Bitter Wind (Death's Handmaiden Book 2)

by Niall Teasdale

  There was a chorus of ‘Yes, Miss Hoshi Horne’ from the group. It was a little sporadic and half-hearted in places, but it happened.

  ‘Okay, let’s get moving. We’ll be stopping for lunch in two hours. Let’s put some forest behind us before we do.’

  ~~~

  Jukai was not the densest of forests, but it was dense enough to make things a little difficult. That was about perfect for people with limited experience of marching across country. Nava was no hiker since, if she really had to, she could fly long distances in considerably less time than it took to walk, but she did have some experience of woodland survival. Just not this woodland. Pretty much all the other students had never spent more than recreational time outside of towns and cities, so the first couple of hours were a learning experience.

  All the forests on Shinden were essentially plantations. Every single one of them had been planted by humans. However, Jukai had been planted for recreation rather than forestry. The trees were relatively slow-growing, deciduous species which had been genetically adjusted to the conditions on their new home. Every one of them was pollinated by wind and they were better at fixing nitrogen than Earth plants, which frequently used symbiotic bacteria for that purpose. The forest was not a monoculture, but it was far less diverse than the original forests back on Earth. There were bushes and fungi on the forest floor. Some of both could provide food and none of them were poisonous to humans. The fungi were primarily included in the ecosystem to ensure that fallen trees decayed since most of the usual decomposition vectors were missing. Jukai sort of looked like a forest on old Earth, unless you had actually seen a forest on old Earth.

  To Nava, it was something of a conundrum since she had been taught survival skills in Earth woodland but half of that training was useless in an entirely artificial ecosystem. There were no animals to trap or shoot. She recognised some of the fruit bushes and mushrooms, but others looked entirely unlike anything she was used to. Actually surviving in a forest like this was, she realised, virtually impossible. Without rations to eat, you were going to have a lot of difficulty. That was why almost half of the load they were each carrying was meal packs.

  Nava’s pack for lunch promised soup, a ‘beef’ stew, and apple pie for dessert. That sounded… okay. She broke the pack into three parts and pulled the tab on the bottom of the soup container. After a second or so she could feel it getting warm, so she put it aside to heat up properly and looked around at her teammates. Hoshi, she guessed, had used a pack like this before, but it did not look like anyone else had. Rochester was very carefully reading the instructions printed on the pack. Most of the combat students had already broken their packs up and were now trying to put the instructions back together so they could read them. Mitsuko, Melissa, and the remaining support students had watched Nava and were now following her lead.

  ‘What makes you think I have any idea what I’m doing?’ Nava asked.

  ‘Well… you always do.’ The speaker was Lydia Bonfils Plank, winner of the class prize for ‘woman most likely to be seen tanning at a health spa.’ Tall and beautiful, Lydia looked like the kind of woman who became student president or head cheerleader and went on to marry the captain of the football team. However, cheerleaders and football were no longer a thing, and Lydia was terribly insecure, deferring to her friends whenever possible.

  ‘That is entirely untrue, Lydia. You will discover this when the winter ball comes around and I have to dance.’

  ‘Lydia Bonfils does have a point though,’ Barrington Roe Bishop said. ‘You may be lacking in certain social skills, and I can’t agree with your morals, but you generally know what you’re doing when it comes to things like this.’

  ‘I think I should probably say thank you, Barrington.’ Word that Mitsuko and Nava were dating had gone around the school’s gossip circuit – and hence to the outside world – like lightning. It had such thorough penetration at this point that even someone like Barrington had heard it. He was a typical Bishop: just a little too holier-than-thou. Worse, he was young enough to still believe what his elders told him. He was, however, quite capable of compartmentalising practicality and morals, so though he disapproved of Nava’s choice of partner and her choice to have sex outside of marriage, he still considered her a good person to be on a survival field trip with. ‘These packs are just about standard everywhere and I think they have been since they were invented.’

  ‘Survival rations,’ Melissa said. ‘I’ve heard bad things about survival rations.’

  ‘Oh, these aren’t survival rations,’ Nava said. She picked up her soup and peeled back the seal. She sniffed. ‘Tomato, I think.’ Carefully, in case it was too hot, Nava sipped her soup and nodded. ‘Tomato. Not bad. If this were survival rations… Well, there wouldn’t be soup. Even if there was, it wouldn’t taste this good. These are meal packs which are to survival rations as a well-cooked steak is to boiled shoe leather.’

  Melissa grinned. ‘And suddenly I’m feeling a lot better about this whole week.’

  ~~~

  By evening, there was a light drizzle falling. The largely leafless trees did little to stop the rain from reaching the ground and there was only so long most people could keep an Umbrella cantrip going before they had to give up. Unless you were Nava or, apparently, Hoshi.

  Some of the combat students were learning a new form of respect for the metaphysics teacher because she could run Gather Quintessence alongside another spell, thus allowing her to keep herself dry while they had to suffer the rain worming its way down the necks of their combat uniforms. Until they twigged why the support students were staying dry anyway and most of them came, cap in hand, to Nava to have the more advanced Umbrella spell cast on them. That one worked for ninety minutes without you having to constantly feed it quintessence and Nava had gone around and cast it on Mitsuko and her classmates when it seemed that the rain was not going to stop.

  ‘Don’t you think they might get suspicious?’ Mitsuko asked, keeping her voice down.

  ‘Of what?’ Nava asked in return.

  ‘Well, that Umbrella spell you’re casting is a lot more complex than the basic one. You don’t think they might notice something odd when you can cast it as a cantrip?’

  ‘They’re your classmates. Do you think they will? Do you think they even know how complex it is? Even if they do, don’t you think they’ll assume I have it memorised as a normal spell? I mean, I’m in support so I’d know a useless spell like that, right?’

  ‘You have a very jaundiced view of the combat stream,’ Mitsuko said in a bit of a huff. Then she spoiled it. ‘And you’re probably right.’

  They stopped when it got dark and various students activated light spells to give them something to work with while they built a fire under Hoshi’s supervision. ‘We don’t need a fire,’ the teacher said, ‘since our food is self-heating. However, when the weather’s like this, a fire is good for morale.’ They had been picking up fallen branches for a while, so the fuel was taken care of. When you were dealing with a squad of magicians, lighting the fire was also a trivial matter, so long as you could scrape up some relatively dry tinder.

  Then, as they were settling down for a meal, Hoshi once again demonstrated that she was right for the task of supervising the trip. Dropping her Umbrella cantrip, she switched in a memorised spell and cast it. Suddenly the rain was no longer falling on them and the temperature was climbing into a more comfortable range. If you looked up, you could see the rain running down the surface of a translucent dome about ten metres in height.

  ‘Weather Dome,’ Hoshi said. ‘Never go on trips like this without it.’

  ‘I like this spell,’ Nava said. ‘And I suppose you can keep it up as long as you like, within reason.’

  ‘I need to sleep. So, I’ll be letting it collapse once we’re all in our sleeping bags. You can close them up and they’ll keep you warm and dry through the night. No need for magic.’

  ‘This is survival for dummies, really.’ Nava lifted
her canteen, which was far from a simple container for water. ‘I mean, vapour canteens. No need to find rivers, streams, or pools. They condense water out of the atmosphere, if there is any.’

  ‘No lack of it here,’ Mitsuko said.

  ‘Quite. Self-heating meal packs. Sleeping bags which work everywhere from deserts to Arctic tundra. This is camping for people who usually sleep in luxury hotels.’

  ‘We’ll still be looking for streams and such,’ Hoshi said, ‘but this is more an exercise in working together and getting the idea of living outside of a controlled environment. We don’t expect anyone to come away from this knowing how to survive a spaceship crash on a desert planet.’

  ‘Well no.’ Pause. ‘Unless you get rescued in the first couple of days, you wouldn’t.’

  ~~~

  ‘Why isn’t metaphysics just a part of physics?’ Lydia asked. The group were sitting around the fire, under Hoshi’s dome, chatting for a while before bed. The topics were various, but Hoshi was a metaphysics teacher – really a postgrad with a teaching qualification – so the subject matter had tended to stray that way. As a result, it was mostly the support students still chatting while the combat students had sealed themselves up in their bags.

  ‘Oh,’ Hoshi said. ‘That’s a bit complicated. You’ll learn more about that in your third year.’

  ‘Why not ask why chemistry isn’t a speciality of physics?’ Rochester asked. ‘Even biology or engineering. It’s all physics, when you come right down to it. But you don’t need to understand quantum mechanics to know how to build a bridge.’

  ‘That’s partially it,’ Hoshi agreed. ‘Part of it is that what we’ll call “regular physicists” wouldn’t accept metaphysics when it was first posited. Then they got really annoyed when Q-field theory suggested that metaphysics created the physical laws of the universe.’

  ‘It… did?’ Lydia asked. She was not the only one looking a little perplexed.

  Hoshi grimaced. ‘Like I said, this is more advanced stuff. Still, here’s the very, very basic, oversimplified version. Metaphysics posits that perturbations in the Q-field propagate the effects of observation through the universe effectively instantaneously. The observer has always had something of a special part in quantum theory. When you’re not looking at something, it exists as a superposition of possibilities. When you look, it picks one. Well, in metaphysics, that choice is initiated and propagated through the Q-field. With me so far?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lydia said. ‘That’s fairly basic, I guess.’

  ‘Right. We still can’t explain how the presence of a sentient mind causes these observations to collapse quantum superpositions, but there is evidence that, without an observer, nothing ever collapses into a concrete state. So, metaphysics suggests that the universe was nothing but a big pile of potential realities until the first observer entered into the realm of possible states of the universe. At that point, the potential observer made a potential observation, and the effects of that observation propagated to all parts of the universe, instantly.’

  ‘Oh,’ Mitsuko said. ‘I’ve never heard it put that way before.’

  ‘That implies that the universe exists with the rules and constants set as they are because they had to be to make the observation possible,’ Nava said.

  ‘Exactly!’ Hoshi said. ‘There’s a problem in cosmology known as the fine-tuning problem. It appears that the universe is just right to make us happen. Some of the constants in physics need to be right within quite small ranges or else stars don’t form or atoms won’t form. One of the arguments for why the universe is as it is is that if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be around to notice.’

  ‘The anthropic principle,’ Rochester supplied.

  ‘Yes. Metaphysics essentially says that the anthropic principle is correct in a more fundamental way than the people who proposed it envisioned. In metaphysics, the observer sets the initial conditions of the universe retroactively by making an observation. All that fine-tuning is because the first observation sets the values to make that observation possible. The universe must be as it is, or it would still just be one potential universe among an infinite number of others.’

  ‘I think I understand that,’ Lydia said. ‘I also think my head hurts.’

  Hoshi flashed a grin. ‘I did say it was advanced stuff. Anyway, metaphysics isn’t part of physics because the metaphysicists and the physicists can’t agree on things like that, and because separating the two makes the practical use of metaphysics easier. At some point, probably, we’ll actually work out a true understanding of how the entire universe is put together. A true theory of everything. Then metaphysics will probably be just a field of study within physics. For now, it’s easier if the two subjects are kept at arm’s length from each other. Making assumptions based on physics and trying to apply them to metaphysics just doesn’t work.’

  ‘Making assumptions isn’t the best of ideas,’ Nava said, ‘no matter what the topic.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose that’s true. And yet, we all do it.’

  ‘Especially about people,’ Melissa said. ‘And Nava’s right, it’s never a good idea.’ It was difficult to tell in the flickering light from the fire, but it seemed like Melissa was glaring at Hoshi when she spoke.

  It was also difficult to tell whether Hoshi was blushing. ‘I think it’s time we all got some sleep. We’ll be setting out again when the sun comes up.’

  ‘Do we need to set a watch?’ Nava asked.

  ‘Not really. There’s nothing in these woods that will hurt a human.’

  ‘Huh. Now that sounds a lot like an assumption…’

  235/10/27.

  Getting everyone out of their sleeping bags was not an entirely simple matter. The bags were something like a cross between a sleeping bag and a tent. Since they were designed to be closed up to provide a fully climate-controlled environment, there was a collapsible framework which gave you space for your head and shoulders. Around the torso and legs, it was a snug fit. Sleeping in one could be a little tough if you were claustrophobic, but otherwise it was very comfortable. The morning had come with grey, overcast skies and a sharp breeze which made the cool air seem colder. It was not entirely surprising that various people wanted to just stay in bed.

  ‘If you don’t come out soon,’ Nava said, ‘you won’t have time to eat breakfast.’

  The reply was somewhat muffled by the transparent shield over Mitsuko’s head. ‘Don’t want to.’

  ‘That I’d gathered, but you need to.’

  ‘Too early. Too cold. Didn’t even get sex last night.’

  Shaking her head, Nava found the release for the bag’s hood and opened it. ‘Come on, Suki. Time to be a responsible young adult.’

  ‘No fair!’ Mitsuko lifted her head and turned pleading eyes on Nava. ‘It’s cold. It’s going to rain again. We won’t get to do it until Saturday afternoon.’

  Nava could not help but think that Mitsuko’s priorities were being skewed a little by the enforced celibacy. What was she going to be like when Nava turned seventeen? Leaning closer, Nava lowered her voice. ‘Well, we could sneak off after dark and rut in the leaf litter like a couple of wild animals.’ Nava was not making any assumptions, so she was unsurprised when Mitsuko seemed to give the idea some serious consideration.

  ‘No,’ Mitsuko said, resigned to her fate, ‘it’s too cold and we’ve nowhere to take a shower.’

  ‘Mm. You’re probably right.’

  ‘Maybe we could come back in summer…’

  ~~~

  ‘This weather is miserable,’ Melissa said.

  ‘Could be worse,’ Mitsuko replied. ‘We could be tramping through a cold, dead-looking forest in the rain without Nava’s Umbrella cantrips.’

  ‘That is a valid point. It would be better if the trees had leaves though.’

  The forest was getting a bit denser as they moved deeper into it. In some ways, anyway. The trees were closer together, but the undergrowth was sparser; there was presumably less light at g
round level in the summer which kept the bushes in check. Now, however, almost all the leaves had fallen, creating a thick bed which was, in the damp conditions, slippery. The fungi were benefitting from the influx of nutrition and there were a lot of mushrooms popping up out of the litter.

  ‘It would be better if the leaves weren’t on the ground, certainly.’

  ‘Miss Hoshi Horne, can we eat these mushrooms?’ Skylar Keyes Mendel was asking the question. She was one of the combat students from Mitsuko’s class and she had told everyone to call her Sky. According to Mitsuko, she was not especially happy with her rather masculine name. She was tall and quite powerfully built, which probably did not help.

  ‘You can eat them,’ Hoshi replied. ‘I wouldn’t especially recommend it unless you’re starving, but they won’t kill you.’

  Nava did not recognise the fungi; it was probably something which had been engineered to clear debris from the forest floor. Each mushroom was of the classic ‘circular table’ design and brown in colour. The upper surfaces were darker brown than the undersides and stems, but there was not a lot of difference. If you looked closely, you could see the tendrils the fungi were using to feed winding through the leaf litter like off-white roots.

  ‘If you dry them out,’ Hoshi added, ‘they make better tinder than they do food. I’ll point out some of the better-tasting fungi if we come across them.’

  ‘I’m not sure mushrooms ever taste good,’ Moritz Evered commented. ‘Can’t stand them.’

  ‘That’s funny, considering that you probably eat them every day,’ Melissa said.