s family who wanted revenge. “So interested parties paid to have the prisoners moved to somewhere the prisoners would suffer more than imprisonment and rehabilitation. I can understand the motivation.”

Nairo put a hand to the base of her neck and began a slow, deep massage. “Except that whoever is running this operation also takes people like Rajiv.”

Kohia sighed, both at the difficulties of what they’d uncovered on Earth, and for the sheer pleasure and relief his touch gave her. “None of this changes what we need to do. We wait till the starship has landed, then we order them to submit. Sean, best guess. Will they abort their approach if the guards at the mine don’t respond to a transmission? Could you intercept it and fake a response?”

He yawned, again. “Given the storms and the radiation planetside, plus the guards’ casual response to Belinda taking out their electrical system, I’d guess that a failure to respond wouldn’t be enough to turn back the starship. Not when they’re this far from anywhere. In my opinion, we’re safer risking no response than a fake one that might trigger suspicion.”

“Okay. You’re the expert.”

“Uh huh,” her intelligence officer said, not very intelligently.

“You need to sleep, Sean. No more stimulant drinks.” Kohia smothered her own yawn. She’d napped aboard the shuttle, but true sleep was impossible during the decontamination process. “Automate the tracking of the starship. I want two hours warning of it reaching missile range. Issue a combat alert at that point.” She clasped Nairo’s hand. “We all need sleep.” She pulled him with her, out from the table and into the passage, barely acknowledging Sean’s assent to her orders.

“Are you sure?” Nairo pressed their clasped hands against his mouth.

“Just sleep.” She smiled tiredly. “I need to be awake for what you’re thinking.”

“Technically—”

She bumped her shoulder against his chest. “You can tease me later. For now, I need you to hold me and keep away the nightmares.” They were at her cabin. She opened the door.

He followed her in. “I can’t scare away nightmares, but I’ll be here for you.” He pushed her gently down till she sat on the bunk, before kneeling and taking off her boots, then his own.

They left their utility suits on in case they needed to react to an emergency. She shuffled to the side of the bunk, pressed against the bulkhead, and he fitted himself into the remaining space in the narrow bed.

Kohia’s composure broke. Outside the cabin, she had to be the tough pirate captain. Her crew depended on her strength and sanity. But in Nairo’s arms, she could simply be herself, and she was hurting. The prisoners in the mine were mostly monsters, but not even monsters deserved the agony of radiation sickness. When you added in that some of the men who’d suffered there were good people, incredibly unjustly punished for acting with justice and integrity, then the horror grew worse.

“It’s not just the prisoners or the fact the death camp exists on Earth…Nairo, in the mine I kept imagining my suit ripping open, the radiation reaching me, the sickness. I’ve never felt fear like that. The ground above me pressed down and my fear of the prisoners’ sickness choked me.”

“You’re safe, now. The medbot scanned you and all the incursion team. You’re healthy. The suits protected you. And I’ve checked your auras. You and your crew are safe, Kohia.”

She nodded against his throat. She couldn’t burrow any closer to him without taking off their clothes. Instead, she concentrated on his scent, the steadiness of his pulse, and the feel of his hand smoothing up and down her back, trying to soothe her. “Could you heal me, if my suit had ripped and I’d been exposed to Earth’s radiation?”

His hand froze. His whole body tensed. “No. I expected the question before I boarded the Stealth, but you never asked. I came to believe that you maybe knew…” He readjusted them until he lay on his back and she sprawled over him. He resumed his slow, calming caress the length of her spine. “I was present onboard a passenger starship when a private courier called in an emergency. There were two people on the courier starship. They’d encountered unmapped space debris at the edge of a starlane between the Sidhe trading planet of Samanth and Station Oberon. The damage to their starship was insidious. They thought they’d repaired the worst of it, only to find that the radiation sensor had been damaged and hadn’t shown the mega doses of radiation they’d been soaking in. When the man grabbed a spacesuit to go outside and finish repairs, that’s when he got a true reading of what they’d been sitting in.”

“Awful.” And the man would have realized his partner was just as exposed. Just as damned.

“The Galactic Police have a base on Station Oberon. The Space Guard’s base is right next to it. The passenger cruiser forwarded the details of the courier’s situation and the Space Guard sent a cutter to retrieve the courier. I was asked if I could try healing them when I reached the station. They had the couple in an isolation chamber. As long as I could see them, I didn’t need to go in to view and alter the sha energy flows in them to heal them. Except that there was no healing the damage. It was both too extensive and too complete on a cellular level.”

Nairo stopped. “Hearing my horror story isn’t going to help your nightmares.”

“Finish it,” she said briefly.

His chest rose and fell deeply beneath her. “Even if I could have healed the damage to the couple, they were, themselves, radioactive. Sha energy can’t cancel out or convert radiation or drain it away. If we’re fast enough, shamans can put up a protective sha energy bubble to prevent radiation reaching us. We wear it like a spacesuit, although it takes concentration to maintain. But we can’t directly affect radiation. So with the couple from the courier, even if I’d been able to repair the damage to their bodies, as fast as I did so, the radiation they carried would damage them all over again. It was a battle I couldn’t win.”

“I’m sorry.” She kissed the base of his throat, sharing comfort rather than desire. “It was brave of you to join the mission, knowing what waited on Earth.”

“I’ve come to terms a long time ago with the fact that I can’t heal everyone.”

His words were tough, but she felt his anger and regret at his helplessness. She slid off him, tucking herself to the side and resting her hand on his chest. As she fell into sleep, she knew that he remained awake, staring into the darkness at his own nightmares.

Chapter 6

“It’s a trampship,” Sean reported in response to Kohia’s request for an update. He’d woken her two hours before the approaching starship’s steady progress would bring it into missile range. Nairo had kissed her and retreated to his own cabin, leaving her to focus on the Stealth’s mission. She was in the recreation cabin, grabbing coffee and a granola bar. He was on the bridge. The crew, apart from Clarke and Belinda who were in engineering, had gathered around the dining table.

“Suit up,” Kohia told them. “Prepare for a hostile boarding.”

Excitement tingled on the air. The Stealth was part of Corsairs’ pirate fleet, but the corvette’s small size, speed and ability to avoid detection, tended to place it in intelligence gathering roles. To actually board an enemy starship was a rare treat.

Kohia leaned her butt against the table, ate her breakfast and finished the last of her coffee with a gulp. In the best case scenario, her crew wouldn’t need to board the trampship. It depended on whether or not its crew were prepared to be reasonable. Fortunately, part of a pirate captain’s training was in the art of negotiation. A starship grounded and under missile-lock would have every incentive to surrender. She’d spell out the benefits, and then, the conditions of their capitulation.

She joined Sean on the bridge.

He sat in the co-pilot’s chair, the screens displaying various data and scans of their environment. “I’d have liked to maintain visual, or at minimum, auditory surveillance inside the mine. An oversight on my part. I should have sent you down with that kit.”

“We didn’t anticipate sitting in orbit waiting on a new batch of prisoners.” Kohia shrugged philosophically. “The guards’ weapons are gone. Even if they attempt to prepare an ambush for us on our return, what can they do?”

“Or we could wait and leave the Galactic Police to recover them,” Sean suggested. “Speaking of whom, do you want to record your message to them while we wait for the trampship?”

She sighed and slouched in her chair. “I hate talking to those jerks.”

“Your cousin is one of them,” Sean reminded her, because he could be a jerk, too.

“Did you have to mention the family’s shame?” Kohia teased. In reality, she respected her cousin Fergus’s decision to break with the shifters’ tradition of piracy and go work for the enemy. It hadn’t been easy for Fergus to earn his acceptance among the police ranks.

She thought of her other cousin, Jaya, who was now one of only two Shaman Justices in the galaxy and working directly for the Galactic Court. “Sean, when you send my message to the Galactic Police, copy it to Cyrus and my cousin, Jaya.” Cyrus was Corsairs intelligence chief, Sean’s boss. The reason for keeping Cyrus in the loop as to happenings on Earth was obvious. If something went wrong—if more of the local garrison of Galactic Police were in on the secret of the death camp’s existence than Kohia anticipated—then ensuring Cyrus had the information meant it would be acted on even if the worst happened to the Stealth and its crew. “Jaya discovered the prison camp. She deserves to know what’s happening here, and if we need it, she has her own political influence to ensure it’s closed down.” Not that Jaya seemed comfortable with her unique role in shaping the future of Galaxy Proper.

Kohia recorded her message, including images of the prisoners’ pitiable condition from her combat suit’s recorder, along with Sean’s findings as to their identities. She emphasized the fact that environmental hero, Rajiv Henderson, was among them. The presence of innocent people meant the existence of the death camp should not be swept under the carpet. The person masterminding the operation had to be caught and punished. Then she added the information as to the newly arriving batch of prisoners and demanded that the Galactic Police get its ass into gear and come and take charge of the situation.

“You’ll need isolation chambers for a hundred people,” she added. There were slightly less than that in the mine, and probably the numbers would drop further as the sickest died. Nairo had warned her from his experience in disaster emergency relief that people could cling to life through appalling conditions, only to die when rescue arrived. It was as if they felt safe to let go.

No one wanted to die alone.

She finished the message, played it back, and nodded, satisfied. The delay in transmitting and receiving messages through space meant she’d have to wait seven to eight minutes for the Galactic Police to receive her transmission. Sean would mark it urgent, so it oughtn’t to be ignored, but even then, the police would need time to decide their response, with another eight minutes of lag time before Kohia received it. As a consequence, Kohia would still be making all the real-time decisions on Earth, even after Sean opened communications with the Galactic Police.

The trampship landed heavily by the mine entrance. The bleak weather with its driving wind had eradicated all sign of the Stealth’s shuttle’s previous presence. The newcomers were broadcasting a demand that the guards in the mine get their act together and send up a wagon to take the new prisoners.

“Idiots,” Kohia muttered. With transmissions down the obvious course of action was for someone from the trampship to go in person to alert the mine guards to the trampship’s arrival. However, its crew’s laziness gave Kohia’s team ample time to initiate their mission.

Clarke’s voice came over the Stealth’s internal network, as calm as ever. “Missile lock achieved.”

Meantime, Sean had identified the trampship. He lifted the jamming of transmissions to and from Earth.

“Starship Yarrow,” Kohia said over tight beam. “You are under missile-lock. Do not take any action. Any attempt to launch will be treated as hostile action. We can and will destroy you. Do you understand?” She indicated for Sean to send her pre-recorded message to the Galactic Police, Cyrus and Jaya.

“Who are you?” an unidentified male voice demanded from the Yarrow.

When her message arrived at the Galactic Police garrison, they’d know the Stealth was here. She might as well have the pleasure of making the announcement first. “Captain Kohia Jekyll of the Stealth.”

“Oh crap,” came over the transmission.

Sean grinned. “Nice to be recognized.”

Kohia was too tense to return his humor. “Last warning, Yarrow. Do you understand that any unauthorized action on your part will result in your destruction?”

“Yes.”

Relief began to trickle down Kohia’s spine, the beginnings of a tension headache easing from her temples.

“Which of our prisoners are you after?” the voice from Yarrow asked.

Kohia glanced at Sean.

The intelligence officer switched off external communications. “Actually, that’s a reasonable assumption, that we want one of the men they’ve brought here. Whoop! There they go. They’ve transmitted an encrypted message. Huh. Good encryption, too. And they’ve bounced it. It may take me a few minutes…”

Sean was a great intelligence officer, but as a teenager, he’d been a hacker. Sometimes its showed. For him, an encrypted message was like catnip to a mouse.

Kohia switched on the comms. “Yarrow, you just sit tight. I’ll organize a boarding party to collect our man.” All of them, she added to herself. Guards and prisoners, they’d turn the whole starship over to the Galactic Police. She’d regret the loss of the trampship, itself. It would have brought solid money if they’d been able to sell it in the Boneyard Sector, the galaxy’s recycling hub for legal and illegal technology.

“Roger,” the Yarrow’s spokesperson, presumably its captain, sounded resigned.

The Yarrow’s surrender without a fight could be a trap, but was more likely a reflection of the trampship’s lack of combat ability and the nature of its crew. A job like this one wouldn’t attract the best. Guards would be of the expendable kind.

Twelve minutes later, while Kohia was waiting on a response from the Galactic Police and Sean was swearing at the encrypted message for rebuffing his decryption attempts, the Yarrow exploded.

The fireball of its destruction flashed white, then yellow, and faded quickly through red into nothingness. A roughly circular burn pattern had evaporated the snow beneath where the Yarrow had landed.

“Wasn’t me,” Clarke said over the internal network.

“It wasn’t a missile, and there are no starships in our vicinity.” Sean hunched over his screen. “There was an incoming beam. Tight, small. It must have triggered a self-destruct switch built into the Yarrow.” He looked at Kohia. “Someone didn’t want anyone learning where it came from.”

“Or tracking back through its transmissions to identify them,” she concluded. Then swore. As the debris from the explosion settled, the Stealth’s sensors revealed that the mine entrance had caved in. The old trampship that had been attached to the mine and provided it with power had been torn loose by the explosion. The spoils heap that had previously protected it from the full force of the planet’s icy weather was gone, obliterated. As they watched, the wind caught the remains of the trampship and rolled it along the valley floor.

Kohia pressed her fingers to her temples. Her tension headache had returned. “The men in the mine are trapped. Clarke, I’ll need you on the ground. If the mine entrance can’t be cleared, we might be able to get in via the elevator shaft from the site where the trampship used to sit.”

“You’ll need me.” Nairo broke into her stream of commands, his voice coming from the door to the bridge.

“The men are radiation sick, Nairo. You can’t help them.” Her voice was gentle despite the urgency. The prisoners and guards were mostly evil. Some might see their fate to be buried alive as justice, but this wasn’t about those trapped in the mine; not really. Her crew had to attempt to rescue them so that they could sleep at night. “The guards’ bunker might be a tight fit for so many, but if Clarke rigs up a power supply, we can keep them in air and water and even light until the Galactic Police arrive. I was keeping the guards separate before because they hadn’t been irradiated, but with the trampship torn away, that seal to the bunker is gone and I doubt they were wearing their spacesuits.”

“The elevator may have stopped the radiation, like a plug in a drain.” Clarke sounded uncertain. None of them were experts on radiation under these conditions.

“If the elevator is damaged,” Nairo said. “You’ll need to get it out of the shaft so that you can descend past it. My shamanic talent is better fitted to healing, but I can pull raw power. I can extract the ruined elevator car from the shaft if necessary.”

Kohia stared at him.

Sean whistled.

Clarke disagreed. “No need for that. If we require raw power, we can pull the elevator car out with the shuttle.”

Kohia stared at Nairo, so casually talking of hauling around a massive weight, but she addressed her engineer. “Don’t risk the shuttle.”

A snort from Clarke expressed his opinion of her suspecting he’d ever damage one of his babies. The Stealth and its shuttle were his pride and joy.

Nairo spoke only to Kohia, even if it sounded as if he addressed Clarke’s issues. “If the elevator car has been deformed by the blast, it could be stuck. Getting it out will require more than pulling at it. I can compress it. I’m more use planetside than up here. Kohia, I need to help.”

She couldn’t resist that plea, not after what he’d confided to her last night. “Fine. But if you’re going, so am I,” she said. “Hami! You’re in command. Sean, transmit an update regarding the explosion and our rescue efforts to Galactic Police. Do not mention Nairo’s presence.”

“Sean, can I borrow your space combat suit?” Nairo asked. The two men were much of a height and both lean.

“Yeah.” Sean was focused on his screens again. “Just don’t get killed rescuing dead men.”

His pragmatic point was well made. Even if the men in the mines had survived the trampship’s explosion and the main tunnel’s entrance collapse, radiation sickness meant they’d be dead, soon.

“As to that…” Nairo hesitated. “I’ve sent you a message, Sean. When it won’t compromise the mission, can you forward it to the listed address, please? The mLa’an have a new hospital specializing in the treatment of all the galaxy’s sentient species. I know there’s a Sidhe professor there working with them on radiation. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll be able to help the prisoners, or at least, help Rajiv. I’ve outlined the situation for them.”

Hope. If they could save just one person, the grim satisfaction of closing down the death camp would become something more positive: a rescue.

“All hands,” Kohia addressed the ship. “The incursion team will be Clarke, Phil, Nairo and myself. Sean is in command while I’m planetside.”

Chapter 7

The main tunnel had collapsed. Nairo stared at it, his skin crawling at the wrongness of being on humanity’s home world, and finding it so merciless. Without his borrowed space combat suit, the freezing conditions would kill him before the radiation affected him.

He forced himself to concentrate on Kohia and the rescue mission. Last night, she’d confided her terror of Earth’s radiation, but here she was, defying that terror to help others. To protect him.

She and Clarke had already dismissed the main tunnel as an access point. It was choked and would be too unstable after the explosion to risk entering. Kohia and Clarke studied the newly exposed entrance to the narrower bunker tunnel, the elevator shaft.

“Nairo’s guess was right,” Clarke said. “The elevator car has deformed under the pressure of the trampship’s explosion. It’s stuck.”

While Phil kept a look out, and the crew aboard the Stealth did the same, Nairo joined the other two in peering into the tunnel.

“Our suits’ sensors can’t get any readings beyond the elevator car,” Kohia said. “Nairo, can you sense life energy? Is this a rescue attempt or can we leave the Galactic Police to recover bodies?”

“There are people alive down there. I don’t know how many, but the pattern of sha energy is for life.”

“Damn,” Phil muttered.

As worried as he was for Kohia and as emotionally and physically chilling as he found Earth, Nairo understood the sentiment behind the curse. It would have been easier if they could just leave. Since they couldn’t, it was time for him to make good on his promise on the Stealth. He had to remove the mangled elevator car, which would mean compressing it while pulling on it so that it didn’t fall into the bunker below, causing further trouble.

Working as a shaman healer meant using tiny threads of sha energy, realigning them in a body, or occasionally pulling extra sha energy to initiate healthier patterns. It was exhausting work. People misunderstood the nature of shamanic activity. It wasn’t the amount of sha energy you manipulated that mattered, but how you used it. The concentration required for prolonged healing sessions meant Nairo could focus extremely well. However, that wasn’t needed here.

What removing the car required was brute force. Nairo hadn’t flung around nearly-raw sha energy in years, but Earth’s atmosphere and surface were saturated with it, so he gathered in a stream of sha energy and shoved it at the elevator car. He closed his fist as he visualized crushing the car, and raised his hand up and back. It was the most basic, embodied use of sha energy, the kind taught at the Academy to the youngest students. But the students were taught on the tame planet of San Juan with teachers like him steadying the sha energy flows. Earth pulsed with sha, and involuntarily he called more to him than he needed.

The car blasted out of the elevator shaft and crashed into snow half a mile away.

“Ooo-kay. That’s more efficient than using the shuttle,” Clarke said.

Nairo opened his closed fist, releasing the sha energy stream into Earth’s aura.

“Nairo?” Kohia gripped his arm. “Problem?”

He shook his head and shoulders, trying to throw it off. “I grabbed too much sha. I’m a bit sha-burned.”

“We’re not shamans. What does that mean?” Her hand tightened on his arm.

His borrowed suit registered her grip as violent. “It means I’m fine unless I want to use sha energy immediately. Like a sprinter finishing a race, and then, being asked to immediately embark on a marathon. I could do it, but it wouldn’t be pretty. But that’s only with regard to sha energy. I’m fine otherwise. And don’t suggest that I go back to the shuttle. We’re a small team. Splitting us for no reason would be stupid. At a minimum, I can act as a go-fer.”

She paused. Then she released her grip on his arm. “All right. Your suit’s readouts indicate you’re physically okay. But tell me if that changes.”

“I won’t jeopardize the mission.”

Meantime, Clarke had been studying the shaft. “We’re good to go.”

“Phil, you’re up,” Kohia snapped.

The weasel shifter secured his blaster against his chest, studied the shaft for a couple of seconds, then dived in headfirst.

A subdued clang, repeated rhythmically, indicated that Phil wasn’t diving recklessly to his death. A space combat suit was tough, but not that tough. Instead, he’d be activating the magnetic force on his gloves and boots to control his descent. Importantly for his and the team’s safety, when he reached the bunker, he’d be able to see what waited for him.

Kohia dived after him.

Nairo was third in line. He descended feet first, the narrow shaft and his long limbs allowing him to climb down as a chimney sweep in Earth’s Victorian age might have done, pushing against the sides of the shaft for purchase; a purchase he enhanced with pulses of magnetized grip.

He was still descending when Phil reported, “Bunker secured. All four guards.”

Which meant Kohia was safe. Relief loosened the tension in Nairo’s muscles and he moved more smoothly. He landed in a crouch, straightened, and moved to the side, out of the way of Clarke’s entrance and where he wouldn’t interfere with the others’ practiced team formation. He ended up nearer to Phil than to Kohia.

The bunker was almost double the size of the recreation cabin on the Stealth, but since it housed both living and sleeping quarters, plus supplies, it felt tighter. The squalor of it was appalling. Ration bar wrappers and similar food discards littered the floor. Clothes and blankets lay in heaps where they’d been dropped or kicked.

The four guards were desperate, and shouted questions at Kohia and Phil. They wanted to know what had caused the explosion. They wanted to know their fate.

Nairo blocked out the babble. Yes, he’d suffered a sha energy burn by reaching for too much of it, but that oughtn’t to have knocked out his sha sense. When he concentrated, he could see the team’s auras and those of the guards. But he couldn’t sense any life on the far side of the decontamination unit.

Worried, he acted without thinking, and crossed toward it.

In doing so, he momentarily blocked Phil’s line of fire, and the nearest guard lunged for Nairo.

Kohia fired. “Nairo, to me.”

The curt order kept him moving when he would have frozen. Kohia had fired to kill, not stun. His lack of combat training and experience had resulted in a man’s death.

Clarke landed in the bunker with his blaster ready.

“If they overpower one of us, they have a hostage,” Kohia reminded Nairo. She’d explained the situation and its risks in the shuttle.

He’d forgotten. “Sorry.”

Her swift action with the blaster seemed to have shaken whatever defiance the former guards might have been able to muster. The remaining three kept their hands up. Two wore spacesuits. The third dropped to his knees, defeated; no longer fighting either the Stealth’s crew or the risk of radiation poisoning.

Nairo couldn’t excuse what he’d done in unthinkingly blocking Phil’s line of fire, but he could explain it. “There’s no hint of life where you said the side tunnel with prisoners should be.”

“We’ll check.” Kohia gestured to one of the two guards wearing a spacesuit. “Open the decontamination unit, then the door to the side tunnel.” Using a guard saved them the time required to break the voice-recognition lock on the doors. “Phil and Nairo, with me. Phil, take point.”

At least she didn’t leave me behind. Nairo trod carefully after her.

In the decontamination unit, she kicked a discarded boot to jam open the door back to the bunker. With the destruction from the trampship’s explosion, the bunker was no longer a sealed safe place, so letting in radiation from the tunnel made no difference to the guards’ fate.

The guard accompanying them opened the door to the side tunnel.

“You first,” Phil ordered.

Inside the tunnel, Nairo’s borrowed space combat suit confirmed that the prisoners were dead. It detected only four biomarkers: Kohia, Phil, the guard and Nairo.

Staying clear of the guard who slumped against a wall between two bunks, and being careful not to block Phil’s line of fire, Nairo approached the nearest set of bunks.

He’d assumed that the mine’s collapse had choked the prisoners, but when he switched on the light on his helmet and bent over the nearest one, the man’s throat was cut. “Murdered.”

Kohia started toward him.

He turned to meet her, and saw the guard lunge forward from his slouch to throw something at her.

Kohia and Phil fired simultaneously.

Nairo ran to Kohia, flinging a protective bubble of sha energy outward to enclose Kohia and himself. But he was too slow to deflect the weapon.

It was the head of a pick, the point viciously sharpened; a makeshift weapon that was nonetheless deadly.

The force of the throw embedded the point of the low-tech weapon in the suit, and gravity did the rest: tearing the suit open as the pick dropped.

Nairo had been too slow to stop the blow or catch the pick, but the sha energy bubble snapped shut, having purged the radiation immediately around Kohia and himself in one push; throwing the pick with it. As long as he held the protective sha energy bubble, Kohia was safe; although she’d need a dose of anti-radiation medication. “There’s a sha bubble enclosing us. We’re safe from the radiation.”

“How long can you hold the bubble?” Kohia asked. She studied her suit. “This is too much damage for the suit’s self-repair function. I’m taking the anti-radiation meds now.” Inside her helmet she turned her head to the side and sucked on the hydration nipple.

Nairo hands shook and his vision blurred a moment. He had to fight through the sha energy burn to hold the protective sha bubble as his adrenaline rush to save Kohia ebbed away.

She stared at him through their helmets. “You can’t hold the bubble long enough for me to reach the shuttle, and even then, the shuttle has to go through decontamination. It’s too long.”

“I’ll hold it.” Or he’d die trying.

“Plan A isn’t going to work,” she said.

In the background, Phil was updating Clarke and the Stealth crew on events.

For Nairo, there was only Kohia and himself. “I will keep you safe.”

She nodded. “But not like this.” Her deep breath sounded through the comms system. “Use what sha energy you can to help me. I’ll try to trigger my shift, hopefully into an inorganic robot form, as with Vulf.”

“Kohia,” he ground out his protest.

“It’s the best option. I’d rather try it and fail, than linger with radiation sickness.”

If he could have guaranteed that he could hold the sha bubble for twenty four hours, through the ascent of the elevator shaft, and the decontamination unit, he would have. But her instincts were correct. Thanks to the sha burn, he didn’t have the stamina.

The untested sha energy schematic he had for guiding her initial shift was their best chance of saving her.

“If we do this, you must shift. It’s shift, or die and leave me with the guilt of failing you.” He wasn’t above using emotional blackmail to motivate her.

“I hear you, lover. Tell me when.”

“The bunker will give us more room for your shifted form,” Nairo said.

But just getting the two of them through the tunnel’s decontamination unit and back into the bunker proved how shaky his control of the protective sha bubble was. It pulsed and twisted, writhing with the active sha energy flows of the planet.

What could kill could also save. Every healer knew that, whether it was drugs or energy. The same wild sha energy that threatened his control would be his means of compelling Kohia’s successful shift.

He couldn’t fail.

Chapter 8

Kohia breathed steadily. Already the anti-radiation meds made her feel sick, or perhaps that was fear? She concentrated. She had to make this shift, her tiger had to come roaring out as an inorganic robot, or she would die an agonizing death—and her mate would blame himself for failing to hold a protective bubble around her.

I will succeed. She called on a lifetime of frustrated desire to run as a tiger. She’d imagined the freedom of shifting so many times.

“Ready?” Nairo asked.

He’d warned them before they descended that he was sha burned. Whatever that meant, she suspected that attempting to help her shift would cost him. But neither of them had any choice.

“Ready,” she confirmed.

She wasn’t a shaman, but she felt energy spark in the atmosphere. Even with the torn suit and the protective bubble Nairo had enclosed her in, the energy reached for her. She wasn’t a shaman and the energy didn’t feel natural to her.

It’s Nairo, she reminded herself. Trust your mate.

Her tiger agreed.

Clarke and Phil had cleared the center of the bunker as best they could to make room for her shift. The two remaining guards had been shoved to the side, their unconscious bodies limp and unwieldy. Clarke had stunned them when his suit registered the damage to hers, eliminating possible threats. Now her two crew members watched her intently. If wishing could help, she’d shift.

But it wasn’t wishes she needed.

Nairo stood in front of her. Through his helmet, the lines that creased his forehead and carved two lines between his eyebrows were visible. His eyes were sunken, but burned with determination. Even with the obscuring bulk of the space combat suit it was obvious that he was giving everything to his attempt to force her shift.

She’d never been able to achieve a shift into tiger form before, but then she’d been trying for herself…

“To me,” Nairo shouted.

Energy blasted into Kohia and simultaneously surged outward. Her tiger lunged forward, seeking their mate. And finding him.

“Thank God.” Nairo wrapped suited arms around Kohia’s powerful robot tiger neck and leaned into her strength.

She gave it readily, devotedly, awed into utter stillness at the shift her mate had triggered for her. She rumbled a sound of affection and possession.

“You did it!”

“Kohia’s a tiger!”

Clarke and Phil’s excited shouts caused one of her ears to flick.

Nairo straightened. He banged a gloved hand against his helmet. He was crying and, forgetting their circumstances, had tried to wipe away his tears. “Let’s get out of here.”

She pushed her big head against him in a feline caress.

“Huh.” Clarke ceased his uncharacteristic chatter over the comms to the Stealth. “How do we get Kohia out of here? She’s safe from radiation as a robot tiger, but she’s massive.”

The four of them looked at the elevator shaft.

Kohia rose and padded across to it. Damn, that felt good, moving on four paws even if they were inorganic ones. She could sense everything underfoot, her smell and vision were acute, and her hearing was phenomenal. She couldn’t wait to escape the wretched bunker and enjoy her shifted self.

She poked her head up the shaft, studied it, then tapped a paw against the nearest side. Her paws seemed to magnetize and demagnetize in the same way her space combat suit’s gloves and boots did. That would help. She maneuvered around. It took a lot of scrabbling to position her body on her hind legs at the base of the narrow shaft. She roared her frustration as, having finally achieved that position to launch herself upward via her powerful hind quarters, her first jump had her falling back down. The shaft lacked room for her to move.

She wriggled back out and huffed at Clarke for being right. She was too big to climb out of the shaft.

“But you fit,” Clarke said. “That’s the vital part. Otherwise we’d have to try and dig our way out through the mine collapse. I’ll go up, improvise a harness, and the shuttle can pull you up. All you’ll need to do is stay still and think skinny thoughts.”

She huffed at him again, but Nairo stroked her shoulder and she subsided. Then she looked at her mate, and immediately lay on the floor like a Sphinx, patting at his boot. He got the message and sat down—collapsed—against her. He was exhausted.

Clarke climbed up the line he’d secured before descending into the bunker, then communicated with Phil regarding the rescue. Within the hour, Clarke lowered the makeshift harness and directed Phil on how to secure Kohia in it.

She’d tried to insist that Nairo went up first, but when your sole means of communication was head butts, snarls and whines, apparently a pirate crew found it easy to ignore you. She’d show them! Just as soon as she was on the surface.

The extraction was anticlimactic. With the shuttle pulling, she shot out of the shaft as easy as water from a tap.

Clarke jumped out of the shuttle and returned to help her out of the harness.

Nairo emerged from the shaft as she was freed. He smiled at her. “You’re magnificent.”

She was taller than the men in this form and against the white of the snow, her deep orange color seemed even more intense.

He rubbed her muzzle. “I’m fine. I’ll rest in the shuttle. Clarke will want to return to the Stealth as soon as possible, so run fast now. Ten minutes.”

“Thirty,” Clarke said. With Kohia unable to communicate effectively, he was in command on the ground. And in answer to Nairo’s look of surprise. “She won’t fit in the shuttle as it is. We have to reconfigure the seating to clear floor space for her.”

“Can we?”

“Yes, it’s designed for weird contingencies. Phil will help me. You, rest.” He pointed at Nairo and at a solid-looking mound of snow comfortably waist-high and sheltered from the wind by the shuttle. “You, run.” Clarke pointed at Kohia.

She wanted to run. She also wanted to guard her mate on this frozen hell of a planet.

“I’m fine.” Nairo smiled at her whine. “Go. Remember, decontamination will take hours. Run while you can.”

It was good advice. Wise. And it let her indulge her tiger’s need for release.

She ran.

The snow crust held her weight if she ran fast enough. Then she found the river, frozen solid, but scoured relatively clear by the wind, and on it she could race as the predator she was. She ran for the sheer joy of the incredible speed and the feeling of her body—inorganic, robotic, but truly a tiger’s—as she pitted her power against Earth’s treacherous environment.

She returned to the shuttle, to find the men observing her. She roared as she felt Nairo’s pride in her robot tiger form.

He stood as she prowled up to him. “Have you run out the fidgets?”

Lovingly, she head-butted him.

He laughed and walked with her to the shuttle’s entrance. She leapt onboard, settling herself as the men climbed in.

Clarke wasn’t a pilot, but he sat in her usual seat at the controls, while the autopilot flew them back to the Stealth. Phil sat beside him in the co-pilot’s seat, and Nairo sat behind him, twisting around to watch Kohia. She lay contentedly on the floor.

Her mate was with her, and her crew, and they were going home.

Chapter 9

Nairo dug the toes of his left foot into white beach sand and kept his hammock swinging gently. It was strung between two coconut palm trees at the popular Balli Resort on the edge of Kohia’s clan’s land on the island continent of Aeaea. To his right, the sea stretched out, impossibly blue, like living crystal as it caught the clear sunlight of late afternoon and reflected it in ripples of light. In the background, the vivid green, crowded vegetation of a tropical rainforest gave an illusion of privacy although there were over twenty other cabins in close proximity. It felt as if he was alone, free to think, to dream.

He hoped Kohia would return soon. When they were on Corsairs, his work kept him so busy that they had little time together. Today, he’d exhausted the sha energy he’d collected in his crystal, and that meant he was free. Corsairs was too young a world, too recently terraformed, for him to pull on its sha energy streams for his work, so he could only do as much as his stored sha energy allowed him.

In practice, that meant triggering the shift in between forty and fifty individuals. Some required more energy than others, depending on how robust their auras were. Weaker auras required more sha energy from him to embed the new pattern. On the whole, though, it was startling and gratifying to observe how well the shifters’ auras accepted re-emergent shifting ability.

On the Stealth’s return journey from Earth to Corsairs Nairo had recovered from his sha energy burn two days in, and spent the remainder of the journey triggering the crew’s shifts into their animal forms. After seeing Kohia’s amazing robot tiger form, none of them had been interested in waiting till they were back on-planet.

What had shocked all of them was that while Kohia, like Vulf before her, shifted into an inorganic, robot form of her animal, the rest of her crew shifted into non-robotic, living, breathing animals.

The same had held true when Nairo triggered other shifters’ shifts on Corsairs. Tigers, lions, wolves, bears and so many other shifter types now roamed in their natural animal forms. The process for triggering their shifts became easier and easier for Nairo. He’d sketched out the schematic, the way sha energy should flow around and through shifters, and other shamans were joining his mission on Corsairs to meet shifters’ desire to experience the world as their other animal selves.

No one was a hundred percent certain why only Kohia and Vulf had shifted into inorganic robot forms. It could have been that their first shifted happened on humanity’s home world, irradiated Earth, and the fact that if they hadn’t shifted into an inorganic form, they’d have died.

Nairo had a different theory. He thought it had something to do with Kohia and Vulf’s personalities and the nature of their work. The danger they faced, and their intense, alpha need to protect others combined to produce a shifted form that could meet those demands in a complicated, perilous galaxy. Nairo didn’t care to test the hypothesis, though. He’d leave it to a non-mated shaman to venture back to Earth with volunteer shifters and attempt to trigger their shifts under controlled conditions—or as controlled as things could be on wild and inhospitable Earth. Nairo had a mate to love.

If he could find her.

As if on cue, she called his name.

He turned his head to face the jungle path, and forgot his plans for luring her inside their cabin for a sexy siesta. He tried to stand up so fast that he got tangled in the hammock, fell out of it onto his knees, and scrambled to his feet, never taking his eyes off Kohia and the small bear cub she carried on her hip.

Shamans and shifters alike agreed that no child should be manipulated into shifting. Their growing bodies and youthful auras weren’t to be meddled with.

On the other hand, if shifting happened naturally, then everyone would celebrate.

“It worked,” Nairo breathed. He touched the cub’s furry head with near-reverence.

Shifters were concentrating shift-capable shifters with people eager to shift in the hope—one that Nairo encouraged—that the patterns of shift-capability in so many auras would “infect” those who didn’t yet shift.

“How does Eiko’s aura look?” Kohia asked. “Is it stable?”

Nairo blinked into his shamanic sight. “Oh yes. It’s beautiful. She sparkles.”

“Hear that, Eiko?” Kohia kissed the girl’s left ear. “You’re a sparkly angel.”

Eiko wriggled, unimpressed, and Kohia lowered the bear cub carefully to the ground. Eiko clambered into the hammock.

Kohia put her arm around Nairo’s waist. She spoke quietly. “That’s a relief. I wanted to be sure she was okay before I told Hami and her family of Eiko’s shift.”

“Where did you find her?”

Kohia laughed. “Under a mango tree feasting on the fruit. Bears like sweet things.”

“They’re not the only ones.” Nairo kissed her mouth, indulging the familiar yet exciting pleasure of desiring his mate.

Her tongue flicked against his before she pulled back. “First, we have to return Eiko to her family and deal with the excitement of what her shift means. Shifters who can naturally shift.” Kohia squeezed his ribs hard. “It’s fabulous.”

“It is.” It was momentous. Shifters would reclaim their birthright that they’d lost when humanity evacuated Earth.

Kohia prowled beside Nairo in her robot tiger form. The jungle at night was rich with scents and life, mysterious and entrancing. She tapped his thigh with her tail before sprinting ahead along the winding path. After the protracted session resulting from everyone wanting to exclaim at Eiko’s natural shift and question Nairo about it, they were finally alone and returning to their cabin. Except she wanted to stop at the beach first.

She sprinted across the sand and into the water, splashing hugely until she was deep enough to swim, then turning around to stare back at Nairo in challenge.

“You never win,” her mate said.

She roared, softly, at that and smacked the water with her right front paw.

“Fine.” Amusement sounded in his voice.

The sea surged and formed a body, that of an octopus as large as Kohia’s robot tiger. Its tentacles were thick and, Kohia knew from experience, powerful. Fortunately, in this inorganic form, she didn’t need to breathe. She dropped to the seabed and lunged forward and up at the sha-energy created facsimile of an octopus.

According to Nairo, the water monster required limited sha energy to manipulate and didn’t disturb the sha energy flows of Corsairs. For Kohia, the challenge it presented was both fun and a way for her to learn how to fight the Ceph, which were somewhat similar to octopus and which her cousin Jaya was currently studying. If something went wrong with Jaya and Vulf’s expedition to the Ceph Sector, then the Ceph could end up threatening the existence of all sentient life in the galaxy. So, yes, this game was fun, but it also had a purpose.

The octopus evaded her lunge with taunting ease, spun about, and seized her in its tentacles. She didn’t even have time to turn her head, teeth bared, before it threw her high in the air, toward the beach—and her mate.

Apparently, Nairo didn’t feel like playing. Or at least, not this game.

She landed at his feet, and grumbled at her crushing defeat.

“I win.” Nairo grinned at her.

Ooh. He knew just which buttons to push.

She shifted back to human, naked human, and threw herself at him.

He caught her, slung her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and started up the beach to their cabin. When she wriggled, he lightly slapped her bare butt.

“I’m mooning the moon.” She laughed, pretending she wasn’t aroused from their game.

But there was no pretense once they reached the privacy of their bedroom. Then there was only the truth of how much they needed each other, their pleasure and their love.

Her tiger had chosen well, and Kohia’s heart was at peace with her mate.

Want More?

First, an apology. Like you, I’d love for Kohia and Nairo’s story to be longer, but I simply didn’t have time. My primary focus is Jaya and Vulf’s next book, The Ceph Sector, and that book is complicated. Telling Kohia and Nairo’s story briefly lets me clear my mind of it—Kohia was NOT going to stop pestering me until she got her shaman!—and focus on The Ceph Sector, which is chewing up my time and energy. It’ll be worth it, but it’s the reason Kohia and Nairo had to get together fast. Not that Kohia’s complaining!

The Ceph Sector will be out in early 2018.

Meantime, Ahab’s story, Jingle Stars, is out December 4, 2017. When an artificial intelligence decides to play Santa Claus, you can guarantee there’ll be trouble!

If you’re looking to read something other than science fiction…

My Old School series is composed of stand-alone paranormal romance novels:

Phoenix Blood

Fantastical Island

Storm Road

Fire Fall

Desert Devil

Amaranthine Kiss (coming in 2018)

Shangri-La Spell (coming in 2018)

As is my complete paranormal romance series, The Collegium. Magic, mystery, shifters and demons. Both are available in Kindle Unlimited.

Demon Hunter

Djinn Justice

Dragon Knight

Doctor Wolf

Plague Cult

Hollywood Demon

Alchemy Shift

You can catch up with me on my Facebook page, Twitter @Jenny_Schwartz, or at my website.

Jenny