Starship's Mage: Episode 3 (2 page)

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.

“
I wanted to apologize for what happened,” Kelly finally said into the silence, and Damien winced. His own age and pretty or not, Kelly was also the one who’d allowed a strange Mage onto the ship to discover the modifications he’d made – which had directly resulted in his arrest.

“
They were going to take my magic away,” he finally replied, looking away from her and the computers to stare at the bare metal walls. That was the fate that Rice and the crew of the
Blue Jay
had saved him from, at the cost of them all becoming fugitives from Protectorate Law.

“Singh told
me,” she admitted. “I am so sorry, Damien – I didn’t know.”

Damien looked
directly back at her, meeting her eyes and noticing for the first time how brilliantly blue they were.

“
You didn’t know,” he repeated back to her. “We didn’t tell anyone what I’d done to the matrix. Even if we had, it’s not like you know Mage Law.”

“The whole mess was the exact opposite of what
I was trying to do,” she said with a sigh. “I was trying to make your life
easier
, not get you arrested!”

“
I’d say the thought was appreciated, but, well, arrested,” Damien replied dryly.

“Let
me make it up to you by buying you dinner,” Kelly told him suddenly, a bright smile returning to her face.

Damien glanced from
her to the starscape behind his calculations.

“
We’re roughly five and a half light years from
any
star system,” he pointed out. “Seven from anywhere with a restaurant, and still almost two weeks from Legatus – a system where I shouldn’t leave the ship. Where are you planning on this dinner?”

“Anywhere
not
your lab, and any meal
not
made of cold coffee. Deal?”

The reference to the forgotten coffee bulb made Damien wince again.

“Okay,” he agreed. “Deal.”

Every jump from deep space to deep space was very much the same, even to Damien. Memorize a set of calculations, focus on the small, impossibly perfect, replica of the
Blue Jay
at the heart of the ship and channel energy into it to move the vessel and all of its contents across a full light year of space.

It
was exhausting, incredible, and done three times a day, became surprisingly routine.

After the first
jump of the day, Damien would review the calculations for the next jump, and then have lunch with Kelly and the other junior officers. He would then carry out the second jump of the day, review the calculations for the last jump, and spend part of the day wandering the ship, studying the ship’s rune matrix and making tiny modifications where his ability to see the flow of magic through the runes revealed inefficiencies in the centuries-old design.

To
his knowledge, no one had ever successfully modified the jump matrix of runes carved into the hull of every civilian starship – not since the first Mage-King of Mars had drawn up the design in the twenty third century. Removing the limiters that prevented the matrix being used for any spell except jumping was the first step, but given the time to go over the runes closely he realized it was improvable in dozens of small ways. Many of the changes were, he suspected, tied directly to his own use of magic.

He
couldn’t make the ship jump further – that seemed tied unavoidably into his own ability to channel power – but he could make the jumps take a little bit less energy from him.

The routine consumed almost two weeks, until the night before
they arrived in Legatus, when Rice invited the ships’ senior officers to dinner.

Rice normally found the fact that the designer of the
Venice
type freighters like the
Blue Jay
had included a dining room in the Captain’s Suite vaguely ridiculous. The room wasn’t large enough to host a meal for all of the freighter’s dozen or so officers, but was really too large for the Captain to eat alone.

The round table
was sized for six, barely enough for a business meeting or a gathering of the ship’s senior officers – him, the First Officer, the First Pilot, the Chief Engineer and the Ship’s Mage.

He
greeted each of his officers as they arrived and poured them drinks himself from the small set of vacuum-sealable carafes on a side counter. Jenna, as always, went at his right hand, and he sat Damien, the youngest and newest of the senior officers, at his left.

When
he served the dinner himself, Damien looked at the plates in surprise.

“
You cooked this, Captain?” the youth asked.

“Welcome to
my culinary experiments club, Damien,” David told him with a smile. “I like to cook, but I don’t normally have time. I foist my creations on my senior officers occasionally.”

He
smiled to himself as the young Mage silently took the food, clearly not quite sure what to make of having a Captain who cooked. David continued to serve up the plates, an old recipe he’d found involving potato dumplings and diced ham.

The quiet sound of enthusiastic chewing proved that
he’d done well, again. The room was quiet until the food was mostly devoured, and then James and Narveer, opposite David, began to talk over some of the repairs to the shuttles.

David turned to Damien, who was looking uncomfortable at the social setting.

“This is just a quiet get-together,” he told the youth. “We’re going to be stuck together on this ship for a while now, if we can’t socialize with each other, we’ll all go mad.”

“That makes sense,” the
Mage admitted. “I hadn’t thought things through that far.” He paused. “How long are we really going to be stuck together?”

Rice considered sugar-coating the situation for a moment, but decided against
it. They’d all volunteered to take on this burden to save Damien, they owed him the truth.

“If we get into Legatus, get a working contract, and get out to the Fringe with a cargo, the usual Fringe run is twelve to sixteen months,” David told him.
“After that, we should be able to sneak back into the MidWorlds to restock and pick up a cargo, but we won’t be able to stay – we’ll have to head back out to the Fringe.”

“
It could easily be five or six years before things die down enough for us to really return to the MidWorlds,” the Captain admitted. “None of us,” he gestured around at the officers, “will ever be able to return to the Core. We’re marked now, and you don’t enter a Core system without that showing up. The MidWorlds… don’t care quite as much.”

“Five or
six years,” the young Mage repeated. “I hadn’t realized saving me could cost so much.”

Rice shrugged.
“Crew is crew,” he said simply. “We don’t abandon our own.”

Damien was silent for a while, staring at
his food. Feeling guilty, Rice tried to change the subject.

“
Speaking of socializing, James tells me that you and Miss LaMonte have been seeing a lot of each other,” he said. To his surprise, Damien jerked like he’d been stung.

“
It’s not like that,” the Mage answered hurriedly. “We’ve just been eating lunch together – she dragged me out of my lab.”

The
Captain, much older and wiser than Damien, decided to mostly hold his peace in response to that.

“This isn’t a
military ship,” he pointed out. “There’d be nothing wrong if there
was
anything going on.”

The faint blush on Damien’s cheeks reminded
Rice that, however vital the Mage was to the functioning of the ship and however much the entire crew owed him their lives, he was still in his early twenties and one of the youngest people aboard. He decided to spare the youth any more harassment, and glanced across the table to Narveer.

“Narveer, there’s something
I need you to do while we’re in Legatus,” he said softly. The First Pilot recognized his tone, and sat up sharply, his dark eyes attentive to his Captain. “Right now, the only weapons we have aboard are half a dozen pistols and a case of stunguns. While I’m tracking down Carmichael’s contact, I need you to track down a gunrunner and pick us up some real hardware. We’re heading Fringe-ward; I want us to be packing.”

“Will
we find that many guns on Legatus?” Kellers asked, sounding curious.

“
They’re the biggest arms manufacturer after Sol itself,” Singh told him. “We can find anything we need there – I might even be able to track down an exosuit if I look hard enough.”

“Nobody else aboard is ‘suit-qualified,
” Rice reminded the ex-military man. Exosuits were powered body armor designed for use in vacuum and microgravity, but also used by elite Protectorate soldiers.

“Then
I’ll only pick up one,” Singh replied calmly, and David couldn’t help but laugh.

“If
you find a suit of body armor designed for the Mage-King’s shock troops, I suppose you can buy one,” he allowed.