Starship's Mage: Episode 3 Read online

  Starship’s Mage

  Episode 3

  By Glynn Stewart

  Copyright 2014 by Glynn Stewart

  All rights reserved. This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons— living or dead— is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art Copyright 2014 by Jack Giesen

  For a heavy cargo hauler, the shuttle was surprisingly maneuverable in deep space. Basically a metal box with a rocket pod attached to each side by a gimbal mount, it was controlled by a pair of joysticks, one on either side of the pilot’s seat.

  Damien Montgomery, Ship’s Mage of the interstellar freighter Blue Jay, gently pushed the left stick forward while pulling the right stick back, keeping both in the center of their side range. His thumb pulled the toggles on the side of each joystick down, reducing the amount of hydrogen being fed to the fusion rockets to slow the force of the spin to something he and the older man in the copilot’s seat could take.

  “Not bad,” Narveer Singh told the youth, reaching back to scratch under the white turban he wore even while dressed in a flight suit. “I guess you really did qualify on these birds.”

  “I qualified on the Hawk type,” Damien admitted. “They’re a few decades older than these, but the controls are much the same.”

  “What else can you fly?” the Blue Jay’s senior pilot asked.

  The slim young man paused, checking the screens to be sure that the shuttle was clear of its mother freighter. Alone in deep space, they were light years from anything else that could pose an obstacle.

  “I qualified on light shuttles, heavy cargo shuttles, heavy personnel shuttles and sub-light spacecraft up to fifteen megatons,” he reeled off quickly. “I’m also qualified for light aircraft, but anything beyond that wasn’t necessary.”

  Narveer blinked.

  “You, you are a pilot!” he exclaimed. “My three boys aren’t qualified for all of the shuttles, and even I couldn’t fly the Jay herself.”

  “I qualified on a Dealer type,” Damien told him. “She was basically a Venice like the Jay without the jump matrix.”

  The First Pilot shook his head, checking the screens in front of him. “Why?”

  “Every Jump Mage trained in Sherwood had to,” Damien explained. “The theory was that, since you couldn’t make it home at all without the Jump Mage, they’d train us so that we could get the ship home on our own.”

  Singh plugged a sequence of way points into the computer as he shook his head in response. “Follow those through,” he instructed. “Gives us a bit of time away from the ship, but then we’ll have to head back. You’ll need to jump us again soon.”

  Damien nodded silently. He was the only Mage amongst the Blue Jay’s eighty crew members, which meant he was the only one able to cast the spell that would catapult the three million ton ship across the stars.

  “Any idea where we’re jumping?” he asked Narveer as he carefully curved the shuttle over their ship. The Blue Jay was built to be functional, not pretty, and looked as much as an egg-beater as anything else. Four massive curved ribs extended from her central keel, rotating to provide gravity for the crew to eat and sleep.

  “The Captain, he’ll have a plan,” Singh stated confidently. “He got you out, didn’t he?”

  Two days earlier, the crew had pulled Damien from a jail cell, saving him from being stripped of his magic. Now, the Protectorate was hunting them, which was why they were in deep space, waiting for the Captain to pick somewhere for them to hide.

  #

  David Rice, Captain of the interstellar freighter Blue Jay, watched his First Officer walk across the ship’s bridge towards him with far more attention to the pot of coffee she carried than the heavily built blond woman herself.

  “You, XO, are a life saver,” he told her as she poured him a cup.

  Jenna glanced around the empty bridge. “From your many and varied enemies on a ship in deep space in the middle of the night?”

  Rice shrugged his broad shoulders and grinned.

  “At this point, ‘many and varied’ is a good description of our enemies,” he reminded her. They’d made enemies of one of the Protectorate’s largest criminal syndicates years ago, and now the government of the Protectorate wanted them arrested – something to do with stealing a Mage prisoner out from under the nose of a Hand of the Mage-King of Mars.

  “How are the flying lessons going?” he asked her after a moment’s silence, nodding towards the main screen, which had one of the Jay’s many exterior cameras zoomed in on the shuttle Damien was flying. “I thought you were in Flight Control?”

  “After about five minutes, I looked up Damien’s flight qualifications and realized I was redundant,” Jenna told him dryly. “Why didn’t you mention that to Singh?”

  “I honestly assumed that Singh knew Jump Mage flight qualifications from the Navy,” David admitted. “Once I realized he didn’t,” the Captain shrugged. “I figured letting him run with it might loosen some of the tension around here.”

  “Telling the crew where we’re going might do that too,” Jenna told him. The Captain shrugged, and with a flick of his fingers across the screen on his chair, threw the contents onto the main screen to replace the view of Damien’s shuttle.

  A three dimensional model of the star systems that made up the Protectorate of the Mage-King of Mars filled the screen. One hundred and eleven stars were lit up in several colors, forming a rough sphere centered on the single gold star of Sol. Scattered through the colored stars were almost four times as many gray stars, indicating systems no one had colonized.

  Twelve stars were silver, showing the oldest, most industrialized and most populated systems known as the Core.

  Thirty-three were green, systems with solid industry, fleet presences and economies – the MidWorlds.

  Fifty, scattered around the edge of the sphere, were blue. These were the latest wave of colonies, systems still struggling to find their feet and desperate for any shipping they could get – the Fringe.

  Lastly, a wedge of fifteen red stars, starting at one of the silver stars which had a red band around it, cut out towards the edge of the sphere from the center. These were worlds where magic was outlawed outside the ships that delivered cargos and news – the UnArcana Worlds.

  “The Core all have RTAs except Legatus,” David said calmly, a flick of his hand causing all of the silver stars except the one banded in red to turn dull. A Runic Transceiver Array was an immense construct of runes and magic that allowed a Mage to communicate verbally with a Mage in another RTA, no matter how far away. “Corinthian didn’t, but as soon as they get a ship to Sherwood, every system with an RTA is going to have us on a watch list,” he concluded. “That takes these systems out.”

  Over half of the green lights and a single blue light turned dull.

  “Anywhere that will have been reached by ship from Corinthian before we get there will also be looking for us,” David continued, overlaying a new layer which turned most of the remaining MidWorlds dull in a sphere around Corinthian.

  “So we go to the Fringe,” Jenna answered, gesturing at the massive swathes of blue stars. “T
his ship has the fuel bunkers and food storage for the long Fringe runs – she was built for it. We both have contacts out there – so does James, I think.”

  The Captain nodded. “He does, though he’s been busy making sure there’s nothing in our data download that incriminates us.” James Kellers was the ship’s engineer, and he’d been face-down in the normally sealed portion of the ship’s computer that carried downloads of all news and financial transaction data between systems since they’d left Corinthian.

  “He can do that?” Jenna asked, shocked.

  “Can’t get into the bank data, but he can open up the news and law enforcement downloads and modify them – undetectably, he insists.”

  The First Officer whistled. The RTAs only allowed verbal communication. The ‘mailbox’ present on every starship carried the large-scale electronic data transfers required to keep a modern economy and integrated society functioning. Supposedly, only the Royal Post offices in each system could upload and download from them, which meant that, for example, the Blue Jay’s mailbox carried the most up-to-date listing of her crew’s own finances – data that local banks would use to authorize withdrawals and spending.

  “Contacts or not, though, we can’t go straight to the Fringe,” David finally concluded, touching a control that made the blue stars flash gently. “Fringe shipping is speculative – we’d have to pick up a cargo we know they’ll buy and take it in, with no contracts or guarantees. That means we need the capital to buy said cargo, and we don’t have it.”

  Jenna looked at him sharply, and David shrugged. “I can cover operating expenses for two years, but even if I put all of that in, it wouldn’t cover a tenth of a full cargo for this ship. Three million tons of anything is expensive.”

  “So what?” she asked.

  The red-banded silver world, on the edge of the Core, flashed on the screen.

  “Legatus,” David answered. “The first UnArcana world. No Mages, so no transceiver array. Shipping is rarer than in the rest of the Core, and the Navy leaves system security to the Legatus Self Defense Force. We get a contract there; build up our cash reserves as we head outwards. Use the cash to pick up a cargo of survey satellites and combine harvesters in the MidWorlds somewhere, then do the long sweep of the Fringe.”

  “Once we’ve done an eighteen month sweep of the Fringe, we won’t be on the top of everyone’s list,” he concluded. “We’ll be able to pop back into the MidWorlds for a new cargo, so long as we don’t draw attention to ourselves.”

  “What makes you think we’ll find work in Legatus?” Jenna demanded. “I thought most of the shipping through there was locked up by big lines willing to play their games.”

  “Carmichael gave me a name,” David admitted.

  “We played Carmichael and left him to face the music when a Hand arrived,” Jenna pointed out. Carmichael hadn’t got anything he’d been supposed to out of the deal he’d brokered between David and a mob boss.

  “The name was in trade for warning him about the Hand in time,” David replied. “I think the man will help us.”

  His First Officer crossed her arms and looked at him crossly.

  “If you’ve already made up your mind, why are we still chatting instead of letting the crew know?” she asked.

  “Because until I said this all aloud, I hadn’t made up my mind,” David told her. “I can still change it if you have a better idea?”

  Jenna shook her head slowly.

  “Fine boss,” she conceded. “The belly of the beast it is!”

  #

  Rice was waiting for Damien when he and Singh exited the shuttle, carefully, into the zero-gravity of the Blue Jay’s shuttle bay. As the final test of his skill, the old Sikh pilot had made Damien slot the cargo shuttle into its bay, one of the seven on the ‘roof’ of the bay. Like everything else Singh had asked, Damien did it slowly, carefully, and without a single mistake.

  “I’ll hook up the fuel lines and check her over,” the pilot told Damien as they spotted the Captain waiting for them. “Looks like the Captain wants you.”

  “Thanks,” Damien told Singh and then, gently, launched himself across the shuttle bay to the freighter’s commander.

  “We have a destination?” he asked Rice.

  “We do,” Rice confirmed. “Let’s go to your lab, I want to pull some data up for you.”

  Damien’s lab slash office was situated at the heart of the ship, just behind the simulacrum chamber that occupied the jumpship’s exact center and allowed him to teleport her through space. Unlike the rest of the ship’s core, though, his office had gravity due to a set of runes the previous Ship’s Mage had carved into the floor.

  Entering the tiny space, which combined the best and worst aspects of an office, a chemistry lab, and a jeweler’s workshop, Rice dropped himself into the chair next to the workstation. Three screens were set up on the desk, creating a pseudo-three-dimensional image of the space the freighter was suspended in.

  That space was unusually empty. They’d made six basically random jumps after leaving Corinthian minutes ahead of a pair of Navy destroyers, and now sat in the dead black space between stars, light years away from even the normal jump zones.

  “Carmichael gave us a contact who can probably get us work, regardless of our questionable legal status,” Rice finally told Damien, the heavyset Captain looking over the screens at the Mage. “There’s two problems – first, we’re talking a long way away, and second, he’s in Legatus.”

  Damien watched carefully as Rice manipulated the controls on the workstation, zooming in on the star in question. The Captain was faster with the software than he was, though even now most of his experience with it had been in school. He leaned in over Rice’s shoulder, and read the course projection the computer was providing.

  A computer’s projection of the course a Mage could take was always slightly off, but it would give him a starting point to work from.

  “That’s forty-two light years away,” he observed quietly. “Two weeks in transit. Can we risk it?”

  Damien was trained and qualified to perform a one light year jump of a ship like the Blue Jay every eight hours. In practice, he could probably cut that down to six hours, and he’d known Mages who could jump after as little as three hours – but those paces weren’t sustainable. To travel halfway across the Protectorate, he’d stick to the safe pace.

  “They don’t have a transceiver in Legatus,” Rice replied, “and they don’t get as much shipping as you would think. I think we’ll still have a few days' leeway before the news gets there.”

  “Legatus is a Core World, isn’t it?” the Mage asked.

  “It’s also the first UnArcana world,” Rice told him grimly. “One of the first colony ships after the Mage-King revealed that the Mages could take humanity to the stars – the colonists got to Legatus, got off the ships, and told the Mages who’d brought them to go to hell.”

  “You’ve never been a real UnArcana world,” the Captain continued, “so I wanted to warn you where we were going. You won’t be allowed on planet. Use of magic off of the ship is grounds for imprisonment – I suggest you stay aboard.”

  Damien swallowed, looking at the innocent looking yellow star again.

  “Do we have a choice?” he asked finally. Heading to a system where he’d be hated just for breathing sounded unappealing.

  “We need to make a big payday, fast,” David admitted. “If we do, we can pick up a bunch of high tech gear the Fringe worlds won’t care who delivers on our way out, but without enough capital, we’re trapped trying to find contracts. Anywhere we can get a contract for; the Protectorate will find us sooner or later.”

  And then they would strip Damien’s magic. That had been made very clear on Corinthian.

  “I’ll start plotting the jumps.”

  #

  Two days and six jumps later found Damien back in his lab, slumped in the chair by his monitors as they projected the calculations for the next days’ worth of jumps. A
cold bulb of coffee rested on the corner of the desk, long ignored when the sound of the admittance buzzer jerked him awake.

  “Hey Damien, are you in here?” the soft voice of Kelly LaMonte, the junior-most of the ship’s engineering officers, asked.

  “Yeah,” he answered blearily, checking the time stamp on the screens to be sure he hadn’t slept right up to his next jump. This wasn’t the gap between jumps he’d scheduled for sleep – that was after the jump that was coming up in four hours now. “Come in.”

  The door slid open and the dark-haired engineer lithely grabbed the top of the door, swinging gently through the transition from the keel’s zero-gravity to the lab’s magical gravity zone and landing softly to smile brightly at Damien.

  “Is something up in Engineering?” he asked, wondering what had brought the young engineer down to the center of the ship.

  “I wanted to check up on you,” she answered, her gaze flicking around the empty coffee bulbs and the most recent cold one. “I haven’t seen you since we started jumping towards Legatus.”

  Damien shrugged, glancing at the calculations on the screen and the starscape they were overlaid on.

  “Keeping an eye on things here,” he told her. “I don’t want to risk any mistakes.”

  “You joined us for lunch most days on the way to Corinthian,” she reminded him, stepping closer and perching on the edge of the desk, looking down at him.

  He didn’t respond immediately. She was right, though he hadn’t realized it until she’d pointed it out. On the trip from his home system to Corinthian, his only previous jump route with the Blue Jay, he’d made the time to eat with the junior engineers and pilots regularly – they were the only people aboard his own age. He worked with Kellers, Rice and Campbell, but those three were all ten years or more his senior.

  The girl sitting on his desk looking concernedly at him was the same age as him, with a degree in starship engineering to his degree in thaumaturgy.