Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) (30 page)

Six men in ship’s clothes with the Hyper-Kevlar vests he and Singh had picked up were collapsed around it. The body armor was pocked with marks where they’d stopped dozens of rounds, but in the end they’d been too little. From the almost twenty bodies floating in the shuttle bay, they’d given a good account of themselves with the carbines in their hands, but the professional boarders had taken them down.

Rice joined him, and tapped a quick code into the airlock door. It slid open, admitting them all and allowing Kellers to bring Kelzin over.

“Ready?” Rice asked after a moment after they were all inside. Damien joined the others in bracing himself against the wall and outer door, ready to fire into the ship, and then nodded.

The airlock filled with breathable air, and then the inner door opened into the antechamber of hell.

As many men as had died in the shuttle bay had died in the corridor at the core of the
Jay
, and there was less space for the bodies to separate. To make it worse, these had been shot down with explosive rounds and micro-grenades. The air was filled with blood and parts of bodies. Damien choked back more nausea, and was glad he’d left his coveralls on.

“Forward,” Rice ordered, suiting actions to words and pushing through the mess.

Cringing against the
wet
pressure against his suit, Damien followed behind – so he was the one close enough to watch the Captain drop his rifle, grab a wall and launch forward like a rocket.

A moment later, Damien saw what Rice had seen and followed his Captain. He landed by the shattered combat exosuit only moments after Rice, who’d already lost his breather helmet and was floating in air next to Singh’s head.

“Narveer!” Rice snapped, reaching out to check for a pulse. Damien was about to say it was a waste, no one with
that
many holes in him was still alive, when Singh’s eyes popped open.

“Sorry Captain,” he groaned. “I tried.”

“Tried, hell,” Rice told him fiercely. “You drove them off Narveer – they left running. You saved the whole damn ship.”

“Ah,” Singh exhaled a sigh, blood bubbling from his lips as he did. Damien watched in horror as the pilot struggled to breathe. Armor-piercing rounds had gone clean through the suit, and his left leg had been blown off by a grenade. None of the wounds were bleeding much – the suit had to be doing something to stop it – but he had
so many
.

“You are
not
permitted to die,” the Captain ordered, his voice choked. “This was
my
mistake.”

“Never,” Singh coughed, more blood interrupting his words, “give an order you know can’t be obeyed.”

An armored hand reached up and grabbed at Damien. Wordlessly, Damien reached out and grabbed the older pilot’s hand in his own. Rice grabbed Singh’s other hand and the old Sikh warrior looked from one of them to the other.

“Stay strong boy,” he ordered Damien. “Both of you,” he glanced at Rice, and then back down the hall at the mess he’d created holding the corridor.

“Not a bad way to go, I gue…” he trailed off, and was gone.

Damien gently, carefully, folded Singh’s hand back onto his chest. He looked over at Rice, the Captain was frozen, covered in other men’s blood, and holding the armored gauntlet of his friend.

“Captain, you’ve got to get to the bridge,” he said quietly. “I need to get to the simulacrum. If we can’t save the ship, Singh died for nothing.”

Rice met his gaze, swallowing hard and slowly releasing Singh’s hand. He looked back at Jenna and Kellers.

“Get him and Kelzin and the others to the infirmary,” he ordered. “I need to go make sure our former passengers don’t blow us to hell.”

#

Kelly looked up in obvious relief as David entered the bridge, snagging his chair as he drifted by and strapping himself in.

“Thank gods you’re here, sir,” she told him. “I have no idea what to do!”

“You’re doing okay so far,” David replied, spotting that the
Jay
’s two anti-missile turrets had been spun up, ready to intercept any missiles launched from the running shuttles or the ship they’d run to. “Any word from the Rock?”

“Not a peep,” Kelly answered. “It’s like they haven’t even noticed what’s going on.”

“With the jamming, it’s possible. But it’s not likely,” David said grimly. “How are the engines?”

“Everything’s green – the boarders seemed to be heading for the bridge and the simulacrum chamber,” she explained.

“Makes sense,” David realized aloud. “They thought Damien was on board – they were trying to eliminate him before he could return the favor. They’d brought enough men they could deal with him – and not enough to deal with Singh.”

“You found Singh? He’s okay?” Kelly asked quickly, only to whiten as David shook his head silently.

“You’re the best engineer on this ship bar Kellers himself,” the Captain said gently, trying to get her to focus. “Can we burn the engines with that tanker still attached?”

“She’s latched onto our cargo points,” LaMonte answered. “We’re a bit unbalanced, but the computer can adapt for that automatically.”

Turning away from the only crew-member currently on his bridge, David hit a series of commands on the screen mounted on his chair, opening a ship wide channel.

“All hands, hear this, hear this,” he said into. “Cruise acceleration in thirty seconds. Secure for acceleration. I repeat, cruise acceleration in twenty-four seconds.”

He ran the toggle bar up on his screen, and hit a command that activated ‘automatic mass balancing.’ It had been a while since he’d flown the freighter himself, but it was a lot less complex than flying a shuttle. His full weight pressed him down into his chair, and he breathed slowly, beginning to relax.

The other jump ship in the system was a shining beacon on his scanners as they continued to scream out-system at an ungodly acceleration. Every person aboard had to be strapped in and half-crushed, but the push had put them outside any range at which Damien could reach them with the amplifier, even if the Mage wasn’t half-dead
anyway
.

“Sir, we’re receiving a transmission from the Rock,” Kelly, who was covering every task on the bridge that David wasn’t – thankfully! – announced.

David flipped a few controls and brought the video transmission up on his screen. He was unsurprised to see the strangely-pupiled eyes of Major Niska, though the Augment looked oddly relaxed given that a battle had just taken place on the planet beneath him.

“Captain Rice,” Niska greeted him cheerfully.

“Major Niska,” Rice answered carefully, somewhat put off. “What can I do for you?”

“I want to inform you that we’ve completed our inspections of the gunships, and we’ve found no issues related to their transport,” the Legatan officer said. “Your contract is fully fulfilled, and we have no complaints.”

David opened his mouth, about to ask what was going on – they’d just escaped the local army and a space-borne boarding attack, and Niska was talking about the
delivery contract
? – but the Augment slightly, almost imperceptibly, shook his head.

“We did run into some issues with the ships’ engines,” the Augment continued, “but my techs have them stripped down and assure me that it’s a manufacturing defect – they’ll have all four ships running in a few days.”

The
Blue Jay
’s Captain stared at his former passenger in shock for a moment. The gunships, which he’d been worried were going to chase his ship down, had their engines stripped down? The Augment had
disabled them
?

From the cheerful smile on Niska’s face, he was
perfectly
aware of what he’d done, but was mugging for the inevitable Chrysanthemum interception of the communication.

“I’ve just transmitted your funds now,” the LMID soldier continued. “I’ve included a small bonus for your patience with us and with the locals. I hope you’ve come out of this with a positive impression of the Directorate, at least.”

David ever so slowly nodded to the camera.

“I think I have,” he admitted. “And thank you, Major Niska. Thank you.”

He didn’t say what he was thanking the cyborg for. From the bright grin the other man flashed him, he didn’t need to.

The bridge was silent for a moment as the channel cut out and he met Kelly’s shocked gaze, and then Damien’s voice cut in as the Mage brought up the intercom screen from the simulacrum chamber.

“Did he just do what I think he did?” the young man asked, his voice incredibly tired.

“I think he did,” Rice confirmed, and glanced back at the screen. “You go get some rest Damien. We’re going to burn for the outer system as fast as we can – and as soon as you can, jump us out of here, I want to brush this planet’s dirt from my heels!”

###

The deep voice of the recorded words of the Sikh
Kirtan Sohila
, strange to Damien’s ears, echoed through the shuttle bay of the jump-freighter
Blue Jay
. He figured no one left aboard the ship understood the ancient words of the Sikh prayer for the end of the day, they only knew it was appropriate to mark the passing of the man they owed their lives to.

Seven bodies floated in the bay’s lack of gravity, and the remaining eighty members of the freighter’s crew floated with them, listing to the old words of the recording. Only Narveer Singh of the seven dead had been a Sikh, but Damien knew none of the others would have objected to the words.

As the prayer faded, Captain David Rice drifted out in front of his crew, standing next to the black bags containing the members of the crew who’d died fighting off a boarding action by bounty hunters before he or Damien, the Ship’s Mage, were able to return aboard to intervene. The Captain’s normally stocky and solid presence seemed subdued, small next to the weight of the bodies.

“As our ancestors before us did to the sea, so we commit our honored dead to the depths of space,” Rice said formally. “All things began from the stars, and so we return the bodies of our friends to those same stars.

“Narveer Singh, Leonard Champion, Li Hu Wong, Michael Reeves, Kyle Lawrence, Raphael Santiago and Karla Hammond died protecting us,” he continued softly. “We will not forget them.”

Damien stood as straight as he could in zero-gravity. The slight Mage tried not to look at the body bags. If he’d been aboard instead of Narveer, he likely would have died, and the ship would have been taken. They’d switched places to fool the government of Chrysanthemum, and so Narveer had died and Damien had lived. Where Damien would have failed, though, Narveer had saved the ship.

Dozens of the mercenaries had died. Their bodies had been dumped into space without ceremony a day earlier when they’d flushed out the bay and corridors of the ship where their boarding attempt had been launched.

A moment of silence passed, and then Rice gestured a command to a crewwoman floating by a control console. A clear barrier descended between the mourners and the floating bodies, and then the massive outer shutters of the
Blue Jay
’s shuttle bay slid open.

The bodies floated in zero-gravity for a moment, and then the air in the shuttle bay rushed into space, taking the
Blue Jay
’s fallen crew and friends with it.

The shuttle bay was silent. Damien felt a hand slip into his, and carefully turned his head to smile at the girl beside him. Kelly LaMonte was the ship’s junior engineer, and he and the dark-haired brunette had grown close in recent weeks.

“It always hurts to lose friends,” Captain Rice said into the quiet. “There are no words I can say to soften that blow. Narveer and the others died to protect us from the bounty hunters after us.

“We have to be careful,” he reminded them. “Our next destination is in the MidWorlds, and there will be people there who know who we are, and why we are hunted. From now on, no one goes off-ship alone, and no one goes off-ship unarmed.

“There are very few friends of ours left, it seems. We have to rely on each other.”

#

With Narveer gone, there was a spark missing from the meetings of the
Blue Jay
’s senior staff. His replacement as First Pilot was Mike Kelzin. The young pilot’s face was deathly pale under his buzz-cut, and he moved carefully around the bandage that still wrapped his stomach.

Jenna Campbell, the ship’s executive officer, sat next to Kelzin keeping a careful eye on him. She was the closest thing the ship had to a human doctor, though she had to rely heavily on the auto-doc to deal with wounds as bad as the pilot’s stomach injury.

Damien sat across from her, watching Kelzin almost as carefully as the XO. He lacked her medical skill, but he owed Kelzin his life. Without the pilot’s intervention on Chrysanthemum, he’d have died trying to protect the others.

Next to him sat the ship’s Chief Engineer, James Kellers. The dark-skinned man responsible for keeping the ship running looked exhausted – much of the work of cleaning up the mess the mercenaries had made of the
Blue Jay
’s rear corridors had been directed by him.

The only person who looked more tired than Kellers was the Captain. David Rice sat at the end of the table, watching his staff, and Damien couldn’t help but worry at the slump in the burly man’s posture. He’d been keeping things close to his chest – he’d told Damien where they were heading, but had asked the Mage not to tell even the other officers.

“All right,” the Captain finally said once everyone was settled, with beverages of choice to hand. “It’s good to see Mike on his feet and joining us,” he continued. “How do you feel?”

“Like someone shot me in the stomach,” the new First Pilot replied. “But I’ll live. Playing it up might keep the other pilots in check, too. Being in charge is going to be a new experience for me.”

“Remind them that
they
picked
you
,” Rice told him. “Any issues on the first day on the job?”

“None,” Kelzin confirmed. “I’m just thoroughly aware of what kind of jokers they all are.”

“Good,” the Captain said, then turned to Kellers. “What’s the status of the ship, James?”

“We got the… debris from the boarding attempt cleared away,” Kellers replied quietly. Damien shivered slightly at the memory of the gore-filled corridors they’d returned to the ship through. “We suffered some minor damage to the shuttle bay, which has been repaired already. I had LaMonte take a work team over to the fuel tanker yesterday as well. There was some damage from when we blew the boarding tube out of the bay, but nothing we can’t fix in short order.”

“Can anyone
fly
it?” Rice asked.

“None of the pilots,” Kelzin admitted sheepishly. “Narveer might have been able to, but the rest of us are only qualified on shuttles.”

“I can,” Damien reminded the Captain.

“As can I,” Jenna said as well. “Do you have any thoughts on using her?”

“Did they do any special work to her for that boarding attempt?”

“No,” Kellers told them. “The boarding tube was an extra module, probably brought along by the mercenaries. The ship itself must have been running on automatic – there’s no crew aboard, and if there had been, they probably would have detached before we jumped out-system.”

“I don’t see a lot of use for her,” the Captain admitted, “but get her repaired up – worst case, we can probably find a buyer for a slightly used in-system tanker somewhere along the way.”

“The way being…?” Jenna asked pointedly.

“Damien has drawn up a thirteen month route through the Fringe systems,” David told them. “We hit nine systems along the way, though we dog-leg around Nia Kriti and the Navy Base there. All nine systems are in various stages of development and they need everything from weather satellites to farming equipment to planes and cars.

“The first few systems are lower-end, but then we hit Theogeny, where we’ll be able to trade food and raw materials for some of the higher tech items the later systems will want,” David continued. “It’s a good, solid, Fringe trade route that will both make us a lot of money and keep us out of the Protectorate’s eye for over a year.”

“First we need a cargo though, boss,” Jenna said pointedly. “Given that everywhere in the Core and MidWorlds is going to know who we are now, where exactly are we planning on getting that?”

“Somewhere where they just don’t care,” David told her. “We’re going to Amber.”

Damien was the only one in the room not shocked into silence, though his reaction on being told had been much the same. Even on Sherwood, people had heard of Amber.

“Isn’t that place, well… a hive?” Kelzin finally asked.

“I was going to go with ‘lawless hellhole,’” Jenna agreed.

“It’s not
that
bad,” Kellers pointed out. “I grew up there. It’s certainly… different from the rest of the Protectorate.”

Amber had been founded by Libertarians from old Earth’s North American continent. They’d looked at the Charter that defined the rights and responsibilities of a member government – and had set up a government that
only
carried out the handful of services the Charter required, run as a co-operative paid for by a transaction fee at the system’s banks.

Amber’s laws were limited in both text and application, leaving many things that were illegal in the rest of the Protectorate perfectly legal under Amber law. Based on Damien’s research over the last few days, something like ninety percent of the pirate ships ever captured and traced by the Navy had undergone their conversion to predators in the yards around Amber.

But since the Co-operatives that served as Ambers ‘government’ didn’t violate the Charter, all the Protectorate would ever do was shut down the specific yard involved, and make ominous threats to the rest. They weren’t even permitted to station warships in the system, as the Charter guaranteed each system the right to provide their own protection if they chose.

“Amber’s a mess, and we’ll have to walk carefully,” David confirmed. “But we can find everything we’ll need there –
everything
transships through Amber – and the Defense Co-op won’t care that we’re in system.”

“There will be Hunters,” Kellers warned. “There’s a standing deal for bounties on people wanted for crimes by the Protectorate. But you’re right,” the engineer sighed. “The ADC won’t stop us docking or leaving, so long as we pay the associated fees.”

“We can deal with Hunters,” the Captain replied. “A real planetwide police force would worry me, but a few independent contractors shouldn’t be a problem if we keep together. James and I have contacts there, too, so we should be able to buy up what we need quickly.”

“I’ll be staying aboard ship,” Damien assured the others. “Even if everything goes to hell, we can run as soon as everyone gets aboard – and I
know
I can jump out from closer in then they expect.”

“We won’t be allowing shore leave,” David concluded. “James and I will go ashore, armed. We’ll meet our contact, and then we’ll get the hell out of here for the Fringe.

“Amber is as safe as a MidWorld will get for us for a while,” he reminded them, “but they have a transceiver, and
someone
is going to smell cash in telling the Protectorate where we are.”

#

Deep space didn’t have many virtues in the grand scheme of things. To Damien’s mind, it had two main ones: it was astonishingly beautiful to see the stars with no light from a local sun to interfere, and it was safe. Outside some of the busy trade lanes in the Core or an ambush, you would almost never run into another ship between the stars – and you were almost impossible to track, too.

He floated at the center of the
Blue Jay
, in the ovoid room covered in viewscreens that showed him the outside of the ship, and ran his fingers over the silver form of the magical simulacrum at the exact center of the starship. Runes spiraled away from that silver artifact, linking to the matrix throughout the ship that would amplify his magic a million-fold.

Energy flickered eagerly at him from the construct that both represented and, in a strange way,
was
the ship. It was far stronger on the
Jay
than on any of the ships he’d trained on, a side-effect of the changes he’d made to the runes. Unlike any other Mage he’d ever known, he saw the energy flows that underlay the runes, which had allowed him to remove the ‘extra’ runes that prevented the jump matrix of a freighter like the
Jay
being used as a full-scale amplifier.

Damien suspected that the knowledge of how to do that was what the mercenaries had been seeking when they boarded the
Blue Jay
at Chrysanthemum. The ability to turn any jumpship, anywhere, into a concealed warship capable of destroying anything the onboard Mage could reach was a terrifying weapon.

Out here, in deep space, they were safe. Even a single light year away from Amber, it was unlikely anyone would ever stumble upon them. Of course, they could never
do
anything from here, either.

With a small sigh, Damien activated his intercom to the bridge.

“I am ready to jump,” he reported to Captain Rice. “On your word.”

“The ship is prepared to jump,” Rice replied. “You may jump at will.”

Damien nodded and placed his hands on the silver simulacrum of the starship. Runes etched into his palms with silver glowed with his power, and channeled that power into the model at the heart of the
Blue Jay
.

With a deep breath, Damien threw his magic into his link with the ship and
stepped
.

A fleeting moment no artifice of man or magic had ever been able to measure passed, and then the jump-freighter was
here
instead of
there
, materializing one hundred and seventy million kilometers – roughly ten light minutes – from the planet, and about seventeen light minutes from the star.