Shattered Earth (Shamans & Shifters Space Opera Book 3) Read online

  Shattered Earth

  A Shamans & Shifters

  Space Opera

  Jenny Schwartz

  The scum of the galaxy are using Earth as a nuclear winter death camp. It outrages pirate captain Kohia Jekyll’s sense of justice. No one deserves to die agonizingly of radiation poisoning, especially not on the planet humanity had to evacuate seven generations ago. So Kohia intends to close the prison camp down.

  She didn’t count on an infuriating shaman healer hitching a ride aboard her starship.

  Nairo Bloodstone isn’t going to Earth to be a hero. He learned the hard way that when you’re a healer, doing your best for people is never enough. One miracle leads them to demand another and another. Heroes die exhausted and alone, and the galaxy continues with billions of people still clamoring for a miracle-worker to save them.

  No, Nairo isn’t going to Earth to be a hero. He intends to change what it means to be human.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Want More?

  Chapter 1

  Pirate captain Kohia Jekyll stood in the doorway of her starship, the Stealth, and fumed at fate. Specifically, she fumed at the two men striding toward her: both so different; both so unwanted aboard.

  The difficulty was that her uncle, who was also her boss and the owner of the Stealth, had made the presence of the two men a condition of permission to travel to Earth on her self-appointed mission of mercy and justice.

  The first man met her glare with a pleased smile. Aaron of House Cardinal was a Freel, the newest allies of her planet’s government. In fact, House Cardinal was more than an ally. It had been accepted as a shifter clan; an equal to the other shifter clans that inhabited the planet Corsairs, formed its pirate fleet, and supplied representatives to the Conclave government. The problem was that until very recently, as in up until two weeks ago, the pirate fleet had been fighting the blue-skinned, humanoid Freels. They still were. It was only House Cardinal that had transformed itself into an ally.

  Politically, Kohia saw the sense of the alliance for both Corsairs and House Cardinal. She even liked the House’s leaders, Rjee and Djarl. But Aaron…Aaron was a problem.

  He stopped on the space dock in front of her and saluted. The gesture flashed the talons at the tips of his ultramarine-blue fingers. He was taller than her, thickly muscled as befitted a Freel warrior, and already wore the sage-green utility suit that was the Stealth’s crew uniform. The color didn’t flatter him.

  “Navigator Aaron reporting for duty.” He smirked, purple lips curving in challenge and pleasure at getting his way.

  She really hadn’t wanted him aboard, but the Conclave had been adamant. The fastest way to ensure Corsairs’ citizens’ acceptance of their new clan members was to integrate some of House Cardinal’s Freels into the pirate fleet. Sure, there’d be fighting within the crews, but pirate captains and their bosuns could deal with the violence and bloodletting. They were, sadly, used to it.

  When Aaron had learned of the Stealth’s mission, he’d immediately volunteered.

  Since Kohia’s usual navigator had already been reassigned to a cruiser to be nearer her mate, Kohia hadn’t had grounds to refuse Aaron’s assignment to her starship. She’d tried.

  “I don’t want him,” she’d told her uncle bluntly.

  “Why not?” Rick Jekyll had been juggling a thousand and one responsibilities in his office that day. Plus, he’d been worried about his newly discovered daughter and her latest assignment.

  His daughter, Jaya Romanov, was half-shifter and all-shaman. Humanity had few shamans—sha energy users—and the rest of Galaxy Proper member species had none at all. They were valuable, powerful and, in Jaya’s case, had just been appointed the second of two Shaman Justices answering directly to the Galactic Court and serving its needs. Jaya’s orders were sending her to the notoriously perilous Ceph Sector to learn more about the recent revelation that a second sha energy using species existed, but had been locked in stasis and hidden for forty two millennia, which was a mind-boggling length of time. What would happen when the Ceph awoke, as apparently would happen in a few decades unless Jaya intervened?

  Kohia hadn’t had a reason to deny Aaron his temporary position as navigator on the Stealth beyond the fact that she preferred the small crew of her corvette to be people she knew and trusted. House Cardinal wouldn’t have allowed his request unless they rated his navigational skills. Rjee and Djarl had as much, or more, to lose on Corsairs as anyone if their people failed to integrate with the pirate fleet. It wasn’t Aaron’s navigational abilities that were in doubt. It was the likelihood that he’d get on her last nerve.

  “Navigator Aaron,” Kohia acknowledge him coolly. “Get on, get your gear stowed. You’ll find Bosun Hami is expecting you.”

  Aaron’s grin widened as he passed her in the doorway, his body ostentatiously not touching hers as he sidled past.

  They both knew that he was attracted to her. She’d already turned him down, and he wasn’t stupid enough to jeopardize his time aboard the Stealth, or his reputation, by trying again, not while he was crew. But he’d be daring her, taunting her, teasing her.

  Hell, it’s been too long without someone, Kohia thought harshly as her body revved just a little. She was a shifter. She needed touch in her life. The problem was that she was old enough now to know that she needed more than casual pleasure. She wanted her mate. But mates didn’t appear merely for the wishing. A lot of shifters never found their mate and settled for an ordinary human relationship.

  Kohia never settled.

  Hami’s crisp voice barked from inside the Stealth’s cargo hold. “Navigator Aaron, your collar button is unfastened. Remedy it at once!”

  Despite her sour mood, Kohia had to chew back a grin. Hami played at being a hard ass. In a fight, the woman was a bear—which was what she’d shift into, if she was capable of shifting. But in day to day life, Hami liked joking around. As Aaron would discover. Hami would give him hell until he woke up to her game and called her on it.

  I wonder how long it’ll take him?

  “Kohia.”

  Just her name, said in Nairo Bloodstone’s smooth voice, and the low simmer of arousal in Kohia heated to real wanting. Damn him.

  Nairo was the second man forced on the Stealth, and the one she’d known she’d have no chance of refusing. He’d invited himself aboard when he’d heard of her mission. “The chance for me to study Earth’s sha energy flows will be invaluable to my research, especially with shifters present.”

  The Conclave had immediately agreed to his request. Hell, they’d have agreed if he’d asked for a harem of hundreds and all the gold on Corsairs. And with Corsairs main industry being piracy, that was a lot of gold.

  “Is that all your luggage?” Kohia looked at the duffel bag Nairo carried, then frowned at his nod. The duffel bag was no larger than Aaron’s crew satchel. Kohia wasn’t used to civilians being so restrained. Then again, Nairo was the definition of control—which strummed all of Kohia’s instincts in the naughtiest of ways. Down, girl.

  She hadn’t realized that she’d moved to block his access to the Stealth until he halted in front of her. She was tall. He was taller. Nairo matched Aaron for height, although he lacked the Freel’s heavily muscled build. Instead, Nairo had a lean, athletic body that suggested speed and endurance.

  He waited. Without a word, simply by being the
re, he challenged her authority. Or perhaps it was more personal. He unnerved her.

  She was captain of the Stealth, but she couldn’t deny him the right to board. So she stepped to the side and gestured extravagantly. “Welcome aboard, Shaman Bloodstone.” Her formality mocked him.

  “Please introduce me to your crew as Nairo. Titles aren’t important to me, Captain Jekyll.” She’d been “Kohia” to him a minute before. Now he turned her formality back on her.

  She leaned into the cargo hold. “Hami!”

  “You bellowed?” But it wasn’t Hami who answered her shout. The Stealth’s engineer, Augustus Clarke, emerged wiping his hands on a greasy cloth. “Hami’s getting the new guy settled.” Clarke measured Nairo with a glance, and apparently the shaman passed. “Heard you out here. Nairo, I’m Clarke, engineer, and the only reasonable person aboard the Stealth. I’ll show you to the guest cabin.”

  Nairo returned the handshake and followed the engineer.

  Both men ignored Kohia.

  She snorted. She’d feared her crew wouldn’t share her reservations about the shaman. To the shifters of Corsairs, he was their Big Hope.

  A few weeks ago, Kohia’s newly discovered shaman cousin, Jaya, had triggered a shift in a wolf shifter. Vulf Trent hadn’t turned into an ordinary wolf, but into an inorganic robot wolf.

  None of the shifters minded that Vulf had turned into a robot wolf. They just envied that he could shift and let his animal run free.

  Since humanity had been forced to evacuate Earth seven generations ago, shifters had found themselves unable to shift form. Losing access to their primal selves hurt their souls in a profound way. They couldn’t realize their full potential, couldn’t be all that they were meant to be. That loss had shaped how the shifter clans established themselves in the galaxy.

  The galactic government was known as Galaxy Proper and was a union of the galaxy’s sentient species. Humanity hadn’t been at a point to demonstrate sufficient technological and social aptitude to earn a place in the union. Humans hadn’t even known other sentient species existed. But when they’d hovered on the verge of self-destruction, Galaxy Proper had shown mercy and provided an emergency evacuation of humanity’s home world and the means for humanity’s survival. Kohia’s ancestors had left Earth as a cascade of technological failure and environmental upheaval pushed it into the horror of a nuclear winter.

  Earth was unfit for life.

  Jaya and Vulf hadn’t gone to Earth to try and trigger his shift into his wolf form. They’d been in pursuit of her grandfather, an unstable and obsessive shaman—or former shaman, these days. Ancient Ceph technology had stripped the old man of his shamanic talent. But while they’d been on Earth, dramatic events had led to Jaya somehow triggering Vulf’s first shift into an inorganic robot wolf form that had enabled him to survive the insane radiation levels on the planetary surface.

  The problem was that no one knew exactly what Jaya had done to initiate Vulf’s shift. As she explained it, the first shift was the important one because it reset the way sha energy flowed through Vulf when he attempted to shift. It reset it so well that he now shifted at will, effortlessly.

  Every shifter wanted that ability, and Jaya wanted to give it, but she was only one woman, untrained in medicine, and with the excessive demands of her position as a new Shaman Justice. Other shamans had to step up and fill her shoes.

  Nairo had volunteered. More than that, he’d insisted on helping the shifters discover the process that would free their animal selves. He was the Star Guild Shaman Academy’s Chief Healer, but after what the Academy had been up to recently—and how shamefully they’d treated Jaya—he’d divorced himself from that institution, maybe forever.

  Which was a decision Kohia could respect.

  However, she was less thrilled by his conclusion that he needed to visit Earth as part of his effort to learn all he could of exactly what Jaya had done to initiate Vulf’s shift before he attempted a similar radical realignment of another shifter’s sha energy. There was no shortage of volunteers for the attempt, even if it was dangerous. Understanding more about the sha energy flows on Earth might make the difference between failure and success, which was the reason Kohia couldn’t refuse Nairo passage on the Stealth.

  She worried, though.

  If he misaligned a shifter’s sha energy flows, what would happen to the person? Would they shift into something monstrous and malformed? Would they go crazy? Would they die?

  As a healer, Nairo had sworn an ancient oath to do no harm.

  Jaya trusted him.

  Kohia trusted her cousin, but Jaya was naïve. The ongoing situation on Earth was proof of her naivety.

  Obviously, no one could have predicted that when Jaya and Vulf reached Earth they’d discover a secret prison camp. No, Jaya’s naivety showed later when she expected that reporting the camp’s existence to Galactic Police meant they’d close it down.

  Kohia was not so ingenuous. For all anyone knew, the prison camp was an element of the police force’s covert operations.

  The only way to guarantee that the camp was shut down and that no one else suffered the torture of radiation poisoning on humanity’s old home world was for an independent watchdog to check it out. Someone like Kohia. And if the camp was still running, she would shut it down.

  Chapter 2

  The journey from Corsairs to Earth would take a fortnight. Kohia could have saved some time if she’d authorized the use of the Stealth’s secret boost system, but with Aaron onboard she was happier keeping that under wraps. The shifters might have a new political alliance with the Freels, but commercial trust was something else again. Jekyll Industries couldn’t be giving away its secrets.

  Not that Aaron seemed overly interested in the Stealth’s secrets. Hami was proving an irresistible distraction for the muscular Freel, and not merely because she was his new bosun and teasing tormenter.

  Nairo spent most of his time in his cabin, emerging occasionally to eat. At which point he’d chat with Clarke and occasionally with Sean, the Stealth’s intelligence agent.

  The Stealth was halfway into its journey when they encountered their second wormhole. Kohia took the pilot’s chair on the bridge. The autopilot was efficient, its design purchased from the Sidhe. But wormholes were uncanny. They tossed starships around like leaves in a fall storm. Yet the fact that they enabled the starships that entered them to cover distances that in real-time travel might take years to traverse meant that wormholes were vital to Galaxy Proper’s commercial, political and military existence.

  Kohia never sent her ship into a wormhole without being at the helm. Like most humans, she suffered the nausea and sensory confusion caused by the ripples in the space-time continuum that was a wormhole, but she fought through them because if something went wrong, she had to be aware and capable of at least trying to fly the starship out.

  “I’m not a starship shaman,” Nairo said from immediately behind her.

  Kohia jumped and swore. “I didn’t hear you come in.” And she had shifter hearing. The outer edges of the wormhole had to be messing with her senses; although she could still see Nairo standing there, tall, dark and without permission to be on the bridge.

  “I can’t guide the jump,” he continued. “But as a healer I can remove your physical symptoms of discomfort.”

  Well, that was interesting. “Just mine or all of the crew’s?”

  “The whole crew. I have memorized their healthy energy patterns. I can hold those against the sha energy storms of the wormhole.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You know, Jaya never explained just how sha energy acted in wormholes, but she seemed to suggest that it contributed to their instability.”

  Nairo shrugged. Unlike everyone else onboard who wore the green utility suits that were the starship’s uniform, he wore a cream cotton shirt with its sleeves rolled to his elbows, khaki trousers, and boots. Around his throat was a leather cord, but whatever hung from it was hidden beneath his shirt. His black
hair was long enough to be sexily unruly.

  “Uh.” Kohia had forgotten what they’d been discussing. Wormholes, right? “Yes, go ahead. Everyone would be thankful not to get sick. Hami suffers badly. I’ll announce it so they don’t panic at feeling healthy.” That was a joke. The Stealth’s crew didn’t panic.

  Nairo didn’t smile.

  Kohia made the announcement and listened to muffled cheers. Then they entered the wormhole, and she and Nairo were alone on the bridge. Safety procedure demanded that everyone aboard stay where they were upon entering a wormhole until the starship exited it. She faced an hour or two alone with Nairo.

  She studied the charts, saw the chaotic stream of readouts that characterized wormhole jumps, and turned back to the man who’d seated himself in the co-pilot’s chair.

  He could have returned to his cabin or gone somewhere else before the jump started. He knew the procedure onboard the Stealth for wormholes, the starship having traversed one three days ago. That he was here with her suggested that he wanted to be.

  Kohia squashed a flare of interest. “Can you talk while you steady the crew’s energy patterns?”

  “Yes.”

  Well, that was definite enough. Nairo exuded a confidence that verged on arrogance. He was very, very sure of himself and his capabilities.

  She regarded him with curiosity. “What do you want to discuss?”

  He met her gaze squarely, shadows seeming to dance in the dark brown, nearly black, brilliance of his eyes. “I want to talk about you, Kohia.”

  Nairo observed the way sha energy coursed around and through the pirate captain. The dance of the energy stream was mesmerizing, and had been since the first time he met her. It took more discipline than anyone would guess for him not to simply surrender to the beauty of her sha energy pattern. But he’d taken responsibility for the health of those onboard the Stealth, and he kept his promises.