Bitter Wind (Death's Handmaiden Book 2)

by Niall Teasdale

  Nava was in front of a solid-looking door in the middle of the corridor when the alert siren started blaring. Great, so they had a motion sensor here too. That seemed like overkill, but it had actually detected something: her.

  She had just been working out how to bypass the door too. It looked promising. A door like that had to have something worthwhile behind it. Judging from the spacing of the other doors, the room beyond was larger than the others in the building. It had to be the one she was looking for, but it was sealed shut and it had a biometric locking mechanism which would take time to bypass. Or, Nava could take a page from her dead sister’s playbook, though that had a couple of downsides…

  The exterior door Nava had come through opened and two men swept in through it, one turning hard to take up the side closest to the door, the other crossing to the other wall. They were both armed with assault rifles, but neither had a target. Nava moved away from them, backing up to the next door down the passageway.

  Eyepatch stepped in behind his two underlings, took in the scene, and decided on his course of action. ‘Suppression fire, three seconds. Hose it down.’

  Nava tried the door which was now on her right. It opened and she slipped inside just before the lead started flying. She was in a storeroom, in the dark after she closed the door behind her. A little effort forced her thoughts into shape to cast Sense Environment once again and the skeletal shapes of shelves appeared in her vision field. There were bottles and boxes on the shelves, but she had no way of reading them for now. Surely they would have put dangerous chemicals behind a locked door…

  The gunfire ceased outside and Nava moved into the room, dropping into a crouch beside one of the shelving units. It was too much to hope that no one had noticed her entering the room, but the mercs would still need to find her inside it. They were also professionals and could be counted on to act in a professional manner. They thought they had their prey cornered…

  ~~~

  ‘Even if we go in, sir, we won’t be able to see him.’

  Major Clayton North Firmin peered at his subordinate with his one good eye. He did not need to have the obvious stuffed under his nose. The man shrank a little under his boss’s stare. ‘You’ll go in crosswise,’ Clayton said. ‘Lohan Bisset will follow when you’ve ensured the corners are clear by touch. He can see through invisibility, so all you have to do is shoot where he tells you to.’

  ‘Who do you think it is?’ the subordinate asked.

  ‘ASF, probably. We’ve seen no signs of more of them, but who else? This guy has training. He has to have followed the squad in to hide from the motion sensors…’ Clayton frowned. ‘Trapping himself in there wasn’t so smart. Hell, if he knew about the sensors, coming into this corridor wasn’t that smart. We’re missing something…’

  ~~~

  Teleportation kind of sucked. Nava had never learned it the way Maya had, but she knew how the spell was performed and had even tried it out a couple of times. There was no actual sensation to it: one moment you were in one place and the next you were somewhere else, and you had no perception of travelling between the two. However, it could be disorienting. Maya had probably learned to cope with that specifically since she seemed to use the Teleport spell as a universal key. Nava had not, but she managed to get through the short hop from the storeroom to the room behind the big door without incident. The mercs would probably think she was still in the storeroom for another couple of minutes. That was the hope, anyway.

  The door looked even more solid from the inside. There were massive locking bars holding it closed. If the walls in here had not been reinforced, that was all pointless, but the interior walls here did have a different quality to them. The door was certainly going to hold against most things the mercs might try to get through it. That assumed they could not just open it. Magelock would take care of that; no one would be able to open the door without breaking Nava’s spell, or the door.

  The room was definitely the one she was looking for. The general impression was ‘spaceship bridge meets medical facility.’ There were screens and consoles. Every self-respecting evil villain lair had to have screens and consoles. In this case, two of the biggest screens were showing satellite images of the hurricane and associated data. That went with the supervillain vibe quite nicely. Several of the consoles seemed to be showing data from various biological monitors, and Nava moved toward what she suspected was the source of that data as well as the provider of the medical bay visuals.

  It was something that looked like an immersive medical pod or maybe some sort of suspended animation unit. It was a metal cylinder with a transparent plastic top and, when Nava got closer, the impression of medical pod got stronger. Inside it was a woman in a tight-fitting bodysuit connected to the container by a lot of cables and tubes. Nutrients in and waste products out for sure, but there seemed to be more than that. The suit had to have a bunch of sensors in it and there was a cable for that. Her head was set into a plastic frame to keep it still, like the kind of thing they used for head and neck injuries, or to put you through an MRI scanner, and there seemed to be a thick cable attached to the back of her skull somehow. Nava got the worrying impression that it was actually plugged into her head.

  The woman herself was attractive and looked fit. She had the kind of working muscle you saw on people who did physical work rather than getting their physique in a gym. She had short dark hair, trimmed for frequently fitting under a helmet. Her eyes were closed and, at first, Nava thought she was unconscious, but her breathing was too irregular for that and her eyes were in constant motion under her eyelids. Her eyes were closed, Nava decided, because she was concentrating.

  Nava turned her attention to the only other person in the room, a man. At a guess, this was Hugo Milton Morgan and he was… unimpressive. Short and thin, he gave off a strong impression of being very smart and disinclined to worry over his physical characteristics. Light-brown hair was haphazardly cut and uncombed. His eyes, feverishly scanning over a couple of displays, were a pale sort of hazel. He was not ugly, or even unattractive, but comparing him to the average Clan Worlds citizen would not have been favourable. His clothing did not help, given that his lab coat was old and stained, the sweater under it had holes decorating it, and his slacks had seen long use, though perhaps less than his brown loafers which were badly scuffed. The man had to be a genius, because he had little else going for him. Nava had an uncomfortable premonition of how Rochester might turn out unless someone intervened.

  The screens the man was watching were showing data Nava had no clue about. Mostly. One window was streaming data from a computer. That was presumably the massive bank of electronics behind the monitors. Nava saw the words ‘neural interface’ flash past in the stream of text and looked back toward the pod. However, another screen had caught her attention and she stepped over to look at it. In large red letters, the display said ‘Self-Destruct in’ followed by a time. Just under thirteen minutes. He had to have triggered the self-destruct system when the alert had been sounded which seemed… reactionary.

  Nava cancelled her Invisibility spell. ‘Stop me if I’m wrong,’ she began.

  The man, Hugo, spun in his chair and stared at her. ‘How did you get in here?’

  ‘Teleport spell. As I was saying, stop me if I’m wrong, but you’ve figured out a way to enhance the capacity of a magician by wiring them directly up to a mainframe. The computer is providing extra processing capability somehow. That’s how whoever she is is able to control weather across such a large area. Ah, yes, and she must be Winter Glass Firmin, currently listed as missing and normally capable of almost exactly one one hundredth of that control radius. Your device provides a hundred times the normal capacity.’

  ‘That’s very good, young lady,’ Hugo said. ‘Excellent deduction.’

  ‘Thanks. You, I believe, are Hugo Milton Morgan.’

  ‘I am. You’ve heard of me, obviously.’

  ‘No. One of your mercs mentioned your name. I have no
idea who you are, aside from being an extortionist and, from appearances, something of a mad genius.’

  His face darkened. Probably not unexpectedly, given Nava’s assertion. Weirdly, it was not for the reason Nava thought it was. ‘You’ve never heard of me! Well, of course. I’d imagine that school has done everything it can to keep my name from the ears of its students.’

  Nava glanced down at the SAS2 logo on the chest of her combat uniform. ‘SAS-squared?’

  ‘Ha! They wouldn’t know talent if it was forced up their nose. Insufficient talent? I’ll show them what talent I have!’

  ‘Not if you blow yourself up.’ Nava indicated the display beside her which was steadily counting down the time to detonation.

  ‘It started automatically when the intruder alert was triggered. I will not allow the coprocessor to fall into the hands of the government or that school. I’m the only one who can deactivate it, and now that I’ve determined that you seem to be alone–’

  ‘I am alone, yes. You said coprocessor. That’s what this thing’s called?’

  ‘I call it a sorcery coprocessor. Yes. You’re alone and you seem to have talent. Perhaps talent matching Winter’s…’

  ‘You’ve literally wired her into that thing, right?’

  ‘I developed the spell I needed for the surgery myself. Carbon nanotubes need to be carefully positioned within the brain. Thousands of them. It took weeks of work. Then the software needs to learn how to interpret the data it gets from the subject’s brain and how to provide the needed feedback. Each instance can only work with a single magician, but the results… And this is just the beginning! With the ransom money, I’ll be able to produce a system with ten or a hundred times the power! And those bastards in that school and the administration will–’

  ‘What does she think of being chained into a medical pod for the rest of her life?’ Nava asked. Those who knew her – and Hugo did not – would have recognised the slight changes in her face, her posture, and her tone suggesting that his answer to her question was very important.

  The answer did not come from Hugo, however. ‘I wanted this.’ The female voice came from a speaker on the side of the pod. Nava looked over to see that Winter’s eyes were open. She was not looking at Nava, because she could not move her head, but she was sparing some concentration to answer the question. ‘This is what I’ve always dreamed of. Controlling a hurricane. Have you any idea–’

  ‘You’re not controlling a hurricane,’ Nava said. ‘You created a hurricane and you’re aiming it at a lot of people who never did anything to deserve it. You work in disaster relief. You know what’s going to happen when that storm hits the city.’

  ‘So what? The next version of this machine will be able to control entire weather systems. I’ll be able to stop storms on Bosquet without breaking a sweat. It’s not like I’m stuck in here, you know. I can unplug. I can have a normal life and this power when I need it. A-anyway, they’ll pay the ransom and I’ll stop the storm.’

  ‘Just like that? You’ll just stop a hurricane, just like that?’

  ‘Don’t you know anything about meteorology? It’s an unnatural system. If I stop concentrating on it, it’ll start to collapse on its own. If I put my mind to it, I can push it back and wind it down easily.’

  ‘Then I strongly urge you to do that, right now,’ Nava said. ‘I don’t think Hugo Milton wants to stop, even if he gets the money. He has a grudge against SAS-squared for some reason.’

  ‘For some reason!’ Hugo roared. ‘They rejected me! They cast me aside like–’

  ‘Thousands of other applicants, every year. Actually, maybe not thousands. Most people know the entrance criteria and don’t bother applying unless they’re sure they can meet them. You, quite clearly, decided to apply anyway. Shut down the storm, please, Winter Glass. I won’t ask again.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Winter replied through the speaker.

  ‘Fine,’ Nava said, raising her hand toward the pod. A pulse of light flashed out, penetrating the pod’s casing. Light blazed within the container and an electronic scream blasted out of the speaker on the side before the glass shattered, letting the quintessence wave out in a cone to burst against the ceiling.

  ‘What have you done?!’ Hugo shrieked.

  ‘Shut down your machine,’ Nava replied flatly. She took a step toward the scientist. ‘And now, I’m going to shut down its creator.’

  ~~~

  Lohan Bisset Firmin stepped into the doorway of the storage closet with some trepidation. He was not a soldier. The Firmin clan had a somewhat biased view of magicians who elected to stay out of combat, but Lohan had decided that a life of research was where he wanted to go. Despite this, he was being asked to locate an enemy combatant who had been backed into a corner. What was it they said about cornered rats?

  Flanked by two men just waiting to open fire with automatic weapons, Lohan scanned the room. Then he scanned it again, taking more time. Apparently, he took too long.

  ‘Well?’ Clayton called out from the corridor. Lohan had noted the fact that the mercenary leader was staying out of the firing line. That had not gone unnoticed, though it did not seem to bother the mercs.

  ‘There’s no one here,’ Lohan called back.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There is no one here aside from me and your two troopers.’ Lohan enunciated the words carefully, just in case the man’s ears had been damaged in the same event that had taken his eye. ‘Are you sure this hypothetical intruder came in–’

  A new alert sounded. They had shut off the intruder alert after everyone had responded to it, but now something new began blaring through the corridor. It sounded, if anything, more urgent. Lohan went white and turned, pushing past Clayton as he rushed to the laboratory door and pressed his hand to the scanner there. The indicator lights on the lock went green. The door remained firmly closed.

  ‘What the Hell’s going on?’ Clayton barked. ‘I don’t know that alert.’

  ‘It’s the alert for a critical failure in the SC,’ Lohan snapped back. ‘Something’s gone wrong with Hugo Milton’s machine.’

  ‘So? We have an actual intruder in the facility. We need to worry–’

  ‘First, if it fails, the plan fails and none of us get paid. Second, have you considered the possibility that the intruder has got into the lab? Third, there’s a ton of Q-cell mass in that room which is rigged to detonate if the self-destruct isn’t turned off. If the machine’s damaged, Hugo Milton might be damaged, and he’s the only one who can turn off the self-destruct!’

  ~~~

  Nava watched Hugo’s eyes roll back in his head. His heart had just stopped. It was, perhaps, a quick and easy death for a man who had created such an abominable device, but Nava had been taught to end her enemies, not to prolong their deaths.

  She turned her eyes toward the door. Someone was trying to open it, which reminded her that she had other enemies to deal with. She had no idea how many of the people here knew enough about the machine to recreate it. That meant she had just over ten minutes to make sure that none of them got out of this place alive.

  She recast Invisibility as she walked toward the door and then pressed her mind into the processes needed to use Teleport. There was work to do. Calmly, without the slightest hint of emotion, Nava set her mind to carrying it out.

  ~~~

  ASF officers marched into the cave, all of them dressed in combat gear. Nearby, Nava watched impassively. The enforcement officers had arrived a few minutes earlier and had immediately set about securing the area, but they were late to the party and they knew it.

  ‘Why didn’t you call us in?’ Fawn Tyrell asked. ‘Before the place got blown to Hell, I mean.’

  ‘I didn’t know if I was right about the location,’ Nava replied. ‘When I became sure, things escalated rather quickly. Do you know who this Hugo Milton was?’

  ‘I looked up the name. He was a Morgan. He was kicked out of his clan for performing some especially unethical experime
nts. There’s a warrant out for his arrest for supplying magical devices to a number of criminal groups. He was a genius, by all accounts, but he was the kind of genius they make horror vids about. Trying to extort money from the Alliance itself is something of an escalation. You’re sure that he was using Winter Glass Firmin to make this work?’

  Nava gave a shrug. ‘I don’t think that’s a valid way of putting it. She seemed to be doing it voluntarily. It was her dream come true to be able to control weather on that scale. Whatever her motives, she was the one controlling that hurricane.’

  ‘Which has been winding down for the past hour or so. And it’s turned west. It looks like Alliance City will see some foul weather, but nothing like hurricane-force winds.’ Fawn shook her head and looked over at the cave’s entrance. ‘Someone’s going to get really angry about this. That machine… If you think what could be done with a machine like that… Hell. There was no way you could stop the self-destruct?’

  ‘Hugo Milton was determined to keep it out of the hands of the Alliance. I’m not exactly sure what the mechanism was, but that thing had to have some large quintessence storage and the explosion looked like a quintessence explosion. Maybe a couple of kilotons. I got out just in time. Personally, I doubt there’s anything left in there for your people to find.’

  Fawn sighed. ‘Yeah. The threat’s done with. The important thing is that the threat is taken care of. I’m going to need a full report, Second Lieutenant.’

  ‘Obviously, First Lieutenant. I’ll take care of it tonight. You’ll have it by morning.’

  ‘Right. We may have some questions once we get it.’

  ‘Of course.’ Nava got to her feet, switching Flight into the active portion of her mind.

  ‘Oh,’ Fawn said, as though something had just come to mind, ‘not that you need it, but good luck with the progression tests next week.’

  ‘Thank you, but you’re right, I don’t need luck to pass those. Now if you’d like to wish me luck with the play next Saturday…’

  Fawn smirked. ‘Wishing an actor good luck is supposed to be bad luck.’