Starship's Mage: Episode 4 (5 page)

David found himself envying Damien’s ability to generate his own gravity with magic as he made his way down the zero-gravity keel of the
Blue Jay
. The personnel tube, which had retracted behind him as he came aboard, connected at the rear of the ship. The
Blue Jay
’s bridge was on Rib One, at the front of the ship.

It was
noticeably
faster
to make the long dive along the keel and around the simulacrum chamber from the shuttle bay to the forward elevators than it was to run along the Ribs themselves with their centrifugal gravity. What it wasn’t, David considered as he plummeted towards the front of his ship, was
safer
.

Practice allowed him to catch one of the handholds by the
elevators with his stronger hand, and swing himself to a halt. The effort almost wrenched his arm out of its socket. He oriented himself towards the elevators gingerly, wincing at the now-vicious pain in his shoulder.

As he reached the
elevator, he felt a familiar vibration run through the ship, followed by a faint but definable sense of ‘down’ – the ship was moving. He spared a moment to be grateful that the engines hadn’t engaged
while
he was making his one handed landing from his reckless zero-gravity jump.

Moments later, the
elevator delivered him to the outside of his bridge and he carefully walked in, trying not to let the pain in his twisted shoulder throw him off too badly.

“Where are we at?” he asked Jenna, settling into his command chair with a
concealed wince.

His
XO was at her usual station at navigation, her fingers flying across the screen as she brought the
Blue Jay
away from the immense-yet-vulnerable bulk of Heinlein Station on their maneuvering thrusters.

“To no one’s surprise, I’m sure,
Heinlein Station will bump you to the head of the clearance queue if you pay an extra fee,” Jenna told him. “We’re pulling clear on thrusters and should be ready to engage main engines in about five minutes.”

“How’s our Martian friend?”

Jenna gestured towards the main viewscreen, which was zoomed in on the single icon and showing a series of numbers around it.

“They came out roughly the standard one hundred sixty million
kilometers out,” she told him. “I don’t think they’ve noticed us yet – they’re burning in at three gravities, but that’s pretty standard for a Navy ship.”

“We’re heading in the opposite direction, I presume?”

“Of course!” she confirmed. “As soon as I’m clear, I’ll push us up to about one and a half gravities.”

David nodded and turned to the channel to the
simulacrum, where Damien was patiently waiting.

“What’s your status, Damien?
When can we jump?”

“The matrix is clean and
functioning,” the Ship’s Mage told him. “I can jump closer in than most with the amplifier as well – at a gee and a half, we’ll probably be clear in six hours.”

David nodded
appreciatively. He kept being surprised by the capabilities that Damien squeezed out of the amplifier he’d turned the jump matrix into. A Navy destroyer could jump at three million kilometers from a planet if they needed to, but it wasn’t fun for anyone.

“Keep an eye on things,” he ordered his Mage.
“I don’t want to pick a
fight
with
a destroyer, but I’m not sure I want to surrender either.”

“They can’t catch us
in time,” Jenna asserted. “We’ll be heading in the opposite direction at half of their acceleration, and we have a lot less distance to cover.”

“I hope you’re right,” Damien said quietly.
“Because they have more Mages aboard, and theirs are trained in the use of an amplifier in combat. I couldn’t face them. And
that’s
assuming they don’t just blow us up with missiles.”

David didn’t respond aloud.
He simply nodded his acceptance of the Mage’s comments, and settled in, watching the viewscreen’s data on the million-ton warship carefully.

The next several hours passed quietly. With the course plugged into the computer, David sent Jenna to rest while he and Damien continued to watch the
Golden Sword
and their own location.

It was obvious when the destroyer’s crew finished running the beacons of all the ships through their databases and
identified the
Blue Jay
. The destroyer’s arc shifted, moving away from a direct course to Heinlein Station and instead shaping an intercept for the
Blue Jay
– and she sped up, her acceleration increasing from three gravities to ten.

A number of warning signs starting flashing on David’s screen a few moments later, as the
Protectorate warship painted the
Blue Jay
with directional radar and lidar – both lightspeed sensors being targeted on the
Blue Jay
from several light minutes away.

The
Jay
’s sensors warned about the laser and radar hits for several seconds, and then the warnings were silent. Standard procedure, David knew from his own long-ago days in the Martian Navy, would be to scan the ship flying a flagged identification beacon to both confirm that it was the right ship and identify any unknown dangers.

From eight light minutes away, it took almost twenty minutes for the sensor reflection to reach the
Golden Sword of Freedom
, the bridge crew to review it and decide that yes, this was the ship in their database, the commander to record a transmission, and for that transmission to wing its way across space back to the
Blue Jay
.

When he received the
transmission, David threw it up on the screen after checking that Damien was in the communication loop. He preferred the Mage to know what was going on – after all, if things came apart, it would fall to Damien and his amplifier to try and save them.

The image in the
transmission turned out to be a tall, slim, black woman with a shaved head and the dark blue uniform of a senior officer in the Royal Navy of the Mage-King of Mars. Behind and around the woman was visible the room-encompassing viewscreens and silver runes of the destroyer’s Simulacrum Chamber – since the main weapon of a Protectorate warship was its amplifier, the Simulacrum Chamber at the heart of the ship doubled as the vessel’s bridge.

Unlike the
Simulacrum Chamber aboard the
Blue Jay
or any other civilian ship, however, the
Golden Sword
’s had magically controlled gravity. Despite the ten gravities of acceleration the other ship was pushing, the Captain showed no sign of being under force except a normal gravity.

“Captain David Rice of the
Blue Jay
,” the woman said calmly. “I am Mage-Captain Amelia Okoro of His Majesty’s destroyer
Golden Sword of Freedom
.” She paused, seeming to consider her words carefully.

“I
know you are running,” she finally continued. “I am ordering you to heave to, and prepare for a rendezvous.”

“I promise you, upon the
honor of His Majesty’s Navy, no harm will come to you or your crew if you surrender, but you
must
surrender. I will range upon you before you reach jump distance. Do not force me to act hastily.”

David ran the
geometry through his computer, and then glanced up at Damien on the screen to his own Simulacrum Chamber.

“When can you jump, Damien?” he asked.

“I could jump now,” the young Mage told him. “I’d be useless for at least twenty-four hours afterwards, though. If we wait three hours to when I originally estimated, I’ll be fine. Can they intercept us short of that?”

“No,” David told him.
“She
could
intercept us well short of the nine light minute mark though, even if she maneuvered to board and we did our best to escape. We’ll jump on schedule, Damien.”

He glanced back at the main
viewscreen, then shrugged and activated his own recorder. He leant forwards slightly and focused his gaze on the camera.

“Mage-Captain Okoro,” he said calmly, “I am afraid that I have no intention of surrendering this ship to His Majesty’s forces. I will not allow a member of my crew to have his magic stripped from him to calm the fears of the foolish.”

Another twenty minutes passed while his short message reached the
Golden Sword
, and Okoro’s response came back. He played it when it arrived.

The black-skinned
Captain had acquired an odd quirk to her mouth, as if she was trying not to smile.

“Your loyalty to
your crew does you credit, Captain,” she told him. “To my knowledge, Mr. Montgomery is in no danger of that anymore – but I am required to deliver him, yourself, and your crew to the Lady Hand Stealey.”

David smiled, and activated the recorder again.

“If you wish to deliver us to the Hand, you will hardly be able to fire into my ship, Mage-Captain,” he told her dryly. “I have no intention of surrendering or being intercepted. You may as well let us go.”

Time passed.
Every exchange burned more time until the
Blue Jay
could escape, but the destroyer continued to blaze towards them on a pillar of antimatter flame.

This time, when the transmission arrived,
Okoro was clearly smiling.

“
You may be correct, Captain, in that I cannot fire into your ship,” she said. “It is even possible, given the data I have from Corinthian, that you can escape. Understand this, Captain Rice. I may not be able track your jumps. I may not be able to chase you from star to star. The Hand can – and the Hand
will
.”

“These are her orders from Mars.
She will not fail. If you run, you will be run to ground. If you hide, you will be found. If you surrender now, you will be safe. You have my word, and the honor of his Majesty’s Navy on that.”

A chill of fear ran down David’s spine, and he met Damien’s eyes through the intercom video.

“No one can track a jump,” the Mage reminded him. “Hand or no Hand, she does not know where we’re going – and she
cannot
follow us.”

David suspected that the younger man was speaking as much to reassure himself as his
Captain, but it made him feel better. He turned the recorder on and faced it one last time.

“I am sorry, Mage-Captain,” he said quietly. “But the fact remains that I can no longer trust the Protectorate. I will guard my crew from you with all that is in my power. By the time you receive this message, I will be less than an hour from leaving this system. You cannot catch us. You cannot pursue us.”

David Rice sat in his command chair for a long time after that, watching the
Protectorate destroyer draw ever closer, until, finally, Damien wrapped him and his ship in a sphere of magic and whisked them away to safety.

“We found them.”

The words were quiet, but Alaura
Stealey, Hand of the Mage-King of Mars, hadn’t missed the door to her private office opening. She heard Mage-Lieutenant Harmon, the executive officer of the destroyer
Tides of Justice
, perfectly clearly.

With a small sigh of
satisfaction, she closed down the screen she was reviewing, filled with the latest in a series of reports from agents across the Protectorate. While the Mage-King’s instructions with regards to Montgomery had been clear, she couldn’t ignore the rest of her duties. There were too many trouble spots, here and there across the sphere of human space, which would eventually require the touch of a Hand.

“Who found them, and where?” she asked.
There was no question as to who had been found.

“The destroyer
Golden Sword of Freedom
was making one of our irregular ‘you’re not building pirate ships, promise?’ stopovers in Amber. They detected the
Blue Jay
making a run for it. Mage-Captain Okoro challenged them, but Rice refused to surrender. The Mage at the transceiver provided a transcript of the conversation.”

Alaura nodded,
quickly taking the sheet of hardcopy from the Navy officer and skimming through it. She grimaced at Rice’s words about trusting the Protectorate, and sighed aloud.

“I guess it was too much to hope that dropping all of the charges would get them to talk to us,” she said quietly.
If only she could talk to them herself! The limitations of the use of transceiver arrays made that impossible unless she could actually convince the
Blue Jay
to stay somewhere until she arrived – and Rice had his opinion on that clear to Okono.

“
After Corinthian made it clear they intended to strip Montgomery’s magic, I’m not surprised,” she continued.” But, why Amber?”

Amber was a problem child for the
Protectorate. While Alaura found herself somewhat in sympathy with the basic
philosophy
behind the planet, the fact that the world’s lax law enforcement tended to be abused by scum to do things like arm pirate ships gave her a headache.

“They were probably looking for a cargo,
Ma’am,” Harmon told her. “From Amber, they’ll likely sweep out to the Fringe – carry cargos between worlds that see maybe three ships a year, and possibly three Protectorate ship a
decade
. They could make a lot of money, and avoid any attention from us.”

“Which will
make tracking them almost impossible,” Alaura said aloud. She cursed, glancing around the tiny office. Her officer gave her command of any resource the Protectorate had to offer, and she had runic tools most didn’t even think were
possible
, but even she couldn’t track a starship once it had jumped. There were rumors that some people had managed it, but if they had, the Navy had never worked out how.

“Someone on Amber has to
know where they’re going, though, don’t they Ma’am?” Harmon asked.

“It’s not a certainty,” the Hand told him.
“If they’re smart, they wouldn’t have trusted anyone on Heinlein Station as far as they could throw them.” She shrugged. “With that said, it’s our only lead.”

“Send a message back through the
Runic Transceiver Array,” she ordered. “Our agents on Amber are to try and track down who Captain Rice dealt with. Once you’ve transmitted that, get us underway. Time is of the essence if we are to find young Montgomery.”

“Understood
Ma’am,” Harmon replied crisply. “I’ll inform the Captain, we should be able to break orbit within the hour.”