Starship's Mage: Episode 2 (8 page)

Kelly led them through the docks as quickly as was humanly possible. The entire area was quieter than Damien had ever seen a space dock before. They saw no one on their way through what should have been a busy industrial dock.

“Where is everyone?”
he finally asked.

“
Our distraction seems to have gotten out of hand,” David said grimly, glancing down at his personal computer. “I don’t think anyone’s been killed, but the bank robbery has managed to turn into a mid-scale riot – apparently they covered their escape by dumping about ten million dollars in cash on the street. It hasn’t spread, much, but I think people are keeping quiet.”

“No lockdown yet?”

“Only in the Spindle,” David replied. “It takes a
lot
of paperwork to get through a dock shutdown. I suspect our ‘friends’ plan is to sneak everyone out on a liner that’s scheduled to leave in two hours – it’ll take more than that to get a shutdown order in place to stop the ship leaving.”

He
was cut off by the buzz of his personal computer announcing an incoming call.

“Captain,
you got the package?” Kellers’s voice demanded once David answered.

“
We do,” David confirmed.

“Good,” the
engineer replied. “We have a problem at the door – an Enforcer-type problem.”

“
We’ll deal with it,” the Captain replied, cutting the channel before turning to Damien as they jogged through the station. “I think you’re up, Ship’s Mage.”

“
An
Enforcer
?” Damien asked, shocked. The Guild’s police Mages weren’t the war-trained Mages of the Royal Martian Marine Corps, but they still had a lot more combat training than he did. And any Mage who’d qualified to be an Enforcer was probably a stronger Mage than Damien too.

“No one else in the
crew can take him,” David replied grimly. “He’s between us and the ship, and if you can’t get him to step aside, all of this has been for nothing.”

For worse than nothing, Damien
realized. If they couldn’t escape, then every member of the
Blue Jay
’s crew was going to go down with him now.

He
was silent for the last few minutes it took them to approach the
Blue Jay
’s berthing dock, where they met Kellers. The black-skinned man looked uncharacteristically grim, while behind him Jenna was busy organizing and co-ordinating the growing mob of
Jay
crew members.

“What do
we do?” the engineer asked bluntly. “There’s a station-wide alert out to security – we were hoping the Enforcer would answer the call. Instead he sent the CSS officers and settled in here himself – he’s watching the only way in like a hawk.”

“Do
we have any gas grenades left?” David asked.

“Won’t work,” Damien told
him, cutting into the conversation. “You took the Mages at the cells by surprise – forewarned to expect trouble, that wouldn’t even work on me.” The young Mage considered the access to the dock. It was a single wide corridor leading to the hatch, big enough for small cargo and completely lacking in cover or gravity.

“
They’re only guarding the personnel lock,” Singh interjected. “I can steal a shuttle and take everyone over.”

“That would work for twenty of us, but the rest would be arrested before we could come back for them,” Damien told the pilot, still distracted and thinking.

“Gas grenades won’t work,” he repeated. “But do we have any flash-bangs left?”

There was no point in trying to sneak up on the Enforcer, so Damien simply came around the corner, slowly approaching the man while keeping his hands visible.

“Damien Montgomery,” the Enforcer greeted
him. The black-armored man was helmetless with short-cropped black hair that accented the face of an older officer, his face carved with the laugh lines and slight ruddiness of a man who lived happily and well.

“Enforcer,” Damien greeted
him, inclining his head slightly as he stopped, about two meters away from the man. The Enforcer had a stungun to hand, but made no move to aim it.

“I
somehow doubt you’ve returned to the scene of the crime to surrender,” the older Mage said quietly, “though it would make life easier and less painful for everyone – including you.”

“No,” Damien admitted
. “I don’t suppose I could talk you into stepping aside?”

“Why in the stars would I do that?” the Enforcer asked, clearly surprised by the thought.

“Either that ship is the deathtrap that the Guildmaster thinks it is, or it’s safe to jump,” the Ship’s Mage said bluntly. “Letting me and those who
want
to risk it aboard the ship doesn’t hurt anyone except us if we’re wrong. It might even save you time! And if the ship still works… has there really been a crime?”

The Enforcer shook
his head, finally starting to lift the stungun. “You’re crazy, you know that right?” he said conversationally. “If you jump that ship, you and everyone crazy enough to go with you dies. Some might call that evolution in action –
I
call it something I’m supposed to stop.”

“What’s
your name?” Damien asked, his eyes riveted on the stungun. He honestly wanted to know.

“Mallory,” the Enforcer told
him, the gun rising to point at Damien’s chest but still unfired. “James Mallory. Why?”

“Because
you’re a good man, James Mallory,” Damien told him quietly. “And I’m sorry for this.”

He flipped the two
flash-bangs that he’d been dragging along behind him up and over his head, closing his eyes and shielding his ears with magic as they went off next to his head – and barely two meters from the unprepared Enforcer.

Mallory lurched backwards in shock, raising
his hands to paw at his suddenly blind eyes. Damien dove forwards, augmenting his lunge with a little extra gravity, and grabbed the stungun from the Enforcer’s suddenly limp hands.

The guard hadn’t even begun to recover from the grenades before the
SmartDart slammed into his neck and disabled him in a spasm of electricity.

Hands of the Mage-King of Mars did not, as a rule, help jump their own ships. When Alaura had ‘borrowed’ the latest-model destroyer from the Royal Navy, they’d lent her the crew too – with a reasonable degree of grace even!

Something
about the situation in Corinthian, though, made her want to rush. Adding herself to the cycle took them from two Mages making four jumps a day to three Mages, which let the warship make six light years a day.

She’d insisted that the last jump
would be hers as well. There was a reason for that, which was glowingly clear to the handful of crew, includes both other Mages, standing in the simulacrum chamber of His Majesty’s Starship
Tides of Justice
. Where most Mages only had silver runes inlaid into their palms, allowing them to interface with rune matrices, Alaura had a series of runes wrapping around her left arm back to the elbow, carved into her flesh by the Mage-King himself.

Those runes glowed with a brilliant white fire as she jumped the ship with a greater degree of accuracy, and
far
closer to the planet of Corinthian, than any of her crew could have managed. The
Tides of Justice
erupted into normal space less than half a million kilometers from Corinthian Prime.

Traffic
Control, understandably, panicked.

“Unidentified vessel,
identify yourself immediately!” a voice barked from the radio, and Alaura took personal control of the communications.

“This is the Hand of the
Mage-King Alaura Stealey,” she said flatly. “I am arriving by request of the Guildmaster to take over a Mage Law case.”

Silence answered
her, then a sigh of relief.

“Thank the Gods
you’re here,” the voice replied. “We’re having a situation – there’s been a riot and a prison breakout, no one has any idea what’s going on!”

That was obvious.

“Prison breakout? Who escaped?” Alaura demanded.

“
I don’t know!” the anonymous traffic controller replied.

The Hand sighed.

“Transmit the Dockmaster’s office’s co-ordinates to my ship,” she ordered. “Tell him to have the details of the breakout ready for me; I will be meeting with him in five minutes.”

“
You can’t possibly dock and get here in five minutes!” the bureaucrat replied.

“
Ma’am, look!” one of the sensor technicians in the simulacrum chamber exclaimed, pointing at a sudden flare of light on the screens surrounding them. The stereotypical four-keeled shape of a freighter had released itself from the station, flipped up ninety degrees to clear the station, and then brought its drives up at maximum emergency acceleration.

“That’s a
Venice
class freighter,” the tech reported. “She’s making just over three gees – her crew is in one
hell
of a rush.”

Alaura eyed the
ship for a second, and then turned back to the video. “I am a Hand of the King,” she said bluntly. “Never tell me what I cannot do. Tell the Guildmaster to be ready.”

Cutting the channel she glanced around the
simulacrum chamber, the rune encrusted room at the heart of every ship, covered in screens and technology to allow the Mage to understand everything happening around her. On a Navy ship like the
Tides of Justice
, the simulacrum chamber doubled as the bridge – there was no point in doing anything else, as the ship’s main weapon was the amplifier that increased power of the Mage at its center a hundredfold.

“Watch
everything,” she ordered Harmon. “Locate every ship that’s moving, and every ship that’s not and keep me in the loop. Do
not
take any action without specific orders – this whole situation stinks.”

“Understood,
Ma’am,” the Lieutenant confirmed. He didn’t even look at his people; both Alaura and he knew they’d already be on it.

She
nodded to him, and then funneled magic through the Rune of Power on her arm and
stepped
across half a million kilometers, to the Dockmaster’s office.

Damien hung onto the simulacrum at the heart of the
Blue Jay
with both hands. Even with the freighter’s jump matrix turned into an amplifier, there was little he could do against the crushing acceleration of her engines at full power.

All
around him, viewscreens showed the space around them, overlaid with icons from the ship’s sensors. Linked into the amplifier, he barely needed them, as the freighter’s sensors were his eyes and ears.

He
saw the destroyer erupt into normal space terrifyingly close to the station and couldn’t help himself from staring at it. The sharp lines of the white warship were clean, and terrifying. If things went wrong, that warship could easily shoot them down, no matter how hard they ran.

The
advantage to the punishing acceleration they were under was that
only
a Navy destroyer could catch them. If nothing intervened, they would reach a region of space flat enough for him to jump the ship in just over a day.

“How the hell did you get here?” the Dockmaster demanded rudely as Alaura overrode the security on his door and strode in. “This is a private…” his voice trailed off as she removed the golden chain from around her neck and dropped the tiny golden open-palmed hand symbol of her office on his desk.

“The
station is in a state of emergency,” she told him flatly. “I came here to judge a case, and I find a hornet’s nest. What happened?”

“There was a bank robbery,” the
Dockmaster replied, after swallowing hard. Hands were terrifying to anyone sane, and Alaura wasn’t exactly trying to set him at ease. “It turned into a riot, and while System Security was dealing with that, seven prisoners broke free from the Core Zero-gravity Cells.”

“
Only seven?” she asked. She would expect somewhere like Corinthian to have more prisoners in the station-side high security cells than that.

“Just the
Mage they had locked up in there and half a dozen mob hit men,” the Dockmaster confirmed. “No one’s been reported dead yet, but they’re only getting back into the Cells now.”

“Have any ships left since then?”
she demanded.

“The
Blue Jay
launched without permission,” the Dockmaster replied, sounding affronted. “I was
told
she was locked down – why the hell didn’t they at least unfuel her?!”

Alaura held the man’s gaze
coldly. The Dockmaster of a station the size of Corinthian Prime had to know the answer to that question –
she
knew that un-fuelling a freighter of the
Blue Jay
’s size was an exercise of days, so he should. That answered one question, at least. Damien Montgomery was gone, and he’d taken his ship with him.

“Any other ships?”

“No,” the Dockmaster pulled up a list on his computer. “There’s a liner scheduled to launch in an hour, we’re trying to get permission to seal the docks.”

“Why haven’t
you?” she demanded, shocked.

“The docks are the
lifeblood of this system!” the Dockmaster insisted proudly, his back straight as he looked her in the eyes. He then deflated slightly. “So, only the Governor can order them sealed, and he’s tied up in meetings.”

“Right,” Alaura said
slowly. She tapped the golden hand on its chain on the man’s desk. “Seal the docks,” she told him. “My authority.”

The
Dockmaster stared at the golden icon on his desk, the symbol of authority of a woman authorized to do anything short of shoot him at a whim. Shooting him, Alaura reflected, would require her to actually hold a trial, however short, and record the evidence in favor.

After a moment’s hesitation,
however, the man quickly got to work, typing messages into his computer and talking on the com.

Turning
away from him now that he was working, Alaura’s earpiece buzzed.

“Stealey,”
she answered quickly. “What is it, Harmon?”

“You wanted to know what was going on,” the Mage-Lieutenant told her
. “Well, we just noticed something you may want to intervene in.”

“Which is?”
she asked. Normally she had more patience with Harmon – he was extremely competent, just a little fussy.

“There are two Navy d
estroyers in the system other than the
Tides
,” he told her. “They both just vectored after the
Blue Jay
– a request coming from the Corinthian Guildmaster. Given that there’s an escaped Class One Fugitive aboard…”

“
They will shoot to kill,” Alaura finished for him, grimly. “Thank you, Harmon. I’ll deal with it. Prep the
Tides
’ Marine detachment for crowd control and search work,” she added. “It looks like we have some scum we’ll need to find on station.”

Turning back to the
Dockmaster, she smiled grimly at him.

“Where
would I find the Navy System Command Center?”