Pulsar Race: A Starship's Mage Universe Novella Read online

  Pulsar Race

  A Starship’s Mage Universe Novella

  Glynn Stewart

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Starship’s Mage by Glynn Stewart

  About the Author

  Other books by Glynn Stewart

  Pulsar Race © 2020 Glynn Stewart

  Illustration © 2020 Jeff Brown

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Published by Faolan’s Pen Publishing. Faolan's Pen Publishing logo is a trademark of Faolan's Pen Publishing Inc.

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  For all the Glynn Stewart news, announcements, and insider information, join the mailing list at GlynnStewart.com/mailing-list

  1

  It wasn’t much of an apartment. A fifty-sixth floor one-bedroom unit in Serendipity City, the capital of the Xanth System on the planet Anthony, it had solid bones and would probably have been more homey if Mage-Captain (Retired) Ivan Halloway had done anything to personalize the space.

  The hawk-nosed Mage ignored the mess and looked out the window over his home city. He’d been back for two months and had yet to decide if he was going to stay in his apartment. His pension, boosted by his promotion to Mage-Captain on retirement, would pay for a larger place, possibly even a house on the outskirts.

  But Serendipity was the capital of a MidWorld star system of the Protectorate of the Mage-King of Mars. It wasn’t a cheap place to live, so keeping more of his money in his own account sounded good to him.

  Mostly, though, he knew he was being indecisive. Serendipity spread out around him, his hundred-story apartment building one of six in a pentagonal cluster—and one of maybe sixty around the downtown core.

  Ivan started at the chime from his console. He wasn’t expecting any calls today, though there were a number of old friends he’d connected with since his retirement. He took a glance at his reflection in the window and then snorted at his own vanity.

  He was still the same tall and dark man who had drawn female gazes throughout his teen years and his twenty-five-year career in the Royal Martian Navy. His hair was starting to grow out—another thing he was feeling indecisive on—but it showed no gray.

  Whoever was calling probably wasn’t going to care that he was wearing a sleeveless vest instead of a suit or uniform. Ivan tapped on the computer he wore on his left wrist, sighing as he mistyped and started playing the recorded message he had saved—something else he hadn’t decided on.

  “Mage-Captain Ivan Holloway, this is Sarah Tapiti at the Xanth Royal Reserve Station,” a female voice greeted him, mispronouncing both his first name—EYE-vahn, not YEH-vahn—and his last name.

  “We wanted to talk to you about your reserve status. I have a copy of your muster-out forms, and it appears that you did not fill out the section requesting active or inactive reserve status. By default, that puts you in full reti—”

  Ivan cut off the recording. He didn’t want to be reserve Navy. He could see the signs—there was a civil war coming and he wanted no part of it. Hell, there had very nearly been a civil war near Xanth, between the Sherwood and Míngliàng Systems, right before he’d chosen retirement at the end of his fifth five-year commission.

  There were so many things a Mage could do with their power and the money that power brought. Ivan felt no need to die for the Mage-King instead of living for himself.

  He finally managed to accept the incoming call, stepping back into his living room and directing the video to the wallscreen above his never-used fireplace.

  “Hey, Ivan,” the man on the screen greeted him.

  “Karl,” Ivan responded. Karl Charpentier was one of his oldest friends. They’d gone through school here in Serendipity together until Ivan had been pulled into the Mage tracks. They’d stayed friends after that, even through both of their careers.

  “I see you still haven’t finished unpacking,” Charpentier said with a chuckle. “Our city isn’t going to eat you, you know.”

  Ivan shared the chuckle.

  “It’s not Serendipity I’m scared of,” he told his friend. “Just habit, I suppose. You can always be reassigned at the drop of a hat in the Navy.”

  “Civilian shipping is so much more consistent,” Charpentier replied. “You should consider it.”

  “I have three different messages from the Guild in my inbox telling me the same thing,” Ivan said. The Mage Guild’s main job in the twenty-fifth century was matching Jump Mages looking for employment with jump-ships looking for Mages.

  Among the many things the Navy had trained him for, Ivan was a fully qualified Jump Mage with the silver polymer runes inlaid into his hands that allowed him to interact with a starship’s jump matrix.

  “Plus at least eight other messages asking me to come in for assorted interviews,” he continued. “Everyone seems to find the concept of a fortysomething retired Mage problematic.”

  “There’s not that many like you around,” Charpentier told him. “You’re a rare and valuable commodity and everybody wants you to work for them.”

  “Including you?” Ivan asked. “What do you need, Karl?”

  His old friend was silent for a few moments, pulling long sandy hair back with both hands in a long-familiar nervous gesture. Holding his hair back, he swallowed and bowed his head slightly.

  “You know I’m divorced, right?” Karl asked. “I think we talked about that.”

  “Messy disaster, you got the ship and Lyle, and she got everything else?” Ivan vaguely remembered the conversation. They hadn’t been drinking that heavily, but neither of them could drink like they had when they were nineteen, either.

  “Yeah,” Charpentier confirmed. “Penny wasn’t responsible for everything that went wrong after that, but she started all of it.” He sighed. “I guess I can’t blame her for getting bored sitting at home taking care of Lyle while I fucked off around the Protectorate, but I still hate her a bit for leaving Lyle.”

  Lyle was, if Ivan remembered correctly, Karl’s eleven-year old son. Ivan wasn’t clear on what Lyle’s living situation was, but he doubted the boy was living on Restoya, Charpentier’s owner-operated jump-courier.

  “I know what jump-courier rates look like, Karl,” the ex-Navy Mage pointed out. “I can’t imagine you’re hurting just because your wife took the bank account and the house.”

  The channel was silent again and Charpentier looked like Ivan had punched him in the gut.

  “I fucked up,” the courier captain finally whispered. “Divorce, midlife crisis, worry about the kid…I can give a billion excuses, but it’s all on me. I fucked it up but good and the crew quit.”

  “All of them?” Ivan asked. He wasn’t sure how many people a civilian jump-courier would have aboard, but the Navy ones he was familiar with ran a crew of twenty—six of them Mages.

  “All of them,” Charpentier confirmed. “Restoya is a well-built ship with good robots and computers. I can fly her on my own, but maintaining her on my own is a life-eating job and…well…without Mages, I’m fucked.”

  Only a Mage could cast the spell that would jump a starship a light-
year away. Karl Charpentier was not a Mage, which meant he’d hired them. If he was having problems hiring new Mages…

  “You got yourself blacklisted?” Ivan asked.

  “Five Mages walked out on the same day,” his old friend told him. “Doesn’t matter if I’m officially blacklisted. No Mage will jump for me.”

  That was…fair enough.

  “What did you do?” Ivan demanded.

  “What do you think?” Charpentier replied. “I took sympathy as something more and made a pass I shouldn’t. Took no for an answer, but apparently I’d been enough of a general shithead through the divorce…” He sighed. “Look, Ivan, I don’t blame them one bit. But I’m in a hole. A deep hole.”

  Charpentier swallowed hard and met Ivan’s gaze.

  “I put myself here and I probably made it worse along the way,” he said grimly. “Doing my damnedest to keep Lyle in the style and schools Penny got him used to. Holding it all together, paying for it all somehow, but…

  “I need your help, Ivan, or I’m going to lose Restoya,” he finally said in a rush. “I’m deep in debt, and if I don’t come up with four mil in the next thirty days, I default. I default on Restoya, I have nothing.”

  “Four million,” Ivan repeated. “Martian dollars, I’m assuming.”

  “Exactly.”

  That was more than Ivan had made in total in twenty-five years in the Navy. How the hell had Charpentier even ended up that deep in debt?

  “How much of it have you got?” Ivan asked with a sigh. He didn’t want to get involved—he’d been considering never leaving the planet again—but he and Charpentier went back a long way.

  “Nothing,” Charpentier admitted. “I’m tapped out, Ivan. I’m…” He sighed. “The bank has given me almost a year of leeway; that’s why the hole is that big. I’ve borrowed from places I shouldn’t to keep things floating, but I need to make a forty percent payment on the main loan to get back into good standing, and nobody is going to lend me that. Not when my income is all over the place.”

  “Even if I jump for you, you need half a dozen Mages to run at your usual speed,” Ivan told his friend gently. “We can’t make four million in a month, even if we pay nothing except docking fees and fuel.”

  “I have a plan,” Charpentier told him. “Restoya is way faster and more maneuverable sublight than most people think. It shaved a few hours off each end of the critical deliveries and made me a pile of money—Penny’s got that money now, but the ship is still a racer.”

  “You can’t win an intersystem race with one Mage—and even this star system doesn’t have that many sublight races,” Ivan said slowly. Xanth had more than most, both legitimate and…otherwise. Some were straight acceleration courses, but most were based around some degree of navigation and obstacles.

  All of the legal ones were safe. Some of the others weren’t.

  “I know exactly how many sublight races Xanth has, yeah,” Charpentier agreed. “I’ve run in most of them over the last year—and won most of them, too. I was hoping to get a partnership or something, but…buzzbugs. Nothing.”

  “So you end up here, thirty days from a payment you have zero dollars toward,” Ivan concluded. “How do I help?”

  “You will help?”

  “I’ve known you for thirty-six years, Karl Charpentier,” Ivan snapped. “I’m not leaving you or your son to swing.”

  If the bank took Restoya, that would clear most of Charpentier’s legal debts and he could sign on as a captain or pilot for a larger shipping firm. He’d hate that, but he’d survive—but from the sounds of it, Ivan’s old friend had debts that wouldn’t be cleared with the seizure.

  “How much shit are you still in if the banks take your ship?” the Mage asked.

  Charpentier hesitated.

  “I’m not helping you if you don’t tell me everything,” Ivan told him.

  “I’ve borrowed over a million from la Cosa Nostra,” Charpentier admitted. “I didn’t know who was behind the loan sharks I went to, I swear! Not until a gentleman showed up and told me they now owned all of my debt.”

  “Fuck.” Ivan stared at the image of his old friend as a familiar shiver went through him. The last thing Ivan wanted was to get involved with the interstellar iteration of the Sicilian and American Mafias. He’d spent twenty-five years quietly dodging any posting that he expected to involve shooting. He didn’t want to tangle with one of the largest criminal organizations in the Protectorate.

  “But I have a plan and it answers everything,” his friend insisted. “Have you heard of the Black Pulsar Race?”

  “The illegal race run by la Cosa Nostra through whichever pulsar they think the RMN isn’t watching this week?” Ivan asked drily. “Yes, I’d heard of it. The Navy really doesn’t like it. A few too many people tend to die on that run.”

  “I have an invitation,” Charpentier told him. “I won enough of the illegal races in Xanth to earn that. Prize is over six mil, Ivan. I pay off my note and my debt to the mob, and then hand you a draft for a million dollars.”

  “But you need a Mage to get you to the Pulsar,” Ivan concluded with a sigh. A million dollars was a lot of money, but did he even need it? His pension would cover the apartment, and even he wasn’t sure what to do with his time.

  It would, he supposed, make it unnecessary for him to sign up for the reserves for the extra money—and if he never signed up for the reserves, they couldn’t recall him when the war with the UnArcana Worlds inevitably started.

  “We have to get to the starting point, jump to the race course, and then jump to the finish point when the course is done,” Charpentier laid out. “I have the coordinates for where we meet everyone.”

  “The Navy would pay you for those,” Ivan said. He was sure la Cosa Nostra had a plan for if those coordinates leaked, but the Navy would still pay for them.

  “Not six million, they wouldn’t,” his friend replied. “What they’d want would be the endpoint coordinates, where la Cosa Nostra and the other criminals hang out and the rich and dumb bet on which of us dies. We don’t get that until we finish the course.

  “I’m not sure of the exact details, but I only have one set of coordinates and a date.”

  Ivan wanted to say no, to back out, to run and leave his friend to his own devices…but he’d already said he wouldn’t leave Charpentier and the kid to swing.

  He should have asked what his old friend’s solution was before he’d said that.

  “I won’t…” He sighed. “Look, I’m retired, and I was never a good soldier, but I can jump for you. Just this one, then I’m out.”

  “That’s all I need, Ivan,” Charpentier promised. “This should be safe enough. I know Restoya can do it.”

  “Karl…I’ve seen the Navy’s records on the Black Pulsar Race,” Ivan said. “A quarter of the competitors don’t come back. A quarter. Just…keep that in mind, okay?”

  2

  “Welcome to the Mage Guild of the Xanth System; how may I help you?”

  Ivan couldn’t help but smile at the perky cheerfulness of the young man behind the desk. Serendipity City’s office of the Mage’s Guild was an entirely normal-looking twelfth story suite in one of the central office towers. The reception area was carpeted in dark blue carpet that matched the comfortable-looking furniture and went well with the sparkling white walls and reception desk.

  “I need to do a Ship’s Mage registration,” he told the youth. “And I’d like to talk to whoever is running registration, if that’s possible.

  “I could help you with the registration here if there’s nothing complicated,” the young man replied. “But if you want to speak to Miz Kush, I’m afraid she’s out for a late lunch. She should be back in the next twenty minutes or so, if it’s important?”

  Ivan considered it for all of ten seconds, long enough for the youth behind the desk to start looking awkward, before smiling and shaking his head. His curiosity over what the Mage Guild was telling people about Charpentier wasn’t
that important.

  “No, if you and I can go through the registration together, that will be fine,” he said. “Identification number is CT-5385, Restoya. I’ll be taking a temporary position as senior Ship’s Mage under Captain Charpentier.”

  “Of course, of course,” the young man replied. “If you want to take a seat, please, sir Mage? My name is Simion Dumitrescu and I’ll be delighted to help you.”

  An unseen command opened a concealed cupboard in the gleaming white desk that disgorged a blue-upholstered rolling chair. Ivan took the seat calmly—he was keeping up enough of the physical exercise program the RMN had trained into him that he could keep standing for a while but he was still closer to fifty than forty.

  “I see Restoya here, yes,” Dumitrescu told him. “Um. That’s odd.”

  “What’s odd, Mr. Dumitrescu?” Ivan asked.

  “Just the history of the ship, sir Mage,” the youth replied. “All five of her Mages resigned on the same day fourteen months ago. Odd situation, no explanation given—but we do have a flag on the file to warn potential Mages about that.”

  “I’m already aware of it,” Ivan said. “Captain Charpentier was quite honest about the problems his ship had had.”

  “Yes, of course,” Dumitrescu said slowly. “I also have a note on here to warn potential Mages that Restoya is subject to a Notice of Potential Seizure by a syndicate of local banks. Both first and second mortgages have applied for the Notice. If you take a position as her Mage, you will be obligated to return her to this system by the date specified.”

  The youth blinked.

  “I haven’t seen this before,” he admitted.