Shifter Planet: The Return Page 9

  He wasn’t fooled by this easy entry. This was the ship’s main ground-based exit. Basic security protocol would include a warning indicator on the bridge every time the ramp opened. Which meant he’d have company soon. Jumping onto the lowering ramp before it hit the ground, he ran to the base of the ladder leading up to the crew level. He paused briefly, barely breathing as he listened for the blare of an alarm, or the thunder of charging crewmen. Nothing. Death was about to roll over these invaders, and they, apparently, were going to sleep right through it. He shook his head. Rhodry and the others were waiting for his signal, but this seemed too easy. What if it was a trap?

  He lifted his face and scented the air. His nostrils filled with the ship’s cold, metal stink. Growling his frustration, he shifted in an instant, rolling the heavy muscles of his huge shoulders and flanks, stretching forward as he welcomed his animal self. He scented the air again, his abilities much sharper in this form, his predator’s nose telling him a much more complex story. He smelled a lot of blood and other bodily fluids that spoke of injured humans. That wasn’t exactly news, but the strength of the scent told him more of the ship’s crew were nursing wounds than he’d thought. If so, it was just possible that they didn’t know Aidan was gone.

  Shifting back to human, he climbed the ladder in two bounds and followed Rachel’s scent to her quarters at one end of the passageway. He glanced down at himself and frowned. She might be startled to find a strange, naked man entering her cabin. He had a speech ready about how he was there on behalf of the Ardrigh, who’d heard of the illegal hunts… But that didn’t explain his absence of clothing, did it? He shrugged with a shifter’s disregard for nudity. He couldn’t do anything about it, and besides, if she was going to be hunting the traitor with him, she’d see him naked sooner or later anyway.

  He just hoped she didn’t have one of those damn tranq guns waiting when he opened the cabin door.

  She didn’t. Because she wasn’t there. He had a moment of pure, unexplainable rage, wondering where she was and which of the assholes onboard she was sleeping it off with. But before he could wonder at the sheer intensity of the emotion, the full range of his senses kicked in, and he knew she wasn’t elsewhere on the ship. She was gone. The overstuffed backpack she’d carried with her during her excursions into the forest was nowhere to be found, and the scent of her throughout the cabin was at least two days old. Which would put her departure on the same day as his escape. He thought back to the last time he’d seen her, standing at the foot of the hatch ramp, cautioning him about the light she was about to turn on. He’d growled a warning for her to get the fuck back onboard, and he’d left…without bothering to verify she’d obeyed his command.

  “Fuck.” She hadn’t followed him. He’d have sensed her on his tail. But she hadn’t stayed put, either. She was somewhere out in the Green on her own, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Because Rachel wasn’t simply in the Green, she was heading for the swamp. And she’d been out there alone the entire time he’d been playing games with Rhodry and deciding the best way to mount the damn assault. “Fuck,” he cursed again, angry at her, at himself, and especially at whoever it was that had brought all of this down on their heads.

  Shifting once more, he padded out of Rachel’s cabin and into the main passageway on the crew deck. He stopped there and stared, his eyes blinking slowly, taking in the tiniest sound, the faintest scent before he called his cousins to the hunt. He shook his head. These Earthers were so utterly unprepared for an attack that it almost seemed unfair. But then he remembered the animals they’d killed, the trees they’d injured and destroyed…and the very unpleasant future they’d had in mind for him.

  All sense of fair play disappeared in a heartbeat.

  These were invaders, and they needed to pay. Not only for the damage they’d already done, but for the harm they’d bring in the future if they, or any of their data, managed to escape Harp.

  Ignoring the ladder, he leaped for the lower deck and the open ramp. Baring his teeth in anticipation of the coming battle, he lifted his head and howled. His fellow shifters, who’d been advancing through the treetops like a soft breeze, suddenly dropped to the forest floor and raced into the clearing, their passage barely stirring the long grass, as the trees whispered of vengeance and coming death. Those whispers drifted up to Aidan on the caress of a warm wind. He shifted back to human the moment Rhodry’s dark head crested the ramp’s opening. Shifters were vicious and uncannily strong, but they couldn’t open doors. That would be left to him.

  He moved fast, opening door after door, using the code that Rachel had used on the night of his escape.

  His cousin Gabriel was first up the ramp, sliding past Aidan and into the first unlocked cabin, so swift and silent that Aidan might have mistaken him for a shadow. Until the screaming started. Door after door opened after that, either with Aiden’s help or in response to the screams. It didn’t matter which, and Aidan didn’t wait to find out. Ignoring yet another ladder, he jumped through the opening to the next deck and, with the sound of screams filling the air, prowled down to the bridge, where, as luck would have it, he found Frank White all alone. The Earther hadn’t raced to help his fellow crewmembers, whose screams punctuated his cowardice. Instead, he’d remained on the bridge, hiding, his back pressed against the big command console, a wicked-looking knife clenched in one meaty fist and a tranq gun in the other.

  He lifted his weapons, ready to fight, and Aidan bared his teeth in a deep-throated snarl. White had been his main tormentor, the one who’d used an electric prod on him when no one was around to see. Aidan had thought at first that the Earther was using the shocks to force him to shift, but it hadn’t taken long for him to recognize the truth. The man simply enjoyed causing pain, especially when his victim was unable to fight back.

  Aidan lowered his head, eyes fixed on his prey, his growl a steady rumble in his chest. He wasn’t going to kill Frank White in defense of the planet. This one was fucking personal. White was going to discover what happened when his victim could fight back.

  Aidan’s howl was a saw-toothed blade of sound ratcheting off the walls as he took a step forward and watched the Earther’s face grow pale.

  “You shouldn’t have come back here,” White blustered from a throat gone raspy with fear. “I’ll kill you and that bitch, too.”

  Aidan’s eyes never left the human coward, whose fear-sweating body took a final, jerking step back and slammed into the console. He hung there for a moment, looking around desperately as if searching for an escape that didn’t exist. Aidan knew he should kill the man and be done with it, but something inside him, some predator’s need, demanded more. Before the human could react, Aidan swept out a powerful paw, knocking the knife from his hand, raking four-inch-long claws across his hip on the downward stroke, ripping through skin and muscle and leaving a bloody ruin.

  White screamed, his face distorted in shocked agony, but he didn’t go down. He might never have faced the likes of Aidan before, but he was a hardened warrior. Using the fixed bridge chair as a flimsy barrier, he shoved away from the console, fumbled beneath it and came up firing a small plasma rifle—a weapon that should never have been brought onto the planet. Teeth bared and eyes crazed, he yelled wildly as he made a run for it, spraying fire behind him, not caring what he hit. He raced down the passageway with Aidan behind him, a laughing cackle howling from between his wide-open jaws, not trying to catch up, playing with his prey. To a point.

  White couldn’t be permitted to leave the ship with the plasma weapon in hand. It could do untold damage if fired outside the ship’s shielding. He hit the downward ladder, clinging to his weapon, practically falling the distance to the lower deck, a shout of victory rising from his throat as he saw the open belly hatch, saw the sunlight that promised escape.

  Aidan waited until the human made the jump to the ground outside, until his body hung in midair and escape seemed a breath away. And then he pounced. With thrust of his powerful hind legs
, he caught the Earther mid-leap, knocking him to the ground and sending his weapon flying. Three hundred pounds of furious shifter landed on the man’s back and pinned him to the ground. Aidan’s claws dug into flesh and satisfaction sank into his bones as White’s terror echoed through the forest, sending a message of vengeance to the trees and animals of the Green in the moment before Aidan closed his teeth over his prey’s neck and snapped his spine.

  He was almost disappointed when White went limp beneath him, when his heart stopped and warm blood rapidly cooled. He lifted his head and spat. He was a predator, not a cannibal. As unlikely as it might seem, he and White were both human.

  Giving the dead man a dismissive flick of his paw that ripped the body’s jaw open, he lifted his head and roared his victory, then turned and raced back into the ship. The screams had stopped. There was nothing but the victorious howls of his cousins echoing up and down the metal passageways. But that wasn’t his target.

  Shifting to human, he climbed back to the bridge and looked around. White had done a lot of damage with his stupid gun. There was still a treasure trove of information to be had here, information that Aidan could have used in his pursuit of Rachel. But it would take time to repair the bridge controls to access the ship’s data, or failing that, to bypass the controls instead. Given enough time, he could do it himself—he had the equivalent of a fleet graduate degree in engineering, and like every other shifter, he’d made good use of the updated database the fleet had provided as part of their arrangement with the Ardrigh. But he didn’t have that kind of time right now. Rhodry would send others to harvest what they could before the Green covered over this ship, eventually destroying it, just as it did every other invader.

  There were more urgent matters at hand for Aidan, and Rachel was number one. She might think she was ready to survive Harp. She might even be right on some level. Rhodry’s fleet-born wife, Amanda, had done it. But Amanda had spent months on Harp getting ready for her trial, months spent studying the planet’s unique dangers and learning to use the weapons available to her. And then there were the trees. Amanda could hear Harp’s trees, just as the shifters could. More than any weapon or training, it was her ability to hear the song of the trees that had made her survival possible.

  As far as Aidan could tell, Rachel was as mind-deaf as any other norm, on Harp or off it. He didn’t doubt she had skills, and experience with any number of deadly environments, but none of them were Harp. He had to find her before the planet itself identified her as an invader and decided it wanted her dead.

  With a quick look around, he hurried back down to the crew level. He needed to consult with Rhodry.

  …

  Rachel woke with a start, and not for the first time. She’d slept rough plenty of times before this, but there was rough, and then there was Harp. The tree she’d chosen was comfortable enough—the limb was wide enough, and the branching from the main trunk deep enough, that she didn’t worry about falling. The tree was huge, with several other branches interlocking over her head that combined to provide protection against moisture and…other things that fell from the forest’s heights. But the tree couldn’t do anything about the unfamiliar noises throughout the forest—the silent whoosh of winged predators, the deep growls of the others, and the death cries of their chosen prey. Rachel was all too aware that there were plenty of predators on Harp who considered her to be prey, and that, despite the comfort of her tree, she was too vulnerable. The restless night made her realize something about the years she’d spent trekking distant planets—she’d never gone solo before. Most often, she was hired as an expert guide for a select group of researchers or adventurers. But even when she’d been trekking purely for her own enjoyment, she’d gone with friends who shared her years of experience.

  On Harp, she was alone. She hadn’t planned it that way. Hell, she hadn’t planned on setting off across the planet at all. But even then, she’d been certain her cat would hang around for the trip. She hadn’t expected the wild creature to become domesticated overnight, but she had thought it would linger in her vicinity, its curiosity protecting her by coincidence rather than intent.

  She rose to a crouch, swallowing a groan when her body protested, feeling aches and bruises all over from her unconventional sleeping arrangement. Sometimes interrupted sleep was worse than none at all. She tugged her pack around from where she’d been leaning against it and dug for a small bottle of water and an energy bar, which she swallowed in four dry bites. The bar was tasteless, but it was designed to give her metabolism a temporary boost while covering some basic nutritional needs. As for the water, she took only small sips, not knowing how long her limited supply would have to last. The humans on Harp would drink the same water she did, but they’d had hundreds of years to adapt to any of the planet’s specific parasites or bacteria that lived in the local water supply. The last thing Rachel wanted was to spend the next few days barfing her guts up, or worse, because she hadn’t properly checked her drinking water.

  She had water purification tablets and a filtered canteen, but while her maps included the distant main river which ran all through the Green, they weren’t detailed enough to show smaller water sources. She’d spent a good part of her sleepless hours bashing herself for not printing better maps from the ship’s data. The fact that she’d never thought she’d need them was no excuse. She was the person whose job it was to be prepared for the worst. She’d failed miserably so far.

  Although she had saved the cat. And she’d stopped the rest of them from continuing their immoral and illegal mission. Well, okay, so the cat had done that when he’d killed three crew and taken Ripper out of the picture for the duration, but she’d done her part by depriving them of their one and only test subject. The image of what they’d had planned for the magnificent creature made her literally nauseous.

  The dry energy bar wasn’t helping, either. She took a second tiny sip of water, just enough to wet her throat, and then another. Shoving the canteen back into her pack, she pulled out her map instead. It didn’t show her anything new. The supposed location of the second ship, where she hoped to find Wolfrum, was in a nearly straight line, due west of her current position. There didn’t seem to be any major obstructions between her and there, other than a dense forest filled with deadly life-forms. But Rachel was certain that, just as her map didn’t show lesser water sources, it also didn’t show the true topography of the Green. The planet’s weird magnetic force made it nearly impossible to get an accurate read from space.

  “Nothing for it, Rache,” she muttered as she rose to her full height. “You always wanted to investigate new planets. Here’s your chance.”

  Looking up, she was more convinced than ever that the sky road was the way to go. The higher one went, the more congested the branches became from tree to tree. Besides, tree climbing happened to be something she was good at. Her father had spent decades as the Research Director and Head Arborist for the Redwoods Sanctuary in old California. Rachel and her brother had grown up playing in trees that rivaled those of Harp in sheer size and age, if not in number. They’d both climbed almost before they could walk. Harp’s giant trees were so old and wrinkled, with so many hand and footholds, that it was like climbing stairs. And if she stayed above the ground, she wouldn’t have to worry as much about bad topography maps.

  When she started her climb, the dawn was barely a hint in the sky, more shadows than light amidst the dense greenery of the forest. By noon, with the sun nearly straight up above her, she was sweating and frustrated and coming to realize that she’d had an unrealistic view of what she’d called the “sky road.” She’d envisioned a nearly seamless network of interconnected branches that she could walk along like a literal road. The reality was somewhat more complicated.

  She’d been right about the intertwining branches, but most of them weren’t wide enough for a two-legged animal like herself to move along easily. And even when they were wide enough, they were so tangled up in each other that sh
e’d have had to hack her way through—a job her very excellent combat knife wasn’t really designed for. If she climbed even higher, the congestion was less, but the tree limbs, while sturdy, were even more narrow, and with wide gaps that required jumping. Rachel was in excellent physical condition and considered herself to be more than average athletically, but she didn’t think she was up to the task of making ten-foot leaps while two hundred or more feet in the air. She was determined, not suicidal. Maybe if she’d been born on this planet, or lived here for a decade or two, she’d develop the skills necessary. But for now, the sky road was an excellent natural route, but it was designed for four-legged creatures, like her cat.

  Accepting the inevitable, she started for the ground, scraping her arms and bloodying her knuckles in her impatience to get there. There was a growing sense of urgency in the back of her mind, a certainty that time was running out. She had to get to that second ship, had to find Wolfrum, before he did something even worse than capturing a lone wild animal.

  Once she hit the ground, she rested just long enough for another energy bar and a sip of water. The scrapes on her forearms were bleeding beneath the long sleeves of her shirt, but she didn’t want to take time to change shirts or properly bandage what were really no more than deep scratches. She’d clean them properly later, when the utter darkness of the Harp night forced her to stop. For now, she had to keep moving, had to make up for the long hours she’d spent climbing up and down and going nowhere. As for her split knuckles, they weren’t even worth noticing. Every climber, whether it was trees or rocks, dealt with scrapes and scratches on their fingers and hands. It was a given.