Starship's Mage: Episode 2 (2 page)

The description of the central portion of Corinthian Prime’s segmented cylinder as ‘an artificial eco-system’ failed to prepare Damien for the reality of it. He stepped out of the elevator from the motionless docks onto the outer rim of the station and into a glass-roofed atrium in the middle of a forest.

He
blinked at the sight, taking a moment to put it into scale. The atrium was, obviously, set into one end of the cylinder, so it was only surrounded by trees on the interior side. The trees themselves were trimmed and maintained, planted in the neat lines typical of a ground-side park… but were very real trees.

A man standing near the elevator cleared his throat, bringing Damien’s gaze back
down to the room he was standing in. The other five occupants of his elevator had already cleared through the security checkpoint leading into the main segment, and the security guard was gesturing Damien forward.

“Welcome to the Spindle,
Mage Montgomery,” the guard said after reviewing Damien’s ID for a moment. “First time on Corinthian Prime, I see. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“
I’m looking for the Jump Mage Guild,” Damien told him. The
Blue Jay
had been blacklisted in Sherwood, so they had been unable to register his contract with the ship in his home system. Unlike most things, however, Jump Mage contracts could be registered anywhere. The details would be included in the encrypted download the
Blue Jay
would take with it to any system they jumped to.

“Ah, yes,” the guard nodded
calmly. “The main path from the atrium meets up with LengthWay Seven about forty meters Yard-wards. From Seven, you’ll want CircleWay Twenty-Six.” The man looked at Damien’s blank expression and chuckled. “It does make more sense if you think about it,” he insisted, “but since the Guild is halfway across the Spindle from here, I suggest you grab a cab when you reach the LengthWay. They’re pretty common, and decently priced.”

“Thank
you,” Damien told him, agreeing with the assessment of the directions after a second. LengthWays ran the length of the center cylinder – apparently called the Spindle by the locals – and CircleWays ran around the exterior of the cylinder.

If they followed the Protectorate’s standard one hundred meter blocks, CircleWay Twenty-Six was over two and a half kilometers away, which was
a bit further than he’d been expecting to walk.

Stepping
out of the atrium into the open air of the Spindle, however, he found himself considering it. To both sides of him, the artificial world rose gently up in the slope of the cylinder. From where he stood in the trees outside the atrium, he could see the entirety of the segment – there was no horizon, only a slight misting of water vapor in the air as he looked across or down the cylinder and the brilliant light of the central spire made it hard to see directly across the cylinder.

Five
kilometers long and fourteen hundred meters in diameter, the Spindle represented more square footage than many cities in the MidWorlds, and much of it was covered in greenery. A neat grid of roads split the surface into blocks, and rarely did he see more than two blocks together of houses or industry. It was so unlike the compressed corridors in the many rotating rings of Sherwood Prime that it took Damien a long minute of standing in the shade of the trees to wrap his head around the sight.

Damien start
ed walking down the LengthWay, looking for signs to tell him the numbers of the CircleWays that crossed it. It took him a few minutes to leave the cultured forest the Corinthians’ had chosen to wrap around the entrances from the civilian docks, and that was when he saw the building.

The trees had blocked his view of it before, but now he wasn’t sure how he’d missed it
. The structure rose in blocks of black iron, softened somewhat by trees growing in terraces atop the blocks, but it remained a sprawling fortress in the middle of one of the more spectacular stations built by man.

A tiny whirring noise caused Damien to turn and spot the promised
cab – a low slung vehicle with a cloth cover and two seats behind its driver.

“Can
I give you a lift?” the driver asked.

“
Sure,” he answered. “I need to get to the Jump Mage’s Guild.”

The driver’s gaze flicked
down at Damien’s collar, then he spat over the side. “Sure,” he said flatly. “We don’t call it the Guild though, here.”

“What?” Damien asked
quickly.

The driver pointed at the fortress Damien had been staring
at.

“Mages don’t trust
us lot not to burn their homes down around their ears,” he said bluntly. “They built that thing when the Spindle was finished. It’s the home of your Guild, but we just call it the Citadel.”

Security at the Guildhouse Citadel seemed lower than the cab-driver’s words and its fortress-like structure suggested. The gates in the artfully concealed fence that surrounded the fortified compound were wide open, and foot traffic passed in and out in a slow but steady stream.

Passing through those
gates, though, Damien spotted the two men just inside who were all the security the Guildhouse needed. Both were clad in dark robes over matte-black combat armor, and the gold medallions at their throats bore a single sword, compared to Damien’s three stars and a quill. His three stars marked him as a Jump Mage. Their sword marked them as Enforcers, the police officers of the Guilds, and the only fully combat-trained Mages outside of the Mage-King’s military.

Those two men could stand off an entire battalion of
conventionally armed troops, at least for long enough to close the gates. For all that efforts had clearly been made to soften the appearance of the Citadel with the trees and gardens, they were still being very careful.

The thought was sobering as Damien entered the main hall, looking for the sign to direct
him to the Ship Mage’s Guild. Corinthian was a major MidWorld, hardly one of the UnArcana worlds where Mages weren’t allowed to set foot on the surface, but the Guilds here clearly felt threatened.

With a shake of his head, he stepped into the Ship Mage’s Guild office, relaxing
slightly in the surroundings of the dozens of plants they’d used to soften the stark angles of the building’s walls. A single desk stood in the middle of the room, with no one waiting to see the older woman sitting at the desk.

“Can
I help you?” she greeted him bluntly.

“
I’m here to register a Jump Contract,” he replied, pulling the chip containing the formal contract between himself and Captain David Rice from the pocket of his blazer.

She
grunted. “Give it here.” He passed her the chip, and she slotted it into the reader on her desk. A holographic screen shimmered into existence at a wave of her hand, displaying the information.

“This says
you signed the contract in the Sherwood system almost two weeks ago,” she observed. “You should have registered it there.”

“
It slipped our minds while we were preparing for departure,” he told her. In truth, the Mage-Governor of Sherwood had unofficially blacklisted the
Blue Jay
from taking on a Jump Mage, so he and David hadn’t believed that they would have been permitted to register the contract in Sherwood.

The woman at the desk grunted
, clearly unconvinced, and hit a few more keys on her projected keyboard.

“Well,
it’s registered now. Charge to your ship?”

“Yes,” Damien confirmed, then reeled off the local account number for the
Blue Jay.

“Done,”
she said, ejecting the chip and passing it back to him. “Anything else?”

Damien shook
his head, but paused as he turned to leave.

“Do
you know why the Guildhouse here is so fortified?” he asked. Anything further from the airy, sprawling complex of bungalows in Sherwood City that served his home was hard to imagine.

She
sighed. “Corinthian Prime was built fifty years ago,” she told him. “Just before that, there was a bombing in Corinth City that killed two Mages and twelve bystanders. Two more Mages were killed in the ensuing riots, and both the Guilds and the Governor agreed that moving the Guilds somewhere more securable and out-of-the-way was a good idea.”

The woman, a senior ranked but still
mundane employee of the Guild, shrugged. “It’s only been ten years or so since it became illegal to bar Mages from a restaurant or store,” she told him, some of her earlier gruffness lost in the sad tone of her voice. “If the government didn’t think flouting the Charter laws around segregation was going to impede their effort to get the first MidWorlds Fleet Yard, I think you’d still see every second or third restaurant with a ‘No Dogs or Mages’ sign.”

Damien winced.

“That’s… different than I’m used to,” he admitted. “Thanks for explaining.”

She
shook her head.

“Wish
I didn’t have to,” she told him. “Step carefully, Mage Montgomery. There’s a reason your kind built themselves a fortress here.”

The first day on station was a blur for David. Bistro had taken them up on the offer for twenty-four hour offloading, so he’d had to arrange hotels for everyone. He’d then touched base with his insurance, a surprisingly un-confrontational appointment where they’d taken his telemetry data and confirmed within twenty minutes that they would cover the repairs under the piracy clause.

He settled into his hotel room, an expensive one in the docking
area with magical artificial gravity that allowed him a view of the
Blue Jay
from the window. David watched the ships and robot arms swarm over his ship, detaching the cargo containers and slowly transporting them to the station. From there automated transfer tubes whisked them away to either destinations on the stations, or transfer shuttles to carry them to the sky-tether that would deliver them to the surface.

Each container removed from the
Blue Jay
was a check mark in his mental book, and in many cases, a literal entry in the ship’s ledgers. Unless he’d missed his math, even with the repairs from the pirate attack, the revenue from this trip would allow him to make the last payment on the ten billion dollar note he’d taken out to finance acquiring the
Blue Jay
a decade ago. It would take time for the funds, encoded in a deep bank cipher, to make their way back to the Martian banking syndicate that had financed him, but under Protectorate Law, once he sent the money, the
Blue Jay
was completely his.

Now if only people would stop
shooting
at his ship.

“Is there any part of the matrix we can let another Mage inspect?” Kellers asked as Damien crawled under the fresh welding in Rib Four.

Damien’s ‘holiday’ had come to an abrupt end as soon as the two days of
offloading were complete and the repair crews started swarming over the ship.

“In theory, anywhere not attached to the
seven matrixes I highlighted on the chart,” Damien told him. Those seven were the matrixes that prevented a jump matrix from acting as a general amplifier for all spells instead of just the jump spell.

“In practice,” the young Ship’s Mage shrugged, eyeing the glitter of energy along the runes and checking for errors, “I
would want to review all of the runes around the work
anyway
, so not wanting someone to see what I did to the matrix just adds to the urgency.”

He
paused, noting a set of runes where the energy didn’t flow quite right. “Pass me the inlayer?” he asked the engineer.

With a
bright white grin, the engineer passed the tool over.

“
I’ll sell it to my guys as professional skepticism, I think,” Kellers told him. “I don’t think we want to explain to everyone on the ship just what you did.”

Damien
carefully drew the engraving tool along the line his gift showed him. A tiny laser burned a trench into the steel, and a soldering iron attachment filled the trench with silver inlay. He pulled the inlayer away and looked at the runes again. He wasn’t actually sure the runes had been damaged when the repair crew had replaced the conduits, or when they’d originally burnt out from the corona of the pirate laser that had disabled the engines. Either way, it would work now.

“The fact that it’s not supposed to be
possible
helps with that,” he said dryly, shivering a little at the thought of the entire crew knowing what he’d done to the ship. The
Blue Jay
’s crew of eighty-plus were good people, but spacers weren’t exactly known for their tact and discretion.

Kellers
laughed sharply.

“
I thought ships were supposed to blow up if you jump with a damaged matrix,” he continued, his dark face grim for a moment.

“
They usually do,” Damien admitted, shivering again, and sliding out from under the conduits. “These runes are good. They’re still working on the bow cap?”

“
The engineering firm said they’d have the new RFLAM turret installed by the end of today, but weren’t going to be working on the plating until tomorrow,” the engineer told him. Rapid-Fire-Laser-Anti-Missile turrets were mounted on all merchant ships, their first defense against pirates with missiles.

“Hold on one moment,”
Kellers continued as Damien continued to pack up. “What do you mean; ships with a modified matrix usually blow up? How the hell did you know
we
wouldn’t?”

Damien sighed and finished packing up the tools
he used to maintain the ship’s runes.

“To put
it as simply as I can,” he said slowly, “the runes are like a circuit diagram – they control a flow of energy, right?”

“
I follow so far,” Kellers agreed with a nod, his eyes dark as he held Damien’s gaze.

“Most
Mages know the runes we’ve been taught – think of them as standard circuit diagrams,” Damien continued. “Scribes are taught how to combine the runes into new matrices.” He touched the quill on his collar – he’d qualified as a base level Rune Scribe along the way to his Jump Mage certification, mostly because runes came very easily to him.

“We have to know the runes and the language around them, because like an electrician, we can’t
see
the power that flows through the runes, right?”

“Yeah, but
an electrician uses a voltmeter,” Kellers objected.

“Yep,” Damien agreed.
“And we don’t have anything like that. So we don’t modify existing matrices or runes, because it’s dangerous. A damaged jump matrix could leave a ship in pieces across an entire light year.”

“So why didn’t that happen to
us?” the older man demanded.

Damien sighed
. “Because I
can
see the flow of energy through the runes,” he admitted. “I’ve never met another Mage who can, but it lets me adjust runes with a far better idea of what I’m doing than any other Mage.”

“
It’s why I could tell that those seven matrices were limiting the matrix to just a jump spell,” he said quietly. “And how I knew that jumping wouldn’t blow us to hell. I could look at the matrix and
know
it would work.”

There was a long moment of silence, and the
engineer shook his head at Damien.

“
You may be damned crazy, son,” he told the Mage, “but I’m glad you were aboard!”