Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) (19 page)

“Only seven?” she asked. She would expect somewhere like Corinthian to have more prisoners in the station-side high security cells than that.

“Just the Mage they had locked up in there and half a dozen mob hit men,” the Dockmaster confirmed. “No one’s been reported dead yet, but they’re only getting back into the Cells now.”

“Have any ships left since then?” she demanded.

“The
Blue Jay
launched without permission,” the Dockmaster replied, sounding affronted. “I was
told
she was locked down – why the hell didn’t they at least unfuel her?!”

Alaura held the man’s gaze coldly. The Dockmaster of a station the size of Corinthian Prime had to know the answer to that question –
she
knew that un-fuelling a freighter of the
Blue Jay
’s size was an exercise of days, so he should. That answered one question, at least. Damien Montgomery was gone, and he’d taken his ship with him.

“Any other ships?”

“No,” the Dockmaster pulled up a list on his computer. “There’s a liner scheduled to launch in an hour, we’re trying to get permission to seal the docks.”

“Why haven’t you?” she demanded, shocked.

“The docks are the lifeblood of this system!” the Dockmaster insisted proudly, his back straight as he looked her in the eyes. He then deflated slightly. “So, only the Governor can order them sealed, and he’s tied up in meetings.”

“Right,” Alaura said slowly. She tapped the golden hand on its chain on the man’s desk. “Seal the docks,” she told him. “My authority.”

The Dockmaster stared at the golden icon on his desk, the symbol of authority of a woman authorized to do anything short of shoot him at a whim. Shooting him, Alaura reflected, would require her to actually hold a trial, however short, and record the evidence in favor.

After a moment’s hesitation, however, the man quickly got to work, typing messages into his computer and talking on the com.

Turning away from him now that he was working, Alaura’s earpiece buzzed.

“Stealey,” she answered quickly. “What is it, Harmon?”

“You wanted to know what was going on,” the Mage-Lieutenant told her. “Well, we just noticed something you may want to intervene in.”

“Which is?” she asked. Normally she had more patience with Harmon – he was extremely competent, just a little fussy.

“There are two Navy destroyers in the system other than the
Tides
,” he told her. “They both just vectored after the
Blue Jay
– a request coming from the Corinthian Guildmaster. Given that there’s an escaped Class One Fugitive aboard…”

“They will shoot to kill,” Alaura finished for him, grimly. “Thank you, Harmon. I’ll deal with it. Prep the
Tides
’ Marine detachment for crowd control and search work,” she added. “It looks like we have some scum we’ll need to find on station.”

Turning back to the Dockmaster, she smiled grimly at him.

“Where would I find the Navy System Command Center?”

#

There were few things in the universe David hated more than full emergency acceleration. He was strapped into his Captain’s chair, with his crew around him, but he couldn’t focus on much more than the fact that he felt like he weighed over two hundred kilos.

The computer was programmed for twenty-four hours of this, which was going to leave the entire crew
very
cranky –but alive and free. Alive was important – and free was even more so.

“Hey boss,” Jenna announced, her voice showing almost none of the strain of the acceleration. “Got a com channel inbound for you – looks like its Carmichael.”

“Put him on,” David told her; and a moment later the image of the red-haired information broker appeared on the screen of his captain’s chair.

“Captain Rice,” Carmichael greeted him. “You look uncomfortable.”

“Emergency acceleration is quite bracing,” David replied. “You should try it sometime.”

“I
like
my home system,” the businessman replied. “I have no intention of pissing off enough people to need to run. I’m surprised you ran as fast as you did though,” he admitted. “Carney and I were planning on the three hours it was going to take to get the Governor to authorize the lockdown – and the fact that the liner in dock has a notoriously stubborn captain.

“You were right, though,” Carmichael continued. “The dock just went into lockdown, which means Carney’s men are stuck on station, instead of being snuck off until the heat dies down. I can’t help but suspect you knew something was coming.”

“Everything I told you was true,” David replied.

“Indeed, you are a man of your word,” the broker agreed. “Also, a man with more morals than most in our business, so I was surprised when you agreed to free six of the worst men in those cells – I doubt you didn’t look up their resumes.

“So tell me, Captain, what speeds up the lockdown by three hours and makes you unafraid of those released thugs?”

David considered it for a moment, eyeing the plot of the system showing the destroyer he was quite certain had delivered the Hand to the station, and shrugged.

“The Guildmaster was planning to burn Damien out,” he said simply, “and summoned the only Judge who could. The same kind of Judge who could order a lockdown without the Governor.

“You have a Hand on your station, Mr. Carmichael,” David continued, “and if you will not run, I would strongly suggest that you hide.”

Carmichael’s face was frozen, and he was silent for a good minute.

“You played us all,” he finally said, and his voice was admiring. “I appreciate the warning, Captain Rice, and I do believe I will follow your advice.” He paused. “I wouldn’t return to this system if I were you.”

“I know,” Rice agreed.

“That said, if you find yourself in Legatus, look up a man named Bryan Ricket,” the broker continued. “Tell him I sent you. He’ll find you work that stays under the radar.”

“Thank you,” David answered. “I might just do that. Keep your head down.”

“And the same to you, Captain Rice.”

The channel broke off, and David looked up at a choking sound from Jenna. Her face had gone pale, and she met his gaze wordlessly, throwing up a wider chart of the system.

On it, glowing in a bright green that mocked the reality of the situation, was the pair of Martian Navy destroyers he’d noted when they arrived in the system. They would intercept the
Blue Jay
well short of jump range. Not that it mattered. With what they’d done, the Navy would settle for putting a missile into them.

#

Two uniformed Marines guarded the entrance to System Command. Armed with black battle rifles and clad in digitally camouflaged armor, they were a barrier to any random and most non-random intruders - a barrier that melted away instantly at the sight of the golden hand hung around Alaura’s neck.

Inside, glowing wall-screens surrounded a massive holographic display that displayed the location of every ship, structure, and rock ever identified in the Corinthian system. Arrows showing vectors and paths criss-crossed the display, but three were glowing brightly as the system focused on the
Blue Jay
and the two destroyers chasing it down.

“Understand me Mage-Captain,” a voice was saying into a communicator, “Damien Montgomery is a Class One Fugitive and the crew aboard the
Blue Jay
accomplices in his escape. We have no idea what that ship might be capable of – you are to destroy it from maximum range.”

“Belay that,” Alaura interrupted, stepping up next to the Commodore, who was clearly taking his orders from the Guildmaster standing on the other side of him.

“Break off the pursuit and return to the station,” she ordered.

“Who the hell are you?” the Commodore demanded, turning to face her. “No one has the authority…”

He trailed off as he saw the chain around her neck.

“
I
have the authority,” she said bluntly, looking past the Commodore to the Guildmaster.

“Look at it this way, gentlemen,” she continued calmly. “If you’re right, it won’t matter – the
Blue Jay
will tear itself apart when Montgomery jumps her.

“And if you’re
wrong
, Montgomery has achieved something unique. I
need
to know which it is, do you understand me?”

Both men glanced away, cowed by the golden hand she wore, and she leaned into the communicator.

“Confirm receipt of your orders, Captains,” she said calmly. “You will return to the station and prepare your Marines to assist Corinthian System Security in tracking down the escaped criminals. Understood?”

#

Damien looked at the two deadly pyramids showing up on the scanners, feeling them through the amplifier and studying them.

He was reasonably sure he had the same capabilities as either ship in terms of magic, though the Ship Mage’s aboard the warships would be better trained. The catch was that he – and the destroyers’ Mages – could only reach out about six light seconds with their magic. He wasn’t sure of the exact capabilities of the missiles the destroyers carried, but his understanding was that their range was on the order of ten times that.

Destroyers had been
built
to take down ships like the
Blue Jay
– stolen amplifiers and obsolete weapons, retrofitted onto freighters that couldn’t outrun the warships, or outrange their devastating antimatter missiles.

Anything they could do with magic, he could do. But they had better technology, and the anti-missile turrets mounted on the freighter would never suffice against
real
missiles.

But he could do anything they could do with magic. Realization sunk in, as he looked back at Corinthian Prime, and the destroyer that had erupted right next to the station.

He reached out through the amplifier and the
Blue Jay
’s sensors, studying the gravity and space around the freighter. His training said it wasn’t flat enough to jump, but now he studied it with open eyes. It… might be possible.

“Captain,” he said into the communicator. “How far are you willing to trust me?”

Rice gave a surprised bark of laughter.

“Far enough to save us from two destroyers?”

“Cut the acceleration,” Damien told him. “Cut the acceleration – and prepare to jump!”

#

The only sound in the Command Center was the soft whir of computers and the slight, almost unnoticeable buzz of the holographic display.

“Any debris?” Alaura finally asked.

“No ma’am,” a Navy sensor tech replied, refusing to look at her as he answered her question.

She glanced over at the Commodore and the Guildmaster, both staring at the simple blue icon of a jump flare exit on the display.

“You were wrong,” she said simply. “It appears that Montgomery has given the
Blue Jay
a fully functional amplifier.

“Now… let’s see what he does with it.”

###

For a heavy cargo hauler, the shuttle was surprisingly maneuverable in deep space. Basically a metal box with a rocket pod attached to each side by a gimbal mount, it was controlled by a pair of joysticks, one on either side of the pilot’s seat.

Damien Montgomery, Ship’s Mage of the interstellar freighter
Blue Jay
, gently pushed the left stick forward while pulling the right stick back, keeping both in the center of their side range. His thumb pulled the toggles on the side of each joystick down, reducing the amount of hydrogen being fed to the fusion rockets to slow the force of the spin to something he and the older man in the copilot’s seat could take.

“Not bad,” Narveer Singh told the youth, reaching back to scratch under the white turban he wore even while dressed in a flight suit. “I guess you really did qualify on these birds.”

“I qualified on the
Hawk
type,” Damien admitted. “They’re a few decades older than these, but the controls are much the same.”

“What else can you fly?” the
Blue Jay
’s senior pilot asked.

The slim young man paused, checking the screens to be sure that the shuttle was clear of its mother freighter. Alone in deep space, they were light years from anything
else
that could pose an obstacle.

“I qualified on light shuttles, heavy cargo shuttles, heavy personnel shuttles and sub-light spacecraft up to fifteen megatons,” he reeled off quickly. “I’m also qualified for light aircraft, but anything beyond that wasn’t necessary.”

Narveer blinked.

“You, you are a pilot!” he exclaimed. “My three boys aren’t qualified for all of the shuttles, and even I couldn’t fly the
Jay
herself.”

“I qualified on a
Dealer
type,” Damien told him. “She was basically a
Venice
like the
Jay
without the jump matrix.”

The First Pilot shook his head, checking the screens in front of him. “Why?”

“Every Jump Mage trained in Sherwood had to,” Damien explained. “The theory was that, since you couldn’t make it home at all without the Jump Mage, they’d train us so that we could get the ship home on our own.”

Singh plugged a sequence of way points into the computer as he shook his head in response. “Follow those through,” he instructed. “Gives us a bit of time away from the ship, but then we’ll have to head back. You’ll need to jump us again soon.”

Damien nodded silently. He was the only Mage amongst the
Blue Jay
’s eighty crew members, which meant he was the only one able to cast the spell that would catapult the three million ton ship across the stars.

“Any idea where we’re jumping?” he asked Narveer as he carefully curved the shuttle over their ship. The
Blue Jay
was built to be functional, not pretty, and looked as much as an egg-beater as anything else. Four massive curved ribs extended from her central keel, rotating to provide gravity for the crew to eat and sleep.

“The Captain, he’ll have a plan,” Singh stated confidently. “He got you out, didn’t he?”

Two days earlier, the crew had pulled Damien from a jail cell, saving him from being stripped of his magic. Now, the Protectorate was hunting them, which was why they were in deep space, waiting for the Captain to pick somewhere for them to hide.

#

David Rice, Captain of the interstellar freighter
Blue Jay
, watched his First Officer walk across the ship’s bridge towards him with far more attention to the pot of coffee she carried than the heavily built blond woman herself.

“You, XO, are a life saver,” he told her as she poured him a cup.

Jenna glanced around the empty bridge. “From your many and varied enemies on a ship in deep space in the middle of the night?”

Rice shrugged his broad shoulders and grinned.

“At this point, ‘many and varied’ is a good description of our enemies,” he reminded her. They’d made enemies of one of the Protectorate’s largest criminal syndicates years ago, and now the government of the Protectorate wanted them arrested – something to do with stealing a Mage prisoner out from under the nose of a Hand of the Mage-King of Mars.

“How are the flying lessons going?” he asked her after a moment’s silence, nodding towards the main screen, which had one of the
Jay
’s many exterior cameras zoomed in on the shuttle Damien was flying. “I thought you were in Flight Control?”

“After about five minutes, I looked up Damien’s flight qualifications and realized I was redundant,” Jenna told him dryly. “Why didn’t you mention that to Singh?”

“I honestly assumed that Singh knew Jump Mage flight qualifications from the Navy,” David admitted. “Once I realized he didn’t,” the Captain shrugged. “I figured letting him run with it might loosen some of the tension around here.”

“Telling the crew where we’re going might do that too,” Jenna told him. The Captain shrugged, and with a flick of his fingers across the screen on his chair, threw the contents onto the main screen to replace the view of Damien’s shuttle.

A three dimensional model of the star systems that made up the Protectorate of the Mage-King of Mars filled the screen. One hundred and eleven stars were lit up in several colors, forming a rough sphere centered on the single gold star of Sol. Scattered through the colored stars were almost four times as many gray stars, indicating systems no one had colonized.

Twelve stars were silver, showing the oldest, most industrialized and most populated systems known as the Core.

Thirty-three were green, systems with solid industry, fleet presences and economies – the MidWorlds.

Fifty, scattered around the edge of the sphere, were blue. These were the latest wave of colonies, systems still struggling to find their feet and desperate for any shipping they could get – the Fringe.

Lastly, a wedge of fifteen red stars, starting at one of the silver stars which had a red band around it, cut out towards the edge of the sphere from the center. These were worlds where magic was outlawed outside the ships that delivered cargos and news – the UnArcana Worlds.

“The Core all have RTAs except Legatus,” David said calmly, a flick of his hand causing all of the silver stars except the one banded in red to turn dull. A Runic Transceiver Array was an immense construct of runes and magic that allowed a Mage to communicate verbally with a Mage in another RTA, no matter how far away. “Corinthian
didn’t
, but as soon as they get a ship to Sherwood, every system with an RTA is going to have us on a watch list,” he concluded. “That takes these systems out.”

Over half of the green lights and a single blue light turned dull.

“Anywhere that will have been reached by ship from Corinthian before we get there will also be looking for us,” David continued, overlaying a new layer which turned most of the remaining MidWorlds dull in a sphere around Corinthian.

“So we go to the Fringe,” Jenna answered, gesturing at the massive swathes of blue stars. “This ship has the fuel bunkers and food storage for the long Fringe runs – she was built for it. We both have contacts out there – so does James, I think.”

The Captain nodded. “He does, though he’s been busy making sure there’s nothing in our data download that incriminates us.” James Kellers was the ship’s engineer, and he’d been face-down in the normally sealed portion of the ship’s computer that carried downloads of all news and financial transaction data between systems since they’d left Corinthian.

“He can
do
that?” Jenna asked, shocked.

“Can’t get into the bank data, but he can open up the news and law enforcement downloads and modify them – undetectably, he insists.”

The First Officer whistled. The RTAs only allowed verbal communication. The ‘mailbox’ present on every starship carried the large-scale electronic data transfers required to keep a modern economy and integrated society functioning. Supposedly, only the Royal Post offices in each system could upload and download from them, which meant that, for example, the
Blue Jay
’s mailbox carried the most up-to-date listing of her crew’s own finances – data that local banks would use to authorize withdrawals and spending.

“Contacts or not, though, we can’t go straight to the Fringe,” David finally concluded, touching a control that made the blue stars flash gently. “Fringe shipping is speculative – we’d have to pick up a cargo we know they’ll buy and take it in, with no contracts or guarantees. That means we need the capital to
buy
said cargo, and we don’t have it.”

Jenna looked at him sharply, and David shrugged. “I can cover operating expenses for two years, but even if I put
all
of that in, it wouldn’t cover a tenth of a full cargo for this ship. Three million tons of
anything
is expensive.”

“So what?” she asked.

The red-banded silver world, on the edge of the Core, flashed on the screen.

“Legatus,” David answered. “The first UnArcana world. No Mages, so no transceiver array. Shipping is rarer than in the rest of the Core, and the Navy leaves system security to the Legatus Self Defense Force. We get a contract there; build up our cash reserves as we head outwards. Use the cash to pick up a cargo of survey satellites and combine harvesters in the MidWorlds somewhere, then do the long sweep of the Fringe.

“Once we’ve done an eighteen month sweep of the Fringe, we won’t be on the top of everyone’s list,” he concluded. “We’ll be able to pop back into the MidWorlds for a new cargo, so long as we don’t draw attention to ourselves.”

“What makes you think we’ll find work in Legatus?” Jenna demanded. “I thought most of the shipping through there was locked up by big lines willing to play their games.”

“Carmichael gave me a name,” David admitted.

“We
played
Carmichael and left him to face the music when a Hand arrived,” Jenna pointed out. Carmichael hadn’t got anything he’d been supposed to out of the deal he’d brokered between David and a mob boss.

“The name was in trade for warning him about the Hand in time,” David replied. “I think the man will help us.”

His First Officer crossed her arms and looked at him crossly.

“If you’ve already made up your mind, why are we still chatting instead of letting the crew know?” she asked.

“Because until I said this all aloud, I hadn’t made up my mind,” David told her. “I can still change it if you have a better idea?”

Jenna shook her head slowly.

“Fine boss,” she conceded. “The belly of the beast it is!”

#

Rice was waiting for Damien when he and Singh exited the shuttle, carefully, into the zero-gravity of the
Blue Jay
’s shuttle bay. As the final test of his skill, the old Sikh pilot had made Damien slot the cargo shuttle into its bay, one of the seven on the ‘roof’ of the bay. Like everything else Singh had asked, Damien did it slowly, carefully, and without a single mistake.

“I’ll hook up the fuel lines and check her over,” the pilot told Damien as they spotted the Captain waiting for them. “Looks like the Captain wants you.”

“Thanks,” Damien told Singh and then, gently, launched himself across the shuttle bay to the freighter’s commander.

“We have a destination?” he asked Rice.

“We do,” Rice confirmed. “Let’s go to your lab, I want to pull some data up for you.”

Damien’s lab slash office was situated at the heart of the ship, just behind the simulacrum chamber that occupied the jumpship’s exact center and allowed him to teleport her through space. Unlike the rest of the ship’s core, though, his office had gravity due to a set of runes the previous Ship’s Mage had carved into the floor.

Entering the tiny space, which combined the best and worst aspects of an office, a chemistry lab, and a jeweler’s workshop, Rice dropped himself into the chair next to the workstation. Three screens were set up on the desk, creating a pseudo-three-dimensional image of the space the freighter was suspended in.

That space was unusually empty. They’d made six basically random jumps after leaving Corinthian minutes ahead of a pair of Navy destroyers, and now sat in the dead black space between stars, light years away from even the normal jump zones.

“Carmichael gave us a contact who can probably get us work, regardless of our questionable legal status,” Rice finally told Damien, the heavyset Captain looking over the screens at the Mage. “There’s two problems – first, we’re talking a long way away, and second, he’s in Legatus.”

Damien watched carefully as Rice manipulated the controls on the workstation, zooming in on the star in question. The Captain was faster with the software than
he
was, though even now most of his experience with it had been in school. He leaned in over Rice’s shoulder, and read the course projection the computer was providing.

A computer’s projection of the course a Mage could take was always slightly off, but it would give him a starting point to work from.