Cosmic Catalyst (Shamans & Shifters Space Opera Book 2)

by Jenny Schwartz

I couldn’t sort out my emotions toward Ivan. He had tricked me, used me, nearly killed millions of people…and yet, he was my grandfather.

  Since finding my biological father, Rick Jekyll, I could no longer think of Ivan as my only blood family, but he remained the man who’d been the secret, vital, shamanic figure from my childhood. The one who in his infrequent meetings with me had engendered an independent streak in me, one which seldom showed itself, but when it did, I clung to its decisions stubbornly.

  That independent streak and my confused emotions led directly to my first real fight with Vulf, and my stricken understanding of how the bond between us that so powerfully and beautifully shared our positive emotions, could strike us both with the pain of anger and betrayal. Neither of us could understand the other’s point of view—or rather, we could, but we couldn’t share it.

  It started so innocently. With the autopilot speeding us to the next wormhole and Ahab monitoring surrounding traffic and wider, galactic current affairs, Vulf and I were free to pursue our own preoccupations.

  I headed for the food dispenser and coffee. My jangled nerves didn’t need more caffeine, but even without it, I wouldn’t rest, so why not indulge? Too many thoughts churned in my mind. Some spilled into speech. “My grandfather’s utterly wrong in what he attempted, but he’s right that the Ceph need to be freed.”

  Vulf swung around. He’d been headed for the cargo hold, on his way down to work out in the gym. He crossed the recreation cabin to me with fast steps.

  As my mug filled with coffee, I blinked at his forceful stride. I put the mug down when he spoke.

  “No,” he growled. “The Ceph cannot be freed, and you must not attempt it.” He caged me in with my back against the counter.

  I shook my head. “You’re giving me too much credit if you think I could free an entire planet from stasis.”

  “I’m not the only one who thinks it. Listening to the message, you focused on Ivan. Fair enough, he’s your grandfather. But Professor Summer isn’t demanding our presence on Naidoc because of Ivan’s hunger strike.”

  I put both hands on his chest and pushed him back a step, winning enough space that I could turn around and pick up my coffee mug. “Maybe he…” I put the mug down again without taking a sip. “I’m one shaman, Vulf. I can’t do anything alone.”

  He moved back into my space. In fact, he picked me up, set me on the counter, and stepped in between my legs. His arms wrapped around me, but without their familiar comfort. His body was too rigid with tension, and not tension of the good, sexy kind. His blue eyes were the light color of glacial ice as his wolf stared at me. Both sides of his nature were stirred up.

  I felt his worry for me through our bond, but I failed to comprehend the depth and nature of it. I smoothed my hands over his chest and up to his shoulders. “Don’t worry. If Professor Summer or any other Meitj ask me my opinion on the Ceph’s status, I’ll be tactful.”

  He huffed. “The problem is that you’ll be truthful. I accepted your pity for the Ceph’s situation. They are the only other sha energy users in the galaxy. But I hadn’t expected you to side with Ivan and want them freed.”

  My hands dropped from his shoulders. “It’s not as if I’m going to threaten to blow people up if the Ceph aren’t freed. I just think they should be.”

  “It would be too reckless. They were shut down for a reason. You heard their history. They were conquering and obliterating solar systems and entire species. They were an unstoppable force until one of their own turned on them.”

  “They were unstoppable forty two millennia ago,” I stressed the immense time scale. “Things have changed since then. The Meitj and mLa’an have advanced hugely technologically, as have other species. New species, like humans, have been discovered and joined Galaxy Proper. A minor species from a single planet could be contained till they could be reasoned with. Shamans—sha energy users—aren’t all-powerful. The action of disrupters and blasters on us proves that.”

  He slapped the counter beside me. “Bang! That’s all it takes and you’ve destroyed those weapons. Give you a single second and the weapons are so much expensive junk. We don’t know what the Ceph’s powers are. They could be, probably are, even more powerful than you. Human shamans are still learning about sha energy.”

  “So what would you do?” I wriggled around him and jumped to the floor. “If you think the Ceph are so dangerous, why not just nuke their planet? Obliterate them.”

  “I would.”

  I stopped. Everything in me froze.

  He folded his arms. “The Ceph are an unacceptable risk.”

  “They’re a people.”

  “Who destroy everyone in their path. They don’t even keep conquered people as slaves.” His voice softened. “Jaya, sometimes it is ‘kill or be killed’.”

  “No.”

  He shrugged, but it wasn’t a gesture that meant the conversation was irrelevant. It meant that the conversation mattered too much and he wanted it done. Finished. He hated arguing with me. His discomfort radiated from him, but like me, he wasn’t going to back down. “The question of what I’d do is hypothetical. The Meitj promised Theta to maintain the Ceph in stasis until there was a sha energy using species capable of matching the Ceph. The Meitj Emperor won’t let anyone destroy the Ceph while they are under his protection.”

  “Some protection.” I snorted. “Locked in stasis.”

  “Until a sha energy using species is capable of matching the Ceph,” Vulf repeated. He stared at me.

  I stared back, dumbfounded. “You can’t mean me?”

  He scowled. A low growl rumbled in his chest. “I’m afraid that the Meitj might.”

  “But why on Earth would you think that?” I used the anachronistic saying out of sheer bafflement. “I’m powerful—for a shaman. But the Ceph rampaged through the galaxy. There’s no way I could…” My voice slowed from confidence to perturbed silence.

  Vulf closed the distance between us. “I’ve had more dealings with the Meitj than you have, and I didn’t know that Professor Summer’s family have been treating the shifter clans as their pet scientific project for generations.”

  “Not ‘pet’,” I protested. “He obviously cares about you.”

  Vulf’s mouth twisted in bleak amusement. “People care about their pets. But Professor Summer’s attitude toward shifters isn’t the issue. It’s what he wants from you that worries me. He could have simply sent you a message that Ivan has decided on a hunger strike and that the Meitj won’t force-feed him.”

  I blinked rapidly. “Warning me that I should hurry to Naidoc if I want to say good-bye to my grandfather.”

  “Yes.” Regret and worry flowed through our bond to me. “Yes, but Professor Summer particularly mentioned the Ceph and that Ivan is willing to die to advance the cause of freeing them. He also said that he’s waiting on Naidoc to talk with you. We’ve only just visited him on Origin. What does he want to talk to you—not me, I’m not mentioned—about? The more I consider it, the more I think the Meitj might pressure you to do something related to freeing the Ceph. And I want you to say no.”

  I flung myself away from him and paced the length of the recreation cabin.

  Vulf leant against the end of the dining table nearest the sofa, watching me. Then he put an arm out and snagged me to him. “We’re not going to agree on what to do with the Ceph, at least, not without a lot more time, energy and, maybe, yelling. I can accept that, for now. But there’s something else you should consider before you promise the Meitj anything.”

  He ran his hands up and down my arms, his blue eyes intently searching my expression.

  “Of course!”

  He sighed faintly, his own emotions volatile but under control. “The Ceph aren’t the only people trapped.”

  Surprise at his statement relaxed my body from its angry resistance. Without thinking, I leaned into him. “There are others?”

  “Your cousin Kohia, my sister Edith, all the shifters.
I sat in the Conclave hearing the desperate hope in our people’s questions and watching their faces when I shifted into my robot wolf form. You manipulated sha energy to initiate my first shift. You changed something just enough that my wolf can be free. All shifters crave the experience of their animal form.”

  I wrapped my arms around him, resting wearily against his shoulder. “I saw Kohia’s face when you ran around the Freel destroyer as a robot wolf. Her tiger glowed in her eyes.” I’d vowed to myself that I’d find a way to free her tiger.

  “If something happens to you, Jaya. If something goes wrong in whatever the Meitj ask of you—and they’re not sha energy users, so they won’t know if what they’re asking of you is dangerous— then you may end up unable to access sha energy. I won’t let you risk that fate. You are a shaman. I’ve seen your joy when you play with sha energy. Don’t risk that, and please, don’t steal from our people the chance to shift into their animal selves. What if you’re the only shaman who can trigger that first shift?”

  “Vulf,” I protested in a shaken voice.

  “I’m not fighting with you, and I’m not trying to manipulate you.” He rubbed my back, offering comfort. “But attempting to free the Ceph would be wrong.”

  Alone in the recreation cabin, I lay on my back on the sofa and played with the sha energy that swirled lazily around the Orion, flowing in rivers of power through the Foundation Sector, and flaring brightly in my shamanic vision.

  Vulf had gone to the gym to take out his emotions on the innocent exercise equipment.

  We’d both forgotten about Ahab while we’d argued, and he hadn’t spoken up to remind us of his presence. Perhaps he thought that our discussion, while having consequences for the entire galaxy if Vulf was right and the Meitj did want me to try something that might assist in freeing the Ceph, was a personal discussion. He was right. Vulf and I had to grow into our relationship. We were mates, and that meant learning how to survive and traverse the difficult elements of life together, as well as the happy, challenging parts.

  Whatever the reason for Ahab’s silence, I didn’t break it.

  I lay and let the sha energy flow through me. Idly, I sent it trickling as water might from pool to pool in a natural cascade. This was the sort of playing with sha energy that I’d done as a child, before the Academy taught me to shape the energy into fixed patterns for using it.

  I’d never discussed with my Academy teachers that their patterns weren’t the only ones that enabled sha energy to divert from its habitual flow. At that young age, I’d been unable to conceptualize what I knew by instinct.

  Before Earth’s evacuation, humanity had known of sha energy. It had been considered evil, the ill-omened energy that practices such as Feng Shui sought to block. As the sha energy flowed from pool to pool in the Foundation Sector, I wasn’t manipulating it as the Academy taught, but guiding it to spill into existing negative spaces. There was an eeriness to those blank spaces that could well have triggered our ancestors’ atavistic repudiation of sha energy. Perhaps the first generation shamans among those who’d evacuated Earth had flinched from it, too.

  Guiding sha energy into those negative spaces meant trusting that the blankness was not a void, but rather undefined potential that became defined as the sha energy filled it.

  A child definitely couldn’t have explained how she “played” with sha energy in this manner. But now, as an upset and temporarily rudderless adult, I lost myself to it. As I did so, I began to find the words to describe it.

  When Vulf had first kidnapped me, I’d destroyed his disrupter by guiding sha energy into a negative space that coexisted with the reality of the disrupter’s energy pattern. The sudden clash of the two energies as the sha energy brought the negative space into conflicting existence caused the disrupter to explode.

  Just how rare was it for shamans to perceive the negative spaces and the patterns that joined them?

  Using them was not about imposing a pattern as Academy-taught shamans did, but trusting the eerie existing ones—if you were able to perceive them.

  I released the sha energy and relaxed my shamanic vision before snuggling deeper into the sofa.

  Vulf woke me, sitting on the edge of the sofa by my hip and caressing my face.

  I woke smiling, reaching for him through the mate bond with my soul, and with my arms before I remembered what he’d said earlier. “You’d really obliterate the Ceph?”

  While I’d slept, he’d finished with the gym, showered and dressed in a clean utility suit. He hadn’t shaved though, and the dark golden stubble edging his jaw emphasized the strong line of it.

  He rested his hand on my waist, fingers curving in a light, claiming touch. “Why do you think Rjee and Djarl were so willing to ally themselves with Corsairs, going so far as to become one of the shifter clans by law?”

  “They need allies. We offered. They saw advantages…”

  “They saw a propensity for violence that exceeded their own, but was controlled by laws. Laws that we live by.” His fingers flexed. My shirt had ridden up as I slept, and he slipped his fingers beneath it, gaining skin contact before he continued. “You’ve studied shifters’ history, politics and society, but I don’t think you’ve emotionally grasped it.”

  I’d have wriggled up to sit indignantly, but I hesitated to break the skin-to-skin contact of his hand on my stomach. We were traversing difficult new ground in our relationship and we needed every sense of connection we could get. “I understand that Corsairs was bought and is sustained by the proceeds of piracy, and that piracy is violent.”

  “We do have legal trade and some industry, as well as agriculture,” Vulf said wryly. “But concentrate on Corsairs. The planet is never attacked because we made an example of the Freel House that tried an orbital assault three generations ago, when the planet was still new to us. We obliterated them, just as we show no mercy in space battles. To keep our children safe, we can’t afford to show weakness. We can’t leave enemies to regroup and attack us again. Corsairs is the safe place where we raise our children. It is our home.”

  Intense, protective urgency pulsed through our bond as Vulf spoke. He meant what he said with every fiber of his being. “The Ceph’s history shows that when they reach Corsairs, they’ll annihilate it. By shifter law, by my upbringing, training and natural inclination, I would take out the threat first.” He took a deep breath, broad shoulders and muscled chest lifting and expanding. “It is only that the Ceph are contained that prevents me trying. They’re too dangerous a threat to loose in the galaxy.” He flattened his palm over my stomach, over where, if I was pregnant, our baby would be. “Don’t do anything to free the Ceph.”

  As conflicted as I was, I neither promised nor refused him. He noticed, but when I dragged him down over me, he came willingly, and we made love with an intense, quietly desperate need for each other.

  Why was I conflicted? Vulf was following his nature. He even made sense. Certainly, many in Galaxy Proper would agree with him if they learned of the Ceph’s existence.

  But I recalled my grandfather directing sha energy weapons at Shaidoc, the Meitj trading planet. He’d threatened to end the lives of millions unless the Ceph were freed. Vulf and I had stopped Ivan from carrying out his terrible threat, but what made some sentients’ lives more valuable than others?

  Did the threat that the Ceph had presented in the past justify killing them now? Did it justify continuing to cage them by holding them in stasis?

  It was an uncomfortable journey to Naidoc. Vulf and I didn’t discuss the Ceph anymore. But the knowledge that I refused to promise Vulf that I wouldn’t help free them lay between us.

  “I won’t do anything reckless.” I could promise him that.

  He paused just inside the exit from the Orion. We were safely docked at the gleaming space dock above Naidoc. Security had cleared us to descend planetside, and we’d been informed that Professor Summer waited for us at the Meitj Imperial Palace.

  I a
ssumed that in the weeks since Ivan’s dramatic, explosive and temporary escape, the Meitj had repaired the section of the palace that he’d damaged.

  Vulf ran his hand down my spine. When he ran his hand back up, he cupped the nape of my neck beneath my ponytail. “I trust you, Jaya. I love you. What I don’t trust is how others may abuse your compassion. But I’ll be there, Stargirl. Trust me?”

  “Always.” I stood on tiptoe and kissed him.

  He kissed me back, passionately. Beneath our dispute ran a raw, true love that nothing would destroy. Whatever happened, we’d be there for each other.

  Then Vulf opened the hatch, and we exited the Orion for the Naidoc space dock.

  It gleamed with the understated wealth and desire for order that characterized Meitj constructions. Its geometric layout and wide, clearly marked passages made navigating it both swift and easy. We travelled down in the space elevator with a party of ten Meitj. Their grey exoskeletons were etched with green triangles that helped to establish that they were a group of some kind. Perhaps family. Perhaps members of a shared profession. They were courteous and maintained an inward focus on one another, although with their multi-faceted eyes, they were probably observing Vulf and I even as they pretended we weren’t there. Such is the etiquette of sharing elevator space.

  Disgorged from the elevator, Vulf scanned for danger as we ventured out into the sunlit day. The bubble car rank was to our right. To our left stood a Meitj guard, his identity proclaimed by the blue interlocking circles etched into his exoskeleton, and by the blaster strapped to his belt.

  Had the Meitj taken to overtly guarding their space dock or was the guard waiting for Vulf and me?

  He saw us and inclined his head. He was waiting for us, then. “Shaman Romanov—” The guard broke off, reaching for his blaster.

  To me, he moved in slow motion. Something had struck me. Not a blaster shot or a disrupter being activated, nor even a fast physical blow. Poison. The realization coincided with my knees melting and my imminent collapse to the ground.