Death's Handmaiden

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘You’re too good for your own good.’

  ‘No. I’m really not. Do you know Rochester Hunt Leighton?’

  Mitsuko looked over her shoulder to where Rochester was now walking alongside Melissa. ‘We haven’t been introduced. Good afternoon, Rochester Hunt. I am Mitsuko Trenton Sonkei. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.’

  Rochester made a sound which was probably not a word in any known language. ‘Chess is worse than me when he has to talk to attractive women,’ Melissa supplied. ‘He’s pleased to meet you too.’

  Mitsuko smiled and went back to looking where she was going. ‘Well, this should make for interesting lunch conversation.’

  ~~~

  Rochester Hunt was in love. At least, that’s what it looked like to Nava and Melissa. Mitsuko had at least as much metaphysics education as he had and seemed happy to talk about it. Nava could keep up with Rochester because she had a greater innate talent for magic, but Mitsuko had been privately educated with a fairly solid basis in the science of magic drummed into her even before she started at SAS2. It was a match made in heaven, so long as he remembered to keep his eyes fixed on Mitsuko’s face.

  ‘Of course,’ Mitsuko said, ‘historically, native talent for sorcery was how it all began. It’s not surprising that the science is easier to understand when you have strong talent.’ The subject had drifted a little, because Melissa was looking embarrassed at her inability to keep up. Now they were discussing why Melissa was having trouble while Nava was not – so much – despite the fact that they appeared to have roughly equal basic knowledge of the subject.

  ‘It is?’ Melissa asked.

  ‘Oh, well yes, that’s true,’ Rochester agreed. ‘Tamara Edison Erickson’s magical talent was only confirmed several years after her first metaphysics paper was published in twenty eighty-three on the old calendar, but she was a sorceress, if only a latent one. Her talent allowed her to see something in an unpopular quantum gravity theory, loop quantum gravity, which no one else had seen. While her work was initially scorned as pseudo-science, experimental evidence began to pile up and she saw her theories recognised and turned into reality within her lifetime.’

  ‘Including faster-than-light space travel,’ Melissa said, a little gleefully. ‘First successfully tested in twenty-one thirty-one.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Without that, we’d probably never have been born. Humans would probably still be stuck on Earth and that’s no place to bring up kids.’ Melissa frowned. ‘It’s been over five hundred years, whichever calendar you use, you’d think things would’ve got better there by now.’

  ‘We, by which I mean humans of the past, made a terrible mess of the place,’ Mitsuko said. ‘We could go back and, perhaps, speed things up a little. We’ve developed terraforming techniques which might help, but those are mostly aimed at warming up cold planets and getting a viable atmosphere. We know that Earth can recover on its own, but the processes are slow and helping them along would be horrendously expensive. Frankly, aside from nostalgia, there’s no reason to make the place habitable again. The only reason for owning a planet is living space, and we have plenty of that on the much more pleasant worlds we’ve colonised.’

  ‘People live there,’ Rochester put in. ‘Not many, but there are a few hardy souls who refused to leave or became obsessed with going back.’

  ‘Or who want to be largely unobserved by the rest of society. The Earth system is within Clan Worlds space, but no clan claims it and the ASF only goes there when there’s a specific reason to. If you want somewhere to hide, Earth can be a very effective hideout. So, a lot of the people living there are, frankly, criminals. You’re very quiet, Nava.’

  Nava looked up from her food, which happened to be a Shinden speciality today: rice cakes known as onigiri. ‘I’ve nothing to add to the conversation.’ Her gaze swept out and around the hall once again, looking for trouble as she had been for the last twenty minutes. She dropped her onigiri and got to her feet, pushing her chair back. For a brief instant, it seemed like the chair had fallen, hitting the ground with a bang, but the chair was still standing, and the bang repeated. There was also screaming, shouting, and the start of spreading panic. ‘Melissa, if you would protect Mitsuko,’ Nava said as she started forward, ‘that would be very helpful. I’ll deal with him.’

  Him was a student. He was dressed in the usual male uniform and he looked about right for a first or second year. Dark hair, mid-brown skin, dark eyes. Holding a combat shotgun which he seemed to be randomly firing at anyone who came into his line of sight. There were three students down now. One of them would never be getting up and the other two looked bad. There was no cover in the refectory aside from the tables and no one seemed to know what to do about a man using a purely physical, somewhat archaic weapon to attack them. It was mostly first years in this refectory: they had not had battle tactics drilled into them yet.

  ‘Hey, you!’ Nava yelled. The shout was far more effective than she had expected it to be. There was a slight pause and then the gunman yanked his weapon up to his shoulder and began to spray heavy lead slugs in Nava’s direction, walking forward as he fired. Mostly, the weapon’s recoil was making it inaccurate; the walls and ceiling were going to need work, but few of the slugs were on target. One slammed into a force field a centimetre or so from Nava’s skin, flattening into a pancake and causing a shimmering ripple in the air. Another round hit its mark and was equally ineffective. Behind Nava, a Force Wall Melissa had put up shattered as a stray round hit home, but that bullet was stopped too before it could reach anyone else.

  The gun stopped firing and it seemed to take the man a second to realise that his drum magazine was empty. He reached for it, pulling it free and letting it drop as he reached for a second magazine hanging from his tunic’s belt. That was when Nava’s fist smashed into his jaw. The impact ripples in her own force armour expanded out from the point of contact. The man’s head snapped back on his neck, jerked forward again, and then he was crumpling onto the tiled floor, his empty weapon clattering as it fell beside him.

  Nava glanced around at the others. No injuries, and Mitsuko was using her ketcom, almost certainly to contact Courtney. Melissa had put up another Force Wall, replacing the one which had fallen. She was shy and she fainted at the sight of blood, but she functioned well in a combat situation. Turning, Nava started toward the students who had been hit before she intervened. Maybe some of them would survive the experience, if they were lucky.

  ~~~

  ‘He’s still alive,’ Courtney said. ‘Did you feel some sudden urge for compassion or something?’

  They were in the infirmary. All the living injured had been taken to the infirmary, though two of them were basically there for a check-up; Nava’s magic had brought them back from the brink of death and they were going to be fine. The gunman was still unconscious, and now he was fixed to the bed by secure straps. Nava was fairly sure that was unnecessary, but she had said nothing when it had been done.

  ‘He isn’t my enemy,’ Nava said.

  ‘He was shooting at you with a fully automatic combat shotgun. If that doesn’t make him an enemy, what does?’

  Nava regarded the man in the bed. His name was Enrique Tapia Espanola. He was a first-year student in the combat stream, an unremarkable member of the student body who had, apparently, elected to go hog-wild with a shotgun in the school’s first-year refectory. ‘When he wakes up, he’s going to have a ridiculous story about a waking dream of some form. He’ll say he was trapped in his body and unable to stop himself. All he could do was watch as he gunned down his fellow students.’

  ‘Insanity plea?’

  ‘I should listen to what he has to say. Have you ever heard of the Puppetry spell?’

  Mitsuko swore under her breath, her eyes flashing. Courtney’s eyes widened and then narrowed. Melissa and Rochester just looked confused. ‘I haven’t,’ Melissa said.

  ‘It’s illegal on every one of the Clan Worlds,’
Mitsuko said. ‘For good reason.’

  Nava shrugged. ‘As a policing tool, it would actually be quite effective and entirely non-lethal. It allows a magician to take control of a subject’s voluntary nervous system, Mel. It’s not mind control. The subject is fully aware but can’t control their muscles. If you’re skilled in its use, you can make your puppet appear almost normal, but it’s very hard to animate everything and the eyes suffer the worst. They tend not to focus properly because the magician can’t look through them. For the same reason, the eyes are often a little off in their aim, so to speak. In this case, the puppeteer was not bothering with facial animation at all.’

  ‘You’ve seen it used before?’ Mitsuko asked.

  ‘I’ve… seen it before, yes.’

  ‘Can you use it?’ Courtney asked, her voice hard.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘But we’ve only your word for that.’

  ‘Courtney,’ Mitsuko snapped.

  The captain of the SSF dipped her eyes away. ‘I apologise. That was… uncalled for.’ Her eyes lifted to look once again at Nava. ‘You don’t actually care, do you?’

  ‘I care that you’re wasting your time attempting to find some reason to dislike me when there’s a killer wandering around our campus,’ Nava replied evenly. The corners of her lips shifted slightly upward. ‘Another killer.’

  ‘Nava, you’re not–’ Mitsuko began.

  ‘I killed Devin Girard. However, I was not just referring to me. There are a number of students and teachers here with blood on their hands. That includes Courtney Martell. The problem we have is that someone on the campus is perfectly happy to use mass murder as a cover for whatever scheme they have in mind. I don’t believe they’re a student.’

  ‘Someone from outside?’ Mitsuko asked, frowning. ‘It’s difficult to believe anyone could infiltrate the school’s security and go unnoticed for this long.’

  ‘The skillset suggests a particular type of terrorist. A certain… faction.’

  Courtney jumped as though she had been shot. ‘You’re not serious!’

  ‘Emotion Control, Puppetry, Invisibility. It suggests one of their operatives.’

  ‘Emotion Control? You’re lumping that fight at the judo demonstration into this?’

  Nava nodded. ‘I am. They like to cause chaos. Their aim is to destabilise the clan system and destroy the Clan Worlds.’

  ‘Who?!’ Rochester almost yelled. Frustration was making him assertive; he really seemed to hate not knowing something.

  Courtney glowered at the floor and lowered her voice. ‘The Redwing Faction. No one is to repeat that to anyone in the school. I’m telling you now so you won’t bug Nava Ward about it and end up spreading the rumour.’

  ‘They’re supposed to be extinct,’ Rochester said. ‘Didn’t the ASF wipe out the last of them last year?’

  Melissa nodded. ‘It was all over the news last April. They had some sort of base on Earth, of all places, and it was raided and destroyed.’

  ‘Anyone who thought that was their only operating base was a fool,’ Nava replied. ‘It was foolish of the Clan Council to suggest the Redwings were finished after that operation. I don’t believe they’ll want it blabbed about that a Redwing operative is here causing trouble.’

  ‘No,’ Mitsuko said. ‘They won’t.’ She sighed. ‘Now I’m going to have to call my family.’ She turned to Nava. ‘You’re quite sure that this is them?’

  ‘No. I can’t be absolutely sure. But this is the kind of operation they run, using the kind of magic they use.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ Courtney asked.

  ‘I’m not at liberty to discuss that.’ Nava regarded Courtney’s exasperated expression and shrugged. ‘Everyone has their secrets, Courtney Martell. If you wish to find out what mine are, you’ll need to ask someone other than me.’

  ‘Who?’

  Nava’s lips twitched again. ‘I’m not at liberty to discuss that.’

  ~~~

  ‘Courtney’s not going to let it go,’ Mitsuko said. She was speaking quickly, between moans, gasps, and the occasional whimper. ‘She’ll dig.’

  Nava lifted her head briefly. ‘I’m aware. And you won’t?’

  There were some unrecognisable sounds and then, ‘Maybe. Maybe I’ll find a… way to get it out of you.’

  ‘Torture? That doesn’t work, you know.’

  ‘There’s more than o-one way to t-torture someone. What you’re d-doing now c-could be c-considered– Ah!’

  235/2/7.

  ‘Quintessence. Can someone explain to me what it is?’ Pause. ‘Anyone other than Rochester Hunt?’

  The speaker was Lambert Stenger Mendel, metaphysics teacher to class 12C. He was an adequate metaphysics teacher, maybe even a quite good one. He was an older man with an academic background, though his age barely showed thanks to modern medicine. His brown hair had no grey in it, his body was moderately fit for someone who spent his life in classrooms and labs, and his blue eyes were clear. He hated it when the only person willing to answer his questions was Rochester. Nava put her hand up.

  ‘Nava Ward?’

  ‘Quintessence is the fifth fundamental force, the other four being gravitation, electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. At its most basic level, quintessence is responsible for the phenomena formerly known as dark energy and dark matter. It moderates the force of gravity depending upon its energy density in a particular location. A peculiarity of quintessence is that it can both affect and be affected by sentient minds. It is the fundamental energy source and active component of all forms of sorcery.’

  ‘Very good, Nava Ward,’ Lambert Stenger said. ‘Today, we will be going over the mathematics of quintessence theory so that you all understand how variance in the scalar field affects the universe and your magic. The explanation you’ve just heard is a simplification of the true nature of quintessence, but it is the one we give when discussing the subject at its most basic level and it meets our needs when using quintessence to enact changes in reality.’

  It was, Nava thought, probably going to be a tough but boring lesson. She had a moderately good grasp on the basics of quintessence theory. You needed it to do even the most basic of magical improvisation. Knowing how quintessence worked was pretty basic to magic of any form, but she supposed they had to go over it in the first year because there were bound to be some students who had no education in metaphysics at all.

  Her desk flashed up a message window and Nava’s eyes flicked to it. A message from Mitsuko, which might be important. Besides, Nava could split her attention between that and Lambert Stenger without difficulty. A gesture opened the message. All it said was ‘Are you free on Saturday night?’ That was going to need clarification at lunch.

  ~~~

  ‘I’ve been invited to a family party,’ Mitsuko said at lunchtime.

  ‘A party?’ Nava asked.

  ‘That’s what it’s called, but it’s more of a political gathering. Boring, but I’m required to attend. I would like you to escort me.’

  ‘As your bodyguard? I would have thought that the Trenton family could handle its own security.’

  ‘It’s overkill, but considering the situation and our, um, suspect list, I would feel happier if you were there to handle security at a personal level.’

  Nava looked at Mitsuko for a long second, holding her eyes. Mitsuko looked back, a slight smile on her face which spoke of encouragement rather than mischief or deception. ‘I don’t have clothing suitable for some high-society dinner party.’

  ‘It’ll be catered, obviously, but it’s more of a buffet than a dinner. Your table manners will not be found wanting. I’ll take care of a suitable dress. Don’t worry about that.’

  ‘You can’t say no,’ Melissa put in. ‘The Trenton family is one of the most powerful on the planet! You won’t get the chance with that kind of company very often.’

  ‘That is not an encouragement to go,’ Nava said. ‘I have no fear of inadvertentl
y insulting someone due to bad manners, but those are not really my kind of people.’

  ‘Then I suppose I’m not,’ Mitsuko said. She did not sound especially affronted.

  ‘You are a student here, just like me and… I suppose I shouldn’t judge other members of your family without meeting them.’

  ‘I assure you that some of them grate on my nerves. Others, however, do not.’

  ‘And I did agree to act as your security until the election is decided. If you have concerns, I should be there. You are asking a lot of me, Suki.’

  ‘I know,’ Mitsuko replied, smiling brightly. ‘I’ll make it up to you somehow.’

  ‘Hm. How are we getting to wherever this junket is happening?’

  ‘It’s taking place at my family home. Family home as in the house my parents own. They’ll send transport for us. All you need to do is have an overnight bag ready on Saturday evening.’

  235/2/9.

  ‘That’s the transport?’ Nava asked. The school had a heliport because it was not exactly close to anywhere and sometimes important people needed to get there in a hurry. Actually, important people who had to visit the school were almost always in a hurry, so the heliport saw reasonable use. Today, the Trenton family had been given permission to land a tiltrotor there. It was now visible on final approach.

  ‘That’s it,’ Mitsuko said.

  ‘That’s a combat aircraft, Suki. Your family has sent something designed for ground suppression during infantry landings to pick us up.’

  ‘I guess they’re taking security seriously.’

  ‘How do they even own something like that?’

  Mitsuko shrugged. ‘Sonkei clan.’

  ‘Right. How long are we going to be in the air?’ Nava checked her ketcom; it was six in the evening.

  ‘Around ninety minutes. We’ll have about thirty minutes to get changed. Uh, do you have any makeup with you?’

  ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t really wear makeup.’

  ‘I’d noticed. We’ll use some of mine. You should really go the whole way if you’re going to dress up for this.’