Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) (11 page)

“Only the standard ones,” Rice told him. Basically, that if he wanted to off-load for more than one shift in a row, he’d be responsible for the hotel bills for the
Blue Jay
’s crew. The four ribs that rotated around the starship’s keel to provide gravity couldn’t do so while offloading, and policy in the merchant fleet was to avoid having people sleeping in zero-gravity.

“Of course,” Bistro replied. “I will be shipping up to Prime to audit some of the review of the cargo myself. Would you and your ship’s officers be available to meet with myself for a dinner in, say, four days?”

Rice was taken aback. Normally, he was wined and dined by the people looking to hire him, not the people he’d just completed contracts for.

“We can arrange a direct transfer for the payment at the dinner, once we’ve reviewed the cargo, and I may have another commission for you,” Bistro continued when Rice didn’t immediately respond.

“My officers and I will be pleased to meet you for dinner, Mr. Bistro,” Rice agreed. “Though I will note that the
Blue Jay
will be under repair for some days after the cargo is off-loaded.”

Bistro made a throw away gesture with one hand, blinking rapidly again. “This is interstellar shipping, my dear Captain. You should know better than I that nothing moves quickly between the stars!”

#

The description of the central portion of Corinthian Prime’s segmented cylinder as ‘an artificial eco-system’ failed to prepare Damien for the reality of it. He stepped out of the elevator from the motionless docks onto the outer rim of the station and into a glass-roofed atrium in the middle of a forest.

He blinked at the sight, taking a moment to put it into scale. The atrium was, obviously, set into one end of the cylinder, so it was only surrounded by trees on the interior side. The trees themselves were trimmed and maintained, planted in the neat lines typical of a ground-side park… but were very real trees.

A man standing near the elevator cleared his throat, bringing Damien’s gaze back down to the room he was standing in. The other five occupants of his elevator had already cleared through the security checkpoint leading into the main segment, and the security guard was gesturing Damien forward.

“Welcome to the Spindle, Mage Montgomery,” the guard said after reviewing Damien’s ID for a moment. “First time on Corinthian Prime, I see. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“I’m looking for the Jump Mage Guild,” Damien told him. The
Blue Jay
had been blacklisted in Sherwood, so they had been unable to register his contract with the ship in his home system. Unlike most things, however, Jump Mage contracts could be registered anywhere. The details would be included in the encrypted download the
Blue Jay
would take with it to any system they jumped to.

“Ah, yes,” the guard nodded calmly. “The main path from the atrium meets up with LengthWay Seven about forty meters Yard-wards. From Seven, you’ll want CircleWay Twenty-Six.” The man looked at Damien’s blank expression and chuckled. “It does make more sense if you think about it,” he insisted, “but since the Guild is halfway across the Spindle from here, I suggest you grab a cab when you reach the LengthWay. They’re pretty common, and decently priced.”

“Thank you,” Damien told him, agreeing with the assessment of the directions after a second. LengthWays ran the length of the center cylinder – apparently called the Spindle by the locals – and CircleWays ran around the exterior of the cylinder.

If they followed the Protectorate’s standard one hundred meter blocks, CircleWay Twenty-Six was over two and a half kilometers away, which was a bit further than he’d been expecting to walk.

Stepping out of the atrium into the open air of the Spindle, however, he found himself considering it. To both sides of him, the artificial world rose gently up in the slope of the cylinder. From where he stood in the trees outside the atrium, he could see the entirety of the segment – there was no horizon, only a slight misting of water vapor in the air as he looked across or down the cylinder and the brilliant light of the central spire made it hard to see directly across the cylinder.

Five kilometers long and fourteen hundred meters in diameter, the Spindle represented more square footage than many cities in the MidWorlds, and much of it was covered in greenery. A neat grid of roads split the surface into blocks, and rarely did he see more than two blocks together of houses or industry. It was so unlike the compressed corridors in the many rotating rings of Sherwood Prime that it took Damien a long minute of standing in the shade of the trees to wrap his head around the sight.

Damien started walking down the LengthWay, looking for signs to tell him the numbers of the CircleWays that crossed it. It took him a few minutes to leave the cultured forest the Corinthians’ had chosen to wrap around the entrances from the civilian docks, and that was when he saw the building.

The trees had blocked his view of it before, but now he wasn’t sure how he’d missed it. The structure rose in blocks of black iron, softened somewhat by trees growing in terraces atop the blocks, but it remained a sprawling fortress in the middle of one of the more spectacular stations built by man.

A tiny whirring noise caused Damien to turn and spot the promised cab – a low slung vehicle with a cloth cover and two seats behind its driver.

“Can I give you a lift?” the driver asked.

“Sure,” he answered. “I need to get to the Jump Mage’s Guild.”

The driver’s gaze flicked down at Damien’s collar, then he spat over the side. “Sure,” he said flatly. “We don’t call it the Guild though, here.”

“What?” Damien asked quickly.

The driver pointed at the fortress Damien had been staring at.

“Mages don’t trust us lot not to burn their homes down around their ears,” he said bluntly. “They built that thing when the Spindle was finished. It’s the home of your Guild, but we just call it the Citadel.”

#

Security at the Guildhouse Citadel seemed lower than the cab-driver’s words and its fortress-like structure suggested. The gates in the artfully concealed fence that surrounded the fortified compound were wide open, and foot traffic passed in and out in a slow but steady stream.

Passing through those gates, though, Damien spotted the two men just inside who were all the security the Guildhouse needed. Both were clad in dark robes over matte-black combat armor, and the gold medallions at their throats bore a single sword, compared to Damien’s three stars and a quill. His three stars marked him as a Jump Mage. Their sword marked them as Enforcers, the police officers of the Guilds, and the only fully combat-trained Mages outside of the Mage-King’s military.

Those two men could stand off an entire battalion of conventionally armed troops, at least for long enough to close the gates. For all that efforts had clearly been made to soften the appearance of the Citadel with the trees and gardens, they were still being very careful.

The thought was sobering as Damien entered the main hall, looking for the sign to direct him to the Ship Mage’s Guild. Corinthian was a major MidWorld, hardly one of the UnArcana worlds where Mages weren’t allowed to set foot on the surface, but the Guilds here clearly felt threatened.

With a shake of his head, he stepped into the Ship Mage’s Guild office, relaxing slightly in the surroundings of the dozens of plants they’d used to soften the stark angles of the building’s walls. A single desk stood in the middle of the room, with no one waiting to see the older woman sitting at the desk.

“Can I help you?” she greeted him bluntly.

“I’m here to register a Jump Contract,” he replied, pulling the chip containing the formal contract between himself and Captain David Rice from the pocket of his blazer.

She grunted. “Give it here.” He passed her the chip, and she slotted it into the reader on her desk. A holographic screen shimmered into existence at a wave of her hand, displaying the information.

“This says you signed the contract in the Sherwood system almost two weeks ago,” she observed. “You should have registered it there.”

“It slipped our minds while we were preparing for departure,” he told her. In truth, the Mage-Governor of Sherwood had unofficially blacklisted the
Blue Jay
from taking on a Jump Mage, so he and David hadn’t believed that they would have been permitted to register the contract in Sherwood.

The woman at the desk grunted, clearly unconvinced, and hit a few more keys on her projected keyboard.

“Well, it’s registered now. Charge to your ship?”

“Yes,” Damien confirmed, then reeled off the local account number for the
Blue Jay.

“Done,” she said, ejecting the chip and passing it back to him. “Anything else?”

Damien shook his head, but paused as he turned to leave.

“Do you know why the Guildhouse here is so fortified?” he asked. Anything further from the airy, sprawling complex of bungalows in Sherwood City that served his home was hard to imagine.

She sighed. “Corinthian Prime was built fifty years ago,” she told him. “Just before that, there was a bombing in Corinth City that killed two Mages and twelve bystanders. Two more Mages were killed in the ensuing riots, and both the Guilds and the Governor agreed that moving the Guilds somewhere more securable and out-of-the-way was a good idea.”

The woman, a senior ranked but still mundane employee of the Guild, shrugged. “It’s only been ten years or so since it became illegal to bar Mages from a restaurant or store,” she told him, some of her earlier gruffness lost in the sad tone of her voice. “If the government didn’t think flouting the Charter laws around segregation was going to impede their effort to get the first MidWorlds Fleet Yard, I think you’d still see every second or third restaurant with a ‘No Dogs or Mages’ sign.”

Damien winced.

“That’s… different than I’m used to,” he admitted. “Thanks for explaining.”

She shook her head.

“Wish I didn’t have to,” she told him. “Step carefully, Mage Montgomery. There’s a reason your kind built themselves a fortress here.”

#

The first day on station was a blur for David. Bistro had taken them up on the offer for twenty-four hour offloading, so he’d had to arrange hotels for everyone. He’d then touched base with his insurance, a surprisingly non-confrontational appointment where they’d taken his telemetry data and confirmed within twenty minutes that they would cover the repairs under the piracy clause.

He settled into his hotel room, an expensive one in the docking area with magical artificial gravity that allowed him a view of the
Blue Jay
from the window. David watched the ships and robot arms swarm over his ship, detaching the cargo containers and slowly transporting them to the station. From there automated transfer tubes whisked them away to either destinations on the stations, or transfer shuttles to carry them to the sky-tether that would deliver them to the surface.

Each container removed from the
Blue Jay
was a check mark in his mental book, and in many cases, a literal entry in the ship’s ledgers. Unless he’d missed his math, even with the repairs from the pirate attack, the revenue from this trip would allow him to make the last payment on the ten billion dollar note he’d taken out to finance acquiring the
Blue Jay
a decade ago. It would take time for the funds, encoded in a deep bank cipher, to make their way back to the Martian banking syndicate that had financed him, but under Protectorate Law, once he sent the money, the
Blue Jay
was completely his.

Now if only people would stop
shooting
at his ship.

#

“Is there any part of the matrix we can let another Mage inspect?” Kellers asked as Damien crawled under the fresh welding in Rib Four.

Damien’s ‘holiday’ had come to an abrupt end as soon as the two days of offloading were complete and the repair crews started swarming over the ship.

“In theory, anywhere not attached to the seven matrixes I highlighted on the chart,” Damien told him. Those seven were the matrixes that prevented a jump matrix from acting as a general amplifier for all spells instead of just the jump spell.

“In practice,” the young Ship’s Mage shrugged, eyeing the glitter of energy along the runes and checking for errors, “I would want to review all of the runes around the work
anyway
, so not wanting someone to see what I did to the matrix just adds to the urgency.”

He paused, noting a set of runes where the energy didn’t flow quite right. “Pass me the inlayer?” he asked the engineer.

With a bright white grin, the engineer passed the tool over.

“I’ll sell it to my guys as professional skepticism, I think,” Kellers told him. “I don’t think we want to explain to everyone on the ship just what you did.”

Damien carefully drew the engraving tool along the line his gift showed him. A tiny laser burned a trench into the steel, and a soldering iron attachment filled the trench with silver inlay. He pulled the inlayer away and looked at the runes again. He wasn’t actually sure the runes had been damaged when the repair crew had replaced the conduits, or when they’d originally burnt out from the corona of the pirate laser that had disabled the engines. Either way, it would work now.