I struggled, but even the exo-armor’s added strength couldn’t combat the speed with which the tiger was shaking me, its jaws clenched on my helmet, flinging me around, trying to dislodge my head from my body. Rationally, I knew the exo-armor had been through far worse but sometimes mind-shrieking fear is the only logical response. With great effort, I jammed my fingers in the thing’s eye. Power crackled through the outer layers of my armor, blasting the tiger off of me. Relief rocked me as I fought off the edge of adrenaline-based queasiness.
My helmet signaled more incoming. No time to be sick. I looked around, and jumped back up to the roof of the ship to get a better vantage point. I scrambled over to the opposite edge of the ship. The prince was still circling the tiger. I could barely catch my breath to yell at him. “Hey Highness, are you done flirting yet?” Another target appeared in my screen. I fired into the trees. Something massive fell to the ground.
The tiger circled. The wolf dodged, twisted and clamped his jaws on the tiger’s neck and bit down. A crack echoed through the forest.
He sprung up and leapt back onto the roof of the ship.
I turned to fire at another target up in the tree canopy. “What the hell are these things?”
The Prince had shifted when my back was turned. “Don’t know. But they sure as hell don’t smell like tigers. They stink of the dead.”
“They’re not movin’ like they’re dead.”
“Captain,” came Red’s voice over our comlink. “Something has short circuited the local artillery. We can’t fire on the tigers without compromising the shield. Check the starboard weapons regrader.”
“Can they get in?”
“No.”
“Good. Stay in the ship with the Princess.”
Ral had picked up my soldering iron and was holding it out like a sword. “See now? Aren’t you glad I’m out here?”
“Zombie tiger shifters, a broken down starship, and a prince who doesn’t know he’s not in charge. What more could a girl want?”
His reply was muffled when another tiger knocked him off the ship.
I started soldering as fast as I could. “Mute all sounds save for immediate threats and requests for assistance.” The noise of battle faded away and I concentrated on manipulating the wires and the screws.
When I had finished, I saw Ral on the ground, stalking back toward the ship. Naked. Shifting had torn his clothing to shreds, and yes, he was big all over. He was filthy, dirty and had no right to be that sexy after a fight.
He said something and I realized I still had him on mute. Maybe I should keep the suit on all the time. “Restore sound.”
“ — going to go investigate.”
He leapt off the ship and disappeared into the forest.
What?
“Replay conversation,” I said out loud.
The helmet played back his voice. “The wind shifted. There’s a strange smell to this place. I’m going to go investigate.”
The fuck was he doing? “Red, is everything working now?”
The sound of Red’s voice crackled momentarily. “Yes. Everything is working. Where did the Prince go?”
“I have no idea.”
Red snickered. “Maybe you should put a tracking collar on him, Captain.”
I scanned the direction he disappeared in. There was something weird about the plant life that screwed with my sensors so I had no idea where he was or how far he was.
With my luck it was probably sentient flesh-eating flowers, the kind that actually moved. Or worse, flying sentient flesh-eating flowers.
A breeze rustled the vine-like tubes, which rubbed against each other in odd haunting whistles.
I watched the horizon. Starshit in a noodledick I could have flied and died in two dogfights by now. Where was he?
I walked to the edge of the roof, looked down at the ground where the bodies of the not-tiger-shifter things laid.
Should I go looking for him? But then if I got eaten, that left Red to get the Princess home.
Red was a good pilot but she was freshmeat, just out of flight school. She got assigned to me to learn the ropes.
Something cracked and I spun, charging up my rifle.
Ral cradled a body much too small to be covered in that much blood. The look on his face was fury incarnate.
“The tiger-shifters are experimenting on their own children.”
Ral ended up bringing a total of five children to the ship. According to the med-bot scans, their ages ranged from six to eleven. They were filthy, emaciated and covered with scars. Neither Red nor I had any fluency in Tigerese beyond asking for the bathroom, so it was up to Ral and Seria, who both spoke it fluently. With Ral, the kids were almost mute but for some reason they opened up to Seria.
After speaking with them at length, Seria drew herself up, anger and tears in her eyes. “There were more. But they’re dead. These five were left behind to survive on their own.”
Red shook her head. “That makes no sense.”
“They’re trying to breed super-soldiers,” said Ral. Despite their emaciated status, the children’s bones and muscles were three times as dense as any ordinary shifter, which meant that despite looking like skin and bones, each one weighed as much as a fully grown human. Ral shook his head. “We had some intel that the tigers were disappearing dissident families and families with crossbloods.”
Fuck. The Star Serpent had been modified to carry five adult passengers, including me and Red. I rubbed my forehead. Any more weight would compromise flight integrity. That could mean the difference between capture and escape or life and death if the tigers got our scent again.
Red, cradling a kid in tiger form, knew what I was about to ask. “Could we take the kids, yes. Would we be able to jump, no.”
Without hyperjump capability, we’d have to rely on access to wyrmholes in heavily guarded spaces. Not the best option to say the least.
“There’s got to be something we can dump. We can’t leave them here.”
Ral raised an eyebrow. “Not enough to make a difference for the kids.”
I took a deep breath and stared at the ship above me. What could we sacrifice in order to get this thing off the ground? I looked at Ral, still shirtless as ever, but thankfully wearing pants. He was devastating when he was naked.
“Red, how much weight could we take if we removed the outer hull shielding?”
There was silence. “Captain. You can’t be serious. That’s…that’s — “
“That’s like walking naked into a tiger pit,” said Ral.
This was my decision. Red would follow orders. I wasn’t so sure about Ral or his sister. I faced him. “You, Your Highness, would be fine walking naked into a tiger pit.”
He gave me a very confident grin. “Your point is, Captain?”
“You’ve seen what I can do. I can get us out of here without the tigers even knowing we exist. I haven’t taken a direct hit on my hull since flight school. We’ll still have the electroshield generator to protect us from long range attacks.”
Red pressed forward. “Captain, stripping the ship of its primary armor is going to put us all at risk of radiation poisoning. We’d have to stop somewhere and either switch ships or somehow get another hull well before we get to Coalition space.”
Without a hull we couldn’t enter any planet’s atmosphere. We’d have to make a stop at either a space station or, more likely, one of the independent floating cities, each of which were filled with space pirates who would sell us out at hyperspeed.
“We wouldn’t have to take off all of the shielding,” I said.
“No, but you’d have to take off most of it,” replied Red.
“Why not leave me behind? I can stay. I would survive,” said Ral.
His words surprised me. I didn’t know of very many who would risk their lives for their enemies, even if they were only children. The wolves and the tigers had been at war and not-quite-war ever since humanity discovered their kin among the stars.
/> “I don’t know what they did to these kids. Red’s a junior pilot with no experience in dealing with children, let alone ones that transform into super-powered killing machines. Your sister can’t handle them alone. I need you to help keep everyone safe in the close confines of the ship.”
He was silent.
“I’m the captain of this ship -“
“So I’ve heard.”
“This decision is mine.” I matched his gaze. “But I need to know you’re on board.”
“Are you giving me a choice?”
“I can save you and your sister. I can save the children. But you need to trust me.”
Something odd flickered in his eyes.
I was expecting him to argue with me. To my surprise, he said, “I’d walk into a tiger pit naked with you.”
There was something else underneath those words, trust and other things I didn’t have time to unpack. I nodded at him.
He saluted me.
He fucking saluted me. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.
“Red, start powering down the outer hull. Redirect that power to the engines.”
“But, Captain — ”
“Do it, Red.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Ral grabbed my hand. “Your name, Captain.”
“You already know it. You’re living in my quarters.”
He moved closer to me, so close I could see a tiny hidden braid tied back in his white hair. “I want you to tell me yourself.”
“Skye.” My name tumbled out. “Skye Daring.” No, I had to remember who I really was. “Captain Skye Daring of the United Coalition Forces.” I was a soldier. A pilot. And not someone who had any right to even want a werewolf prince.
He released my arm. “Skye,” he said, somehow looking as if his tongue was licking my name. “How fitting.”
I turned my back to him and walked away. “It’s still Captain to you.”
Chapter Four
In the process of trying to escape from tiger shifter zombies, I started thinking of the prince as Ral, rather than His Highness. I knew this kind of thinking was dangerous, like flying into a fight with cold weapons dangerous. Fighting together against a common undead enemy that was trying to eat your brains undoubtedly created a simulation of closeness. I shouldn’t let him have a name, shouldn’t let him be a person, because then I might actually start to like him.
And at the end of the path was a black hole even I’d have trouble escaping.
I had to admit though, he was efficient at lifting heavy sheets of metal shielding off the ship and hauling them off into a pile by himself. And with those muscles rippling, that sweat rolling down his back and chest, he looked all too good doing it. Even wearing powered exo-armor, the job should have taken at least a day because of how heavy the damn shielding was.
With Ral, it took three hours.
What made it worse was that oddly enough he wasn’t being such a pain in the ass about it. He nodded when I told him where to put the shielding and went to work.
The final piece of mottled blue-green metal was the size of an air truck. A piece of metal that seemed designed to crush someone into the ground. He lifted it, hauling the thing atop his shoulders, lifting with his knees, and carefully carried it over to the pile of scrap metal, the weight of his load forcing deep footprints in the damp ground.
He had some poppin’ abs.
I had to stop watching him.
I turned my attention back to the Star Serpent. It looked vulnerable and naked. The ship wasn’t programmed with an AI but I still felt for it. I remember how it was to be unprotected without exo-armor. It was in part, why I knew I belonged in the military. Military grade exo-armor like mine was not only extremely expensive, but highly restricted. As a civilian, even if I had the credits, I still wouldn’t be able to obtain a suit on my own, especially not like this one.
Now, any stray space garbage could rip through the thin skin of the ship. If we jumped through a wyrmhole with a rip, the stresses would tear it to pieces. Actually, if I came in too hot on a planet with an atmosphere that would probably break the ship open too.
I didn’t like the odds. But we didn’t have a choice. We weren’t going to leave those kids behind.
Ral thrust the massive piece of shielding into the ground, creating a barrier for a makeshift yard. Initially, when he’d brought up the idea, I had been against it. Ral pointed out that the kids had survived on their own for months with the tiger zombies hunting them. I was about to get in his face, until Red showed me she could create a small protective field bubble outside the ship. She also reprogrammed the weapons sensors to track for speed and motion rather than heat, and deployed a few hovering drone mines. If the tiger shifter zombies came back, the ship’s auto targeting would eliminate them, or at least give us enough warning to take care of them.
With a little coaxing and food, the kids opened up. Not to me, of course, but Ral and Seria. Maybe it was a shifter thing. All Seria had to do was give them a firm look and you never saw such sad oh-shit-I-disappointed-her faces.
But as for Red and I, the kids didn’t quite know what to make of us. When they thought we weren’t looking, they kept sneaking close, sniffing us, and then running away.
At some point, I asked Ral about it.
“You and Red are the first non-shifters they’ve ever seen. They’re afraid it’s contagious.”
There was a yowl, followed by a crash and more screams. Seria’s sharp warning whistle cut through the air. Silence followed.
Ral jammed the shielding further down into the dirt. “Teaching children is a matter of drawing boundaries and being firm and consistent.”
“I’m surprised the kids actually respect you, considering the natural enmity between tigers and wolves.”
He gave a test shove at the shield wall. “‘Natural enmity?’ You’ve been watching too many First Earth vids. Human media likes to make the tension between wolves and tigers as a racial thing. But it’s not.”
“What is it then?”
“Power, territory, and the ability to live out your life as you see fit,” he said, in between grunting and digging the piece of metal into the ground. “The same thing humans have always fought over, even before they reached the stars. There are wolves on Altai and there are tigers on Alzar-4. There are tigers in the House of Night Claw. Crossbloods are everywhere.” He stood up, his muscles flexing as he wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. Ral looked at me. “Things are not always as sharp and clear as you humans make it out to be.”
He was looking at me, challenging me for a response.
I patched Red’s com. “Bring out the kids.”
Within seconds, the tiger kids streamed out, screaming at the top of their lungs. They were prone to biting when stressed, which wouldn’t have been so bad if they stayed in human form. They were actually kind of cute in tiger form, but the sharp claws and super-strength made that dangerous on our passenger transport, even if it was a military grade ship. One tussle between the kids had nearly taken out one of the emergency escape pods. No amount of admonition from Red had any effect, but after Ral gave them a low growl all were quiet for several hours.
Ral let loose with a sound that made one kid lose control of his bladder. No one was about to try any more shifting or biting on the ship after that, at least while the wolves were around. They surrounded Ral and begged him to chase them.
“You’re the monster,” one high pitched girl squealed, my exo-armor translating her words. “You have to catch us!”
Ral’s hands shifted to monster-like claws and he ran after her.
Despite the gruesome sight of his hands, the sight of him playing with those kids twisted me inside in an odd way. I knew the life I planned on living had no room for children. But there was a deep primal part of me that ached for that kind of life and love, even as I knew it wouldn’t work.
I turned to go back inside.
Red was prepping the common area to
enable it to secure the kids in transit. Frizzled strands escaped from the dark single braid in her hair. She still wasn’t enthralled with the idea of removing the ship’s shielding, but she carried out her orders anyway.
“Any more crazy ideas, like dismantling the drone deployers to save the rest of the universe while we’re at it?” said Red, drilling extra straps into the bulkhead. We had so little space on the ship we had resorted to creating additional restraints in the common area. I had to give up my crew bunk to two of the girls. Now I shared my bed in my own quarters with Ral, via alternating shifts. It wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t leave the sheets smelling so damn good.
"We're doing the right thing here," I said, with a confidence I didn’t feel.
Red put down the drill. Her eyes flickered to the open bay door. “We’re not really going to return Seria back to her father, are we?”
This conversation had been coming. Red and her mother had lived in hiding from an abusive father for years. I knew where her sympathies would lie. They were where mine lay too. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the luxury of acting on them.
I couldn’t look at her. I picked up the drill. “You know what we have to do.”
She turned her back on me, paced a few steps and then back. “Yes. But I don’t have to like it.”
“We have to do what we have to do, to complete the mission. Unless someone catches up with us or we have to halt for repairs, we are to proceed as planned, Lieutenant.”
She gave me a level look. “I understand, Captain.”
An alert beeped and a screen appeared in front of us, displaying a problem in the engine room. Red punched the bulkhead in frustration. “Remind me next time that messing with other people’s hacks is among my least favorite things to do. I have to show you what those idiots back on base did to the engine.”
As we walked over to the engine room, Red launched into a tirade about the amoebic intelligence of the Section Nine black ops mechs. Like I hadn't already heard her opinion eighteen times this month alone.
Wanted By The Werewolf Prince: a paranormal space adventure fantasy romance (Space Shifters Chronicles Book 1) Page 4
