Starship's Mage: Episode 1 (6 page)

Damien took about forty minutes to unpack his few belongings and lock them away in the drawers set into the wall of his bedroom next to the lightweight bedframe. The bedroom shared the front room’s lack of any major pieces of furniture, containing only the bedframe and two sets of shelves set into the wall. A handful of the drawers contained the multi-point clips that substituted for hangars when you were traveling in zero-gravity, so he placed his two dress jackets and the eight half-necked dress shirts that were formal wear for mages in them to keep them un-wrinkled.

Fully unpacked,
he found himself with over an hour before he was supposed to meet Jenna for the tour of the ship, so he pulled up a map of the ship on the screen in his sitting room and began to study it.

His stomach allowed him long enough to locate the mess hall on Rib Four before loudly growling at him, and he realized he hadn’t eaten
since before Grace had arrived at his hotel. With a grin at his own forgetfulness, he took mental note of the location of the mess and headed out into the ship’s halls.

The half-gravity that
Blue Jay
maintained wasn’t much lighter than the inner area of Ring Seven where he’d been staying and the layout of the Rib was straightforward – each floor had a single corridor down the center, and the mess hall spread from one side of the hull to the other at the end of that corridor on Deck Two.

There was no one in the mess hall when Damien entered it, giving him a minute to take in the plain, lightweight table bolted to the floor, and the similarly lightweight magnetized chairs.
One of four mess halls on the ship, this one had enough tables and chairs for sixty people – half again the number Jenna said would live on a rib, and almost three-quarters of the crew.

There was a kitchen, set up to
function in gravity but be easily secured for zero-gravity, and a number of reasonably high quality food prep units. They were glorified vending machines, but they happily spat out a sandwich and a cup of coffee for Damien with only a little coaxing.

He
was half-finished his sandwich when someone else wandered into the mess. A bulky, dark-skinned man with a black turban wrapped around his head, the newcomer flashed bright white teeth at the sight of the gold medallion on Damien’s throat.

“So!
The Captain did find us a Mage!” the stranger boomed, stepping over to Damien and offering his hand. “I am Narveer Singh, First Pilot aboard the
Blue Jay
. May I join you?”

Damien shook the big man’s hand and gestured to the several empty seats at the table
he’d taken.

“Feel free,”
he agreed. “I’m Damien Montgomery – the new Ship’s Mage, as you guessed.”

“The Captain, he is a lucky man!”
Singh boomed as he conjured a stew-like dish from the food prep units. “Rumor I heard was that the Governor blacklisted us!”

“I had my reasons to ignore that,”
Damien told him. “I also never officially heard about it, so I don’t think it counts as breaking it.”

Singh boomed
laughter, echoing off the previously sterile and silent walls of the mess.

“I like your style, Montgomery!”
He told the young Mage. “It isn’t disobedience if you didn’t hear the order – ‘communications failures’ are good for that in shuttles!”

Damien was
about to ask about the ‘First Pilot’s role when the ships public address system clicked on with a slightly noticeable, almost definitely artificial, buzz.

“Now hear this, now hear this,”
Jenna’s voice rang clearly throughout the ship. “We have confirmed loading times with Sherwood Prime Docking and will have a twelve hour loading shift commencing at oh-nine hundred OMT. Please secure all items for zero-gravity.”

“I repeat: we will have twelve hours of zero-rotation in the ribs starting at oh-nine-hundred Olympus Mons Time tomorrow.
That is all.”

Singh pumped
his fist exuberantly. “Brilliant!”

“What is?”
Damien asked, thinking through the announcement. It made sense, though he’d never thought about it, that they’d have to stop rotating the ribs to load the cargo. The
Blue Jay
’s ribs were two hundred meters out from the ship’s center, which meant they rotated around the ship three times every two minutes, preventing anyone from attaching cargo to the central keel.

“We have a cargo – with the blacklisting, we might not have found one,”
the dark pilot explained. “The Captain, he is brilliant!” He paused, swallowing down some of his spiced stew. “I’ll need to check on the shuttles,” he continued after a moment. “We’ve been using them to help with repairs, but we’ll need to get the beasts set up for cargo handling again.”

With a shudder at the
thought, Narveer Singh started inhaling his food so he could get started. Damien simply watched in amazement and nodded goodbye to the pilot as he left, charging towards the aft of the ships and the shuttle bays.

“And this is your working area of the ship,” Jenna told Damien as she drifted up to a handhold near another hatch. They’d started their tour of the keel of the ship at Singh’s shuttle bay at the rear end of the ship and worked their way down the central corridor of the keel in zero-gravity. “The last Ship Mage called it the ship’s ‘Sanctum.’”

Damien followed Jenna through the hatch and
saw that the central corridor dog-legged ahead, around a chamber he knew would be exactly one-hundredth the length, height, and width of the
Blue Jay
’s exterior structure. Even if Jenna hadn’t warned him what he was approaching, that dogleg would have suggested he was approaching the starship’s simulacrum chamber.

Runes coated t
he outside of the chamber: swirling patterns of silver inlay that Damien knew cut through the wall and were visible from the inside as well. From here, they linked into other patterns that marked carefully calculated routes out to the outer hull of the
Blue Jay
.

“Your workshop is over here,”
Jenna continued, gliding neatly up to a side hatch leading off the dog-legged main corridor. “Watch your step,” she warned, “Kenneth put in gravity runes, but they’ve been finicky since…” she trailed off.

“They likely haven’t been charged recently enough,”
Damien told her as he joined her by the workshop door. “Runes like that need to be renewed weekly.”

Jenna hit the panel to open the hatch, and
it slid aside to reveal what Damien judged to be a relatively standard Mage’s workshop – a Wonderland-esque cross between a research lab, a jewelry workshop, and a private office. On the far wall, a centrifugal casting unit occupied the center of a workbench, surrounded by soldering irons and etching tools.

Another
wall held a desk with three massive work screens, touch-driven interfaces that were currently combining to show a pseudo-three-dimensional view of the space around Sherwood. The opposite wall held a spectrometer, a microscope, and a set of micro-scale manipulators – for the
really
fine rune work.

The floor plating was the same plain steel as the rest of the ship, but here someone – Kenneth, presumably, or possibly an even earlier Ship’s Mage – had inlaid the silver pattern of runes that provided artificial gravity equivalent to the spinning ribs.

Even from outside the room, however, Damien could tell that the runes were almost uncharged, spitting out tiny bursts of gravity that would make the entire room a tripping hazard.

“Hold up a moment,”
he told Jenna, and focused. He needed to touch the runes without worrying about spinning off, so he oriented himself with the floor of the workshop and slowly created a gravity field underneath himself. He drifted downwards and then settled his feet onto the floor in a comfortable half-gravity before kneeling and removing the glove on his right hand.

As soon as
the rune on his palm was within a few centimeters of the runes on the floor, both began to glow gently. Damien focused on that glow, and fed energy into the gravity runes. The glow rapidly spread out from his hand, and Jenna’s gasp behind him suggested that it was bright enough the ship’s first officer saw it.

After about
fifteen seconds, the entire room’s floor was glowing brightly to his eyes, and Damien closed his hand into a fist, cutting off the connection between his own power and the runes on the floor.

He
rose to face Jenna, standing in his own personal field of gravity as he met the gaze of the officer floating in zero-gravity beside him. “It’ll be safe to enter now,” he told her. “It doesn’t take much to maintain a room this small; it just has to be done regularly.”

“You don’t actually need to deal with zero-gee,”
she answered accusingly, reminding Damien of what he was doing.

He
released the spell, though without motion he remained standing on the deck initially.

“Not really, no,”
he admitted. “We’re taught not to show off magic though,” he explained. “It tends to attract unfortunate attention.”

“I
can see that,” Jenna agreed. “Is there anything you need to check in here?”

Damien took a glance around the workshop.
All the equipment looked relatively standard. “Nothing that I can check quickly,” he told her. “I’ll need a few hours to get used to the gear and the setup before I do much of anything, but you said we have a few days?”

“We do,”
she confirmed. “Enough of the crew is living aboard that we need to rotate the ribs during the night, so we can only load for one of Sherwood Prime’s twelve hour shifts each day. Even with all of their gear, it takes two full shifts to attach three hundred ten thousand ton containers to the keel.”

“That’ll give me time to review the gear, and go over the ship’s rune matrix,”
Damien told her. He had never had a chance to inspect the rune matrix of a jump ship in detail before. He saw and identified power flows and purposes better than any other Mage he knew, but it still took time to examine as complex a spell as a jump matrix.

“Speaking of which,”
Jenna gestured carefully towards the simulacrum chamber. “The rest of your Sanctum awaits you.”

Damien did
n’t wait for her to catch up with him once he’d kicked off, and touched the panel next to the hatch. It slid gently open, and he slipped into the only space from which he would be able to jump the ship.

The same runes that coated the
room on the outside were visible on the interior as well, continuing up onto the roof and the floor and coating the room on all sides. The inlaid silver runes stood out against the thousands of tiny optical diodes around them that projected the image of the outside of the ship. Right now, Damien saw the docking arms and the base of the hub of Sherwood Prime, but beneath him fell away the black of space, and if he looked carefully up and to the side, Sherwood itself was visible past the bulk of the space station.

In the exact
center of the room, unsupported yet utterly incapable of moving from that position, was the simulacrum. Forged by magic from molten silver when the ship was built, it exactly mirrored every part of the ship’s exterior. The
Blue Jay
’s four ribs rotated around. Her forward radiation shield still showed the damage where the last repairs were being done. Damien drifted, unthinking, to the model – exactly one-thousandth the size of the ship itself, catching himself on the immobile engines. His hands on the simulacrum, he
felt
the ship, and with the screens around him, he saw what the
Blue Jay
saw.

“This place is always awe-inspiring to me,”
Jenna said quietly from the edge of the room, and Damien glanced up from the impossibly perfect model of the ship to look at her. “I don’t understand
any
of how what you do works, but this room… this is the key to the stars.”

“That was the Compact,”
Damien half-whispered, reveling in the power pulsing around him. “Peace between Mage and Mundane, between Mars and Earth… and in exchange, we gave you the stars.”

“How’s the firewood loading going?”

Captain David Rice
turned around, carefully, in the bridge’s zero-gravity to face his executive officer.

“I think the company paying for a million tons of premium hardwood would be
… displeased if it was used as firewood,” he observed drily. “Or were you referring to the forty-five containers of luxury furniture made from said hardwood?”

Jenna shrugged, grabbing a handhold and
positioning herself to review the video screen Rice was watching. On it, the dozens of manipulator arms of a major docking station were carefully maneuvering the Protectorate’s standard ten meter by twenty meter by fifty meter; ten thousand ton rated mass; cargo containers onto the
Blue Jay
’s keel.

“Did you follow up on the secondaries?”
he asked her.

“Yep,”
she confirmed. “Corinthian is just major enough that people are shipping there, and just minor enough that no one has shipped out for two months.”

There were dozens of cargos to be shipped between the worlds under the protection of the Mage-King of Mars, but few of them would justify filling even a three megaton freighter like the
Blue Jay
. The usual policy was to book a standard container, fill it with your cargo, and list it as a secondary cargo on a station like Sherwood Prime. As soon as Rice had the contract to ship a hundred and forty-five containers to Corinthian, he’d had Jenna put in a notice to Prime of which world they were shipping for.

All
secondary shipping contracts to Corinthian would now be loaded onto the Jay, along with a massive data upload to be transferred to the other system’s communications net. The data transfer fees alone were a hefty part of the freighter’s operating costs, but it was the primary cargo contracts that paid the bills.

“How’s our young Mage working out?”

“He seems dedicated and smart so far,” Jenna told him. “I showed him around Kenneth’s lab – he fixed the gravity in about two seconds flat. Last I saw, he was going over the runes in the simulacrum chamber with a magnifying glass.”

“He thinks they may have been damaged?”
Rice asked, remembering Damien’s comment to that effect with a shiver.

“I don’t
think
so,” she replied. “From what he said, I think it’s the first chance he’s ever had to really examine a jump matrix, and he wants to make sure it all… ‘flows right’ was how he described it.”

“Good,”
David let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d taken. “We’ll have all of the rest of the repairs finished by the time the primary cargo is loaded. We’ll hang out a day or so after that for any new secondaries, but then we need to get to Corinthian.”

“That wood isn’t exactly going to rot in our hull, skipper,”
his executive officer pointed out.

“No,”
David agreed, looking around the empty bridge carefully before continuing quietly. “But I don’t think our pirate friends are deaf and dumb either, and I’ve got an itchy feeling between my shoulder blades. The sooner we’re out of Sherwood, the happier I’ll be!”