Starship's Mage: Episode 4 (7 page)

The
Blue Jay
jumped into Excelsior in the middle of the night Olympus Mons Time. Kelly had joined Damien in the Simulacrum Chamber and was looking around wide-eyed as they emerged into the new system. The screens all around them began to fill with images as the
Jay
’s many cameras began to record the universe around them again.

“Well, we’re here,” Damien said quietly to the screen showing David on the bridge.
The Captain nodded, checking something on his own screen.

“We’re about eight hours from the Trojan cluster we’re supposed to meet this
Captain Seule at,” he told the Mage. “Keep an eye on things, this system has a
lot
of rocks floating about.”

The entire system looked odd, Damien
realized. There were only four planets, for one thing – one tiny ball of fire-kissed rock tucked in right next to the star, one ball of ice light-hours out, and two mid-sized gas giants. Where orbital dynamics said there should be two more planets between the fire-seared inner planet and the innermost gas giant was two massive asteroid belts.

Both belts were clumped up, with most of the rocks
concentrated in a single massive cluster for each. A navigation beacon announced the presence of a number of mining platforms on the outer of the two clusters.

“This place is weird,” Kelly said next to Damien.
“Those asteroid belts make no sense.”

“That’s about what the first explorers who surveyed the system said,” David told the two youths.
“A lot about the system didn’t add up, so they pulled some of the historical astronomical data for this region of space. Some oddities showed up in the late twentieth century data – which just gave them more questions!”

“Doesn’t look like this system has a lot of answers,” Damien said quietly,
eyeing the local radar data also being fed to his screens. With the amount of debris in this system, it would be up to him and the
Jay’s
laser turrets to keep the ship safe.

“It doesn’t,” the
Captain admitted. “But the Corporation that had purchased the mining rights wanted to make sure that if something had happened to create the strange asteroid belts, it wouldn’t repeat. They funded an expedition to go into deep space and capture the old light from Excelsior.”

“They went almost two light centuries outside explored space,” he continued.
“Dodging systems to avoid tempting fate, they went hunting what they figured was the death of a world.”

“
Jumping from deep space to deep space, looking backwards the whole time?” Kelly said softly. “Sounds romantic.”

Damien was reminded that his girlfriend, as an
engineer, had a strange definition of romantic.

“What they found wasn’t,” David said grimly.
“It turns out that about six hundred years ago, a small black hole – a couple of earth masses, nothing more – ripped through the Excelsior system and tore the two middle world to shreds.

“They also discovered what no one had guessed before that – that Excelsior had been inhabited before that.
A technic civilization, the only one we know of, had died when that black hole hit. They’d been a couple of centuries ahead of us – early twenty-second century in our nineteenth century – but without magic, they were unable to escape the death of their worlds.”

That got Damien’s attention.
Humanity had discovered a total of five non-human intelligences. So far as the xeno-anthropologists could determine, all had lacked critical biological or mineral resources to achieve anything resembling civilization – all of them were still at the hunter-gatherer level. Now that David mentioned it, though, he vaguely remembered something about a dead technological alien race.

“A couple of space stations
survived. Once we knew to look for them, we found them. One of the biggest had survived for almost a hundred years after the black hole before they finally died out from the inability to replace critical tech,” David finished. “No one has any idea what pathogens may be aboard, so even the archeologists are only allowed to study it with robots, and only for limited amounts of time. It’s under a quarantine order.”

Damien glanced at their course, towards the trailing Trojan cluster of the outer gas giant.
He noticed, now, that there was a second navigation beacon there. One warning everyone away.

“That’s where we’re going,” he said quietly.

“Yeah,” David confirmed. “To the Graveyard of the only other technic civilization we’ve known.” He shrugged. “I’m prepared to bet any ghosts will like me though.”

“Why’s that?” Kelly asked, sneaking her hand into Damien’s.
He squeezed, hopefully reassuringly, as he needed the reassurance himself.

“When they
identified what had happened, the ship I was serving on in the Navy was part of a task group testing a theoretical way to break up a singularity threatening one of our systems. We took it as a sign of a good test subject.”

He smiled sadly.

“We know almost nothing about Excelsior’s inhabitants even now – but in a strange way, we avenged them.”

David was alone on the bridge for most of the approach to the trailing Trojan cluster of the third of Excelsior’s remaining planets. The cluster of asteroids followed the massive gas giant in the lull of gravity in the orbit, what was often called the Lagrange points after the eighteenth century mathematician who’d first theorized them.

After the first hour or so proved non-eventful, with the handful of rocks that had come their way readily handled by the
Blue Jay
’s defensive turrets, he’d even sent Damien to bed – though, from the way Kelly had dragged him from the Simulacrum Chamber, he wasn’t sure the young Mage had got much
sleep
.

As they crept closer to the cluster of asteroids, thankfully, the
ship slowly came awake around him and Jenna joined him on the bridge. For all of his brave words to Damien, David found the thought of entering the Graveyard discomfiting.

Part of the reason that the
Protectorate had managed to swing putting the Graveyard off-limits was that the final desperate struggle to survive of Excelsior’s inhabitants had stripped the Trojan cluster of any useable resources – most specifically, potable water. Most of the rocks that followed Excelsior Three in its orbit were just plain rock now, where a cluster like this should have had ice asteroids and a few captured comets.

“There it is,” Jenna said quietly as they finished slowing to a crawl and began drifting into the cluster.
In the center of the Lagrange point was the immense structure of the space station that had been the last, doomed, hope of an entire species.

It was possible
, sort of, to identify the original mining platform at its center. Welded onto that pitted and ancient heart, though, were the remnants of transport ships, cargo containers, and even entire hollowed-out asteroids. It was dead and silent now, a monument in black iron and meteor pitted rock.

“There is a
lot
of debris out there,” Jenna said quietly. “It’s full of iron and heavy metals – pretty much every sensor we have is picking up nothing but static.”

“No one else can find
us
either,” David reminded her. “That’s why we’re here.”

“So, any idea where the
Luciole
is?”

“Keiko gave us a specific set of
co-ordinates,” he said, typing them into the computer. A flashing sphere appeared on the main screen. “We’re to decelerate to zero relative to the Graveyard Station there, and wait for Seule to contact us.”

“I keep expecting ghosts to come jumping out of the shadows,” Jenna complained.
“Why the hell are we meeting here?”

“Because nobody comes here except
archeologists, and the latest expedition isn’t due in for eleven months,” David replied. “It’s a perfect place to hand over enough guns to conquer a world.”

Jenna shivered visibly.
“Yeah, because
that
thought makes me more comfortable.”

The
Captain shrugged as the
Blue Jay
entered the agreed co-ordinates, and the maneuvering thrusters brought the massive freighter to a halt relative to the ancient alien station. There wasn’t much he could say to Jenna beyond that he trusted Keiko, and he wasn’t even certain that was wise.

“Do you
see anything?” he finally asked.

“Nothing,” his
XO replied. “Damien?”

The Mage on the video link shrugged.
“I can’t see anything the ship can’t,” he said dryly. “So right now, I’m feeling a bit blind.”

The
Blue Jay
’s bridge was silent, the two officers and the linked-in Mage all straining their own senses and the ship’s, trying to see
something
- anything.

“There!
What’s that?” Damien asked.

David followed the icon that the Mage threw up on the screen.
It was blinking on one of the larger asteroids, a ten kilometer long hunk of iron and rock that a long-ago mining ship had cut a massive gorge into to extract whatever the aliens had needed to sustain a few more years of life.

Inside that
massive gorge, a light was flickering. After a few moments, the light rose out of the gorge and revealed itself to be the fusion maneuvering thrusters of a starship. The ship was smaller than the
Blue Jay
, only three hundred meters and narrow for most of its length with a sizeable ‘mushroom head’ radiation cap shield at the front and hefty engines at the back.

“That’s a
Navy High Priority Courier,” David recognized it aloud. The Navy had built them fifty or so years ago to carry small cargos at extremely high speed speeds – the ships had been fitted with antimatter engines and carried a warship’s complement of Mages.

“Those were all
decommissioned, weren’t they?” Jenna asked, and David nodded.

“Mars decided that
mounting antimatter engines on full-size freighters was more valuable in an emergency, and that they could use normal freighters the rest of the time,” he confirmed. “The last one was supposed to be scrapped five years ago, but it looks like our Captain Seule saved one from the breakers.”

Antimatter
was expensive, and most civilian ships didn’t use it. Somehow, though, David was sure that the
Luciole
still used antimatter in her main engines – she was, after all, a blockade runner. Corporations would hire and use private warships, but they rarely mounted military grade engines on them.

Once the spindly blockade runner was clear of the gorge and directed towards the
Blue Jay
, the computer informed them of an incoming transmission. With a swipe across the command pad on his chair, David threw the image up on his main screen.

“You’re our
drop-off, I presume?” the dark-haired man in the dark red shirt on the screen asked him. “I can’t see someone randomly stopping in exactly the right spot, not in this place,” he gestured at the space around them.”

“If you are
Captain Nathan Seule, then yes, I’m your delivery,” Rice confirmed. “Captain David Rice, of the
Blue Jay
.”

“I am
indeed Captain Seule of the
Luciole
, Captain Rice. I see that Miss Alabaster delivered as always. How are you set up for cargo transfer?”

“I have four heavy lift shuttles,” David told him.
“I think we should be able to transfer the cargo quickly, depending on your own resources.”

“Good to hear,
Captain,” Seule told him. “We only have two shuttles ourselves, so it would take a while if we’re left to just my resources. Shall we be about it? I aim to not be around if the miners in-system start asking questions, if you catch my drift.”

“I’ll have my
pilots start loading containers,” David said. “Have your pilots contact my First Pilot Kelzin as they approach, he’ll guide them in.”

The entire process of deep space cargo transfer, without the many and varied tools and
resources of a space dock, was a new one for Damien. The
Luciole
matched vectors with the
Blue Jay
at about twenty kilometers distance, just far enough that both ships would be safe to light off their main drives, and then dispatched their two shuttles over.

By the time the
Luciole
shuttles arrived, Kelzin and his three pilots had their shuttles out as well. Once the transport shuttles, each minuscule compared to their parent vessels but still forty meters long apiece, were in place, Jenna released the catches holding six of the cargo containers of weapons to the
Blue Jay
’s cargo pylons.

The
ten thousand cubic meter containers, each rated for ten thousand tons of cargo, drifted away from the
Jay
. The shuttles, already positioned above each container, swept in and latched onto the containers. Once the connection was secure, they flew over to the
Luciole
, where they repeated the process in reverse.

Both
Kelzin’s and Seule’s pilots clearly knew the drill. The first transfer of six containers went without a hitch, and Damien started to relax – at least with regards to the transfer. There was a lot of small debris drifting through the Lagrange point, and every minute or two, the laser turrets of one vessel or the other would take out a good-sized rock.

“Keep a
n eye over there,” Damien told the pilots, flicking a warning icon over to all eight ships. “We’ve got a good sized chunk of rock heading our way. The lasers won’t be able to blast it, but its big enough and moving slow enough that you should be able to maneuver around it.”

As the shuttles continued with the second load of cargo, Damien kept an eye on the rock.
It was a mid-sized asteroid, roughly a kilometer long and three hundred meters across at its widest point. With the futz of minor debris in the area, he couldn’t tell more about it than that it was primarily iron, and that it was going to pass pretty much exactly between the two freighters.

He
figured he could break it up if it turned out to be a threat to either ship, but he also had no reason to expose the presence of
Blue Jay
’s amplifier to the crew of the
Luciole
. They knew nothing about the smugglers they were supplying cargo to, after all.

The second transfer of cargo went as smoothly as the
first, and the third as well. As the six shuttles headed back towards the
Jay
, Captain Seule opened communications again.

“I think my shuttles can grab the last two containers,” he told
Captain Rice. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with a competent crew, Captain Rice. If we’re ever together in more civilized space, look me up. I think I owe you dinner.”

“I’ll take you up on that,” Rice replied.
“For now, I think we’d both like to be a
long
way away from this place. It gives me the creeps.”

“I hear you,”
Seule replied with a laugh.

The last two containers were loaded onto the shuttles.
They then paused, orbiting the
Blue Jay
for a few moments as the asteroid Damien had picked up on passed through the space between the two ships.

“That’s strange,” the senior
Luciole
pilot, a gruff-faced man named, of all things, Vera, said over the channel. “I’m getting an energy reflection off that rock.”

Damien took a look at the rock on the scanners and blinked.
It wasn’t a reflection – all along the dead rock, fusion thrusters were blasting to life.

Without thinking, he grabbed the
Jay
’s Simulacrum and merged with the ship. The power of the amplifier, the runes woven throughout the ship, sank into him and he breathed out, focusing his gaze on the asteroid as the ships that had been hiding on the asteroid.

He didn’t
recognize them – they were small and narrow, almost missile shaped but significantly larger. Before he could say more, though, all fifteen of them fired off main engines – and blasted for the
Blue Jay
at eight gravities.

“
Boarding torpedoes
!” David shouted, and Damien finally recognized the threat.

He had
only seconds before the tiny attack ships reached the
Blue Jay
, but he was linked into the amplifier. Time slowed as he shifted his consciousness into the runes, slowing reality
just
enough to let him channel his magic.

A whip of
fire, the deadly close-range attack spell he’d been practicing from the Enforcer manuals, appeared in deep space and slashed across the ships. His magic and the deadly fire danced from torpedo to torpedo, shattering hulls, detonating engines – and ending lives. He didn’t know how many men each of the fifteen boarding torpedoes carried. Even one might carry enough men to take the
Blue Jay
if he let them board.

The last boarding torpedo died
a hundred and twenty meters from the hull of the
Jay
, as Damien unleashed the fury of a fully functioning amplifier on his ship’s enemies.