Starship's Mage: Episode 5 Read online

  Starship’s Mage

  Episode 5

  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

  Alaura Stealey was a Hand of the Mage-King of Mars, the King’s voice and his sword in the worlds beyond the Sol System – a Judge and warrior; the representative of the executive branch of the government that ruled humanity.

  She was not used to being kept waiting.

  The gray-haired woman stood impatiently in the outer office of Mage-Admiral Lillian Castello, commander of the Royal Martian Navy’s Seventh Cruiser Squadron, and the station commander of the Nia Kriti Naval Base.

  Stealey had arrived in the system nine hours before and her personal transport had set new speed records closing the distance to the Naval Base. After that rush, however, she’d now been left cooling her heels in the Admiral’s office for forty minutes.

  She turned back towards the door with its Marine sentry, about to order the neatly turned out young man to stand aside, when it finally slid open. A middle aged woman in the dark blue uniform of a Navy Captain exited the office, presumably the commanding officer of the cruiser they were aboard, the Rising Sun of Gallantry.

  Alaura was through the door into Castello’s office before the ship’s captain had half-completed her salute. The Admiral sat on the other side of a massive desk of dark black wood, polished to a fine sheen, her mouth half-open in an unvoiced protest as the Hand crossed the space to her desk and stood, facing her in silence.

  The two women regarded each other for a long moment. Alaura knew that what Castello saw was unimpressive. The Hand wore an unmarked, black, version of the Navy’s uniform, from which hung the open-palmed golden hand of her symbol of office. She was short, stocky, and graying – unbothered by her appearance, she’d declined the many and varied treatments available to a citizen of the Protectorate to reverse the look of age.

  Castello, on the other hand, was a lithe red-headed woman who looked in her early thirties – and was closer, Alaura knew, to seventy.

  “How may I… assist you?” the Admiral said after a long pregnant pause.

  “You were sent a brief of the situation and the forces I requested,” Alaura told her calmly. “I presume you have reviewed it?”

  “Frankly, Lady Hand, I have not had time,” Castello replied, her tone icy. “I am responsible for a security area of fourteen star systems. I cannot drop everything every time a self-important flunky from Mars arrives.”

  Alaura regarded the other woman with a degree of calm she didn’t feel.

  “I am sorry,” she said calmly. “Did you just tell me you intentionally disregarded a Priority Alpha-One Communique from a Hand of the Mage-King?”

  “Everyone who comes to this system thinks their needs are Alpha-One, Lady Stealey,” Castello replied. “It is my job to decide whose needs actually are.”

  “Who is your second-in-command?” Alaura asked.

  “What?” Castello replied, startled.

  “Who is your second-in-command?” Alaura repeated. “Since you are so busy, I will do you the courtesy of not imposing further on your time.”

  “Mage-Commodore James Medici of the Fifteenth Destroyers,” the Admiral said slowly.

  “Very well. Pack your things,” Alaura ordered. “Mage-Admiral Medici will be assuming command of the Seventh Cruisers, as well as the Fifteenth Destroyers, to accompany me on my mission.”

  “You don’t have that authority!” Castello bellowed, surging to her feet.

  “I am His Majesty’s Hand, Admiral,” Stealey said flatly. “Be grateful I do not relieve you of your commission. You will transfer your flag to one of the ships remaining – I will be taking your cruisers and Medici’s destroyers.”

  “If I were you,” she continued, “I would pray that your delay does not result in the failure of my mission. His Majesty will be… displeased if that’s the case.”

  Alaura turned on her heel and strode from the Admiral’s office, leaving the woman whose career she’d just shattered staring after her in shock.

  #

  James Medici was waiting for Alaura once she returned to the Tides of Justice, the destroyer she used as her personal transport. The newly-promoted Mage-Admiral was a tiny man with skin as black as night and the slanted eyes of a Martian native.

  “Lady Hand,” he greeted her calmly.

  “You’ll need to get new insignia, Admiral Medici,” Stealey told him calmly. He still wore the single star of a Navy Commodore, not the two stars of an Admiral.

  “I believed reviewing your brief and meeting with you were a higher priority,” he told her dryly. “I did not wish to raise your ire as Lillian has done.”

  “That would be difficult,” the Hand replied. “My office,” she ordered curtly, allowing Mage-Lieutenant Harmon, her personal aide and ‘Navy Liaison’ to lead the way. Medici was silent until they reached her office and Harmon had left them in private.

  “Admiral Castello is a capable officer with a lot on her plate,” he said quietly. “Your arrival was unexpected, and this region has more than a few priority concerns.”

  “That is my presumption, Admiral Medici,” Alaura told him. “That is why the Admiral is still employed. That said, I need her ships – and I don’t trust her to command them in action. Don’t disappoint me.”

  He nodded sharply, standing calmly at attention as she took a seat behind her desk. She gestured Medici to a chair, but he shrugged and remained standing.

  “You have reviewed the brief,” Alaura reminded him. “Your opinion?”

  “The cruiser represents a significant threat to the security of the Fringe,” Medici agreed. “She is insufficient to present a major threat to the MidWorlds or the Core, of course, but her presence in the hands of the Blue Star Syndicate is a concern.

  “That said, the force level you are requesting seems excessive,” he continued. “A squadron of cruisers, a squadron of destroyers and three Marine battalion transports? I’ve seen planetwide rebellions suppressed with one cruiser, let alone eight with as many destroyers.”

  “You have professional blinders, Admiral,” Alaura told him calmly. Unlike with Castello, at least he’d read the briefing and seemed prepared to listen. “You’re focusing on the rogue warship and not the other factors in play.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “The destruction of the Syndicate’s cruiser is a priority,” she told him, “but it is one of two Alpha-One priorities at play here. The second is the capture of the Blue Jay and Ship’s Mage Damien Montgomery – and Montgomery must be captured alive. That requires numbers, to make sure he doesn’t run.”

  “I also wish to minimize casualties when bringing the Syndicate cruiser down,” Alaura continued, “for which overwhelming force seems wise. Could you guarantee the destruction of the ship with no casualties with a lesser force?”

  Medici shrugged, still standing at a slightly relaxed form of attention as he faced her, his hands clasped behind his bac
k.

  “There are no guarantees in combat, ma’am,” he reminded her. “Even outnumbered seventeen to one and out-massed nine to one, the Syndicate ship may still inflict damage.”

  “The ships are available,” Alaura concluded, “so we will use them. They will also come in handy in exploiting the opportunity we have been handed – the opportunity I want those Marine transports for.”

  “I’ll admit to being unclear on that, ma’am,” the Admiral said. “My understanding is that we are pursuing the Blue Jay, as we know her destination and that the Blue Star ship is also chasing her. Why are we bringing enough Marines to fight a mid-sized war?”

  “I take it you didn’t note where we know Blue Jay is going, Admiral,” the Hand replied. “My information is that the Jay is headed to Darkport to take on supplies and make repairs. I have the co-ordinates.”

  “If we can bring our various prey to bay there, so much the better. But I see no reason to pass up the opportunity to wipe out the center of the Protectorate’s slave trade when it is handed to me on a silver platter!”

  The little Admiral considered for a long moment, and then nodded.

  “Darkport,” he said quietly. “That’s a pockmark on the universe I’ll be glad to burn out.”

  #

  “I guess that answers that question,” Mikhail Azure said drily, watching the footage on the main viewscreen of the Blue Star Syndicate cruiser Azure Gauntlet. His cruiser.

  The screen was showing the now six days old light from when the deadliest bounty hunter he’d ever known had finally caught up with the Blue Jay and its ever-frustrating Captain. For several moments, the crime lord had begun to believe that his pursuit of the hunter and the freighter had been unnecessary.

  Then the Jay’s ‘discarded’ fuel tanker had lit up its engines and rammed the bounty hunter ship, removing the most useful contractor Azure had known in recent years from the galaxy in an explosion that put stars to shame.

  He crossed over to where Wong, the Captain of the Gauntlet, was reviewing the information from the sensors.

  “Well, Mister Wong?” he said calmly. “Can you track them now?”

  “Now that I can identify the source of the interference, yes,” the other man replied. Wong was one of the few in the Protectorate who had mastered the complex art of tracking a jumpship through its jump. “That explosion threw out a massive amount of energy,” he continued. “There was no way we could track the Blue Jay through its aftermath.”

  Azure nodded grimly. If he’d had even the slightest doubts in Wong’s ability, the Tracker’s insistence that he was unable to pick jump signatures out of the hash of radiation in this quiet corner of deep space would have resulted in the Gauntlet having a new Captain. As it was, the four day exercise of jumping ever-further out, trying to get ahead of the light and radiation from the ‘battle’ had strained his patience to the limit.

  “Able did not survive?” he asked.

  “Only one jump signature, and there was no ship left when we were there,” Wong answered with a shrug. “Your Hunter is dead.”

  Wong did not sound displeased that the second-best Tracker in the Protectorate was dead.

  “Then find me the Blue Jay,” Azure told him. “We better not need to repeat this,” he added, gesturing at the old light scans on the screen.

  “We won’t,” Wong confirmed. “We will gain on them quickly now. Five days at most – they have only Montgomery to jump them, after all.”

  Azure himself had never learned to jump a starship, but Wong had three Mages serving on his ship. They would jump three times as fast as the Blue Jay. Unless Wong was somehow unable to track the Jay again, they would soon bring their prey to heel.

  The Blue Jay and its Mage would make Azure even more powerful than he was now – and the capture of the freighter’s Captain would finally allow him to avenge his son’s death.

  He settled back into his chair as Wong began to co-ordinate the jump. He would wait. Impatient as he was, for this prize, Mikhail Azure could wait.

  #

  The system looked empty. Dead. The ugly bloated red giant of a star recently out of its transition from a smaller sun illuminated the shattered wreck of the system it had eaten. A single gas giant, half again the size of Sol’s Jupiter, orbited well outside the sparse remnants of what had likely been a dense asteroid belt once. Inside the asteroid belt, two rocky balls of worlds orbited, both seared clean of any atmosphere when their star had begun to burn helium.

  The ship that had surveyed the system, almost a hundred years ago now, had written the entire place off as useless, even going so far as to name the system Nani Mo Nashi. According to the survey database the Blue Jay had provided Damien, the name meant roughly ‘there’s nothing here.’

  “I’ve seen colleges after exams are over with more life than this place,” the young Ship’s Mage announced over the intercom to the bridge. “There’s really supposed to be something here?”

  “You’re seeing what they want you to see,” Captain David Rice replied. The ship’s stocky Captain tapped a command on the panel on his chair, zooming in the main viewscreen – and the screen in Damien’s simulacrum chamber at the center of the ship that was currently mirroring it –on the gas giant.

  “Most of the system is dead, but Nashi Three has a massive moon, four times the size of Earth,” Rice explained. “This gives it gas giant sized Lagrange points here, here, and here.”

  Three spheres were defined on the screen in transparent blinking white light. ‘Nashi Three’ was the gas giant, which had never earned a name other than that of its system. Who would name worlds in a system they never expected humanity to visit?

  “From the co-ordinates Seule gave us, Darkport is at this one,” Jenna told the two men, zooming in the view on the Lagrange point directly ahead of the immense moon. Zoomed in that far, even the Blue Jay’s powerful telescopes could only reveal so much, but they showed that the low gravity zone had accumulated a small collection of good-sized asteroids, including one easily eighty kilometers across.

  “I have thermals in that cluster that aren’t natural,” Damien told the two bridge officers softly. He floated at the heart of the ship, one of his hands on the magical Simulacrum that allowed him to cast magic through the ship itself. The walls of the simulacrum chamber were coated in screens showing the stars and space around the Jay, and Damien had begun to master the techniques of adding the more esoteric sensors the starship commanded to that view.

  “Looks like at least a dozen ships,” he concluded. “If they’re careful, they can jump in and out a lot closer than we did – and if they have any kind of sensor network, anyone leaving can use the giant as a shield to hide their jump flare.”

  “It’s a clever set up,” David agreed. “Jenna, set us a course for the cluster. We’ll see how well this ‘bounty hunter truce’ holds up once we show up.”

  Captain Seule, the man who’d sent them here, had assured them that no bounty hunter would try and take them on Darkport. Apparently, the Family that ran the station disapproved of trouble.

  Of course, given the… enthusiasm the Blue Jay’s pursuers had shown so far, Damien wasn’t entirely sure that the threat of such disapproval would be enough.

  #

  It took the Blue Jay twenty-one hours to attract the attention of Darkport’s equivalent of Traffic Control. David figured that emerging three light minutes away, easily halfway to the bloated sun at the center of Nani Mo Nashi, had kept them from being noticed. As soon as they made turnover on a Darkport-bound course, however, the station noticed them.

  The audio-only transmission, when it arrived, was short and to the point:

  “I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, but if you don’t explain yourself damn-sweet, you’re going to be eating missiles up the exhaust port, capiche?”

  “They’re not kidding, boss,” Jenna told him. The ship’s husky first officer focused in on a new pair of infrared signatures that had materialized in the Lag
range point they were heading to. The telescope showed them as regular looking shuttles, only slightly larger than the four heavy fusion missiles strapped to them. “Missile boats. No idea how good the missiles are, but it doesn’t take much for eight birds to ruin our day.”

  “I was planning on playing nice anyway,” David reminded her. He turned to the small camera installed on his captain’s chair and hit record.

  “This is David Rice of the Blue Jay,” he told the station. “Captain Nathan Seule sent me. We’re looking for somewhere to rest and refit, away from prying Protectorate eyes.”

  Three minutes later, the audio transmission was replaced by a video transmission, and David knew he’d said the right things. A young, swarthy-looking man with dark hair dressed in an extremely old fashioned suit faced the camera in an extremely ordinary looking traffic control center.

  “Darkport is not a resort, Captain,” he told David. “That said, if you have trade goods or physical transfer chips, you can do business here.”

  “Looks like Seule’s name does open the door,” David muttered to Jenna, but the traffic controller was still speaking.

  “You may continue to approach the station, but be advised we will acquire weapons lock at seven million kilometers – just to discourage any ideas, you understand,” he said calmly.

  “The rules of Darkport are simple. This station is run by the Falcone Family. You fuck with Falcone affairs, we kill you. You risk the atmo integrity of the station, we kill you. You break the bounty ban, we kill you.”

  “Your safety and the safety of your goods are your problem,” he concluded. “The Family are neither cops nor courts. Cause too much trouble, though, and we kill you.”

  “Your docking fees are payable upon arrival in goods or physical transfer chips, as assessed by the Family Capo on hand when you arrive.”

  “If you’ve any issues, you can fuck on off right out of our system. Capiche?”