Shattered Earth (Shamans & Shifters Space Opera Book 3)

by Jenny Schwartz

  “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, c
an 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.