‘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
