Starship's Mage: Episode 1 Read online

  “We’re being hailed,” Jenna told him. “Playing it.”

  “Captain Rice,” a sardonic voice told him. “I do believe your ship may be a bit banged up! Please don’t run too hard, you might hurt yourself.”

  “Shit, shit, shit, SHIT,” Jenna exclaimed as the hull lurched again, this time much less noticeably.

  “What?!”

  “Asshole painted us with an x-ray laser while we were busy listening to his transmission,” she said bitterly. “Now the aft RFLAM is gone.”

  Jenna didn’t wait to play the second transmission; she just threw it on when it arrived.

  “In the name of the Blue Star Syndicate, I order you to heave to and be boarded,” the voice ordered. “Continue running, and I will put a kinetic warhead through your bridge, and then collect your cargo and bodies from the debris field.”

  Rice shared a helpless look with Jenna and McLaughlin. If the Blue Star Syndicate boarded the ship, he was dead. If they blew out the Jay’s bridge, he was dead.

  Now Captain David Rice knew he was going to die, and his crew with him.

  The Ship’s Mage took a deep breath and looked him in the eye.

  “Not happening, sir,” he said quietly. “Ready the ship for jump.”

  “You just jumped,” Rice told him. “You can’t jump for at least a few hours!”

  Regulations said a Mage should jump every six hours. If you had a strong, brave, Mage, you could jump after three… once. They’d arrived at the final jump zone short of Sherwood barely twenty minutes before.

  “I’m sorry David,” Kenneth said quietly. “I won’t let everyone on this ship die.”

  The camera to the simulacrum chamber cut out, and David turned back to look at the sensor board and the pirate ship closing. Then the indescribable sensation of teleportation took hold, and the whole bridge faded out.

  When it slowly faded back in, the sensors were clear. They were a day’s regular flight out of Sherwood Prime.

  “Get the camera back,” he ordered Jenna. “Kenneth, answer me dammit!” he snapped.

  The monitor flipped back on, and Rice swallowed hard. The simulacrum chamber was at the center of the ship. It had no gravity, only the small model that was always, somehow, at the exact direct center of the ship it was a copy of.

  One of Kenneth’s hands was caught in the model. The rest of him had started to float away when his eyeballs had exploded out of his head.

  The Blue Jay’s only Ship’s Mage, the youngest son of the Mage-Governor of the planet they’d just arrived at, was very, very dead.

  #

  Damien woke up to bright lights and white walls, blinking as he slowly realized that he could breathe and wasn’t in pain, both facts a minor surprise after having a human-mountain hybrid try to choke him to death.

  He managed to make it about a quarter of the way into a sitting position before a nurse realized what he was doing, arriving in time to stop him from collapsing back onto the clinic bed he was occupying.

  As the brunette clad in light blue scrubs helped him upright, he glanced around a room that any citizen of a Protectorate world would recognize. The Charter defined a minimum standard of health care as a human right for governments to provide, and Olympus Mons helped meet that standard by providing funding and a standard pre-fabricated clinic-in-a-box with a certain set of diagnostic and medical tools.

  “Hold still,” the nurse ordered once she had Damien upright. This was followed by a series of scanners, pokes and prods. Apparently finished, she grunted and disappeared out of the clinic room with a sharp “Stay here.”

  Still dizzy, Damien thought that might have been the most useless instruction ever. The room slowly stopped spinning while he waited, but the nurse eventually returned with three other people.

  Behind the others was the spacer from the Gentle Rains of Summer. In front was an iron-haired gentleman in a white lab coat reading over a datapad the nurse had passed him as they entered the room. In between was a tall redheaded woman in the dark blue uniform of Sherwood System Security.

  “I am Doctor Anderson,” the man introduced himself. “This young lady is nurse Kosta – remember to thank her on your way out.”

  “You are lucky to be alive, young man,” the doctor continued, setting the datapad down next to Damien’s bed. “Your trachea was damaged and several of your ribs were cracked. The dizziness will fade, though you will be very tired for a day or two – a normal side effect of the bone-mending process.”

  The doctor asked him a few questions, ran a more complex scanner the nurse hadn’t used over him, and nodded in satisfaction.

  “We’ll keep you in tonight for observation, but you’ll be free to go in the morning,” Anderson told Damien. “If there’s anything that needs to be taken care of at your home – pets to feed or a girlfriend to let know - let Kosta know and we’ll get it taken care of.”

  “Neither,” Damien told him, coughing to clear his throat after he spoke. “Thank you.”

  “Now, Kosta and I will leave you with Captain Harrison,” the doctor continued. He turned to the SSS officer. “You have fifteen minutes,” he said sternly, “and then I am kicking you out of my clinic, clear?”

  “Perfectly, Doctor. Thank you,” the Security officer said calmly.

  The doctor shuffled out, and Captain Harrison pulled two chairs up beside Damien’s bed, gesturing for the spacer to sit.

  “I kept Mr. Casey here around as I figured you’d want to thank the man who saved your life,” she said quietly. “Brian Kendall – the thug who worked you over – is known to System Security. Given the number you’d done on him, he was going to kill you. Mr. Casey’s intervention prevented that, and his witness statement is going to put him behind bars for a very long time… after the doctors finish fixing his knee. That was you, I presume?”

  Damien nodded. “I… didn’t think he would keep coming after that,” he admitted. “I was trying to calm things down.”

  “With most thugs, that’ll work,” Casey told him with a small smile. “But that Kendall… ‘e seemed a piece of work.”

  “Thank you,” Damien told the spacer. “I’m not even sure why you were there, but Captain Harrison is right – he was going to kill me.”

  Casey slipped a small paper envelope from his jacket onto the table by Damien. “The Cap’n wanted to give you a little something for your help with the ward,” he told him. “’e sent me after you to hand it over. I, um,” he gave a sideways glance at the Security Captain, “pinged your PC for your location… and hurried when I saw where you were.”

  Harrison was studiously looking at Damien’s medical monitor, pretending she hadn’t heard the spacer confess to a minor crime. Personal Computers were keyed to a user and contained all of their personal information – accessing one without permission was considered a form of personal assault.

  After a moment, the Captain turned her eyes back to Damien and tapped her own PC.

  “I need you to give me a recorded witness statement,” she told him. “After that, I shouldn’t need to call you in for anything, but we’ll hold onto your contact information in case. Is that acceptable?”

  Damien nodded, and Harrison pressed a button on the computer. “All right, let’s get started.”

  #

  It didn’t take very long for Damien to give as complete a description as he remembered of the incident. Some of his memories were clouded from being choked into unconsciousness, but at least the start of the encounter was clear.

  “One last question for the record,” Harrison finally told him. “How many spells do you know that would have killed Kendall?”

  Damien blinked, confused. “Sorry?”

  “I’m aware of at least some of the spells taught in the self-defense portion of the Practical Thaumaturgy curriculum,” she said. “Your response was non-lethal, but you were capable of a lethal response – correct?”

  Damien thought about it. He’d learned self-defense spells around various forms of energy
manipulation – heat, cold, electricity. Even the straight force spell he’d used could have been more deadly if directed at, say, Kendall’s neck.

  “At least five,” he finally answered quietly. “At most basic, a fire spell would have inflicted significant third degree burns if not killed him.”

  “Thank you,” Harrison said, turning off her PC. “That will be sufficient for the courts I think.” She was shaking her head slightly.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I think you are the first Mage I’ve ever met to default to a non-lethal level of force when threatened,” she told him. “Most Mages go straight for fire or lightning – we spend a good part of the training for the System Security Mages teaching them to use a targeted level of force.”

  “I thought I could scare them off,” Damien admitted. “I was wrong.”

  “That wasn’t your mistake,” Harrison told him. “Your mistake was not escalating as soon as you realized you couldn’t. Training can fix that – have you ever considered joining the SSS?”

  “I’m trained to be a Jump Mage,” Damien answered. “That’s what I’m going to be – as soon as I find a ship.”

  The Security Captain looked like she had swallowed something sour.

  “Every Mage wants to Jump,” she told him. “There are what, ten thousand Mages in Sherwood? Out of two billion people – ten thousand Mages. Everyone, from System Security to the Ship-wrights, to the damned power company, needs Mages. They’re desperate for anyone who can cast a spell – and you are sitting up on this station, doing nothing, complaining that you can’t find a place on a starship?”

  Damien touched the collar he wore – the product of years of study and training so that he could Jump. Getting into Jump training wasn’t easy, for the exact reasons that Harrison had just thrown at him.

  “I earned the right to Jump,” he told the cop. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t give up on that just yet.”

  Harrison took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “It’s frustrating trying to recruit Mages, and watching there be not enough Mages for anything except Jumping – and too many Jump Mages. Just… keep it in mind, hey? You’d make a better cop than most.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Damien told her. He even might, if he went long enough without finding work on a starship.

  #

  It took six hours to get any of the Blue Jay’s massive fusion engines working after they’d jumped into Sherwood. Rice had made his way along the ship’s zero-gravity core after the first hour to help out – without engines they were dead in space and unlikely to even show up on sensors so anyone knew they were in trouble.

  Finally, the Captain was shoulders deep in a maintenance box re-connecting wires when he heard the ship’s engineer shout, “That looks like it, Skipper. Get clear, I’m going to open up the hydrogen feeds.”

  David pulled himself free of the open panel and glanced up at the even blacker than usual face of his senior engineer, James Kellers. “Go for it,” he told the man.

  “Everyone clear?” the engineer asked loudly. Both of the two assistant engineers responded in the affirmative, and the wiry black man threw a toggle on the datapad he was carrying. The engine room was on the aft end of the gravity-less main core, so they all felt it when the engines kicked. The room had a sudden, very faint, sensation of down.

  “Well?” David asked.

  “It’s not much,” Kellers admitted. “We’ve got the thrusters back at about fifty percent, but the main engines are shot to hell. Call it… two percent of a gee.”

  “It’ll get us inbound – and make it so the Fleet can detect us,” David told him.

  “And if they do, you should be on the bridge, not immersed in the Jay’s guts,” Kellers replied. “We can take it from here boss.”

  Rice looked down at his hands, which were covered in ash from the burnt out conduits he’d been helping replace. It had been years since he’d worked Kellers’ job, but he hadn’t forgotten which way the circuits went in. He knew from when he’d done that job, though, how filthy his face was after crawling into a burnt out maintenance panel.

  “I don’t know, looking like this might get help from the Martian boys faster,” Rice observed, but he was carefully making his way up the engine room against the very slight pressure of the ship’s acceleration.

  For once, he’d welcome ‘the Martian Boys’ – the Royal Navy of the Mage-King of Mars, more commonly simply the Protectorate Navy – showing up.

  Given that any Navy ship would have to at least wait until the light-speed signature of the Jay’s engine reached them though, he probably even had time for a shower.

  “Captain to the bridge,” Jenna’s voice echoed over the intercom. “Captain Rice to the bridge, ASAP.”

  With a sigh, David increased his pace up the core.

  #

  Jenna had somehow managed to get the main view screen for the communicator online, and it was showing an impeccably turned out officer aboard the disgustingly neat bridge of a Navy warship.

  “This is Mage-Captain Adrian Corr of His Majesty’s destroyer Guardian of Honor,” the dark-haired man in the dark blue uniform told David as he entered the room and faced the concealed camera over the viewscreen. “You are Captain Rice of the Blue Jay?”

  “I am,” David replied. “I have to say, I’m glad to see you boys so far out.”

  He counted in the back of his head until the Mage-Captain responded. He made it to four seconds – the destroyer was still two full light-seconds away. Close in interplanetary terms, but still quite a distance away.

  “We were doing an outer-system scan as an exercise and one of my officers identified your jump flare,” Corr said in his neatly precise tones. The blonde hair, with the slightly angled eyes and the soft accent marked the Mage as a Martian, one of the old Mage families. “When she did not see an engine signature, she recommended we investigate. My apologies for the delay, Captain – my first officer believed that even an in-system jump was my decision, not his.”

  “As you can see, Mage-Captain, the Blue Jay is in no state for me to be complaining about any help present.”

  “Of course,” Corr nodded. “My apologies again - are you in need of medical assistance?”

  “We have no significant injuries,” David told him. “Only minor injuries and one fatality.”

  “What happened?” the Mage-Captain asked.

  “A pirate ship jumped us at our last jump lay-over,” Rice answered. “Disabled our defensive turrets, and was preparing to fire into us when our Ship’s Mage jumped us.”

  The Navy Officer’s wince, four seconds later, was small but noticeable. “Early,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “We will take your ship under tow when we arrive,” Corr informed Rice. “I will pass your report on to System Command. We will investigate this pirate.”

  David nodded his agreement. “Thank you,” he said quietly.

  “We serve the Mage-King of Mars,” the Martian Noble told him. “What does his Protectorate mean if we do not protect people?”

  #

  The Guardian of Honor was unable to tow the Blue Jay much faster than the battered freighter could move on her own power. While the destroyer’s engines were both more powerful than the freighter’s and fully intact, the navy ship had done a full sensor sweep of the freighter – and Mage-Captain Corr judged her only capable of surviving about a quarter-gravity of acceleration.

  At that much reduced rate, it took the destroyer several days to haul the ship into something resembling real-time communication range of Sherwood. David spent most of the trip on the bridge, watching the battered thermal scanners carefully for any sign of trouble. A million-ton warship was a lot of reassurance, but after watching pirates try to blow his ship away, he figured he was allowed some paranoia.

  He’d sent Jenna to get some rest earlier, which meant he was the only one on the bridge when the Blue Jay received the first of the two transmissions he was dreading.
/>   The transmission was a video signal, carrying the image of an expensively dressed dark-haired woman with the kind of perfectly imperfect prettiness that spoke of either natural beauty or truly expensive cosmetic surgery.

  “Office of the Sherwood Governor,” the woman announced herself. “Please connect me to Kenneth McLaughlin.”

  It was phrased as a request, but the tone made it very clear that the woman expected to be obeyed instantly.

  “I’m sorry miss, I can’t do that,” David told her with weariness tingeing his voice that had nothing to do with having been conscious for over twenty hours.

  A few moments later, he could tell when his response arrived. The woman blinked, clearly surprised by his response. “And why not?” she demanded sharply.

  “Kenneth McLaughlin is dead,” the freighter captain told her simply.

  This time, he could time the light-speed lag to the microsecond. As soon as his words arrived, the haughtiness took a full-on body blow, and the woman’s lips tightened until they were almost white. It took her a few seconds to even minimally re-compose herself.

  “Hold for the Mage-Governor,” she instructed sharply before the screen threw up the eagle and bagpipes of the Sherwood planetary crest.

  David waited out the crest patiently. They were slowly decelerating towards the massive station in orbit around Sherwood. Even with the Guardian of Honor’s tow, the Blue Jay wouldn’t dock for another five hours at their current pace. There was no rush.

  Finally, the crest cleared to show a man that David had only met once before, though he’d seen the face on dozens of newscasts.

  Miles James McLaughlin, patriarch of his clan and seven times elected Mage-Governor of Sherwood, was a tall, steel-haired man with cold blue eyes. He wore a plain black suit, but pinned to the breast pocket of the jacket was a small red ribbon with a golden planet hanging on the end – the Mars Valor Award, given to a much younger Mage-Commander McLaughlin after single-handedly ending one of the nastier anti-pirate campaigns in recent history.