‘Huh? I don’t–’
‘About sixty percent of artificial meat is based on fungi. It’s cheaper than growing cloned meat cells and most people can’t tell the difference. The school almost certainly uses that kind of meat substitute in the refectories.’
‘It does,’ Hoshi confirmed. ‘As you say, it’s rare that anyone can spot the difference. That restaurant in the Estate uses cloned meat, which is one reason its prices are higher.’
‘But I don’t want to become a vegetarian!’ Moritz exclaimed.
‘Technically,’ Mitsuko said, ‘you probably do have a vegetarian diet. You know, given that your meat dishes are made from mushrooms. You might even be vegan.’
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Moritz said morosely.
Mitsuko grinned. ‘Isn’t knowledge a wonderful thing?’
~~~
‘How fast could you cross this forest on your own, Nava?’ Melissa asked as she laid out her bed for the night.
‘Um. Ten minutes? Something like that,’ Nava replied. ‘You could do it in under an hour.’
‘Forty-five minutes. Maybe a little less.’
‘It would be closer to three hours for me,’ Hoshi said. ‘I know the Flight spell, but I’ve never taken it past rank one.’
‘Oh.’ Melissa actually looked a little surprised that Hoshi could fly at all. ‘I’ve got rank three. Nava has rank five, I think.’
‘Five,’ Nava agreed.
‘Well,’ Hoshi said, ‘now I know who to send for help in an emergency.’
‘It does seem a little unsafe to send ten young adults out like this with only one teacher.’
‘Well… I won’t disagree. And if this were a real survival course, I’d expect to see more supervisors. But we’re not really in an uncontrolled environment. Shinden, and a lot of the Clan Worlds, is about as close to laboratory conditions as you can get outside a lab. We’re not climbing or anything else that’s really dangerous. The landscape is pretty flat. We could get sprained ankles or something given the slippery conditions, but we have several people capable of rendering first aid. I know the First Aid spell and I happen to know you could fix someone up if they lost a leg. If I was badly hurt, you would be able to get help out here pretty quickly.’
Nava nodded. ‘This is more like a Sunday afternoon walk in the park than a real hiking trip.’
‘Tell that to my feet,’ Mitsuko said. ‘What I wouldn’t give for a hot bath right now.’
‘Sorry,’ Hoshi said, looking up at the dome she had created over them. ‘All I can offer is a respite from the cold shower.’
‘Under the circumstances, I’ll take anything I can get.’
~~~
‘Have you completed Mister Mathias Statham’s assignment, Nava?’ Barrington Roe asked.
Nava waved the question away. ‘I did that on the Friday evening after he gave it to us.’ It was another chat around the fire, but this evening they had everyone there since the chatter had been more general so far.
‘You did?’ Lydia asked. Then she seemed to realise who she was talking to. ‘Of course you did. It took me a few days to research what he was talking about.’
‘You have Mathias Statham as your tactics instructor?’ Skylar asked. ‘I don’t know whether to say congratulations or offer sympathy.’
‘He’s adequate,’ Nava replied. ‘As a basic tactics instructor, he does his job. He could do with improving his attitude and I’m not sure I’d trust him with anything more advanced. He has no real practical experience with using what he teaches.’
‘He does!’ Moritz exclaimed. Then his assured tone shifted. ‘Doesn’t he?’
Nava shook her head, but it was Hoshi who answered. ‘Mathias Statham’s “combat” experience is from competitive MagiTag. He does, however, have a strong grasp of tactics and strategy from an academic standpoint and quite a deep knowledge of military history. I think you’d find, Nava, that you would see him in a new light if he were teaching you battle tactics and strategy, rather than the small unit tactics you learn in the first year. He lectures on tactics and strategy to the fifth and sixth years.’
‘Interesting,’ Nava said. ‘His attitude to the support stream is still an issue. He doesn’t like teaching people he believes have no desire to be in combat. I’m not sure why he’s teaching us.’
Moritz opened his mouth, but Mitsuko cut him off before he could say a word. ‘Don’t say it, Moritz. Don’t even think it. Three of the five support students here have actual combat experience. Which is more than you can say for yourself. Even if they did take the support stream with the expectation of never having to fight, they’ve proven that they don’t lose their heads when they have to.’
‘Right,’ Lydia said. ‘The incident in Alliance City in the summer. I’m not sure how I’d have reacted. I went for support because my brother’s in the ASF and he told me that they really need engineers and such.’ It was just like Lydia to go for something suggested to her rather than making up her own mind. ‘I’m ready to fight if I need to.’
‘That’s what First Lieutenant Fawn Tyrell said at the symposium,’ Melissa said. ‘They have no trouble getting combat magicians, but those specialising in the more technical side have plenty of options so they’re harder to find.’
‘Mm. Truthfully, I’m not entirely sure why I went with the combat stream,’ Mitsuko said. ‘I suppose it was sort of expected. Not that my parents ever pushed me that way. I think I’d like to see Michiko go down the support path, but… We’ll see what she does when she’s of age.’
‘Michiko’s your little sister, right?’ Moritz asked. ‘I think I saw that in some news report. She’s a sorceress?’
‘Yes. To both questions.’
‘She’s really cute,’ Melissa said, grinning. ‘Quite grown up for her age, but really cute. Her pouts are deadly.’
‘I think she’ll end up being a match for her sister,’ Nava said. ‘Whichever path she chooses, she’ll likely end up a powerful sorceress. Actually, if she can retain the power of her pouts, she won’t need to learn combat sorcery.’
‘No,’ Mitsuko agreed. ‘If she ever gets challenged to a duel, she’ll have them begging for mercy before they get near an arena.’
235/10/28.
‘I don’t like the look of those clouds,’ Nava said.
Everyone looked up at the sky which had been growing darker for the last thirty minutes or so. The day had dawned bright and cold with a clear, blue sky in which there were only wisps of cloud visible. Getting everyone out of their sleeping bags had been even more difficult; even Nava and Hoshi had wanted to stay in bed. Now there were dark clouds speeding across the sky, and the air, which had been barely moving, was gusting strongly enough to lift some of the leaf litter at ground level.
Hoshi frowned. ‘The forecast said nothing about a storm…’
‘The forecasts have been a bit off recently,’ Melissa said. ‘That heatwave wasn’t forecast. And they kept saying it would be over tomorrow every day until it happened to be true.’
‘True…’ Hoshi took out her ketcom. She had the only one in the group with a satellite transceiver which would work out in the middle of nowhere. A few taps just produced a deeper frown. ‘According to this, we still have clear skies. Tonight is going to be really chilly.’
‘That, I can believe,’ Mitsuko said. ‘Tomorrow, I think I’ll just stay in my bag and do a caterpillar impression.’
‘Not the most efficient means of locomotion,’ Nava suggested.
‘But it’ll be warmer.’
Any rejoinder Nava might have made was pre-empted by Hoshi’s ketcom suddenly putting out an alarming sort of noise. That Hoshi’s eyes were widening was, perhaps, more alarming than the alert tone. ‘That’s… not possible,’ the teacher said.
‘Now there’s a storm?’ Nava asked.
‘Now there’s a storm. Now there’s a serious storm. Wind speeds of over a hundred and fifteen kilometres per hour. That’s hurricane force in Shin
den’s atmosphere. Heavy rain. It’s heading north from the ocean and it’s heading right for us.’
‘Can we get lifted out?’ Lydia asked.
‘Not in time.’
‘We can handle a bit of wind and rain,’ Moritz said.
‘Winds that strong can uproot trees,’ Nava said. ‘In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in a forest. We need shelter.’
‘I can shelter us from the weather,’ Hoshi said. ‘I’m worried about flying debris. I could put up a Force Dome, but then I couldn’t use Weather Dome. Or, not for long enough to make a difference.’
‘Anyone have a schema for Force Dome?’ Nava asked.
‘I do!’ Melissa said. ‘It’s one of my “must learn” spells.’
‘Send it to my ketcom over peer-to-peer, please. I’ll do the physical protection.’ Nava pulled out her ketcom, unfolding the screen and waiting for Melissa to handle the transfer.
‘That’s a fairly complex spell,’ Hoshi said. ‘Are you sure you can– Oh, never mind. I was forgetting. We should find a space with as little in the way of branches overhead as possible.’
‘There?’ Moritz said, pointing. ‘There’s a bit of a clearing in the trees there.’
Hoshi scanned around and nodded. The wind, obviously getting stronger, was whipping her hair about while they all got organised. ‘There. Let’s move. I’ll get the Weather Dome going and Nava can put her Force Dome up inside it.’
‘That sounds more comfortable,’ Nava said, her eyes on the data on her screen. ‘Mm. I can make a big enough dome, but I’m not entirely happy with the strength. It’ll stop the debris. It might stop a branch. If a tree falls on us…’
‘Do what you can.’ Hoshi moved into the middle of the relatively clear area. ‘Gather around me, please.’ When everyone had assembled, she focused her will and activated her spell. A translucent dome of energy flickered into life around them and the wind died away to nothing. At the edges of the dome, the fallen leaves were still being thrown about; they would lift off the ground beyond the barrier and then fall again as they were swept through it. When the wind outside gained strength, it would clearly be able to throw things at them if it could get the debris moving fast enough.
‘Was it just me,’ Mitsuko asked, ‘or did that stutter?’
‘It wasn’t just you,’ Hoshi said. ‘It felt like something was resisting my control.’
Another dome appeared inside Hoshi’s and Nava let out a breath. ‘Okay. That’s up. Did you say something was resisting your spell?’
‘That’s what it felt like. But the only way that could be true is if this storm was the result of a spell. No one can generate weather over the kind of area this storm is covering.’
Thunder rolled across them, coming from somewhere to the south. The sky was now pitch black and a couple of the students had started up Light spells so they could see where they were stepping.
‘That’s an assumption I’ve been hearing a lot recently,’ Nava said into the silence after the thunder.
‘That wasn’t dramatic timing or anything,’ Mitsuko said.
‘Well,’ Hoshi said, looking south toward the oncoming storm, ‘we’re not going to get any further today. Let’s set up camp and wait it out.’
‘And hope we don’t get struck by lightning,’ Skylar said.
‘That at least is unlikely. Lightning will hit the trees before it hits us.’
‘Let’s hope we don’t get hit by a burning tree then.’
‘That… could be an option.’
~~~
‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ Rochester had just the kind of slightly sonorous voice to make a statement like that. It was not inaccurate either. The wind was howling through the trees and there was the constant sound of debris hitting Nava’s Force Dome. So far, nothing really big had tried its luck at breaching the shield, but everyone was sitting toward the middle of the circle, just in case.
‘It has to stop sometime, right?’ Lydia said.
‘Probably,’ Hoshi replied. ‘Natural storms don’t last forever.’
‘But if it’s not natural…’ Nava said, letting the sentence trail off for someone else to end. Along with the Force Dome, she was keeping a light going in the circle because they had had no time to gather firewood and sitting in the dark was starting to freak people out. The only natural light came from the lightning which was still turning the night into day on a not-infrequent basis.
‘It can’t be sorcery,’ Rochester said. ‘It’s just not possible. The storm is around sixty kilometres in diameter, according to Miss Hoshi Horne’s ketcom. I did the calculations. That’s not far off a thirty-five thousand Tammy spell. Someone who could do that wouldn’t be a magician, they’d be a god.’
‘Huh,’ Nava said. ‘You make a valid case.’
‘You just sat down and calculated that?’ Moritz asked.
‘I didn’t have anything better to do,’ Rochester replied. ‘None of us have anything much better to do. Aside from Nava and Miss Hoshi Horne.’
‘True…’
‘I suppose,’ Rochester said in more of a musing tone, ‘that someone could have come up with a more efficient means of controlling the weather.’
‘It’s unlikely that they could come up with a schema that could reduce the spell complexity by several orders of magnitude,’ Hoshi said. ‘There’s genius, and then there’s this. It would require something like a god of spell crafting to pull off that kind of metaphysical trick.’
‘And yet,’ Nava said, ‘we keep getting weather that shouldn’t happen over areas too large for it to be normal sorcery.’
Hoshi gave a shrug. ‘Right now, I’m more concerned with surviving this weather than worrying over why it’s here.’
‘Yeah. You have a point. Then again, like Chess said, what else do we have to do?’
235/10/29.
The storm finally blew itself out about an hour before midnight. Actually, it was almost exactly an hour before midnight when the winds began to die rapidly and the thunder stopped rattling through the trees. Nava found that rather interesting, but she decided not to say anything. There was nothing to be done about it and sleep was beckoning.
There was a slightly depressed mood sitting over the camp when they got up and began getting breakfast ready. Around them, the forest was a mess. The ground was sodden, a muddy quagmire. It was not so bad where Hoshi’s dome had kept the rain out, though even that had been softened. Outside that circle, you trod with great care unless you wanted to fall on your ass in the mud. Fallen branches littered where there had previously been none; they had been lucky not to have anything fall on their camp.
Hoshi ate her breakfast while scanning over something on her ketcom and, when she was done eating, she apparently came to a decision. ‘We’re heading out early,’ she announced. ‘There’s more rain expected this afternoon. Nothing like last night, but enough that it’s going to make this place just about impassable. If we head north from here, we should be able to get to the edge of the forest before night falls. We’ll airlift out from there.’
‘We can manage,’ Moritz said, though it sounded more like empty bravado than usual. ‘It’s not that tough. I’m sure we could–’
‘No, you couldn’t. Being out here is not meant to be life threatening or an exercise in willpower and determination. By the time we get to the forest’s edge, you’ll have had plenty of experience of what it’s like to be in a survival situation. Believe me. Getting out tonight will be a hard slog. Also, I’m the supervisor here and it’s my decision. We’re leaving early.’
‘Well, if you’re pulling rank…’
‘You don’t really want to slog on to the other side any more than the rest of us, do you, Moritz?’ Mitsuko asked.
He looked like he was going to be defiant for about a second. His foot shifted and you could actually hear the mud sucking at his boot. ‘No,’ Moritz said, deflating a little. ‘No. I’m macho but I’m not actually that stupid.’
Mits
uko flashed him a smile. ‘Didn’t think so. You wouldn’t be in SAS-squared if you were that foolish.’
~~~
It was not easy going. The combination of mud and leaf litter was slippery and difficult to walk on, or the leaves had been blown aside and then the mud sucked at their boots. They were not making especially good time when they stopped for lunch, but they needed to rest before pushing on and hot food seemed like a good idea. So far, the rain had held off, but the sky was darkening and it looked like only a matter of time before things would get worse.
‘We may not get to the treeline before dark,’ Hoshi said. ‘We’ll see what the situation is when the sun starts to go down and decide whether to push on or make camp.’
‘Light won’t be a problem,’ Moritz said. ‘Most of us can cast Light spells, right?’
‘You were all for keeping going this morning,’ Skylar pointed out.
‘And then I spent a morning slogging through this muck.’ Moritz gave a shrug. ‘Plus, the thought of lying in a real bed has a lot of appeal right now.’
‘A bed…’ Melissa looked wistfully up at the lowering sky. ‘A bed would be really nice. I mean, it’s kind of snuggly in those bags, but they’re nothing like a real duvet and mattress.’
‘Especially the mattress,’ Lydia said. There were some general rumbles of agreement, and Hoshi looked like she was having trouble keeping the guffaws in.
‘You’re a duvet girl, Melissa?’ Skylar asked. ‘I’m solidly into layers. Sheet and blanket for me. Better climate control.’
‘That’s the thing,’ Melissa explained. ‘Even in the capsule apartments, the climate control is good. If my duvet’s too hot, I can set the air con to make the room cooler. I like the weight of a duvet lying on top of me. Plus, getting a sheet and a blanket up that ladder would be a real pain. Duvet’s all done in one shot.’ There were some rumbles of agreement about that too.
‘I just use a sheet,’ Mitsuko said. ‘I’m used to very good air conditioning.’
‘Hey, same here,’ Moritz said as though this revelation made them cousins. He waggled his eyebrows. ‘Black. Silk.’
‘That sounds about right for you, Moritz.’ Mitsuko pursed her lips. ‘I do have some crimson sheets in a satin material. I’m not sure I’ve ever used them.’
Bitter Wind (Death's Handmaiden Book 2) Page 13
