“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 h
ammock 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
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