The Emperor looked at me. His eyes glimmered blue. The contrast with the crimson of his exoskeleton seemed to intensify both colors. “It was wrong of me, Jaya, to put the question and responsibility to you.” His right claw smoothed along a curving band of rhodium that formed the crown. Then he pressed the central ruby.
Instantly, the sha energy that had been swarming to the crown exploded outward.
More accurately, it struck at me.
I was already tense and simmering with the need to act. Alex’s kidnapping and his threat against Vulf had left me alert for other dangers. As the sha energy arrowed from the crown Raine held to me, I flung up a shield, solidifying it with layers and layers of sha energy.
Dimly, I heard Ivan shout and lunge toward Raine and the crown.
Professor Summer intervened, catching Ivan and restraining him easily enough. His hunger strike had weakened my grandfather.
The arrow of sha energy coming from the crown increased. It drilled through the layers of shielding between me and it. I had only seconds before it reached me, and then, as it had done with Ivan a few weeks before, it would strip me of my shamanic talent. Forget the agony of becoming insensible to the sha energy that played through the galaxy. I needed my shamanic talent to save Vulf from an insane Shaman Justice.
Fury that Raine would do this to me howled through me.
The sha energy the Imperial crown could gather and focus exceeded anything I’d ever encountered. The pattern of it resisted my every attempt to seize or deflect the stream of power. In a direct confrontation like this, I was outclassed and outgunned.
So I had to change the battle.
I’d contemplated the nature of sha energy on the journey to Naidoc. There were the patterns we shamans created and guided the sha energy into, and it was apparent that at this practice, the Ceph were our masters. The weapon that was the Meitj Imperial Crown proved that.
But there was another aspect to sha energy: the negative spaces that linked in pre-existing patterns which apparently only I could see and into which sha energy could be coaxed to flow. Such negative spaces were untapped, unreliable potential.
I reached for one. It wasn’t in the court room. It wasn’t even entirely in our dimension. However, now that I'd identified it, the nothingness of that space tugged at me. I couldn’t hold my shield against the stream of sha energy arrowing at me from the Imperial Crown for more than five more heartbeats. I had to act, and the negative space might be the sole potential construct capable of countering the crown’s control of the sha energy that swept through the palace. I had to hit the stream of sha energy hard enough to divert it into the negative space. In doing so, I might save myself, or I might kill us all.
Panic and instinct collided with the moral dilemma of the high price that everyone might pay if my attempt to save my shamanic talent misfired. Unfortunately for the moral dilemma, there wasn’t time enough to consider it, and instinct won.
I had to save my shamanic talent to save Vulf.
I stepped backward into the negative space that didn’t really exist, not yet, and which only I could perceive. Then I dropped the tattered remnants of my shield and grabbed for the sha energy arrowing to me.
It hit and I arched back in convulsive agony. It was too much for a human body to endure.
Then the negative space caught the sha energy arrow and splashed it out around me like a raindrop hitting a puddle.
That wouldn’t be enough to protect me for more than a few minutes. The crown in Raine’s hands kept drawing in sha energy. I had won myself a temporary reprieve, but I wouldn’t be safe till I could deactivate the piece of Ceph sha energy technology.
Or destroy it.
With my shamanic senses heightened, and perhaps because I stood in the center of a previously negative space, I suddenly “saw” other, interconnected negative spaces more clearly than ever before. They folded in on one another, and at the same time, were incredibly distant. They were spiral space, a concept physicists had discarded decades ago, but which seemed valid now. The negative spaces weren’t dark matter. The sha energy they channeled wasn’t dark energy. But they were everywhere.
They were the universe’s unrealized potential.
True understanding settled over me and brought me a sense of control. Years ago, Ivan had taught me how to create what he’d called a pocket dimension, and I maintained one to store spare clothing and supplies so that they were available to me anywhere. But what Ivan hadn’t understood was how, in creating a pocket dimension, he’d edged close to using negative spaces, only to limit himself by his lack of imagination.
My pocket dimension was a negative space, brought into “real” world existence by the sha energy I’d used to define its presence and tie it to me.
The negative spaces were the raw material of reality. Multiverse theory said anything was possible, somewhere. The negative spaces were the choices not chosen in this universe: potential ignored. They linked to one another with cascading possibilities, and sha energy brought them out of the shadows.
I reached for those shadows, pulling two more negative spaces to me and weaving them together into a net that caught the sha energy arrowing from the crown and absorbed it. The negative spaces became real. They weren’t physically visible. I doubted any technology could register their existence. But the negative spaces grew brighter and brighter, flared with sha energy, and then, at the clap of my hands, collapsed together, enclosing the Imperial Crown.
The ruby at the peak of the crown cracked.
Sha energy swirled into wild patterns. I let it go, and I let my vision of negative spaces vanish with it. One reality was all I could manage now, and I had a big and immediate problem.
Whatever Raine had hoped to achieve with his attack on me, I had one fear. Alex would have left a shaman on Naidoc to monitor my actions. That shaman hadn’t been able to enter the court room in the Imperial Palace, but the amount of sha energy that had just exploded inside it was unmissable. When the shaman reported that blast to Alex…
I pulled violently on the sha energy that I’d just released and shaped it into a portal. Without a word to anyone, I stepped into it and out into Alex’s office at the Academy.
Vulf and he were gone.
Chapter 14
A wolf’s howl echoed through the corridors of the Academy, immensely amplified by the robotic body it came from. Vulf was hunting.
My knees wobbled and I had to lean for an instant against the doorframe of Alex’s office. Vulf was alive, and I could feel him through our bond once more.
He felt me, too.
Love, concern, burning fury, all poured from him to me.
Feral amusement flooded our bond.
In the foyer, I found Nairo Bloodstone leaning over Alex’s crushed body. “Your mate did this.” The shaman healer snapped his accusation at me.
“He crunched the Shaman Justice!” a woman just a few years younger than me squeaked.
“Focus,” Nairo ordered.
She nodded, face flushing in shame, and held her hands over Alex’s left leg. It lay at an impossible angle, still connected to his body, but jelly-like as if the bones had been pulverized. It seemed she was one of Nairo’s graduate students, learning advanced healing from him.
“Why?” Nairo asked.
I jogged toward the rear of the central hall, headed for the Archives. “Alex kidnapped Vulf and me, and tried to force me to obey him by threatening Vulf’s life.” The hall was crowded, but people parted for me. There were no children present, so some people in the Academy were still showing sense. Whatever went down here—and
there would be a showdown, I was finished with people manipulating and threatening Vulf and me—the children would be safely out of it.
Vulf came tearing up the corridor, running silently in his massive robot wolf form.
A couple of people screamed. They were shamans like me, and it hurt to doubt them, but after Alex’s actions, I had to. I flung up a shield to protect Vulf and me from a sneak attack and ran to meet him. He shifted to human, naked human, and hugged me against him hard enough to hurt. Since I was hugging him just as fiercely, I didn’t complain.
My protective sha energy shield abruptly parted.
“Trousers. You’ll want them,” a male voice said gently. Trousers were flung toward us. Vulf caught them.
I stared at the intruder who’d too easily countered the shield.
The galaxy’s second Shaman Justice regarded me steadily, making no attempt to move closer. Michael Smith appeared to be in his late fifties which, given the way shamans aged, meant he was much older.
“Are you working with Alex?” I asked bluntly.
Vulf stood naked at the edge of the central hall, the borrowed sweatpants in one hand. If he needed to defend us, he’d shift to his robot wolf form, again, and there was no need to destroy more clothing in the process.
Not that I’d wait for him to defend us.
“I’m not working with Alex,” Michael said. “In fact, I’ve been doing the opposite, I’m afraid, by giving him enough room to maneuver that his own actions will condemn him. As they have.”
Vulf pulled on the sweatpants. “He still lives.”
“What happened?” The last time I’d seen Vulf, he’d been unconscious and at Alex’s mercy.
Michael raised a hand. “One moment.” He gestured imperatively.
Dan Carson stepped forward.
Vulf growled at him. “I have your scent. You took Jaya from me.”
“For her safety.” Despite Vulf’s visible fury, Dan ignored the threat to his continued breathing and focused on me. “I am sorry, Jaya. I never anticipated that Alex would go so far as to threaten Vulf’s life. When Michael came to me with the mediators of the Galactic Court’s scenarios of conflict within the Academy, I thought them highly improbable. I trusted Alex, implicitly.” He stared across the hall to where Nairo continued to heal the Shaman Justice. “Winona and I agreed to the farce Michael outlined because we never thought it would eventuate. We couldn’t believe the treachery the scenarios envisaged.”
“We refused to believe that one of our own could turn on us.” Winona approached our small group, watched by the other shamans. The acoustics of the hall were excellent. Without sha energy being needed to amplify our speech, everyone could hear us.
I hoped that meant that the time of secrets and secret plots was over.
Evidently, I’d expressed my tired wish telepathically.
If I was tired, Winona appeared exhausted. Lines grooved the corners of her eyes and bracketed her mouth. Her eyes were red rimmed and she held herself erect as if she didn’t dare slump or she’d fall over. The former chancellor might have lost her job, but she hadn’t retreated into an easy retirement.
“Most of us, most shamans,” Winona ostensibly spoke to Vulf and me, but her words were for everyone. “We enjoy being shamans, learning about our talent, and using it. Before all of this, I’d have said that we’re non-political, that political power couldn’t possibly interest us because we’re already utterly absorbed in sha energy. I was wrong. The Galactic Court’s mediators have millennia of experience in the lure of power of all kinds. They knew that humanity was fast approaching the first test all new member species of Galaxy Proper face. Whether we could accept the uncertainty of living in such a complicated galactic union. Until now, we’ve been focused on survival, on settling our planets and establishing sufficient agriculture and industry to sustain ourselves and prosper. But as we’ve prospered…apparently, that’s when fear creeps in.”
Michael nodded at her. “When you have nothing, your fear focuses on survival. But when you have something to lose, or you have power, then your fear focusses on retaining it. As a Shaman Justice, Alex Ballantyne enjoyed—” I doubt anyone missed Michael’s use of the past tense for Alex’s position with the Galactic Court. “—the prestige and power of his role. Few of the galaxy’s multitude of people ever think about shamans, but the powerbrokers do, those whose responsibility it is to sense and react to changes in Galaxy Proper’s equilibrium. Shamans have irrevocably changed that balance.”
Nairo Bloodstone straightened from his crouched position working over Alex. “Clarence foresaw this,” he said, speaking of his great-grandfather and the Academy’s founder. “He said that every generation of shamans would have to choose to serve Galaxy Proper.” Nairo stressed serve. “We are the price of humanity’s rescue from Earth and entry into Galaxy Proper.”
“But not as a full member species,” a woman said from the group of shamans near Alex.
“You supported President Hoffer’s actions,” I said, understanding her attitude, and with it, the evolving scene.
The crowd of shamans in the hall was gradually shuffling into two groups. The much larger group stood nearest to Vulf and me. But the group that hovered near Alex was still thirty or more strong.
Nairo stared at the company he was keeping, and stalked away from them toward us.
His graduate student attempted to scurry after him, but Dan Carson, who’d been strolling through the hall, was suddenly there, preventing the woman from merging with the larger group. The shuffling separation of the two groups wasn’t self-organizing. It was being orchestrated. There was a “them” and an “us” emerging in the Academy.
The graduate student squeaked as she found herself on the wrong side of the divide.
Nairo turned. “Maisie?” His shoulders slumped in momentary defeat. “You supported breaking humanity’s Charter of Galactic Union? What did you hope to achieve?”
“Equality.” Her voice shook, uncertain under the pressure of so many people’s disapproving and shocked gazes. Of her fellow rebels, a few managed defiant glares, but most avoided looking at anyone. The floor was apparently incredibly interesting; although two of the rebel shamans stared instead at Alex’s unconscious body. Had the fact that he was a Shaman Justice convinced them that they had a right to seize more power?
I was disgusted, and my revulsion sounded in my voice. “We have equality, a right to live freely and well. What Alex wanted was to be special.”
“Well, we are, aren’t we?” Maisie suddenly spat. “We’re shamans. We can do things no one else can.”
Except the Ceph, who could do what us shamans could do, only better.
What had my destruction of the Meitj Imperial Crown done to the decision as to the Ceph’s future? It had been a powerful sha energy weapon. So powerful, in fact, that a shocking possibility had to be considered: had it been the key to unlocking the sha energy working that held the Ceph in stasis? How ironic would it be if, after my argument with Vulf and Alex’s kidnapping of us, I’d ended up doing what both men wanted and reinforcing the Ceph’s stasis?
“Everyone has a talent,” Michael said. “Some use it to serve the greater good. Others use it to serve themselves. Most people fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.” The old Shaman Justice sighed. “You don’t seem to realize what you’ve done.”
The rebel shamans who’d been studying the floor looked up at the grief and resignation in his tone.
“Humanity failed its test,” Michael repeated his earlier point, heavily. “Nairo understood. In allowing, even siding with President Hoffer and the other leaders of the various human-settled planets to appoint an interstellar leader for humanity, we broke one of the core terms of our Charter of Galactic Union. A single voice is forbidden to us. It was such a simple clause, almost meaningless in itself, but it was put there for a purpose.”
No one broke the silence as Michael walked
across to Alex and stared down at his former colleague, one of our most powerful shamans. “The clause was written into the contract for humanity to prove that either it had learned its lessons from the manner in which we brought nuclear winter to Earth, effectively destroying our home world, or if we would still gamble everything for ambition. To be the leader for all humanity…what ego could resist it? The more profound question was if humanity as a whole would have the sense to deny that ego.
“We proved that we didn’t.” Michael rolled his shoulders, exhausted at the stupidity of people. “And now, no other member species of Galaxy Proper will trust humanity to honor its contracts. We will find it incredibly difficult to progress because of that fact. Our treachery condemns us to stagnation or predation.”
As the Freels had found. They hadn’t stagnated, and they’d fought off their aggressors, but at a massive cost—and they’d entered Galaxy Proper from a far stronger base than humanity.
“What did Alex actually do?” Matron Fatima Hawi mightn’t be a shaman, but she was there, in the thick of the action, as insatiably curious as always.
The note of doubt in her tone struck me on the raw. Did she actually think there might be some justification for Alex’s actions? “He kidnapped me from Naidoc where the Meitj had requested my presence. He kidnapped Vulf at the same time, rendering us both unconscious, and used a portal to transport us to his office here at the Academy. He then threatened Vulf’s life.” Vulf’s growl was a low rumble, less a sound than a vibration I felt through my back as his chest pressed against me. “Alex wanted to ensure that I didn’t free the Ceph.”
I’d had enough of secrets, so I continued, disregarding Winona’s urgent hand flap for silence. “The Ceph are a sha energy using race that was conquering and annihilating sentient species across the galaxy likely before humanity even gained sentience. They were ruthless, presumably because they thought themselves better than everyone and unstoppable.” I glared at Maisie. “Remind you of anyone? But they were stopped, by one of their own, and the Meitj guarded their planet where the Ceph have been in stasis for millennia. Alex wanted to ensure that I didn’t do anything that might contribute to freeing them.”
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