Starship's Mage: Episode 3 (9 page)

Margrave had abandoned the long open-topped car he’d driven them from the landing pad in. Damien kept watch as the others piled in, Jenna grabbing the wheel while Kellers settled into ‘shotgun’ with a stolen stungun at the ready.

The only soldiers
actually at the Festival Hall, it seemed, had been the squad now lying whimpering on the floor, nursing their shattered limbs. Some of them might be crippled for life, but so far as Damien could tell they would all live.

He
followed David into the backseat of the car, and Jenna gunned the engine, heading towards the shore.

“
I can’t raise Kelzin or the ship,” Kellers reported, fiddling with the personal computer strapped around his wrist. “They must have slammed a jamming field on us just as the soldiers moved. What did they expect the
Jay
to do from orbit?!”

“The
Jay
is under attack as well,” David informed them all grimly. “Singh told me they’d launched a boarding tube into the shuttle bay. We could easily escape to our ship and land directly in a trap.”

“
You’ve
met
Singh, right?” Jenna said drily, swerving the car around a speed bump and ignoring a set of traffic signals. “Strap him into that exosuit, and it would take an army to get to the ship.”

“From the size of the tanker,
they could have
brought
an army,” David reminded her. “Or some Augments or exosuits of their own.”

T
he car was silent for a moment - a silence suddenly interrupted by gunfire as Jenna whipped around a corner into the face of a blockade of black armored vehicles. Three of the black armored personnel carriers they’d seen while driving through the neighborhood had been parked in a row, blocking the road to the landing pad.

“Turn
us around!” Kellers shouted, and they all lurched to one side as the car swerved in a dangerously tight turn.

“Hold
me down,” Damien told David sharply, rising to his feet in the back of the car and facing the APCs. The other man grabbed onto his waist, and Damien stretched out his hands. He felt for the core of power within him, throwing it out in front of him.

The second burst of gunfire from the
APCs was more on target than the first. For a moment, even Damien though the heavy bullets were going to rip through the car – then they slammed into the shield he’d raised with a force that shoved him backwards. Without David’s grip, the Mage would have fallen out of the car.

Grimly
, Damien held the shield as the car turned around and Jenna slammed on the accelerator. Bullets continued to splash off for a few moments, and then they were clear. The young Mage slumped, leaning on David for a second as they screamed around another corner, turning onto a different route to the landing pad.

“Damien!”
Kellers shouted. “Up ahead!”

Blocking
the way to the road and rumbling towards them was a tank. Damien barely got his shield forward in time, and was slammed back into his seat when the first shot from its main gun slammed into his defense.

He
took a deep breath as the world seemed to slow down around him. The soldiers in the Hall had brought stunguns – they hadn’t been trying to kill him and his friends, so he’d tried not to kill them. Now he was being shot at, and he was out of patience.

Surging
back to his feet, Damien thrust his right hand out in a clenched fist. Bright light flashed around him as he moved, a field of super-hot plasma coalescing around him without touching his skin, and then blasting forwards with the motion of his fist.

The bolt met the
tank shell coming the other way and incinerated it before slamming into the tank’s turret. Molten metal exploded away from the top of the armored vehicle, and then Damien slammed a second plasma bolt into the main chassis.

This one went clean through the
tank, and hit the ammunition on the way. From sixty meters away, the explosion rocked the car the
Blue Jay
’s crew had stolen, the heat blasting against Damien’s face.

Exhaustion collapsed
him back into the seat and it felt like his head was exploding as a vicious migraine stabbed into his skull. Blinking against the pain, he put his hands to his face – and at a warm wet feeling, pulled them away to see them spattered in his own blood.

“Damn
it Damien, you’re bleeding from everywhere but your eyeballs,” David hissed, tossing him a package of gauze from somewhere in his suit. “I saw Kenneth after he overdid it, I
won’t
bury two Mages!”

Wincing
at the fierceness of David’s speech and the migraine, Damien shook his head. “Not likely,” he half-whimpered.

“
I’ve got something!” Kellers suddenly snapped, turning the volume up on his personal computer.

Most of what
they heard was static, but a few words came through: “Pad… attack… took off… your way.”

“That’s Kelzin,” Jenna exclaimed.
“Where is he?”

“Not close enough,”
Kellers replied grimly, as they reached the end of the road with the burning tank, and a second light battle tank emerged from the greenery at the side of the road. Another APC and a dozen infantry had dug in behind a temporary barrier to block the road behind the tank.

“Shoot
them!” David ordered, suiting actions to words and opening fire with the stungun. The weapon’s range was impressive, but the SmartDarts couldn’t penetrate military body armor. The Captain ducked back down next to Damien as more bullets rattled off the hull.

Damien tried to
rise; to see if he could shield them again, but David easily forced him back down as the migraine stole his balance.

“What do
we…” Kellers’ voice was cut off by the roaring of rockets as their shuttle came screaming overhead. Down-facing thrusters sent the soldiers scattering as the shuttle set itself down, its back ramp opening.

The
tank started to train its gun on the shuttle, and then a new sound ripped the sky. Modern armor-piercing rounds ripped through its armor like tissue paper, each bullet carrying only the tiniest of explosive charges – but the accumulation of a hundred rounds enough to shatter the tank’s armor and leave it a burning mess.

“Get over here!” Kelzin shouted, stepping around the shuttle as
he loaded another pair of magazines into the carbine. “These guys are
not
playing nice!” Fitting actions to his words, a hail of gunfire landed around the pilot, who ducked behind his shuttle before returning fire.

Jenna slammed the car into a screeching stop, throwing
her door open and leaping out. Kellers followed her, but paused to look back at David and Damien.

“Can
you walk?” David asked as Damien struggled to his feet. Gunfire echoed around them, and before Damien could work up the energy to reply, the Captain looked at Kellers. “Grab him,” he ordered.

Strong
arms grabbed each of his shoulders and dragged him forward. He stumbled, struggling against the migraine and the exhaustion wracking his body.

“
I can’t do this,” he muttered to David. “I’m not an Enforcer.”

“Cover
us!” David shouted forwards, continuing to drag Damien forward. “You’re my Ship’s Mage,” he said harshly. “I don’t
need
you to be a soldier!”

They
rounded the shuttle to discover there was no cover between them and the Chrysanthemum soldiers now except the second burning tank. Jenna had made it into the shuttle, and was returning fire with a carbine she’d grabbed from inside.

Kelzin was next to
them, pumping careful bursts at the locals.

“Go first,
I’ll cover you,” the pilot ordered.

Damien felt more than saw David nod, but managed to struggle enough to
his feet that he wouldn’t be completely useless when they ran.

“Go!” Kelzin snapped.

David and Kellers took off, half-supporting, half-carrying Damien as he ran with them. For a moment, gunfire echoed around them, but then it diverted. A few steps behind them, Kelzin followed, spraying bullets with abandon to keep the soldiers’ heads down.

Damien slumped into a seat on the side of the shuttle as
David and Kellers released him, breathing a sigh of relief as Kelzin followed them in and slammed the button to close the hatch.

The young
pilot opened his mouth to say something, but stopped with an expression of shock on his face as blood exploded from his stomach. A heavy sniper round slammed into the shuttle wall next to Damien as Kelzin collapsed to the ground.

Jenna dropped
her carbine and was at the pilot’s side in a moment.

“Toss
me the medkit,” she ordered. Kellers was quick to obey, passing over the white box with the green cross.

“
Can you fly this thing, boss?” the engineer asked David.

Damien forced
himself to a sitting position, knowing the answer the Captain was going to give. David shook his head, and met Damien’s eyes.

“
Can you fly?” he asked.

“
I can fly anything,” Damien replied, as confidently as he could with his face covered in his own blood and a migraine eating at his skull.

“That wasn’t the question.”

“It’s fly or die,” the Mage replied. “Someone’s going to have to carry me to the cockpit.”

The heavy cargo hauler had been built tough. Even as Damien was hauled into the cockpit and strapped in, the soldiers continued to spray it with rifle and machine gun fire, but it lifted smoothly into the air when he engaged the thrusters.

That was the cue for the remaining soldiers to scatter, hiding behind
their APCs as the shuttles thruster fused hydrogen to blast the street with masses of ionized particles as the ship blasted for orbit.

Damien
quickly brought up the various displays, checking their height, velocity, and acceleration. Three gravities of acceleration pressed them into the chairs, and he prayed silently that the pressure wasn’t making Kelzin’s wounds worse.

“
We’re clear?” David asked, and Damien shook himself, focusing on the displays again.

“
We have enough fuel to make it to the
Blue Jay
,” he reported. “Can we com her yet?”

The
Captain was in the copilots seat and checked the communications panels for a moment before shaking his head.

“
We’re clear of the jamming, but I’m getting nothing from the ship,” he told Damien. “Most likely they’re being jammed too.”

Damien nodded, blinking against
his migraine, and then blinking again as a set of indicators began flashing on the console. It took him a minute to remember what they meant and bring up the radar display.

“
We have a problem,” he told the Captain quietly. Before David could ask, the Mage pointed at the screen he’d just opened, which showed two atmospheric interceptor jets at the maximum range of the shuttles sensors.

“Can
you evade them?”

Damien checked
his fuel gage, and then the computer’s estimate of the jets closing speed.

“
I have barely enough fuel to reach the
Blue Jay
,” he said grimly. “If I push hard enough to evade them, I won’t be able to slow down for rendezvous. I can evade if they fire on us, but I can’t escape them.”

He
flipped two timers up on the screen. “Left is time to orbit – these guys can’t follow us that high,” Damien told David. That timer showed just over ten minutes. “Right is time to when they’ll range on us.”

That timer showed
seven minutes.

“
You’re done for magic,” David told him flatly. “This ship has no weapons. All we can do is hold on tight, and hope you’re good enough to dodge missiles.”

“No pressure
, I see,” the Mage replied, gently massaging his temples. “Let’s see what happens.”

The next minutes passed in a terrifying silence as Damien watched
his fuel gage, his height, and the distance to the jets. After five, Jenna clambered in against the acceleration and dropped into the last seat.

“Kelzin will live,”
she said flatly. “The round pierced his intestines, and he’ll need serious medical care once we get him aboard, but the bullet went through cleanly otherwise. Patched up what I could and have compresses on it. He won’t die before we make it home.”

“Unless the rest of
us do,” Damien muttered. “Have any ideas about evading atmospheric interceptors?”

“Be somewhere else?”

“Working on it,” the Mage replied, running through a series of menus, trying to see if he could eke any more acceleration out of the ship without spending more fuel than he could afford.

“Watch
it!” David snapped. “Incoming!”

Damien
snapped his gaze back to the main screen, wincing against the sharp movement. It looked like he’d underestimated the interceptors range. With four minutes before they passed beyond the region of the atmosphere where the air-breathing craft could follow them, the fighters had each launched two missiles.

A moment later,
he had a timer to impact up, and kept an eye on it as he twisted the ship slightly, arcing their course away from the missiles.

“What do
we do?” Jenna asked, her voice very small.

“Pray,” David told
her grimly, his eyes on the radar as the missiles came screaming in, far faster than the shuttle could fly.

“That might not hurt,” Damien told
them absently, his mind on the missiles, the shuttle… and the shuttles ridiculously overpowered engines, designed to lift it from a planetary surface into orbit.

“
I’d also recommend hanging on,” he finished, grabbing onto the manual controls as the missiles entered final acquisition. “This is going to suck.”

The shuttle had
no ECM, no defenses and wasn’t maneuvering. Presented with an easy target, the smart missiles had clustered together, sweeping in from one vector, with no more than a hundred meters between each of them. As they screamed in on the shuttle at several thousand miles an hour, Damien jerked the ship about, pointing her nose up and away from the missiles before hitting the engines at maximum power.

For a moment, half a dozen beefy men sat on the
Mage’s already bruised chest. Then the engines cut back to normal strength, and the shuttle stabilized.

The impact counter had gone negative.
David reached over and shut it off, looking at Damien in surprise.

“What was
that
?”

“That was running air-breathing missiles into the
blast of four fusion rockets at maximum power. They’re designed for atmosphere – not the equivalent of a point blank solar flare,” Damien explained.

“
We’re clear of atmo,” he continued. “They’re breaking off.”

The
Captain breathed a deep sigh.

“Alright, Damien.
Get us home,” he instructed.