Starship's Mage: Episode 1 (7 page)

The Martian Runic script defines a spell matrix in the same way that a programming language defines the 0s and 1s that allow a computer to function. With seventy-six characters and fourteen different ways of connecting them, the script is complex and difficult to read – and the
Blue Jay
’s jump matrix contained the equivalent of sixteen million lines of code.

Damien read Martian Runic
fluently, but he couldn’t go over that many runes in detail with less than a month of solid reading. Unlike every other Mage he’d ever known, though, he didn’t need to. He saw the flow of energy along the patterns and read the purpose and flow of entire blocks and sub-matrices at a single glance.

On a small
matrix, like the ‘warning spell’ in Captain Michaels’ office, he often read the entire structure of the spell, from its triggers to its actions, in a few seconds. Larger spells would take him some time, but it was minutes where another Mage would spend hours.

He
’d never done it on a spell matrix as large as the
Blue Jay
’s jump matrix though, so when he hit the first utterly wrong sub-matrix he assumed he was misreading it.

The sub-matrix was at the core of the spell, one of the seventeen that linked into the simulacrum at the center of the ship.
The other sixteen sub-matrices fed energy out from the simulacrum, but the seventeenth interfaced with the others and changed the energy flow somehow. On certain criteria, it redirected energy away from the main matrix.

Damien spent an hour
reading the runes on the sub-matrix, and then took another long, hard look at the energy flows. Sub-matrix clusters came in primes and squares, so it was theoretically possible that the seventeenth sub-matrix was unnecessary, but it made no sense. Shaking his head, he made a note on the matrix diagram he’d inherited from the ship-mages before him. It was the only current notation on the file, all the previous notes were ‘sub-matrix in this location damaged by crate impact, repaired’ or similar minor fixes.

Still confused,
he moved on, following the rune matrix forward towards the prow of the ship.

At the front of the ship, where the lengthy connecting sub-matrix expanded into the runes that covered the inside of the immense radiation shield, he found another ‘wrong’ sub-matrix. Four of the sub-matrices made sense, channeling the power of the jump spell out into space, but a fifth, again interfacing with the other four, siphoned off energy if criteria were met. The criteria didn’t make sense to Damien, the runes basically redefining the standard teleport spell that the matrix would amplify.

From the
empty, echoing void beneath the radiation cap, Damien made his way into Rib One, following the chains of runes that linked together the major sub-matrices into the locked down decks. At the far extreme of the rib, the links broke apart to create seventeen sub-matrices, spread along the length of the outer rib, the extreme exterior of the ship. The central matrix, the one linking all seventeen together, was ‘wrong’ again. Like the runes in the simulacrum chamber and the radiation shield, it channeled away energy on criteria that read like a description of a jump spell.

By the time Damien had followed the rune matrices around to the central part of Rib Two, he wasn’t surprised to find almost the exact same rune matrix as he found in Rib One.
He noted the slight differences on his matrix diagram. It almost looked like all three of the matrices were redirecting energy towards the same place if it met the same criteria.

In Rib
Three and Rib Four, he didn’t even try to follow the linking matrices, heading directly to where he knew he would find the strange matrices. Each was basically an ‘if-then’ line of code, redirecting energy to a single point in the jump matrix if their criteria were met.

He floated in an empty maintenance space on Rib Four with his personal computer up, reviewing his notes on the sub-matrices.
The six patterns had more to do with each other than with the hundreds of other sub-matrices and millions of other runes that made up the jump matrix, and they made no sense to him.

All
six redirected energy away from the matrix, where the entire purpose of the runes was to multiply a spell that would transport Damien, personally, roughly ten thousand kilometers at best into a spell that would transport an entire ship a full light year.

The
calculation he’d set to run finally finished, and the computer spat out an answer – all six runes were directing energy to the same place, likely a seventh and final sub-matrix. If his calculations were correct, it was in engineering.

Drifting into the engineering spaces in zero-gravity almost got Damien crushed as a load of containment cylinders of some kind swung through the space just inside the door. Only an instinctive jerk of magic pulled him back from a dangerous collision, and a voice bellowed across the cavernous space at the rear of the freighter.

“
Watch
what you’re doing, you dimwits! That’s the only damn entrance; let’s
try
not to kill ship’s officers, eh?”

Damien remained motionless for a long moment as a white-faced assistant
engineer caught up to his wayward cargo. The man gave Damien an apologetic glance before regaining control of the floating cart from his datapad. Tiny jets flared on the cart, redirecting the cylinders – which he now noticed had a ‘Warning: Explosion Hazard’ sign on them – away from the Ship’s Mage.

A dark-skinned man, not much bigger than Damien’s own slight frame,
appeared out of the depths of the engineering space, zipping across the empty space and grabbing a support loop with practiced skill, turning bright blue eyes on the Mage.

“Only one folk on a ship like this wears that gewgaw,”
he said gruffly. “Welcome to Engineering, Ship’s Mage Montgomery. Chief Engineer, James Kellers.”

Damien
carefully shook the engineer’s hand, keeping his feet and spare hand carefully wedged to keep him in place. Releasing the handshake, he looked around the engineering room in awe. There were no rooms, corridors or dividers in the working space at the rear of the ship. Designed to function in zero-gravity, the space around the engines was festooned with hundreds of devices and consoles that he didn’t begin to comprehend.

The room stretched to the
exterior of the hull on all sides, and on the far edges of the room Damien saw the graceful looping patterns of the runes of the Jump Matrix.

“What brings you to engineering Mr. Montgomery?”
Kellers asked.

“Looking in awe, right now,”
Damien admitted. “I did my jump tests on a much smaller ship, and they had the life support and other equipment separate from the engines.”

Kellers
nodded. “Probably ex-military,” he admitted. “The Navy likes to space important bits out through the keel, minimizes the point failure sources. Concentrating all of the important gear in one place allows three of us keep everything functioning, though.”

Damien took a deep breath, inhaling the faint scent of burnt plastic and fused hydrogen.
“Is it safe for me to move around in here?” he asked. “I need to review the runes and make sure nothing was damaged when we got banged up.”

“The Ship-Wrights had a pair of Mages in here day before yesterday checking all of the runes,”
Kellers told him, scratching the stubble on his chin. “But if you’re careful, you should be fine. My boys are not normally quite that dumb,” he finished loudly, glaring at the assistant who’d nearly flattened Damien.

With a nod to Damien, the
Engineer kicked off towards one of the many strange machines in the cavernous space. Damien took a moment to orient himself against the map he’d put together on his PC, and then kicked off himself.

The runes
he was looking for weren’t on the exterior hull, but as he approached the strange device they were carved on, he saw that they were close. A massive block extended in from the ‘bottom’ of engineering, with grills and strange conduits all over it. The runes ran in from the sub-matrices that connected the matrix to the rear of the ship, and Damien looked at them, tracking their energy.

The links that flowed out to the
matrix on the massive metal block were barely even connected to the main spell, tying directly back to the other strange matrices throughout the ship. Whatever the other runes were doing, it focused here.

The runes on the center of the block were different from the other six weird matrices.
Those had all been roughly the same, criteria triggered redirects. This just took all of the energy that flowed into it and cast a simple… fire spell?

“Keller
s?” Damien called. After a moment, the engineer rejoined him, a worried look on his dark face.

“Something broken in the runes?”
he asked quickly.

“I don’t think so…”
Damien said quietly, eyeing the matrix. “What’s this block?”

“Block…?”
the engineer said slowly, blinking at the massive piece of technology in front of him before smiling brightly. “Oh,
that
– sorry, I’ve never heard anyone not know what it is. That’s our primary heat exchanger – takes the excess heat from the reactor and life support and dumps it into space. Without it, we’d eventually cook ourselves just with our body heat, let alone the engines!”

The Mage eyed the runes.
A spell to create heat in something that had the purpose of getting rid of heat still made no sense.

“How much extra capacity does it have?” he
wondered aloud. If this was something wrong, at least it probably wouldn’t cause too much damage.

“A lot,”
the engineer told him. “The only thing on the ship more over-engineered than the heat exchanger is the main reactor core. You could fire one of the main engines at this baby and it would dump the heat to space. Whatever you’re thinking, this gear can take it.”

Damien nodded, eyeing the runes again.
Whatever they did, it clearly wasn’t new – the runes had the permanently rubbed-in layer of dirt over them that came from being as old as the ship itself. The jump matrix was a standard set of runes, no one ever changed it. Whatever these runes were, they made sense to experts with a lot more experience than Damien.

But the pattern of energy to
them… didn’t fit.

The strange matrices didn’t quite leave Damien’s mind over the next few days, but they weren’t the focus of his attention as the
Blue Jay
loaded its cargo for its journey to the Corinthian System. He’d helped arrange the loading of supplies onto the freighter for the crew, while keeping one eye on the overall loading process, and spending his spare time checking the rune matrix for any damage.

The last day before
they left the station, he and Captain Rice spent three hours going over the calculations for the fifteen jumps it would take them to travel to the other system. They’d worked out a relatively sedate three jumps a day path that would deliver their massive cargo in just less than five days without straining Damien much on his first ever voyage. Including the two and a half days of maneuvering clear of the gravity wells at the beginning and end of the trip, it would be a ten day voyage to cross fifteen light years.

Finally, after
three days of chaos, he waited in the simulacrum chamber as the
Blue Jay
began to slowly accelerate out of Sherwood Prime. The chamber had a small platform just ‘beneath’ the simulacrum in the acceleration-driven gravity, allowing him to keep a hand on the magical token, sensing the gentle rush of power as the freighter accelerated at one-twentieth of a gravity.

Around him, he watched the station rotate around the ship as they spun to face open space.
On a part of the bubble of screens that surrounded him he had a video link open to the bridge. Jenna sat at the navigation console, her face composed as she fed the computer the series of maneuvers that would get them clear of the station.

On the screen of the
PC strapped to his wrist, Damien reviewed the calculations for the jump. He kept one eye on the world around the ship though, and saw when they were finally clear, the last gantries falling behind them.

A few
more minutes passed in silence, and then Rice spoke on the bridge link.

“Link to Sherwood Prime,”
he ordered. A moment later, a triple click announced an open channel.

“Sherwood Prime to
Blue Jay
, our screens show you clear of the station safety zone,” a space controller’s voice informed them. “Please confirm.”

“Sherwood Prime, this is
Blue Jay
Actual,” Rice replied. “We show five kilometer separation, requesting permission to fire main engines at seven hundred thirty eight Olympus Mons time.”

“We confirm five
kilometer separation and authorize main engine firing,” the controller informed him. “
Cair vie
,
Blue Jay
.”

“
Na h-uile la gu math duit
, Sherwood Prime,” Rice replied, the old Gaelic flowing smoothly off his tongue. The channel shut down and his next words were for the crew.

“All hands, hear this, all hands, hear this,” he
said into the PA. “All ribs are secured, all cargo is secured, prepare for one gravity burn in two minutes.”

At
seven thirty eight A.M. on the far-away clock of the mountain the Protectorate was ruled from, the
Blue Jay
’s main engines burned to life, the tiny stars sending a surge of entirely non-magical power through the simulacrum under Damien’s hands.

Standing on the acceleration platform, Damien breathed deeply, standing against the firm acceleration and reviewing the calculations on the datapad again.
There was no computer assistance for the final jump – he had to know the vectors and energy levels in his mind, and move the ship entirely with his magic.