Tonespace: The Space of Energy (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 3)

by Matthew Kennedy

  Henry just watched him. “What are you gonna do?”

  “Something stupid,” Lobsang muttered, as his staff roared and his feet left the ground.

  This was crazy, He hadn't tried flying since graduation, and even then he'd done barely more than lift off the roof of the Governor's 'scraper. The only wizards he knew who had ever tried to do much with swizzle flight were Xander and Lester – and they didn't recommend it.

  He tried to remember Xander's advice (other than the advice to never fly by himself). Going straight up isn't too hard. You just stay near the bottom of the staff. If it tries to tilt over for any reason, your weight will pull the bottom down and pull the top to point straight up again. Self-stabilizing, like a buoy.

  The real challenge comes, he thought, when I get to the roof. Then I have to go sideways. That's harder.

  Windows set into the black monolith wall of the 'scraper blurred by as he increased speed, but he wasn't racing her to the top. If he got there first all she had to do was turn her swizzle down and let the makeshift elevator drop. No, he had to let her arrive first and climb out of the box. The guide wire that passed through the elevator showed that she had no skill in flying an unguided swizzle.

  Well, he had more experience than her, but not much.

  Grimacing, he tweaked the pathspace of the swizzle weave again, increasing his speed and making more of the air go through the staff instead of into his face. Looking up, he saw her reach the top, where something projected out over the side of the building. A crane? Hmm. A bit crude, but then Xander's students wouldn't be going up the side of a 'scraper.

  He managed to avoid hitting the crane as he rocketed up over the edge of the roof. From there it was only a matter of leaning the staff over for a second and then cutting the weave. He pushed the staff to one side, tucked into a ball and tried to protect his head as he hit the roof rolling.

  Hello Rochelle. Did you miss me?

  The flash of astonishment he felt through the mental link was nearly worth the pain when he slammed into something metal. But at least he wasn't rolling any more.

  She choked off her surprise. Is that you, Dog? Has Xander taught my poodle how to fly?

  He unfolded himself and stood up. “My name is Lobsang. I'm not your pet.”

  She frowned. “I have the feeling you're going to tell me you don't work for me any more. I shouldn't have waited so long before executing your family.”

  He brushed himself off and picked up his staff. “You really shouldn't have said that. The thought of rescuing them was the only thing holding me back from killing you.”

  She laughed. “You think you can take me on, librarian?”

  Lobsang shrugged. “What I think,” he said, “is that it was a mistake of you to eliminate all the potential wizards you could find.”

  “Why? Do you think I'll need any help to put you down?”

  “No,” he said. “that's not it. I think you haven't had any sparring partners for a long time, just victims. Must make it hard for you to keep in practice.”

  She scowled and pointed at him.

  He felt his body jiggle a little. “O come now,” he said. “Surely you know I control the pathspace near my own body, just as you do.”

  He pointed the business end of his staff at her, turned his feet to brace against slipping, touched the swizzle weave with his mind and jammed it as tight as he could, unleashing a blast of wind straight at her. The staff roared in his hands and tried to push him backwards.

  The Queen just smiled a sad smile as the wind split and went around her. “Thought you could blow me off the roof? I guess you weren't listening to yourself a moment ago."

  He held the staff pointed at her and tried to think. She probably couldn't attack him while she was busy deflecting the wind, but as soon as he stopped to try something else she'd be back on offense.

  I could use spinspace, he thought. Twist her head and body in opposite directions. But he was slower at spinspace weaves. It's easy to control an everwheel once the weave is in place, but a lot harder to whip up one up in the middle of a fight. Too bad I didn't bring Kareef with me.

  Rochelle yawned into a fist. “Is that all you have?” Suddenly the wind blasting toward her stopped splitting. Instead, the entire stream of it bent counter-clockwise around her body and blasted straight back at him.

  The combination of slingshot wind and the backwards thrust from the staff knocked him off his feet. Flailing, he lost his grip on the staff as he fell, and it tilted up, slammed into the surface of the roof with its suction end, rebounded and sucked its way across the roof past him.

  He rolled to his left and jumped to his feet again.

  “I suppose you have adequate control of pathspace,” she said. “But the trouble is, you still have to think about it. I've been using it for years. You'll never be faster than me.”

  “Are you sure?” Keep her talking, he thought, and reached out to weave two spinspace weaves. I'll bet she loves the sound of her own voice too much to interrupt herself to attack me. “Some people might be naturally faster than others.”

  “Dogs are more predictable than cats,” she remarked. “Right now you're trying to get me talking while you cook up another weave.” She lifted a hand.

  He heard the sound of it just in time and dropped prone as his staff, the direction of its thrust reversed, popped off the lip of the wall it had been trying to suck its way through, tilted up a little (because it could only inhale air from above the roof while it lay there) and flew through the space his body had been occupying a moment before.

  He managed to get to his feet again as she ducked, letting the staff fly over her and off the 'scraper. He resisted the urge to watch it arc over the street and smashed its way into another building, and reached out to make four tonespace weaves. “That's a good trick, reversing the swizzle weave so fast. Where did you learn that?”

  “Stalling again?” She shook her head. “Didn't Xander tell you I used to be his apprentice? He taught me a lot of tricks, until that bitch Kristana got her claws into him. I was with him longer than you.”

  “Did he teach you this one?” Now! He wrenched at the weaves he had wrought, tightening all of them.

  She looked puzzled for a moment, then she must have realized part of what he was doing when her head began to turn. It stopped. “Trying to twist my head off? I see you got to learn the everwheel weave.” She yawned. “But you can always cancel out a torque by an unbalanced pathspace weave.”

  “I didn't know that,” he admitted. Something to add to our isometric pair exercises for students, he thought. “But you missed a weave or two.” What's taking it so long?

  She opened her mouth but behind her the four guide cables snapped under a combination of stress and melting under the elevator. They welded themselves to the bottom of its steel floor and metal fittings screeched as the crane whipped around like a massive flail, dragging the box of the elevator with it. A wooden wall bashed into her right side and knocked her off her feet. She rolled for a couple of seconds and then lay still.

  Is she dead? Is this finally over?

  A hissing, roaring filled the air. At first he thought it was another pathspace wind attack. But the Queen hadn't moved. Was she playing dead while she wove against him? No, her head was still down. She couldn't possibly be aiming at him.

  A shadow fell on him. He felt a breeze blowing on him. A vertical breeze.

  Lobsang tilted his head up. Instead of the sun, he saw a black rounded rectangle, pierced at its corners by four blue holes. It seemed to be getting larger.

  As it descended, the roar became deafening. The shadow slid sideways a bit, and the wind blasted him off his feet. What the hell was this?

  Lobsang shut his eyes, trying to avoid being blinded by flying grit, as something landed on the roof. The roaring ceased, and he rose to his knees, shaking his head like a child at the beach with water in its ears. But his ears kept ringing.

  Fifteen feet away from him, the Queen ra
ised her head. He turned to see what she was staring at.

  A wooden platform forty by sixty feet, with four metal barrels, one in each rounded corner, rested on the rooftop. He stood up to get a better view. Rochelle struggled to her knees, wincing as she held a hand the right side of her abdomen where the elevator wall had struck her.

  In the center of the platform a dome sat, like a hemispherical cobweb in a glass bubble. Two more of the metal barrels lay bolted to the platform on their sides on the left and right. There were people in it.

  A door in the side of the bubble opened and a man stepped out. There were still four people inside, each sitting cross-legged on a cushion facing one of the four upright metal barrels. Their heads were shaved, their eyes closed as if in meditation.

  Swizzles, thought Lobsang. A swizzle hovercraft. The two horizontally-aligned ones are for thrust, for moving forward.

  By the look of the man who had emerged, this craft had come a long way.

  Rochelle forced her body to stand up.

  “My name is Wu,” the man told them. “And I believe you have something I want.”

  For James, December 30, 2015 2:04 AM EST Crystal River, FL

  – MRK

  Keep reading for a peek at HEALSPACE: The Space of Life

  Other books by Matthew R. Kennedy

  Gamers and Gods

  Gamers and Gods: AES

  Games and Gods II: MACHAON

  Gamers and Gods III: ALEXANOR

  The Metaspace Chronicles

  Pathspace: The Space of Paths

  Spinspace: The Space of Spins

  Tonespace: The Space of Energy

  HEALSPACE

  The Space of Life

  Volume 4 of

  The Metaspace Chronicles

  by Matthew R. Kennedy

  Copyright © 2015 by Matthew R. Kennedy

  Prologue

  Every living thing goes through growing pains. The embryonic plant inside the seed must push leaves up out of the soil, and roots downward. Baby sea turtles hatch on land and run a gauntlet of predators to reach the sheltering sea. In many birds, more than one egg hatches in the nest but only the strongest hatchling gets fed by the parents. Once the new life form is out of a seed, out of its mother's body, or out of the homeostatic egg, it is launched into a struggle - a struggle to survive long enough to grow into something less easily eaten.

  The Xander School was up and running now. Xander and Lester had trained the first class of new wizards, although Xander still preferred the term “psionic engineers.” Most of these would form the nucleus of the school faculty and help train subsequent students. One might think that after surviving the initial attempt to destroy the School, they had passed through their growing pains.

  But one would have been wrong.

  The seed of greatness that Xander had planted, though it had flowered and multiplied, was not yet a mighty forest. Other than the old man himself, all of them, even Lester, were still young, still growing in knowledge and power, still hardly more than seedlings under a stormy sky.

  They'd need more than luck to survive what was coming.

  Chapter 1

  Rochelle: Never A Dull Moment

  “A King may choose his garment as he will: there is no certain test: but a beggar cannot hide his poverty. ”

  – The Book of the Law II:58

  She stood motionless for a moment, ignoring the stabbing pain that was probably at least one cracked rib, her thoughts whirling like water going down a drain. From the look of these people, and they way they had arrived, this man who called himself just “Wu” must be that Wu she had heard of - the new Emperor of China. But what was he doing here, all the way across the Pacific from his own empire?

  No time even to consider how badly she'd underestimated Kaleb/Lobsang. She'd never expected him back from Rado so soon. She'd never expected him back at all. The best she'd hoped for was that he might disrupt the School and slow down Xander's efforts there to buy her a little time to come up with another plan.

  But never mind that. Look at Wu's hovercraft! While Xander and Lobsang messed around with swizzle staffs zooming around like Halloween witches, the Emperor had crossed the ocean on a swizzle-powered craft that let him sit out of the wind in comfort. She ignored Lobsang for the moment and bowed very low to Wu. “What could we possibly have that you might want, O Emperor of China?” she asked, straightening up again.

  He blinked, and his surprise pleased her. Lobsang gaped.

  “You know who I am?” said Wu.

  “Of course. But forgive my lack of manners. I am Rochelle Wu Peña, the Queen of Angeles. I have received reports of your successful reunification of Zhong Guo, the Middle Kingdom. Which makes you the first Emperor in a long time.”

  Wu glanced at Lobsang. “Who are you?”

  “I'm a wizard, like you. Except I don't have my own empire. My name's Lobsang.”

  Mentally she shook her head. Had the fool no respect? Or did he imagine his rude frankness would impress a man who had conquered an empire, a realm that could swallow Cali, Rado, and even the Lone Star Empire without a trace of indigestion?

  Wu's gaze snapped back to her. “In answer to your question,” he said, “I am seeking an artifact known as a tissue regenerator. I'm told it glows with a green light.”

  She thought rapidly. Those people inside the bubble canopy of Wu's hovercraft, the four seated facing the four barrel-sized metal swizzles, apparently in meditation, they must be wizards too, fine-tuning the thrusts to keep the craft in balance. Wu himself must control the two horizontally-mounted swizzles to control the speed and heading. That meant all five of them were wizards, and masters of at least pathspace. Even if she wanted to, she dared not lie. So she wouldn't. But how could she get them to believe she spoke the truth?

  Then she remembered something Xander had said. She projected her thoughts to Wu, knowing that no one can lie in mental communication because the receiver would hear one's afterthought that what had been just sent was untrue. I have heard of the artifact you seek, she sent, but I do not have it.

  Then where is it? he demanded. I know it is somewhere near your west coast.

  If I knew its location, she responded, I would already have sent operatives to collect it. I know that one of the northern tribes has it, in a place called the Shrine, but no one I know has ever set eyes on it.

  Wu looked at Lobsang. He's probably asking him mentally if he knows more than I do about it, she decided.

  She hoped the fool knew enough not to try to lie in a mental conversation.

  Wu looked from Lobsang back to her. “I might be back,” he said, and turned back to his hovercraft.

  The lift swizzles began to hiss as he strode back to it. By the time he reached it, the platform had already risen a foot above the surface of the roof. He stepped onto it as calmly as if he were treading on stairs and entered the glass bubble, shutting the door behind him. The hiss of the swizzles became a roar and the platform ascended, turned slowly, and then accelerated north.

  Chapter 2

  Lobsang: The Pact

  “Yield and remain whole

  Bend and remain straight ”

  – The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tse

  As the emperor of China roared off in his hovercraft, Lobsang looked at Rochelle again. “Now where were we?”

  She stared back at him. “Seriously? You want to go back to killing each other? After that?”

  He regarded her. “Nothing's changed. My family are still dead, and I vowed I'd kill you for that, or die trying.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh get a clue, Dog. They're not dead. I only said that to rile you. To make you so angry you'd be reckless.”

  “Well it worked,” he said. “Yet now you say you lied. Why should I believe you this time? You killed my father.”

  The answer came immediately inside his head. Because I can't lie during mind-to-mind and you know it. The rest of your family is alive. I wouldn't kill women and children who were no threat
to me.

  He scowled at her. “Well now you know that I am a threat to you. Yet you want to call a truce?”

  She studied him. “It seems to me there are bigger issues to deal with now. You heard him. He's coming back.”

  “Might be back, is what I heard.”

  She shook her head. “He flew all the way across the ocean looking for the Shrine? You really believe that? He didn't look as if he needed any healing to me.”

  “Then why is he here?”

  “Because China isn't enough for him.” She shaded her eyes with a hand and gazed at the speck in the sky. “Isn't it obvious? He's going to invade.”

  “With one hovercraft and four wizards? I doubt it.”

  She frowned. “Even with all that Xander taught you, you're still thinking like a librarian, Dog. For all we know he could have a fleet of hovercraft and an army of wizards.”

  He laughed. “For all we know he's only got the one, and he needs those four flunkies to help him fly it. Oh, it's nice I suppose,” he conceded, “but not very stable.”

  Now she was really staring at him. “It's way more than Xander and you have, isn't it? Are you really that blind?”

  “The design is inherently unstable,” he said. “Any significant difference in the thrusts from his four main swizzles and it could flip over and kill him. That's why he has those other four wizards tuning them.” He glanced northward, but the speck was gone now. I could destabilize it, he realized. All I'd have to do is mess with the weave on any of the swizzles. If I affected one of the four lifters, it could flip the thing. Or I could reverse one of the sideways thrusters, like she did with my staff, and he'd spin until he passed out.