Starship's Mage: Episode 2 Read online

  Five kilometers long and fourteen hundred meters in diameter, the Spindle represented more square footage than many cities in the MidWorlds, and much of it was covered in greenery. A neat grid of roads split the surface into blocks, and rarely did he see more than two blocks together of houses or industry. It was so unlike the compressed corridors in the many rotating rings of Sherwood Prime that it took Damien a long minute of standing in the shade of the trees to wrap his head around the sight.

  Damien started walking down the LengthWay, looking for signs to tell him the numbers of the CircleWays that crossed it. It took him a few minutes to leave the cultured forest the Corinthians’ had chosen to wrap around the entrances from the civilian docks, and that was when he saw the building.

  The trees had blocked his view of it before, but now he wasn’t sure how he’d missed it. The structure rose in blocks of black iron, softened somewhat by trees growing in terraces atop the blocks, but it remained a sprawling fortress in the middle of one of the more spectacular stations built by man.

  A tiny whirring noise caused Damien to turn and spot the promised cab – a low slung vehicle with a cloth cover and two seats behind its driver.

  “Can I give you a lift?” the driver asked.

  “Sure,” he answered. “I need to get to the Jump Mage’s Guild.”

  The driver’s gaze flicked down at Damien’s collar, then he spat over the side. “Sure,” he said flatly. “We don’t call it the Guild though, here.”

  “What?” Damien asked quickly.

  The driver pointed at the fortress Damien had been staring at.

  “Mages don’t trust us lot not to burn their homes down around their ears,” he said bluntly. “They built that thing when the Spindle was finished. It’s the home of your Guild, but we just call it the Citadel.”

  #

  Security at the Guildhouse Citadel seemed lower than the cab-driver’s words and its fortress-like structure suggested. The gates in the artfully concealed fence that surrounded the fortified compound were wide open, and foot traffic passed in and out in a slow but steady stream.

  Passing through those gates, though, Damien spotted the two men just inside who were all the security the Guildhouse needed. Both were clad in dark robes over matte-black combat armor, and the gold medallions at their throats bore a single sword, compared to Damien’s three stars and a quill. His three stars marked him as a Jump Mage. Their sword marked them as Enforcers, the police officers of the Guilds, and the only fully combat-trained Mages outside of the Mage-King’s military.

  Those two men could stand off an entire battalion of conventionally armed troops, at least for long enough to close the gates. For all that efforts had clearly been made to soften the appearance of the Citadel with the trees and gardens, they were still being very careful.

  The thought was sobering as Damien entered the main hall, looking for the sign to direct him to the Ship Mage’s Guild. Corinthian was a major MidWorld, hardly one of the UnArcana worlds where Mages weren’t allowed to set foot on the surface, but the Guilds here clearly felt threatened.

  With a shake of his head, he stepped into the Ship Mage’s Guild office, relaxing slightly in the surroundings of the dozens of plants they’d used to soften the stark angles of the building’s walls. A single desk stood in the middle of the room, with no one waiting to see the older woman sitting at the desk.

  “Can I help you?” she greeted him bluntly.

  “I’m here to register a Jump Contract,” he replied, pulling the chip containing the formal contract between himself and Captain David Rice from the pocket of his blazer.

  She grunted. “Give it here.” He passed her the chip, and she slotted it into the reader on her desk. A holographic screen shimmered into existence at a wave of her hand, displaying the information.

  “This says you signed the contract in the Sherwood system almost two weeks ago,” she observed. “You should have registered it there.”

  “It slipped our minds while we were preparing for departure,” he told her. In truth, the Mage-Governor of Sherwood had unofficially blacklisted the Blue Jay from taking on a Jump Mage, so he and David hadn’t believed that they would have been permitted to register the contract in Sherwood.

  The woman at the desk grunted, clearly unconvinced, and hit a few more keys on her projected keyboard.

  “Well, it’s registered now. Charge to your ship?”

  “Yes,” Damien confirmed, then reeled off the local account number for the Blue Jay.

  “Done,” she said, ejecting the chip and passing it back to him. “Anything else?”

  Damien shook his head, but paused as he turned to leave.

  “Do you know why the Guildhouse here is so fortified?” he asked. Anything further from the airy, sprawling complex of bungalows in Sherwood City that served his home was hard to imagine.

  She sighed. “Corinthian Prime was built fifty years ago,” she told him. “Just before that, there was a bombing in Corinth City that killed two Mages and twelve bystanders. Two more Mages were killed in the ensuing riots, and both the Guilds and the Governor agreed that moving the Guilds somewhere more securable and out-of-the-way was a good idea.”

  The woman, a senior ranked but still mundane employee of the Guild, shrugged. “It’s only been ten years or so since it became illegal to bar Mages from a restaurant or store,” she told him, some of her earlier gruffness lost in the sad tone of her voice. “If the government didn’t think flouting the Charter laws around segregation was going to impede their effort to get the first MidWorlds Fleet Yard, I think you’d still see every second or third restaurant with a ‘No Dogs or Mages’ sign.”

  Damien winced.

  “That’s… different than I’m used to,” he admitted. “Thanks for explaining.”

  She shook her head.

  “Wish I didn’t have to,” she told him. “Step carefully, Mage Montgomery. There’s a reason your kind built themselves a fortress here.”

  #

  The first day on station was a blur for David. Bistro had taken them up on the offer for twenty-four hour offloading, so he’d had to arrange hotels for everyone. He’d then touched base with his insurance, a surprisingly un-confrontational appointment where they’d taken his telemetry data and confirmed within twenty minutes that they would cover the repairs under the piracy clause.

  He settled into his hotel room, an expensive one in the docking area with magical artificial gravity that allowed him a view of the Blue Jay from the window. David watched the ships and robot arms swarm over his ship, detaching the cargo containers and slowly transporting them to the station. From there automated transfer tubes whisked them away to either destinations on the stations, or transfer shuttles to carry them to the sky-tether that would deliver them to the surface.

  Each container removed from the Blue Jay was a check mark in his mental book, and in many cases, a literal entry in the ship’s ledgers. Unless he’d missed his math, even with the repairs from the pirate attack, the revenue from this trip would allow him to make the last payment on the ten billion dollar note he’d taken out to finance acquiring the Blue Jay a decade ago. It would take time for the funds, encoded in a deep bank cipher, to make their way back to the Martian banking syndicate that had financed him, but under Protectorate Law, once he sent the money, the Blue Jay was completely his.

  Now if only people would stop shooting at his ship.

  #

  “Is there any part of the matrix we can let another Mage inspect?” Kellers asked as Damien crawled under the fresh welding in Rib Four.

  Damien’s ‘holiday’ had come to an abrupt end as soon as the two days of offloading were complete and the repair crews started swarming over the ship.

  “In theory, anywhere not attached to the seven matrixes I highlighted on the chart,” Damien told him. Those seven were the matrixes that prevented a jump matrix from acting as a general amplifier for all spells instead of just the jump spell.

  “In pract
ice,” the young Ship’s Mage shrugged, eyeing the glitter of energy along the runes and checking for errors, “I would want to review all of the runes around the work anyway, so not wanting someone to see what I did to the matrix just adds to the urgency.”

  He paused, noting a set of runes where the energy didn’t flow quite right. “Pass me the inlayer?” he asked the engineer.

  With a bright white grin, the engineer passed the tool over.

  “I’ll sell it to my guys as professional skepticism, I think,” Kellers told him. “I don’t think we want to explain to everyone on the ship just what you did.”

  Damien carefully drew the engraving tool along the line his gift showed him. A tiny laser burned a trench into the steel, and a soldering iron attachment filled the trench with silver inlay. He pulled the inlayer away and looked at the runes again. He wasn’t actually sure the runes had been damaged when the repair crew had replaced the conduits, or when they’d originally burnt out from the corona of the pirate laser that had disabled the engines. Either way, it would work now.

  “The fact that it’s not supposed to be possible helps with that,” he said dryly, shivering a little at the thought of the entire crew knowing what he’d done to the ship. The Blue Jay’s crew of eighty-plus were good people, but spacers weren’t exactly known for their tact and discretion.

  Kellers laughed sharply.

  “I thought ships were supposed to blow up if you jump with a damaged matrix,” he continued, his dark face grim for a moment.

  “They usually do,” Damien admitted, shivering again, and sliding out from under the conduits. “These runes are good. They’re still working on the bow cap?”

  “The engineering firm said they’d have the new RFLAM turret installed by the end of today, but weren’t going to be working on the plating until tomorrow,” the engineer told him. Rapid-Fire-Laser-Anti-Missile turrets were mounted on all merchant ships, their first defense against pirates with missiles.

  “Hold on one moment,” Kellers continued as Damien continued to pack up. “What do you mean; ships with a modified matrix usually blow up? How the hell did you know we wouldn’t?”

  Damien sighed and finished packing up the tools he used to maintain the ship’s runes.

  “To put it as simply as I can,” he said slowly, “the runes are like a circuit diagram – they control a flow of energy, right?”

  “I follow so far,” Kellers agreed with a nod, his eyes dark as he held Damien’s gaze.

  “Most Mages know the runes we’ve been taught – think of them as standard circuit diagrams,” Damien continued. “Scribes are taught how to combine the runes into new matrices.” He touched the quill on his collar – he’d qualified as a base level Rune Scribe along the way to his Jump Mage certification, mostly because runes came very easily to him.

  “We have to know the runes and the language around them, because like an electrician, we can’t see the power that flows through the runes, right?”

  “Yeah, but an electrician uses a voltmeter,” Kellers objected.

  “Yep,” Damien agreed. “And we don’t have anything like that. So we don’t modify existing matrices or runes, because it’s dangerous. A damaged jump matrix could leave a ship in pieces across an entire light year.”

  “So why didn’t that happen to us?” the older man demanded.

  Damien sighed. “Because I can see the flow of energy through the runes,” he admitted. “I’ve never met another Mage who can, but it lets me adjust runes with a far better idea of what I’m doing than any other Mage.”

  “It’s why I could tell that those seven matrices were limiting the matrix to just a jump spell,” he said quietly. “And how I knew that jumping wouldn’t blow us to hell. I could look at the matrix and know it would work.”

  There was a long moment of silence, and the engineer shook his head at Damien.

  “You may be damned crazy, son,” he told the Mage, “but I’m glad you were aboard!”

  #

  On the fourth day in Corinthian, David Rice found Damien under the forward radiation cap on his own, putting the final touches on a re-inlaying of the forward rune matrix. This section had survived the pirate attack relatively intact, but had needed to be cut around when the repair crews had replaced the forward turret.

  “You realize we’re supposed to be on station meeting Bistro in less than two hours,” the Captain observed, slowing his drift through zero-gravity to come to a rest next to the Mage. He glanced over the rune matrix that the young man was working on. Even to his eyes, it looked different than the old version – most notably, there was a blank space where one of the youth’s ‘seven limiter sub-matrices’ had been.

  “Hadn’t been watching the time,” the Ship’s Mage said distractedly, carefully connecting a final set of runes with an odd looping line that Rice was sure meant something quite specific to the Mage. The Captain noticed, with a minor pang of envy, that the Mage was standing on the deck to work, in his own magically generated field of gravity.

  “I need to get down to the engineering spaces once I’m done here,” Damien continued. “The repair crew is working on the main hydrogen feeds for Engine One. I’ll need to check for rune damage when they’re done.”

  “I note, Damien, that there are no runes on the hydrogen feeds,” Rice observed dryly. “We were told to bring the ship’s officers, which includes the Ship’s Mage.”

  “There are runes close enough to the feeds that a Mage need to check they’re intact,” Damien replied. “Those include the runes on the main heat exchanger, which I really don’t want anyone else taking a look at.”

  Rice shook his head as his youngest officer. “They’re not going to be any more or less damaged tomorrow,” he told him. “I appreciate both the concern around strangers looking at our runes now, and your dedication to overseeing the repairs.”

  “That said,” the Captain continued, “I believe I am ordering you to take the evening off. Finish up the runes in this section and then get yourself cleaned up. Clear?”

  The youth looked at his boss and sighed.

  “Clear, Captain,” he replied.

  “We’ll meet in the lobby of the hotel in ninety minutes,” Rice concluded. “It’ll take you fifteen to get there, so you’d better work quickly.”

  #

  Damien stumbled out of the hotel room shower with about five minutes to spare on Rice’s deadline. The hotel Bistro had put the senior officers up in was located next to the docks to allow easy access to the ship and had floors marked with gravity runes throughout to avoid the dock’s lack of gravity. Maintaining the spells that allowed artificial gravity required weekly renewing by a trained Mage, which explained much of the cost of the rooms.

  To Rice and most other ship’s captains and officers, the extra price was worth it to be close to their ships and still not have to sleep in zero-gravity. Damien agreed completely, as the rune work he’d been doing around the new forward turret had taken longer than expected. If they’d been staying at a hotel any further away, he wouldn’t have been able to be ready in time for the Captain’s deadline.

  As it was, he carefully rushed dressing. He slipped into black slacks and the black mock-nocked dress shirt common for Mages. Where a non-Mage’s shirt collar would fold down over the tie, Damien locked the warm leather of the rune-inlaid collar that carried his medallion over the half-neck. That gold coin, with its three stars and quill, marked him as a recognized Mage of the Royal Orders and Guilds of the Protectorate of Humanity. Without it, he would feel naked.

  In the end, he was two minutes late into the lobby. David, Jenna and Kellers were all waiting, the ship’s two senior officers in quiet conversation with the dark-skinned engineer. He joined them wordlessly, exchanging nods with the other officers.

  “Where’s Narveer?” he asked.

  “There was a problem with one of the heavy lift shuttles,” Jenna explained. “He didn’t make it back to the hotel until after you did, he’ll be a few more min
utes.”

  The Captain shook his head with a smile, and was about to say something more when the ship’s First Pilot bustled into the lobby, his turban neatly tied, but his dark blue tie flapping loosely around his neck and the jacket of his charcoal suit wide open over it.

  “Stop,” Rice ordered flatly as the Pilot reached them. “Hold still.” The squat Captain swiftly grabbed the loose ends of Singh’s tie and knotted them in a blur of motion. “Better. Are we ready?”

  Kellers and the Captain wore the same style of charcoal gray suit as Singh, similar enough that Damien suspected they’d all be acquired at the same time. Jenna wore a plain black suit that looked somewhat newer than the men’s, though still worn.

  All four of the ship’s officers, including Damien, nodded their readiness to the Captain.

  “Alright,” Rice replied. “Let’s go collect our paycheck.”

  The Captain led them out and drifted into a transit pod that would take them to the Spindle. Damien kicked off after him, stepping out of the gravity in the hotel lobby and into the zero-gravity of the docks.

  He caught the handle on the side of the pod and swung in, managing not to embarrass himself too badly he thought. The other officers quickly followed, all moving with the practiced ease of professional spacers that Damien had not, quite, picked up yet.

  The pod shot away as soon as the five were all aboard, a small acceleration pressing the officers into the back of the cushioned seats.

  “How are the repairs proceeding, James?” Rice asked once they were on their way.

  “Better than I was figuring,” the engineer shrugged. “Forward repairs are basically done, and the repair crew promised to have the engine conduits fixed up tonight. If they manage that, we’ll have the new rear turret bolted on and wired in by the end of tomorrow.”