Shifter Planet: The Return

by Reynolds, D. B.

  Fire flickered in the distance, and the air was filled with smoke. It was already affecting her, and she could hear others coughing. It would be especially dangerous for anyone who was injured.

  She scanned the clearing, looking for Aidan, figuring he’d listen to her while the others might not. The smoke shifted abruptly, and she turned, only to stop and stare. The ship was nearly identical to the one that had brought her to Harp, except that this one was crawling with vines and other greenery. And she did mean “crawling.” She’d been on other planets, in other tropical forests, had seen how quickly they could take over every obstacle in their path. But she’d never seen anything like this. This was the Green fighting back, a counterattack that must have begun as soon as the ship landed for it to have grown to such overwhelming heights. Enormous ropes of growth, some as thick around as her thigh—hell, as thick as Aidan’s thigh—slithered up and over the ship, poking into every vent and valve, choking off sensors until anyone inside would have been blind and at least partially deaf to what was happening outside.

  Even worse for those on board, all manner of external equipment had been destroyed, completely ripped from their mountings by the twisting greenery. She wondered if the crew had managed to fight back at all before the accelerated growth around them had taken over. From where she stood, she doubted the ship was even capable of lift-off at this point. But then, she wasn’t sure there could be survivors to try. If this ship had landed at roughly the same time as her own, if they’d been smothered by the Green with the speed it appeared, their oxygen must be running down, and with so much of the external equipment clogged or destroyed, they’d have been using battery power for who knew how long. She felt no sympathy, however. She didn’t care that she’d shared the same mission with these people once upon a time.

  As she drew closer, she saw evidence that someone, at least, had survived. An enormous hole had been torn into the enveloping vines as if something had burst from the ship outward, and she knew the explosion they’d heard had been the result of a large weapon being fired from inside the ship. Trees were flattened and destroyed in a ninety-degree arc around the ship, with the ones closest to the vessel reduced to little more than piles of ash. Dead animal carcasses littered the devastation as the eye moved away from center, and shifters in both human and cat form ranged over the disaster zone.

  Damn Wolfrum, she thought. He had gotten word of her ship’s failure, but instead of acknowledging the futility and immorality of his venture, he’d instructed this second ship to use even greater force.

  “Rachel!”

  She spun in relief at the sound of Aidan’s voice. He was in an area of intense activity near the edge of the blast zone. There was a medium-size structure there, or there had been, before it’d been blasted to hell and back. It had been a wood construction, built of thick, sturdy logs. They were shattered now, broken like huge matchsticks and tossed into haphazard piles. Aidan and the other shifters were working feverishly, moving the enormous logs and destroyed trees, tossing them aside as if they weighed nothing.

  Rachel raced to join him. There must be someone trapped under all that wreckage. Why else would they be digging so fiercely? She couldn’t lug huge trees around, but she could help whoever was injured.

  “Rachel.” Aidan’s voice was full of the same relief she was feeling.

  She gripped his arm, not fully realizing until she saw him whole and healthy how worried she’d been. “What’s going on? What can I do?”

  “The bastards attacked the Ardrigh and his guard, using the same tricks they tried on me. All but two of the invaders’ party were killed in the fighting, both of those badly wounded when they retreated to their ship. The Green fought back its own way.” He gestured at the overgrown ship. “But they must have grown desperate.”

  “They’ll have no power and no way of generating more with everything overgrown like that,” she said. “That means no oxygen, except what’s in portable tanks. If this ship is like the other one, it’s not supplied for hostile environments.”

  Aidan nodded. “Yeah, well. The fire they started to lure in shifters was already out of control when they retreated to their ship. It’s been expanding away from this clearing. But now…you must have heard the explosion just now. They targeted the lodge with a laser weapon. Those things are forbidden on the planet for a reason. It blasted through the overgrowth on the ship, completely destroyed the lodge, and did all of this.” He gestured around the devastated clearing. “They already needed to die for what the first ship did, but this put the seal on it. This blaze is spreading on four fronts, completely out of control. The best we can hope for is rain because we sure as hell can’t put it out. We’re trying to evacuate our people, but when the lodge collapsed—”

  Rachel nodded grimly. “Are there injured?”

  “Yes. Come on.” He took her hand, pulling her forward while he kept talking. “The Ardrigh and all of his party were inside. They’re all shifters, so some got out unscathed. Others were hurt but have already managed to shift enough to heal.” His hand squeezed around hers. “But Cristobal… He’s severely injured, trapped. He can’t shift because there’s too much weight on him. We’re digging him out, but we’re afraid that even once he’s freed, he might be too badly—”

  Someone shouted, interrupting whatever he’d been about to say. Rachel couldn’t make out the words, but Aidan immediately raced ahead to where the rescue work seemed most intense. She followed, catching up just as a blond man approached Aidan and started talking rapidly. He was plainly stressed, covered in cuts and bruises, with blood coating every inch of his bare skin and soaking his clothes, dried in some places and still fresh in others. He shouldn’t have been walking at all, but his sheer size and the golden sheen covering his blue eyes told her he was a shifter.

  “We’ve lifted most of it away, but he still can’t seem to shift,” he was telling Aidan, sounding harassed, as she caught up. “We think he might be too injured, but he’s in and out of consciousness, and even when he’s conscious, he’s not making any sense.” He was becoming more agitated with every word. “We need a doctor. The city’s too far, but there must be someone at Clanhome who—”

  “I can help,” Rachel interrupted. “Aidan, I can—” She stumbled backward when the big blond shifter lunged at her, his eyes going completely gold, teeth bared in rage.

  “What the fuck!” he snarled. “She’s one of—”

  Aidan stepped between them, cutting the furious shifter off and blocking him with his body. “Fionn. Stop,” he growled. “This is Rachel.”

  “I don’t care who she is. She’s one of them and doesn’t belong here.”

  Aidan bristled. “She’s not like the others. She saved my life.”

  Fionn sneered. “You just wanna fuck—”

  The sound of flesh hitting flesh cut off his words, but Rachel wasn’t paying attention anymore. She was already kneeling at the injured man’s side, dragging her backpack over and digging down for her first aid supplies. She could tell at once that he needed more help than her kit could offer, but he was a shifter. If she could stabilize him enough to shift, he could begin his own healing.

  “Hey,” she said softly, addressing her patient. “My name’s Rachel.”

  His eyelids flickered up at the unexpected sound of her voice. He had Fionn’s eyes—turquoise blue with gold flecks—and his age made it likely he was either father or uncle. Her brain filed away that detail automatically before her thoughts stuttered to a halt. Aidan had said it was Cristobal who was badly injured. This wasn’t just any shifter, he was the Ardrigh.

  She glanced down the length of his body and saw that his lower legs were still buried in rubble. The shifters who’d been working on clearing the debris had stopped, more intent on watching her. As if she was the greatest danger here.

  “You need to get the rest of that weight off him,” she ordered, then turned back to her patient, only to have Fionn push through the crowd to kneel on the Ardrigh�
��s other side.

  “Are you a doctor?” he demanded, while taking Cristobal’s badly broken hand and holding it with a care she wouldn’t have thought possible, given his abrasive words with Aidan.

  She hid her grimace but went with the truth. “I’m a xeno-veterinarian, but—”

  “My father is not a fucking animal!” he roared and lunged at her again, throwing his arm out.

  But whether he’d intended to shove her away or punch her, she never knew, because Aidan intervened once more, this time with the help of one of his cousins. The two of them held Fionn at a standstill but didn’t pull him away.

  “The physiology is the same,” she said calmly, looking up at the furious shifter, “and I’m also a fully qualified medical technician, if that makes you feel better. Now, if you don’t want your father to die, you need to shut up and let me help him.”

  She turned back to Cristobal then, trusting Aidan and the others to keep Fionn under control. She couldn’t blame him. This was his father, and he didn’t know her. But she couldn’t let him stop her, either, because she hadn’t exaggerated. Cristobal was going to die if she didn’t do something soon.

  She did a quick field examination, running her hands carefully over his skull, then his arms and thighs. There were no signs of a concussion, no head injuries, other than some minor cuts and bruises. The rest of him didn’t fare as well. His right forearm had a double fracture, and his hand and fingers were crushed. With all the weight on his legs, there had to be injuries—bruises, if nothing else. But she could see serious bleeding and malformation on his left thigh and suspected more broken bones there. Saving his chest for last, she pulled an old-fashioned stethoscope out of her pack. There were more modern devices for this purpose, but she hadn’t known if they’d work in Harp’s weird magnetosphere, so she’d gone old-school. Resting the bell on Cristobal’s chest, she noted an accelerated heart rate, which wasn’t entirely unexpected, but when she checked his lungs, she frowned. The left lung was moving normally, but the right one definitely was not.

  She started digging through her pack. “How resistant to infection are you guys?” she asked without looking up.

  “Very,” Aidan responded. “Nothing gets to us.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she muttered and pulled a writing stylus out of her pack. It was an elegant creation, made of some rare wood and designed to work with a digital tablet, which made it pretty much useless on Harp. But it had one benefit. She chopped the ends off with her knife, which gave her a hollow tube. Using antiseptic wipes from her first aid kit, she cleaned her knife and the tube as well as she could, then used another wipe on Cristobal’s bloody skin between the fourth and fifth ribs, hoping that shifter physiology was close enough to regular human for this to work.

  She heard a yell and glanced up. The treetops on one side of the clearing had burst into flames. She swallowed a curse. This couldn’t wait. She looked down and saw that Cristobal was watching her, his eyes filled with pain, but alert enough to know what was happening. “You have a collapsed lung,” she told him, hoping her voice wasn’t as shaky as she felt. She’d been trained in this procedure, but she’d never done it under field conditions like this. “You have air and blood pushing on the lung inside the chest cavity and it needs to get out. I’m going to make a small cut and insert this tube. It’s going to hurt.”

  His eyes crinkled slightly. “Do it,” he forced out.

  Fionn broke away from Aidan and dropped to his knees next to his father. “Da.”

  Rachel glanced up at the emotion in his voice, and he met her gaze.

  “If you harm him—”

  Cristobal’s strained whisper stopped him. “Fionn. Enough.”

  Rachel was no longer paying attention to what was going on between father and son. Her focus was narrow and absolute. She had to get this right. She pressed her fingers against Cristobal’s side. There was no fat on him, just taut muscle and skin. And air that shouldn’t be there. She could feel it popping beneath her fingers.

  “Hold your breath, please, sir.” Then, holding her own breath, too, she slipped her knife between his ribs, made a small incision, and immediately slid her makeshift tube into the resulting hole. She was close enough to hear the air immediately begin rushing out, followed by a gush of blood. Normally, the procedure would be performed with a drainage tube, which certainly wasn’t included in her first aid kit. She did the best she could, wrapping tape and gauze around the opening, stabilizing the tube as much as possible, and packing the wound with as much material as she had. Hopefully, that super shifter metabolism would make up for her lack of supplies. A quick check of his heart and lungs verified that he was improving, but she didn’t know what would happen next. Cristobal almost certainly had internal crush injuries. That blood had to have come from somewhere, but she was no surgeon, and there wasn’t exactly a med bay or emergency hospital a few minutes’ flight away.

  Aidan had told her that shifters healed faster, that the shift itself could deal with just about anything. So maybe she only needed to get Cristobal stable enough that he could shift. But she had no idea what that meant.

  She glanced down and met his gaze again. “Does that feel better?”

  He nodded. “Thank you,” he mouthed, but the lines of pain were still etched on his face. If anything, they seemed worse than before. Were there more injuries that she couldn’t see?

  She forced a smile and began gathering her things. “Okay, guys. Let’s move him. Careful, please,” she said, shoving her supplies in her pack. She stood, still feeling shaky, but with relief this time, until she saw what surrounded them. The fire had grown in the short time she’d been working on Cristobal. What had been a small, concentrated area of flames had jumped dramatically, igniting treetop to treetop. More than half the trees circling the blasted area of destruction caused by the Earther ship now burned like towering torches, the shorter trees around them quickly becoming completely engulfed in flame.

  Rachel stepped back slowly, staring at the fire, and nearly went down when her foot slipped into a pothole beneath the debris. Aidan grabbed her arm, and she leaned into him, soaking in some of his heat and strength. But only for a moment. She understood human psychology well enough to know that she couldn’t afford to show weakness in front of this crowd. She wasn’t weak. She’d just saved their leader’s life. A few minutes more and, shifter or not, Cristobal would have been dead.

  She gave Aidan a grateful nod, then shouldered her pack and straightened. “What about the people in the ship?”

  “All dead. There’s a reason lasers are forbidden on Harp. When they fired their weapon, it exploded inside the ship. Two of the Clanhome hunters dug their way in through the rupture. There’s no one alive in there.”

  “Wolfrum?” she demanded.

  His mouth tightened and her heart sank. He didn’t want to tell her what they’d discovered, which meant it wasn’t good. “One of them who knew Wolfrum by sight says the bastard wasn’t among the bodies. But he might be wrong. They were in bad shape.”

  Rachel’s eyes closed briefly. She’d wanted to face Wolfrum down, to demand answers. But this… It would have been better if he’d died with all the others. Now, the hunt would go on, and who knew what other crimes he’d commit? A desperate man was far more dangerous, and he’d already inflicted so much pain and loss.

  She drew a deep breath and opened her eyes. First things first. “Can they outrun this fire?” she asked, jerking her chin at the shifters now carefully lifting Cristobal out of the wreckage. What she really meant to ask was could any of them escape the flames? Aidan would know his forest far better than she ever could. But when she looked up at him, she found lines of pain that mirrored Cristobal’s. “Are you hurt?” she demanded, running her hands over his arms and chest, searching for injuries.

  Her grabbed her hands. “It’s not that.” His voice was tight with pain, but he didn’t meet her eyes, glancing aside almost guiltily. “I’ll explain later. Right now, we h
ave to move. Can you run?”

  “Hell, yes, but Cristobal—” She stopped mid-sentence, abruptly aware that all the shifters around her wore the same look of pain as Aidan. Some showed it only in the lines of stress on their faces, but others were bent over, panting with effort, while a few of the younger ones were retching in misery. She frowned, angered and concerned in equal measure. It was possible the burning trees were releasing a toxic spore. But since she wasn’t affected, and since no one else seemed surprised at the shifters’ nearly uniform distress, she assumed this was another of Harp’s secrets that Aidan wouldn’t discuss with her, at least not in front of the others. But she couldn’t just ignore it. She drew a deep breath and regretted it instantly as she coughed, tasting nothing but smoke.

  “Aidan,” she said, drawing his attention from where he’d been supervising the construction of a makeshift stretcher to carry Cristobal. “Is it the smoke? Does it bother you all more?”

  His eyes shuttered, and his expression went oddly blank before he said, “Something like that. You should go ahead. We’ll carry Cristobal and catch up to you.”

  She tilted her head studying him. He was lying. But why would he lie about something like toxic smoke? “I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “Not this time. You’re all in worse shape than I am.”

  He opened his mouth to argue, but she stepped right into his space and met his eyes. “I don’t know what’s happening here, but you know I’m right. Get these others going. I’ll help with Cristobal.”

  He swore savagely, but spun on a heel and strode away, calling orders to the various groups of shifters, getting them all moving in the same direction.

  Rachel dropped back to oversee the five who’d hung back to carry Cristobal, including Fionn. She studied each of them in turn, wanting to be certain they could handle their task. But while they all seemed to be suffering the same pain, none of the four had more extreme symptoms.