Starship's Mage: Episode 1 (3 page)

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.

“Where is my son?”
he demanded.

“In the morgue of the destroyer
Guardian of Honor
,” David told him quietly. “We didn’t have the facilities to properly preserve his body.” Or the spare manpower to clean up the awful mess Kenneth had left of himself, but the medical team the
Guardian
had sent over had taken care of that too.

“What the hell did you do?”
McLaughlin snarled. “I sent my son with you so he’d stay
safe
, not so you’d get him killed!”

“Kenneth saved our lives,”
David told him. “We were ambushed by pirates – he jumped early, saving everyone else aboard.”

“Pirates don’t find ships at random anymore.
What the hell are you involved in Rice?” the Mage-Governor demanded.

“Your son died a hero,”
the captain repeated, his voice even quieter. “I have no idea how the pirates found us.”

“Heroes happen when other people fuck up,”
the McLaughlin said sharply. “You won’t be dragging any more children of Sherwood into your disaster, Rice. Get out of my system.”

The connection terminated, and Rice stared at the screen wordlessly, glad none of his crew had been on the bridge.
Getting out of Sherwood wasn’t an option, not with no Mage and the damage the
Blue Jay
had taken. Staying in the McLaughlin’s system after he’d told you to get out wasn’t wise, though.

Before
he could begin to come up with a plan the communicator announced the second call he’d been expecting – this one from his insurance company.

With a sigh,
he opened the channel.

The medallion of a Mage opened a lot of doors – even for an unemployed Mage like Damien. When he’d heard that a new freighter was coming in, he’d made his way down to Sherwood Prime’s zero-gravity hub. His medallion had earned him a respectful nod from a security guard as he entered an observation lounge he’d normally be barred from.

There was a
neatly marked and signed line between the zero-gravity hub and the luxury lounge. The signs warned Damien, so he was ready when his feet dropped sharply towards the ground when he crossed over the rune-inlaid carpet. Like so much else, artificial gravity could be created with magic, but runes like those woven into the carpet required recharging by a Mage at least once a week. Only warships, with their multiple Mage crews, would expend the resources to have gravity throughout the ship.

Damien
reveled in the experience of full gravity for a moment as he made his way to the massive windows. Even the rotating rings only maintained about seven-tenths of a gravity, but this lounge was spelled to Sherwood’s nine-tenths. Weirdly, the slightly heavier weight he was bearing was… relaxing.

The lounge was quiet at this time, roughly midnight by the station’s clocks, which was likely part of why the gold medallion at the base of his throat had been enough to get him into the lounge unquestioned.
Lounges like this were the only ones in the hub with tables and chairs, and he settled into one by the windows.

The
windows were impressive. Normally, an ‘observation lounge,’ even on the hub, was just a set of viewscreens, but the Angelus Gravity Lounge had managed to get itself a place right on the edge of the station’s hull – and right above the main docking arms. The owners had then paid an astronomical sum of money to magically transform the complex ceramic and metal composite of said hull to be transparent.

Damien ordered a small coffee from the cute but tired waitress and settled in.
From here, he could see the
Gentle Rains of Summer
at a far docking arm, having cargo containers slowly maneuvered into locking positions on the massive ship’s keel. Closer, a fast passenger liner, its sleek lines suggesting that it, like the Angelus Lounge, had magical gravity, rested at another docking arm.

E
ight of the slender docks were visible from the cafe, half of the civilian docking arms on the Station. The other eight were on the other side of the hub of Sherwood Prime’s ever-rotating wheel. Of those sixteen docks, four were full. Sherwood wasn’t one of the Core systems around Sol and Mars, but it was a hub of interstellar trade by Midworlds standards, let alone the Fringe further out.

The distinctive star-white flare of an antimatter engine took Damien’s attention entirely away from the incredibly good coffee the waitress delivered.
No civilian ship used an antimatter torch, and the young Mage stretched his eyes for what he knew had to be out there.

The
Protectorate destroyer swum out of Sherwood’s corona like a swimmer from the surf, carefully short bursts from its rockets slowing it as it guided its charge home. An even pyramid, one hundred meters on a side, at this distance its hull was a smooth white, the weapons it bristled with invisible.

He was so shocked by his first sight of one the famous Martian ships that he almost missed what the ship was doing.
Massive cables, only visible by the occasional glint of sunlight on them, linked the destroyer to a long and rounded container ship. Like the
Gentle Rains of Summer
, this ship had a long solid keel with four rotating ribs arrayed around the keel and cargo like an old egg-beater.

The ship was about a third of the size of the
Gentle Rains
, and even from several hundred meters distance, Damien could see someone had worked the freighter over hard. Scorch marks marred an already dirty gray hull, with the engine so battered the Mage wasn’t surprised that the ship had needed a tow.

From the
looks of it, the freighter might
need
a Mage but, sadly, he didn’t think they were going to be hiring one anytime soon.

Wondering
both at the sharp lines of the destroyer and the battered curves of the freighter, Damien sipped his coffee and watched the
Blue Jay
arrive at Sherwood.