Cosmic Catalyst (Shamans & Shifters Space Opera Book 2) Read online

  “Those ‘aliens’ saved us.” A man strode from the foyer into the corridor, approaching us with a bull-dozing stride that I recognized as instantly as I did his voice.

  His voice.

  My mind betrayed me and sent me back twenty years to when I’d waited eagerly to hear his voice, had run to meet him at the door, and had pestered him trustingly to play sha energy games with me. My treacherous mind skipped back to a time when I’d called him Uncle Alex.

  “Shaman Justice,” the President snapped out Alex Ballantyne’s title and offered no other greeting.

  Behind us, the presidential bodyguards moved to full alert. I wondered if they had disrupters as well as guns hidden beneath their jackets. They wouldn’t have time to use them. Alex Ballantyne was fast.

  He’d barely aged. Like shifters, shamans lived longer than ordinary humans. He looked to be in his late thirties, although he’d be nearly sixty now.

  “President Hoffer.” Alex matched the President’s non-greeting, but his gaze remained locked on me. “Jaya.”

  “Hello, Alex.” I refused to call him Mr. Ballantyne, and he’d revoked my right to call him uncle eighteen years ago.

  “Ms. Romanov,” the President demanded my attention. “Dinner, tonight. Eight o’clock.”

  “She won’t be able to attend,” Alex said. “Shamanic duties.”

  Like what? But as annoyed as I was at his refusal on my behalf of the President’s command invitation, I didn’t want to endure the dinner. “I’m sorry, Mr. President.”

  He glared at Alex, and strode out to the foyer. A bodyguard lengthened his stride, circled him, and checked for threats.

  Alex and I weren’t alone, but for a moment there was no one near us. “We need to talk, Jaya,” he said quietly.

  “Everyone’s been talking at me for three weeks. Why not you, too?” I went to pull at my ponytail as I did when agitated, and remembered too late that my hair was tightly coiled in a knot. I lowered my arms, feeling silly, and regretting that I’d displayed my nervousness. “All right. When and where?”

  “My room. Now.”

  We crossed the foyer to the West Wing in silence. The faculty had rooms in the South Tower, and although Alex as a Shaman Justice wasn’t technically Academy faculty, they kept a room for him. With only two Shaman Justices in the galaxy, and their service to Galaxy Proper the most important condition of humanity’s Charter of Galactic Union, Alex got special treatment.

  It seemed that special treatment didn’t include dusting or otherwise cleaning his room.

  “One moment.” He stopped me at the door, sending a wisp of sha energy to gather up the dust and billow it out the window. He left the window open afterwards. A cool wind blew in carrying the wood smoke and chill of a late fall day. It was refreshing after the crowded conference room.

  The room had a desk, but Alex gestured me to one of two armchairs and took the other. Apart from the desk and chairs, there was a row of cupboards along the wall behind the desk. That was it. There were no pictures or desk ornaments. Nothing to personalize the space. I sat facing the window, able to see the gray clouds massing over the forest. He sat and stared at me.

  I knew how he looked from memory. He was broad and stocky, his brown hair holding an auburn tinge and freckles splattered across a nose he’d broken while playing rugby and left to heal crooked. These days I matched him for height. His fingers were unexpectedly long and slender. He’d used to play the violin, calling it a fiddle, which had always made Celine smile and tease him that he overplayed the folksiness. Back then, he’d smiled easily.

  “Michael’s stuck with a wormhole glitching in Weta Sector. It’s swallowed a dozen starships and he’s working on getting them out. That left me.” He fell silent.

  Unwillingly, I acceded to his unspoken demand and looked at him.

  “I’m sorry, Jaya,” he said in a rough voice.

  “Yeah.” The apology was eighteen years too late, and you know what? When it came right down to it, an apology wasn’t enough.

  “One of the Shaman Justices had to talk with you. The things you did…I couldn’t have shut down a wraith from half a galaxy away, let alone seven of them. You saved the Meitj, and you impressed them.”

  I knew that. The Meitj had expressed their gratitude both in the immediate aftermath of the foiled terrorist attack, and later, via their representatives, here at the Academy. Winona hadn’t just been meeting with humans over the last three weeks.

  “You’ve always been powerful,” Alex said.

  “Is that why you took me in?” I asked him. I shouldn’t have. I should have drawn a line in the sand and insisted on keeping the discussion impersonal. A discussion about my power was fine. I discussed it with the research shamans. A discussion about what was so wrong with me that everyone I knew either left me or used me? That wasn’t a safe discussion to have.

  And it wasn’t true. Not anymore. Vulf loved me just for me.

  I wished that he was here.

  “Celine…” Alex’s voice didn’t crack on his dead wife’s name. “Celine couldn’t have children.”

  I’d learned that fact later, after she’d died, when it was too late to ask her if she’d have ignored me if she’d had her own children. When I recalled Celine, there were memories of hugs and laughter. She’d been a shaman, too, but her power had been slight; just enough to play sha games with me and to work as a researcher at the Academy.

  I’d been abandoned to the Academy at the age of three. It had been done anonymously; my grandfather contacting me secretly years later to admit it had been his doing. Surrendering me to strangers and leaving me without any sense of who I was or where I came from had been only the first of Ivan’s many betrayals. It had been his terrorist attack against the Meitj that I’d thwarted three weeks ago. He was their prisoner, now. Imprisoned for life.

  And I was his granddaughter. Irrationally or not, I felt I had to atone for his sins, or more truly, I believed that I had to prove that his murderous and obsessive inclinations didn’t taint me. We shared more than our blood. He was an unregistered shaman, and I was a shaman who hid much of my talent for working with sha energy. What I could with sha energy was like nothing the Academy taught.

  The five years I’d spent since graduation working as a starship shaman and collecting sha energy for my experiments had been unostentatiously satisfying. Being the only shaman for hundreds of clicks, deep in interstellar space, had given me the freedom to simply be myself.

  All that had changed.

  Alex’s arrival was merely the official expression of those changes. I could guess why he was here. Vulf and I had even discussed the likelihood. The Academy mightn’t know the full extent of my talent, but they’d registered enough to have marked me as a likely Shaman Justice. I’d had five years of freedom. But the other two that I’d counted on, to make up seven years of self-discovery, had been blasted out of existence by my display of formidable shamanic talent to save Shaidoc.

  “Celine thought of you as her daughter,” Alex said. “In every way but blood, you were hers. She would have loved you if you had no shamanic talent, but the fact that you did gave us priority for fostering you. We could help you to understand and control your early-developing talent.”

  He cleared his throat, cleared it again, stood, and walked to the window. “You were like a daughter to me, too.” He stared out the window rather than look at me.

  So many responses to that ran through my mind. Disbelief. Anger. Sorrow. If I’d been truly his daughter, would he have left me behind?

  “When Celine died, I broke,” he said. “I functioned. As a Shaman Justice I probably even improved. I had no distractions. But as a person, all I could see was the gap where Celine should have been. Every time I saw you.” He drew a deep breath and turned around so that I could read his expression. He stood rigidly, like a man on trial. Regret shimmered in his hazel eyes. “You were so perfect, Jaya. You still are. Beautiful and caring. A strong person. Always determined t
o do the right thing. Celine would have been proud of you, and it killed me to see you and know that she was missing out on your life, on all the important milestones.”

  “So you decided to miss them, too?” My sarcastic response failed to hide my emotions. A shaking voice will give you away every time.

  He returned to his chair, dropping into it and leaning forward. “I’m an emotional coward, Jaya. You should hate me, despise me. But never, ever believe that my abandonment was any reflection on you.”

  I shook my head, over-whelmed.

  He cleared his throat. “I should have explained myself to you years ago, but avoidance becomes a habit. You built your own life, one without me. I had—have—no right to crash it with my emotional needs. But someone has to walk you through what it means to be a Shaman Justice. The Meitj have already expressed a desire for you to assume the role and assist the Galactic Court. You deserve to know what you’d be agreeing to.”

  “And if I refuse to be a Shaman Justice?” I wasn’t being difficult. I wanted to know how honest he’d be with me.

  “It’ll be difficult. The Academy will put pressure on you, sufficient that you’ll find yourself uncomfortable here and avoiding it, and likely, most shamans. A major reason for the Academy’s founding was to train up shamans for the role of Shaman Justice. We give Galaxy Proper the best of the best to fulfil our commitment under the Charter of Galactic Union. You are the best, Jaya.”

  He put his hands on the arms of his chair and pushed up. “That said, you can refuse. The position of Shaman Justice carries substantial pressure. You can end up responsible for countless lives…something you experienced with the wraiths threatening Shaidoc. A Shaman Justice must be a willing volunteer. A willing, informed volunteer.”

  “President Hoffer wants me to serve him, not the Galactic Court.”

  “The Galactic Court is more honest,” Alex said bluntly.

  I didn’t disagree, but I needed time alone: time to consider everything he’d told me and determine my options. “I appreciate your offer to instruct me on the realities of life as a Shaman Justice. It’s been a…challenging day, and tomorrow Winona wants me to sit in on the meeting of planetary presidents. They intend to petition Galaxy Proper to admit humanity as full members.” I wasn’t sure if he was aware of the latest political games.

  He nodded. “Can you give me an hour before the meeting starts?” He was a Shaman Justice with a thousand and one demands on his time, and he was letting me set the schedule.

  “We could meet for breakfast, if that suits you?” I waited for his agreement. “There’s a coffee shop near my apartment.” I gave him the address. “Is seven o’clock too early?”

  “That’s fine.”

  I had my hand on the door, almost gone.

  “Thank you, Jaya.”

  I stepped through and closed the door firmly behind me. The tension I’d been controlling burst free and set me shuddering. My past and my future had collided in one man: Alex Ballantyne. My teeth chattered in a particularly convulsive shiver. I didn’t want anyone to see me like this, so I stumbled into the nearest bathroom and closed myself inside a cubicle.

  One of the tricks of sha energy manipulation that my grandfather had taught me was the creation of pocket dimensions. They were useful, if not always reliable, personal storage systems. The problem was that you couldn’t be sure that what you put in there would be retrievable. I opened mine, reached in, and pulled out a utility suit in dull blue, boots and socks. I stripped off my sensible don’t-look-at-me conference clothes, threw them into the pocket dimension and sealed it. Then I dressed quickly. By the time I’d knotted my boots, the familiar uniform of a starship shaman had calmed me.

  The mile and a bit walk from the Academy to my apartment in town would burn off the remainder of my adrenaline, especially if I took it at a jog. I disciplined myself to walk out of the tower and down the driveway that curved around a giant oak that a botanist shaman had coaxed to appear centuries old. In colonizing San Juan and other planets, shamans specializing in terraforming planets had accelerated the lifecycles of plants to establish robust ecosystems.

  When I reached the bridge that crossed the Rubicon River and joined the Academy to the town of Independence, popularly known as Indy, I started to jog.

  I’d never thought I’d be grateful to reach my apartment overlooking the river. I’d bought it four years ago to reassure the Academy that while I was a starship shaman without close ties to family or friends, I wasn’t untethered, and hence, a risk to be monitored. Buying an apartment for such reasons, even with the generous terms of the mortgage the Academy offered me as a graduate, meant I’d always vaguely resented it.

  Now, as the door locked behind me, it felt like a refuge.

  “House, show Vulf’s latest recording,” I directed the apartment’s housekeeping system. His familiar face appeared on the viewscreen in front of the short sofa. “Pause.” I touched his face. I ached to touch him for real. More than anything, I wanted him to hold me. “Vulf, I miss you.”

  He was nine days fast travel away in the Dragon Sector on the pirate planet of Corsairs. Our communication was via recorded messages, and even then, we couldn’t speak openly. As Vulf had warned me before we separated on Naidoc, we’d gained a scary amount of attention and with that would go covert surveillance. In short, whatever we sent over the communications network would be monitored.

  “House, resume play.”

  On screen, Vulf’s recorded image moved. His sexy, growly voice was rough. “I love you, Jaya.”

  “I love you, too.” But if I became a Shaman Justice could we make our relationship work?

  Chapter 2

  My closest friends at the Academy had scattered after graduation. Most served as starship shamans, as I had. Lily had chosen to specialize in terraforming planets, and had taken up her lifetime role on a planet the Sidhe held in the Psy Sector. Guiding sha energy into new planetary patterns and gently sustaining the altered flows until they embedded tended to bind a shaman to a planet. Her life and sha became entwined with that of the planet. Two other friends were working on sha weapons development and healing respectively.

  Just because my close friends were absent didn’t mean I knew no one. The staff at the Academy were largely unchanged after five years. Matron still ruled the dorms where the students slept. She had taken responsibility for me after Celine’s death and Alex’s departure. Rather than find me a second foster family, the Academy had accepted me at a younger than usual age as a student.

  Usually shamanic talent revealed itself at puberty, around the age of twelve. On Earth, shamanic talent hadn’t been understood, and when it had woken at puberty, people had panicked. Instead of helping the young shamans to master their talent, the children had been labelled freaks, and their gift mislabeled as poltergeist activity and suppressed.

  On San Juan, in more enlightened times, I entered the school aged eight and unable to recall a time when I hadn’t played with sha energy. The older students hadn’t been unkind, but it had been impossible to juggle sharing shamanic lessons with them where I already possessed the control of sha energy that they were still to learn, with ordinary schoolwork where I was naturally four years behind them. Fortunately, private tutoring advanced me sufficiently that within two years I could join a new intake of students on equal terms in schoolwork, and by then, I’d learned how to disguise the extent of my shamanic abilities. I made friends.

  Matron ensured that I learned manners, stayed healthy and, she hoped, felt some kind of emotional connection to the Academy. She thought of me as “that poor little foundling”.

  All of which explains why, when I saw Matron accompany Alex into the coffee shop for his and my breakfast meeting, I felt shoved off balance again. For this difficult meeting, I didn’t need Matron’s pity or her insistence that I respond emotionally to her.

  Matron, Fatima Hawi, was Alex’s age, but she wasn’t a shaman, so she actually looked her sixty years. She’d dyed her
hair a dark brown and wore make-up, but there was no disguising the softening of her body or the wrinkling of her neck and hands. She defined herself by her maternal identity, claiming that she was a “second mother” to the students. Many students agreed. I never had. Matron was someone I endured.

  “Good morning, Jaya,” she said brightly. “No, no, don’t get up.”

  I hadn’t attempted to; merely regarding them with a polite smile. “Good morning.”

  “I’m not staying,” Matron continued, speaking over Alex’s quiet greeting. “I was leaving the Academy at the same time as Alex, popping out for some pastries as a treat for the first years, so of course I stopped to give him a lift.” She leaned in to whisper. “I’m double-parked, so I must dash. However, I wanted to remind you that if you need me, my door is always open.” She looked to squeeze my hand, a habit of hers, but I’d tucked my hands under the table. She hovered.

  She wouldn’t leave till I’d thanked her for interfering, so I forced the words out.

  She beamed. “Of course, of course. You are one of my most successful children.” She patted my shoulder, and finally, left.

  “Sorry,” Alex said briefly, apparently to the menu board that hung on the back wall.

  “You know, when you took off after Celine’s death, I was landed with her.” My remark was rude, and just spoke itself.

  It also served to break the ice.

  He grinned quickly and ruefully. He was also wise enough not to comment.

  I could imagine how deftly Matron had snagged her chance to intrude. Gossip flew around the Academy, and she was the hub of that rumor network. News that Alex had made one of his rare visits to the Academy and met with me would have created a rampaging curiosity in her. A moment’s thought would have suggested that he was here to speak with me about the question of my becoming a Shaman Justice, but she would have wanted to see for herself my emotional reaction.