Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) (39 page)

Then the entire region of space around the missiles dissolved into gray static on the screen as the missiles, real military weapons, engaged their electronic counter measures and turned the
Blue Jay
’s sensor beams to hash.

“I can’t get a bead,” Jenna exclaimed. “I can’t even estimate time to impact.”

David hit a button on his controls that took over direct control of the turrets from her, and then brought up a program he’d ‘borrowed’ from the Martian Navy years before. The turrets started to fire again, sweeping cuts designed to try and cover as much space as possible.

He glanced at the link to Damien. The Mage could see slightly better through the
Jay
’s sensors than they could. What the laser pattern missed, the Mage
might
be able to stop – but David wasn’t sure he’d like the price.

The static cloud of the missiles grew ever closer to the
Blue Jay
. There was a flash that might have been the lasers hitting a missile. A couple more. Even in the best case, he couldn’t stop the remaining missiles before they reached his ship.

For a long moment, David Rice knew, once again, that he and his crew were going to die.

Then an immense explosion erupted in space where the missiles had been. Antimatter flared and died as
dozens
of sub-munitions swept through the bounty hunters salvo. The static flashed and disappeared, revealing a single surviving missile, still running desperately towards the
Blue Jay
.

The
Luciole
swept past it, a military grade missile defense turret swatting it from space contemptuously as her
own
missile launchers spat fire back at the bounty hunter, and the image of Captain Seule appeared on Rice’s screen.

“I was starting to feel hurt that everybody had forgot us,” he said cheerfully. “Get out of here, Captain. I aim to teach a lesson here - one that
fils a putain de lignage déloyal
won’t forget!”

#

“Do you have the co-ordinates Seule sent us?” David asked over the bridge link as Damien gently massaged his temples.

“I’ve got them,” he replied, slowly. “I’ll need at least an hour to run the calculations and recover from the attack before I can jump.”

On his screens, Damien watched the running battle between the
Luciole
and the bounty hunter. Recognizing the greater immediate threat, the bounty hunter had launched a second salvo of missiles at the blockade runner – which had responded by demonstrating that it mounted four military grade battle-lasers concealed under its radiation cap.

They’d scored at least one hit, and then the bounty hunter ship had turned and run. Blazing away at a full ten gravities – the ship
had
to have magical gravity – the bounty hunter had ducked behind Graveyard Station even as Seule had used a second multi-warhead missile to wipe away the missiles aimed at his ship.

Then Damien felt the strange, almost indescribable to a non-Mage, sensation of a nearby jump. The hunter was gone.

Resting his head in his hands against the
Blue Jay
’s own acceleration, he checked that his computer was running the new jump details for the first jump of their course to Darkport. A glance at the co-ordinates themselves revealed why Seule had suggested they head to the outlaw port. Darkport was in a system less than ten light years from Excelsior.

That system was supposedly completely uninhabited. It had no habitable worlds, and lacked the extra appeal of multiple exposed planetary cores that had brought a dedicated mining operation to Excelsior. It held just a single gas giant, a sparse asteroid belt, and a couple of heat-seared rock balls orbiting a bloated and radiation-spewing giant red star.

Seule’s ship was quickly lost in the debris field of the Lagrange point as the
Blue Jay
flew outwards, towards the spaces clear of debris that Damien could jump from. He needed the time to recover from defending the ship against the first attack more than anything else.

He wondered how many people he’d just killed. He knew nothing about boarding torpedoes, and he knew that looking them up right now was probably a bad idea. His defense had cut so close that he suspected if he
hadn’t
been spending his time studying the more advanced Enforcer combat spells he wouldn’t have been able to stop them all.

If someone had been judging what a Mage with Damien’s formal training and an amplifier could do, and based their attack plan on that… they’d planned exceedingly well. He would have failed, and his friends would have been captured or killed.

The spell had taken a lot out of him though. Not as much as a jump – he would be ready to jump before the calculations were complete – but more than any defense spell he’d known before. He couldn’t repeat that kind of attack.

Sighing, Damien starting reviewing the complete parts of his jump calculation. Stopping the boarding torpedoes had proven one thing to him – he wasn’t strong enough. An Enforcer or a Navy Mage would have been able to do what he did and then carry on and take out the missiles too. A Navy Mage might be better trained for it, but a lot of it was also sheer power.

If they ever had to face a true warship, with a functioning amplifier and trained Navy Mages, there was nothing Damien would be able to do to save the
Blue Jay
.

#

Deep space jump layovers were the safest place Damien knew of. Exhausted and battered from defending the ship and jumping, he passed out almost as soon as he made it back to his quarters. He barely registered Kelly joining him several hours later, waking up barely enough to shift over for the engineer to join him.

They were both violently awoken by a sudden burst of emergency acceleration that threw them from the bed as the clanging acceleration alarm began to ring throughout the ship.

Damien, half-naked, stumbled to his intercom and triggered it.

“What’s happening?” he demanded.

“The hunter is
here
,” Jenna told him. “Get to the simulacrum Chamber –
fuck he just launched missiles
.”

Damien was already moving by the time the XO had stopped swearing. He didn’t even bother with a shirt, directing his personal field of gravity to sling him out of his quarters and along the corridor of Rib Four. Whatever damage Seule’s
Luciole
had done to the bounty hunter’s ship clearly hadn’t been enough.

In the back of his mind, he was counting seconds as he charged through the ship. Everyone else aboard was crushed to the side by the three gravities of acceleration, but he burned magic recklessly to pull himself through the ship.

With thirty seconds to spare, he saw the simulacrum Chamber at the end of the hallway. Breathing deeply, he kicked off and added his magic
to
the three gravities of acceleration the
Blue Jay
was pulling. A flick of power popped the door open before he hit it, and then he was in the Chamber, heading for the simulacrum and the platform under it for when the ship was under acceleration.

He missed the simulacrum.

His right leg hit the platform and
snapped
, the heart-wrenching noise echoing through the oval chamber at the heart of the ship as the pain slammed into him.

Damien didn’t check to see where the missiles were. He didn’t look to see how close he’d cut it. He
somehow
drove the pain down, and slapped his bare palms onto the silver simulacrum.

He looked up to see the missiles screaming towards him, in final acquisition, and
jumped
.

#

He realized when he woke up in the ship’s infirmary that he’d passed out from the pain. His leg was numb and stiff, and when Damien glanced downwards, he saw it was wrapped in the dark blue extruded plastic casts that the ships auto-doc robot applied to broken limbs.

Standing next to him, putting away a hypodermic, was Jenna. Kelly hovered behind her, he realized, and David was on the intercom screen from the bridge.

“The auto-doc is screaming at me that this is irresponsible and dangerous,” Jenna said quietly, “but we needed you awake. We jumped an hour ago – about five seconds before those missiles were about to split all four Ribs in half.”

“Split the Ribs?” Damien asked, blinking away the fuzz as the amphetamine the XO had injected him with began to course through his bloodstream.

“Yeah – the missiles had split into four groups and were making kinetic attack runs on the ribs,” Jenna explained. “Given their velocity, they’d have snapped the ribs in half but left the keel intact. I have no idea why.”

Damien winced at her use of the word ‘snapped,’ then paused as he thought about it.

“If they severed the Ribs, it would break the amplifier matrix,” he said quietly. “The matrix might work with one of the Ribs broken – two would be a stretch, and I wouldn’t want to even
touch
the simulacrum if we’d lost three or four.”

“He was trying to cripple us, so we couldn’t run or fight,” David said grimly from the intercom. “That makes sense, even if I have
no
idea how he found us.”

“It’s supposedly sort of possible to make out a vector in an outgoing jump flare,” Damien said quietly. “You need
really
good sensors to even start to get a ghost, and supposedly you can’t narrow it down more than twenty or thirty degree arc.”

“I’m guessing this prick is a bit better than that,” Jenna said drily.

Kelly snuck up next to Damien’s bed and took his hand. He gave her a pained grin, and then turned back to the Captain and XO.

“Any sign of him yet?”

“Nothing,” David told them. “But if he could follow us from the Graveyard…”

“He can follow us again,” Damien agreed, sighing and wincing as the motion moved his leg. “My guess is that he’s got two Mages aboard, and is waiting until both can jump. That way, even if I pull a Kenneth and can jump away when he gets here, he can follow us. And with only
one
Mage aboard…”

Everyone in the room winced at the mention of Kenneth McLaughlin, the
Blue Jay
’s previous Ship’s Mage who had died saving them from a pirate attack before they arrived at Damien’s home world of Sherwood.

“What’s your guess?” David asked.

“If I’ve been out an hour, maybe four hours,” Damien replied. “Given what they were prepared to sacrifice in that boarding attempt, I just bet they’re willing to risk a Mage jumping a little too early – that isn’t fatal. Just very painful.”

“So what do we do?” Jenna said quietly. “Our turrets can’t stop military missiles. Damien can’t jump us away. Do we just sit here and
die
?”

“If he’s following us, where will he jump in?” Kelly asked, interjecting herself into the conversation and squeezing Damien’s hand.

“At a guess, he’ll try for about the same position as last time,” Damien replied. “They can probably jump the same exactly one light year as I can, so they’ll come out almost exactly where they were before relative to us.”

“So we know where he’ll come out,” Kelly said aloud, and everyone in the room, including Damien looked at the young engineer. “I have an idea, sir,” she told David.

#

Freighters were not, by their nature, stealthy creatures. Nonetheless, that was what David was aiming for five hours later. They’d shut down the engines. Halted the spinning of the Ribs. Turned off every exterior light. He’d even, over Kellers’ protests, ordered the engineer to shut down the main heat exchanger.

They couldn’t do the last for very long – an hour at most – or they’d start to cook in their own skins. But it made them, for a little while, as invisible as they could be.

Kelly had joined him and Jenna on the bridge to help execute her plan. She was having trouble not watching the screen showing the simulacrum Chamber where Damien was floating next to the simulacrum, doing his best to ignore his broken leg.

Exactly five hours, almost to the second, after Damien had jumped them away their sensors reported a new jump flare. Erupting into deep space just over three million kilometers away, the familiar sight of the bounty hunter’s modified yacht appeared from nothingness. The
Blue Jay
’s cameras had just enough resolution to show the black and twisted scar along the surface of the ovoid hull where Seule’s lasers had hit – but also enough to show the still functional gunports of the hunter’s dozen missile launchers.

“Arrogant asshole,” David heard Jenna muttered, and shook his head. He couldn’t disagree. If the
Blue Jay
had had anything resembling real weapons, they could have opened fire immediately. A battle laser couldn’t normally score reliable hits at this range, but it would take thirty seconds or so for the ship to start moving. A Martian destroyer could have shredded the yacht before it even reacted.