Death's Handmaiden Page 5

  More interesting was what was happening on a second mat. There, some of the senior students were fighting whoever wished to give it a go. It was apparent that these students had learned more than just the sporting version of jujutsu. They were demonstrating that their art could be used for self-defence against people who could select a range of fake weapons or try to attack unarmed.

  It all went wrong when someone who looked like a first year got flattened when he tried to stab his opponent with a plastic knife. Nava did not know either of the men, but the younger one had the cocky look of someone from one of the rougher worlds in the Alliance. He thought he knew how to fight, though Nava could see that he was basically just a street brawler. As he struggled back to his feet after his unceremonious dumping onto the mat, he looked angry. More angry than Nava would have expected. His body language was far too aggressive. He dropped the fake knife, clenching his fists convulsively, and then fire burst around his hands as he turned, snarling, to face his opponent again.

  ‘I’ll teach you to–’ he began, and that was when something like a distortion in the air hit him in the side, catapulting him a metre across the mats. He ended up lying on his face, clutching his side in pain. An instant later the fire on his hands died away and Courtney stepped out onto the mat. She was looking annoyed, but at least she was not annoyed at Nava this time.

  Courtney came to a stop over the fallen student. ‘Stay down if you know what’s good for you. Improper use of magic is a serious offence. You’re lucky if you get away with a couple of cracked ribs.’ She looked around. ‘What happened here, Rene Garver?’

  She was apparently addressing the senior judoka because it was him who responded. ‘I’m… honestly not sure. He didn’t seem like the type to go nuts like that. I put him down and he called up Hand of Flame to attack me.’

  ‘Huh. Is that what you saw, Nava Ward?’

  Oh, so Courtney was annoyed that Nava was in the room? ‘That matches what I saw, yes. The freshman strikes me as a street fighter, used to winning at all costs. The use of Hand of Flame was unexpected, and his reaction seemed… excessive. And I think you may have broken his ribs, not cracked them.’

  ‘Right… I’ll get a stretcher over here and get him shipped out. Then I’ll want statements. None of you are to go anywhere.’

  ‘I’ll be happy to stay, Courtney Martell,’ Nava replied. ‘I believe I’d like to try my luck against this judoka.’

  ‘Fine. Just remember not to kill him. Okay?’

  ~~~

  ‘I hear you had an eventful afternoon,’ Rochester said at dinner.

  Inwardly, Nava sighed. The school had a rumour mill as efficient as any professional news media organisation. Probably better, in fact. ‘Someone got a little overenthusiastic in the judo demonstration. I happened to be there to see it.’

  ‘I heard that you beat the judo instructor,’ Melissa said.

  ‘Actually, Rene and I were fairly evenly matched. We called it a draw.’

  ‘Rene?’ Melissa was grinning. She thought she knew something, and Nava was almost sorry to disabuse her.

  ‘Rene Garver Morgan, one of the club’s senior members, not an instructor. He allowed me the honour of calling him by his first name. Actually, he said, “When you’ve had a man’s head between your thighs, you’ve earned the right.” I think he was being suggestive.’

  Melissa made some sputtering noises. ‘No, really?’

  ‘I had him in a scissor hold. That’s all. He also agreed that there was little point in me joining the Judo Club. He did offer to spar with me whenever I felt the need. I think he was being suggestive there too. However, he’s too old.’

  ‘He is? He can’t be that old if he’s a student here.’

  ‘He’s eighteen. We could date, certainly, but anything beyond kissing would be illegal, which seems a waste if he’s going to let me use pins like that on him.’

  ‘Oh, I, um, see what you mean.’

  ‘If he was closer to my age it would be fine, but as it is, no. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with flirting. Anyway, Courtney Martell took our statements when she got back and there was nothing more to say about it.’ Nava frowned slightly as a thought crossed her mind. ‘She did say that the man who started it all had calmed down by the time she got him to a secure location. He was very apologetic. She said he seemed unsure of what had come over him.’

  ‘He would be apologetic,’ Rochester said. ‘Inappropriate use of combat spells could be grounds for expulsion.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘You think it was something else?’

  Nava gave a shrug. ‘I don’t have enough information to give an opinion. It’s Courtney Martell’s problem anyway. Nothing for any of us to worry about.’

  235/2/2.

  Politics was not something Nava had ever paid much attention to. In the last couple of weeks her lack of interest had grown, but she had also decided that paying attention to it now might be useful. It was student politics, but that seemed to be just as cut-throat, perhaps worse, than the adult variety. Out in the real world, the ‘politicians’ were the heads of families or their representatives. Here, they were students and the successful ones got elected into their positions. Nava was going to get to vote.

  Since she was going to need to vote, Nava was going to do the research, which was why she was standing in a courtyard listening to a speech. Someone named Tracey Spears Cook was droning on about school pride and great achievements which needed to be bettered. Droning was probably being unkind. Tracey had a fair voice and she knew how to use it, but she was not really saying anything. Nava could have got the same information with a network search, and then it would have come without the biased commentary.

  Vaguely, Nava wondered whether Mitsuko Trenton would be just as worthless as a candidate. The tall beauty had seemed fairly down to earth, but then Nava had done a search on her. The Trenton family was high up in the ranks of the Sonkei clan. Mitsuko was a princess, if such a thing existed in the Clan Worlds. Politics was in her blood. Nava was just wondering what that actually meant when the world went a little crazy.

  There was a sound which Nava immediately recognised. It was a tearing sound, like a series of very rapid, very small explosions one after the other. The sound came from the brief passage of a beam of light through the air. It ionised the gases in the atmosphere, heating them and causing them to expand violently. When it hit the backwall of the little stage that had been set up for the speech, it exploded a small section of that too. Nava turned, tracing the ionisation trail to the roof of one of the habitation blocks maybe eight hundred metres away. She looked back to see Tracey diving for cover, and then the courtyard was descending into chaos and Nava was too busy dodging other people to see more.

  ~~~

  ‘No one there when we got to the rooftop,’ Courtney said. She was back at the scene of the speech now, looking over it once again with the member of the committee who had been there when it happened. ‘Do we have the target secure?’

  ‘She’s in her apartment. We locked it down pretty thoroughly.’ Courtney’s colleague was Kyle Maynard House and he was in his last year at the school. He knew his way around weaponised magic and military tactics. ‘Someone tried to kill her with a Laser Strike spell. She’s a little shaken.’

  ‘A little shaken?’

  ‘She’s a third year in the combat stream, boss. She’s not a hardened soldier, but she’s working on it.’

  ‘Huh.’ Turning from the hole the spell had drilled into a poster of Tracey Spears, Courtney looked around and her eyes fell upon Nava, standing at one side of the stage and watching Courtney and Kyle. ‘We may have to call in the ASF on this, Kyle. Make sure everything’s perfect, just in case we do.’

  ‘Sure. What’re you planning to do?’

  ‘Interview a witness.’

  ‘This is an interesting situation,’ Nava said before Courtney could ask anything.

  ‘Interesting? You were here when it happened? You saw it
go down?’

  ‘Yes. It’s interesting because the evidence gives conflicting pictures of the shooter.’

  Courtney frowned. ‘Are you always enigmatic?’

  ‘I’m not being enigmatic. This was an attack using a Laser Strike spell. The maximum range is about a kilometre, but no one would seriously try to use it at eight hundred metres without a magitech sniper rifle to extend the effective range. That’s a military weapon, but no military sniper, or professional assassin, would use Laser Strike to try to kill someone under these circumstances.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Tracing the shooting location is too easy. Kyle Maynard identified the location almost immediately, correct? You were there in three minutes and you found nothing. So, a professional weapon, a professional escape plan, but the method was amateurish and they missed. The picture’s… inconclusive, confusing.’

  ‘Hm. We may end up having to call in the ASF on this one.’

  ‘The Allied Security Force won’t be able to do more than you can with the available information, Courtney Martell. You do realise that the sniper may try again?’

  ‘Yeah. That I figured out when I couldn’t find him or her. We’ll be moving all the future speeches indoors.’ Courtney gave a shrug. ‘The weather’s supposed to take a downturn overnight anyway.’

  Nava looked up at the clear, blue sky above them. ‘That’s a shame. It’s been excellent flying weather and I’ve been too busy to indulge. It’s also excellent weather for sniping. And yet, the sniper missed.’

  ‘Yeah… The school has sniper rifles in storage. We could be looking for a student with a grudge. It’s something to work with at least.’

  ‘Good luck with your work.’

  ~~~

  MagiTag had come out of military research into a method of training combat magicians. It was still used for that purpose, having a number of advantages over the alternatives. It familiarised magicians with the types of weapon employed by battlefield and police magicians. It was not especially expensive to deploy and it was relatively easy to use. Most importantly, it avoided the issue of people throwing potentially lethal spells around just to learn tactics.

  The name, however, had come from a marketing team who had been given the task of commercialising it as a civilian game. There were enough people out in the Clan Worlds – about forty percent of the population, averaged across all the clans – who had just about enough magical potential to register that marketing to them was viable. They were more or less useless as magicians; those who bothered to learn could manage enough magic to levitate a coffee mug. Most of them were magically illiterate, but they could activate a lot of magitech items, which other people could not. And that meant they were potential customers for a game which involved running around shooting at people with magitech weapons. MagiTag™ had been born.

  Nava was, perhaps unsurprisingly, quite good at it. It should not have come as much of a surprise, but it seemed that the people running the game for the MagiTag Club had not got the memo. They watched as she moved around an abstract obstacle course of cover-providing objects, silently demolishing her opposition with an almost frightening efficiency. The MagiTag pistol she was using seemed much like an extension of her arm. She barely aimed at her targets, but she always hit. Each hit took another opponent out of the ‘battle royal’ tournament. She was beating people three years her senior without trouble.

  In turn, Nava found the MagiTag gear restrictive. It came in two parts: the weapon and the receiver harness. The latter was generic, a pair of plastic pods which sat on your shoulders, held in place by straps. It was, basically, a magic detector, but it was tuned to detect hits from MagiTag weapons which it converted into a simple display: green was good, yellow was wounded, and red was dead. Two yellow hits made for a red, or you could go right from green to red if a precise enough hit was registered. Military models gave more detailed information on where you had been hit.

  The weapon Nava was using was a pistol, but there were carbine and rifle versions available. They were hardwired to cast a single spell, powered by a quintessence battery, a Q-Cell, in the form of a magazine which slotted into the grip. You got six shots per magazine and there were ten people in each game. That meant you had to swap magazines at some point and you had to be somewhat careful since you got three spare magazines to work with. Miss too often and you would be out of ammo and a sitting duck.

  Nava did not miss. However, the basic messenger pulse spell the weapons fired had no penetration and there was the issue of limited ammunition in each magazine. In close quarters like this, she would normally have dispensed with a weapon, done her aiming by hand, and been able to keep shooting until she was exhausted. But this was a game and you had to abide by the rules.

  Abiding by the rules, Nava turned a corner and spotted her last adversary more or less where she had expected him to be. He also saw her, and his pistol began to rise so that he could take aim. Nava squeezed the trigger of her pistol, not bothering to lift it from where she was holding it beside her right hip. On her target’s left shoulder, a large, glowing panel went from green to red and that was almost immediately followed by a horn sounding to indicate that the match was over. Nava’s target – a handsome young man with a shock of blonde hair and bright blue eyes – sagged his shoulders in mock resignation and then gave Nava a broad grin full of very white teeth. Well, he was good humoured in defeat.

  ‘You’re good,’ he said as they closed the range between them on the way to the exit. The match was being held in one of six arenas the school had for training purposes. This one was, supposedly, meant to mimic an urban environment, though it lacked buildings you could actually enter. It was a good thirty metres on each side, which was plenty of room for a ten-man match. ‘I haven’t seen you before, but are you really a first year?’

  ‘I am,’ Nava admitted, ‘though I have had some training prior to coming here.’

  ‘Obviously. I’m Francis Goretti Orlando, third-year combat stream.’

  ‘Nava Ward, first-year support stream.’

  ‘No way!’ Francis was a good fifteen centimetres taller than Nava and he looked down at her with a genuine expression of shock on his face. ‘What’s a girl with your talent doing in the support stream?’

  A slight smile touched Nava’s lips. ‘Learning. There isn’t much this school can teach me about killing people, so I’m on the support stream, learning how to keep them alive.’

  ‘Well… damn. You’re going to join the club though, right? I mean, to keep your hand in. You don’t want to lose your edge while you’re learning to cast barrier spells.’

  ‘I’m considering it and for that reason. You’re a member?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Francis pulled himself up straighter. ‘I’m actually one of the best we have. Not the best, but I’m working on it.’

  That was a little disappointing, but Nava decided saying so would be politically incorrect. ‘As I said, I’m considering joining. Perhaps we’ll get a rematch at some point soon.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to that.’

  ~~~

  ‘Who would do something like that?’ Melissa asked. She was sitting at Nava’s table, drinking coffee. Nava had managed to get her food situation sorted out by this point, but Melissa still had a habit of bringing coffee over anyway.

  ‘Take a shot at Tracey Spears?’ Nava looked thoughtful briefly. ‘Well, if I had to guess, someone who doesn’t like her policies.’

  ‘I don’t even know what her policies are.’

  ‘You need to get with the programme, Mel. We have to be responsible young adults and consider every candidate carefully.’

  ‘I just figured I’d vote for Mitsuko. She’s the only one I know, so…’

  ‘Hm. Well, if you had looked into Tracey Spears’ policies, you would have discovered that one of them is a prioritisation of the school’s budget toward the combat stream students.’

  ‘But… She can’t say that, can she? The student president doesn’t con
trol the budget.’

  ‘No, but she can make the suggestion that she does. And if she becomes president, she will undoubtedly be bad for those of us in the support stream. It may be that someone has decided that her blatantly discriminatory viewpoint needs to be eliminated. However, I’m not sure that’s what’s happening.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Nava took a drink from her mug and paused, considering her answer. ‘I don’t think this will be the last attempt on a candidate’s life. I don’t believe that Tracey Spears was the only intended target. Which is just one more thing that doesn’t make sense about whoever is doing this.’

  235/2/3.

  Another speech, another candidate, another venue. Courtney had announced that there would be no more outdoor meetings, so Ryan Fairhaven Corley was about to give a speech to the assembled students in one of the larger lecture theatres normally used by those attending the final two years of school. It was a tiered room with a stage and lectern at the front and curved rows of seats climbing up toward the rear.

  At the rear, Nava sat near the middle with Melissa beside her. It was early and Melissa was not needed at the Flight Club stand for a couple of hours, so she had decided she would come along to see what a candidate other than Mitsuko had to say. Apparently, Nava’s little speech about responsibility and proper voting had sunk in. Or maybe she had nothing better to do.

  ‘So, what’s this guy like?’ Melissa asked while they waited for the last students to come in and for Ryan Fairhaven to get started.

  ‘Ryan Fairhaven? He is squarely middle-of-the-road. He’s a second year on the combat stream, but all the signs are that he believes in relative equality between the streams. He has no especially exciting ideas either. It’s likely that his tenure would be marked by no changes in anything.’ Nava was watching the stage. Kyle Maynard was standing there in his uniform looking very efficient and very guard-like. He was, Nava assumed, there to ensure that nothing like the event outside occurred here.

  ‘That’s Kyle Maynard, isn’t it?’ Melissa asked.