by Tasha Black
Tesla
Stargazer Alien Barbarian Brides #2
Tasha Black
13th Story Press
Copyright © 2019 by 13th Story Press All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
13th Story Press PO Box 506 Swarthmore, PA 19081
[email protected]
Contents
Tasha Black Starter Library
About Tesla
Tesla
1. Raina
2. Nick
3. Raina
4. Nick
5. Raina
6. Nick
7. Raina
8. Nick
9. Raina
10. Nick
11. Raina
12. Nick
13. Raina
14. Raina
15. Nick
16. Raina
17. Raina
18. Nick
19. Raina
20. Nick
21. Raina
22. Nick
23. Nick
24. Raina
25. Raina
Tchaikovsky (Sample)
1. Angel
2. Peter
3. Angel
Tasha Black Starter Library
About the Author
One Percent Club
Tasha Black Starter Library
Packed with steamy shifters, mischievous magic, billionaire superheroes, and plenty of HEAT, the Tasha Black Starter Library is the perfect way to dive into Tasha's unique brand of Romance with Bite!
Get your FREE books now at tashablack.com!
About Tesla
A space-pirate-in-training, a shape-shifting barbarian with an ancient secret, and a baby boy who just might be the clone of Nikolai Tesla…
Raina yearns for a chance to discover new things in the galaxy, just like the famous explorers she read about as a child back on Earth. But Leif Erikkson and Magellan didn’t have to deal with the pressure of a tough-as-nails pirate captain demanding results, or the distraction of a hot-as-hell alien shadowing her every move. Raina spends her days dreaming of exploring new worlds, and her nights resisting the temptation to explore her budding desires.
Nick has just awoken from stasis to find himself alone on the luxury cruiser he was hired to defend. He’s looking for answers, but finds something he never expected - his blood mate. Raina is brave and beautiful, and Nick burns for her from the moment he sees her. But it’s hard to trust a human, especially when she is only onboard to steal things.
When a hostile creature attacks, the two must team up to get themselves to safety, and their growing attraction reaches the boiling point.
And then they discover a baby whose DNA could change the new world.
Can a baby in a stasis pod rein in Raina’s wanderlust, and give Nick the impetus to trust her? Or are they all going down with the ship?
Tesla
1
Raina
Raina stepped into the main hall of the ship and looked out over the trees. She had expected to be amazed, but the sight in front of her was beyond anything she had ever imagined.
The biodome was huge, the size of a football stadium. Inside, maples and conifers reached to the heavens. Literally. Though the UV sun over the forest was almost blinding, Raina knew that above it, the velvet backdrop of space would be visible through a portal in the evenings. She had seen the outside of it reflecting the starlight on her approach.
“Report, please,” she said.
“Toxicity, zero percent,” a male voice answered. The husky, vaguely British voice was at odds with its owner, a tiny origami drone the size of Raina’s palm, currently hovering above her right shoulder.
“Oxygen content twenty-two percent,” he continued. “The air is breathable.”
He floated a few feet away as Raina pulled off her pack and set it down.
She removed her helmet and took a tentative breath.
The air was indeed breathable, and not too stale in spite of the ship having been in space for who knew how many decades. She suspected that was mostly thanks to the forest in front of her.
The temperature in the biodome was comfortable and the air smelled like rain. The weather programming must have just played a storm.
She stripped off the rest of the space suit and pressed the button to deflate it. When it was at its smallest, she placed it in the pocket inside the helmet and clipped it to her pack.
She felt light as air without the helmet and suit. Taking them off seemed more freeing than it should have.
“Can I get a gravity check?” she asked.
“Artificial gravity currently reading sixty-seven percent of standard,” BFF20 said.
So that was why she felt light. Earth’s normal gravity was considered standard on human-inhabited ships. Raina felt a small shift, like when an elevator started to descend.
“Forty-five percent,” the drone said.
“What?” Raina asked.
“Seventy-two percent,” BFF20 amended. “This is quite unusual, darling, the gravity on the vessel is inconsistent.”
“Don’t call me darling,” Raina said distractedly.
She could definitely feel the inconsistency of the ship’s gravity - it was almost like being on a swing. Her stomach was doing little flip-flops.
“Would you like me to continue updating the readings?” the drone asked.
“No, thanks,” Raina said. “Let’s see if we can find the navigation room and check out the control settings.”
“Very good,” BFF20 said, sounding like a sexy butler.
Raina slipped her navigation palette, like a souped-up version of the iPad she’d had back home, from her pocket and slid her fingers over the glass.
A hologram of the rough shape of the ship in front of her lifted from the screen. She held it aloft in her palm and spun around slowly and some of the blanks filled in.
She shaped and adjusted the floors that ran around the forest in rings up as high as she could see but the forest was blocking her from completing the map.
“Hopefully I can get detailed schematics from the navigation room too,” she said to no one in particular.
Raina had always loved maps and mapping. As a child on Earth she had reveled in the tales of explorers and bemoaned the fact that nearly everything on the blue and green planet had already been discovered and mapped long before she was born.
When the opportunity arose to join the space cadet program she’d leapt at the chance, dreaming that maybe one day school kids would read about her adventures.
But there had been issues on entry and the portal to Earth had closed. The ship that had contained her pod and the pods of two other Earth women was lost, and hundreds of years had passed before the three of them were discovered and awakened.
Raina was grateful to be alive. But it was hard not to notice that just enough time had passed that the golden age of near space exploration was coming to a close.
Once again, Raina had missed out on her calling by only a few generations.
“The navigation room is most likely this way,” BFF20 said politely, hovering in front of her.
“Let’s go,” Raina said crisply, swinging her pack onto her back.
The little drone folded himself into a crane shape and flitted through the air, leading the way down a corridor covered in thick carpet.
The whole place had an odd feel, as if a shopping mall had been crossed with a high-end hotel and wrapped around a forest.
But it was the silence that was truly haunting.
Her footsteps were muted by the rug, and BFF20 flew noiselessly.
Raina wasn’t the imaginative typ
e, but something about the enormity of the ship and the profound silence within gave her the creeps. She picked up the pace and BFF20 zoomed on ahead.
Every so often the gravity would unexpectedly drop, and she’d find herself sailing a few inches above the floor and floating along for five feet or so. Then gravity would kick back up a bit and she would land.
It reminded her of the feeling she sometimes had in dreams, where she was jumping and floating. It might even have been fun if she hadn’t had a tingly feeling that they weren’t alone.
She was beginning to get used to her new command of intermittent partial gravity when at last they arrived at a large walnut door bearing a brass plate that said Navigation Room.
“The navigation room, milady,” BFF20 announced needlessly.
“I’m not your lady,” Raina said automatically, pushing the door open.
The plush carpet and glossy millwork of the public space ended at the threshold. The navigation room itself was all gleaming ceramic and carbon fiber.
Raina found it reassuring that this space looked like what she would have expected to be in a navigation room in her own time. She went to the control panel, which ran the length of the room, and scanned the buttons and slides carefully without touching anything.
“I believe the gravitation field access panel is here,” BFF20 said.
He was hovering over a small ivory colored toggle covered by a transparent bubble.
Raina studied it carefully without lifting the dome. There were numbers on it almost like a thermostat. Currently it was set at 1G. The digital readout below was fluctuating between .45G and .72G.
She lifted the bubble and slid the toggle gently upward to 1.1G.
Nothing happened.
She eased it back down to 1G, hoping that would reset the whole thing.
There was no change in the reading.
“Damn it,” she murmured to herself.
“May I be of assistance?” BFF20 asked politely.
“I don’t think so,” Raina said as she slid the toggle up to 2G.
That should have increased the gravity to twice what she was used to on Earth, but she didn’t feel any difference, and there was no change in the digital read out.
“Something must be wrong with the control panel,” she said.
Gravity kicked in slightly and she felt the weight of her pack again.
A sound echoed in the threshold of the room, where something larger than Raina had just landed.
2
Nick
Nick held his breath and tried to steady his mind.
Coming out of stasis was always difficult, but he was having a harder time than he’d ever had before. The halls blurred before his eyes and his body weight seemed to ebb and flow.
He wondered, not for the first time, how long he’d been out.
His last memory before waking up was of Captain Reese. The normally confident leader had worn an expression of utter terror.
“Something’s wrong, Nick,” he heard her say, an octave above her normally husky voice. “Something’s coming…”
There had been whispers. Crewmembers had been scuttling around for days. There were unexplained minor power outages, and a general sense of unease among the professionals who manned the craft.
Of course, none of them had seen fit to discuss their concerns with the head of security.
Nick was a barbarian, a distinction he was never once permitted to forget, no matter how long he worked among other species, or how easily he took on their forms and habits. Whatever the problems on the ship, the humans had preferred to hedge their bets alone rather than engaging the help of the likes of him.
Their gamble had obviously not paid off. When he came out of his post-stasis haze, it was clear that Nick was the only living thing on the ship.
And then he wasn’t.
Something’s coming…
He heard footsteps and the sound of low voices down the long corridor. Something was already there.
Nick knew he ought to hole himself up somewhere and recover, but he had never been good at avoiding trouble. It seemed to come looking for him, and it never found him lacking in the bravery needed to face it head on.
At least, he thought of it as bravery. His brothers often teased him with less flattering terms.
They were endlessly amused by the situations he got himself into. If someone heard that a barbarian had gotten himself into a duel with a Warblanix outside a bar in an intergalactic safe zone, or that someone had been jumped at a Mondalvian fueling center, his brothers joked that they would know it was him before hearing the details.
He scanned the corridor for a porthole, suddenly wondering if his brothers were okay. They were on the other two cruise ships moving in tandem to this one.
But the ornate carpet and chestnut wainscoting seemed to go on for miles without a bit of glass or view.
Just ahead though, an open door allowed a triangle of light to spill out into the hall. He guessed that was where the voices were coming from.
He slowed his pace and tried to flatten himself to the wall as much as his large form would allow. He thought of shifting, but he was still disoriented, and didn’t want to add to the effect by altering his form.
His stomach lurched as gravity suddenly released its hold on him and he left the ground.
He sailed a few feet before landing hard in the threshold of the open door, effectively ruining his chance to observe the intruder surreptitiously.
He pulled his body into a crouch, preparing to land in a ready state.
Her scent drifted to him.
Before he could fully take in the scene, something locked up in his chest.
My mate…
He fumbled his landing, but caught his balance at the last moment, scanning the room and finding her against the far wall.
A haze seemed to surround the woman, though he couldn’t be sure whether it was his post-stasis symptoms or the mating thrall.
He could see that she was young, with soft tendrils of blonde hair drifting to her chest.
As his vision came into focus, at last he saw the spark of bravery in her bright blue eyes.
Just before it hit him that she was human.
His senses reeled with the pleasure of observing her even as his mind recoiled from what she was.
Mate.
His heart spoke again, and he found himself horrified and attracted in nearly equal measures.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
The alto timbre of her voice slid over his ear like a carnal caress. She wasn’t scared, or if she was, she hid it well.
Brave mate, his heart noted approvingly. Bravery was a prized quality among his kind.
“I’m the head security officer of this ship,” he volleyed back automatically. “Who are you?”
A fleeting expression crossed her face and he took a closer look at her.
She wore simple clothing, too simple to match her class, if her posture were any indication of her birth.
A loose holster slung around her hips told him she might be a threat.
But the holster’s contents told him something worse.
Not a weapon, but some type of inventory tagger.
Taggers were the tools of privateers who made their petty fortunes stealing from the wreckage of the unoccupied vessels that littered the stars after the Earth sent her first colonizers to the skies. They used the taggers to put their marks on all the inventory and then their utility drones came back to carry it away.
For all her pretty hair and brave eyes, she was nothing more than a scavenger, here to steal from the ship he was tasked to protect.
“This ship is occupied,” he told her. “You can’t loot it.”
“Well, I know that now,” she said.
He glowered at her and she scowled right back.
He was suddenly reminded of his grandmother, a tiny woman with a ferocious glare.
“Where is everyone?” the woman demanded.
“I detect no other living beings on this ship,” a man’s voice said.
Nick nearly jumped out of his skin until he realized it was only the drone hovering near the woman’s left shoulder.
“What about the other two ships?” Nick asked.
The drone buzzed softly.
“My apologies, my comms appear to be down,” the little robot said at last.
“Don’t apologize to him,” the woman said. “You don’t work for him.”
“Quite right, my dear,” the little drone said. “Apology rescinded.”
“I’m not your dear,” she pointed out. She turned her attention back to Nick. “So, what’s the deal? What happened here?”
“I… don’t know,” Nick admitted. “I just woke up from stasis.”
3
Raina
Raina swallowed back the words she had been about to say.
The man had just awoken from stasis, and everything he knew was gone.
She had been in that spot herself not so many months ago.
The confusion she had felt in those first awful hours was still never far from the surface. Loss of memory and time was the worst kind of violation.
“I’m Raina,” she said, offering the big man her hand. “Can we start over?”
