Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) (5 page)

Before he expressed that thought aloud, however, Grace laughed, and kissed him.

“You, of course, have an even greater portion of pure Sherwood Scot stubbornness than any of the family,” she told him. “Which is a small, teensy, portion of why I’m spending my last night on the station here.”

“You leave tomorrow?” Damien asked, surprised.

“Yeah, we ship out at eleven hundred hours station time,” Grace told him. She sat up straight, remaining on his lap but creating some distance between them. “Which, given that I need to be on-ship two hours beforehand, means we only have about twelve hours. I’d better get business out of the way.”

“What business?”

She slid a tiny data disk out of her cleavage and dropped it on the side table.

“That’s from Captain Michaels,” she told him. “It’s the contact info for Captain David Rice on the
Blue Jay
– they’re the ship that came in damaged from a pirate attack a couple of days ago. Trick is, they lost their Mage on the way in – but for whatever reason, the Sherwood Guild has blacklisted them. Rice can’t post for a new Mage.”

“You mean…” Damien said slowly.

“Rice asked the Captain if he knew anyone,” Grace told him. “Then the Captain asked Kyle and me if we knew you – and I said I was trying to track you down since we were leaving, and he told me to tell you to contact Rice if you still wanted a Jump job.”

For a long moment, Damien was silent, looking at the tiny disk on the table. Finally, he looked up at Grace.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

“You’re welcome. Now, I believe I mentioned spending the night?” she continued with a familiar wicked grin.

#

Damien didn’t get a lot of sleep that night, but when he did wake up, Grace was gone. He wasn’t sure when she’d left, but by the time he woke up, it was only an hour short of when she’d said the
Gentle Rains of Summer
was due to leave. Running his hand down the slight indent her body had left in the cheap motel mattress, he realized he could still clean up and make it down to watch the freighter leave.

Making sure to grab the data disk Grace had left with him, he made his way down to the same observation deck he’d watched the
Blue Jay
arrive from, slipping into the window table in the Angelus Gravity Lounge in time to see the last lines drop away from the big freighter.

The
Summer
was one of the biggest freighters the worlds of the Protectorate built, rated for twelve million tons of cargo and massing over twenty million tons fully loaded and fuelled. This close to the even greater mass of Sherwood Prime, the immense ship moved slowly, running on secondary ion thrusters to avoid damaging the station itself.

Her gravity ribs locked as she maneuvered out, so Damien could clearly make out the four flattened structures that contained crew quarters, and the hundreds of standard ten thousand cubic meter containers attached to the central keel’s cargo spars.

Launching from the central, immobile, hub of the station forced the ship to build up her momentum entirely on her own. It took easily ten minutes before the minuscule thrust of the ion thrusters moved the
Summer
out of the station’s safety zone and rotated her to face out-system. Once the ship was in position, the massive fusion rockets at the end of the central keel flared to life. The window between Damien and the rockets darkened noticeably to prevent the light of those miniature suns from injuring the patrons’ eyes.

Watching the ship burn away from Sherwood, it finally sunk into Damien why Grace had been looking for him even before her Captain had asked her to. It would be months, even years, before the
Gentle Rains of Summer
returned to Sherwood. If Damien went on another ship, it was exceedingly unlikely that he would be in Sherwood when the ship returned. Last night had been the last time they were likely to see each other.

Damien pulled the data disk out with a sigh and eyed it. The PC on his wrist could read it and place a call. On the other hand, the
Blue Jay
’s dock was only ten minutes drift through the zero-gravity section of the station.

#

“David, there’s a young Mage here to see you,” Jenna told Captain Rice, sticking her head in the office just off the bridge. The bridge and his office, located on Rib Four, had only had gravity restored about two hours before, and David was trying to catch up on the paperwork his insurance agent was inflicting on him.

David suspected he’d never seen this much paperwork for insurance before because he’d never seen insurance work progress so quickly, but the agent was taking an almost gleeful pleasure in ramming through the
Blue Jay
’s repairs before his superior could find some way to argue against the sworn affidavits of the bridge crew of a Martian destroyer.

“A Mage?” he asked, to be sure he’d heard correctly. His best efforts to try to track down a Jump Mage without going through the Guild hadn’t produce much more than vague promises, and his best hope of poaching a junior Mage from someone had just left port, Michaels assuring him that ‘steps had been taken.’

“He says his name is Damien Montgomery – and that Captain Michaels sent him,” his first officer advised, glancing at the small pile of authorizing data disks on Rice’s desk. The stocky blonde flashed a bright smile at her Captain. “I’ll send him in, shall I?”

“Any distraction from Mr. Clarke’s mountain of helpful paperwork,” Rice told her, agreeing with her implied glance. For that matter, David was willing to meet with
any
Jump-qualified Mage, even if they had three heads and only spoke Sanskrit.

The ‘young Mage’ that Jenna showed into his office a minute later, though, was barely more than a boy. Dark-haired, short and slim, he was probably older than he looked, but David would have placed him at maybe sixteen years old.

“Captain Rice, I’m Damien Montgomery,” the youth introduced himself calmly. Instead of the tie that David would have worn with the dark slacks and shirt combination he was wearing, Montgomery wore a black leather collar holding a gold medallion against the base of his throat. As the youth stood across from David, the Captain recognized the tiny three stars carved into the medallion that marked him as Jump-qualified.

“Have a seat Damien,” Rice told him. “I’d ask if you were here about the Ship’s Mage posting, but I’m afraid there is no posting.”

“So I was told,” Montgomery said quietly, settling into the proffered chair. “The Governor has blacklisted you. The Guild won’t let you hire anyone.” He paused, and shrugged. “I’ll jump for you.”

Rice regarded him levelly.

“As you said, the Guild has blacklisted us,” he said carefully. “Our last Ship’s Mage died jumping too early to get us away from a pirate attack. Jumping for us may be risky, and will definitely get you in trouble with the Guild. Why?”

The youth shrugged again. “I Jump-qualified in the same year as six children of the McLaughlin clan,” he said quietly. “Their families have connections and wealth to buy favors. My father was a baker, and died several years ago.”

Rice nodded slowly. “What you’re saying, Mage Montgomery, is that we are both desperate?”

“Exactly.”

The Captain eyed the young man across the desk for a long moment. To qualify as a Jump-Mage, a Mage had to have made at least twenty supervised Jumps, but he suspected that those jumps were the only time Damien had ever cast the spell. He hesitated to put his life – and his crew’s lives – into the hands of a youth with no experience.

“Are you prepared to have me review your Jump calculations?” he asked bluntly. Normally, a Jump Mage’s work was extremely private, with no oversight except maybe a more senior Mage. After thirty years on merchant ships, though, David knew enough to at least tell if the calculations were wrong.

Damien paused again; then nodded. “I think that might even make me more comfortable,” the young man admitted, looking sixteen again for a moment.

“Fine. You’re hired,” Rice told him. “Jenna will find you a bunk – we only just got our Ribs rotating for gravity, so you may have to lend a hand cleaning up around the ship if that’s all right?”

“There is a lot I can do to help ‘clean up,’ I suspect,” Montgomery told him. “If nothing else, I will need to review the rune matrix before we jump. From what I saw of the damage, I want to be sure it wasn’t compromised.”

That wasn’t a thought that had occurred to David yet, and he shivered at the potential danger. Hopefully the young Mage in front of him knew his job. At best, a compromised rune matrix wouldn’t work. At worst… it would scatter the ship in pieces across the full length of the jump.

“What about registering your employment with the Guild?” David finally asked: another unpleasant thought.

“I… would prefer to do that in a system not Sherwood,” Damien suggested, and the Captain laughed.

“I think we can both agree to that.”

#

Damien took a long, slow look around the tiny room he’d been living in for the last two months. It had never been much of a room, though Grace had managed to add some pleasant memories to the space before vanishing out of both the room and his life.

When he’d left the surface, he’d sold or given away anything large or heavy he’d owned, so it had taken him under ten minutes to pack a single mid-sized bag with all of his worldly belongings. Now, the room was sparse and empty, merely awaiting a simple transmission to the landlord to deliver his last payment and cancel his access code.

Once he left this room, it was done – he was leaving Sherwood, and unlikely to return. Even if he switched ships later on, the McLaughlin was unlikely to forget that Damien had defied his black-listing of the
Blue Jay
and returning to Sherwood would be unwise.

From the moment he’d tested positive for Mage Gift and his life had changed forever, Damien had known he wanted to be a Jump Mage. He’d failed the entrance exams for the Protectorate Navy – by the skin of his teeth, in a year when no Mage on Sherwood
had
passed the exams – which meant the merchant ships were the only way to Jump.

His family had passed on before he graduated with his degree. Grace had left aboard the
Gentle Rains of Summer
. Nothing held him to Sherwood, but he still hesitated for a moment.

But it was only a moment. He sent the transmission to the landlord, shouldered his bag, and headed for the
Blue Jay
.

#

Jenna was waiting for Damien when he reached the transfer tube onto the
Blue Jay
, a zero-gravity transfer cart waiting by her. She glanced at his single bag and arched an eyebrow at him.

“I brought the cart to help carry your stuff, but I see that wasn’t necessary. Light packer?” she asked.

“I lived alone, I didn’t have or need much,” Damien admitted. “Anything specific I should make sure to have?”

“Not really,” the heavy-set officer told him. “Food and such are included in your pay. Grab the cart, let’s get aboard.”

Damien grabbed onto the cart and pushed it forward, keeping a hand on it as it drifted through the zero-gravity boarding dock. Not much more than a metal tray with clips for keepings objects attached to it, the cart was useful to keep things from drifting away while moving through zero-gravity zones such as the central hub of Sherwood Prime, and the transfer tube that linked it to the keel of the
Blue Jay
.

“The
Blue Jay
is a
Venice
class freighter,” Jenna told him as she kicked off into the tube. “We’re rated for three megatons of cargo – three hundred standard ten thousand cubic meter cargo containers at their max mass.”

“To carry that, she’s almost a full kilometer long, with four rotating gravity ribs. With a crew of eighty-five, we have quite a bit of cubage to give people living space.” She paused as they entered the main lock and gestured to a storage rack on the side of the plain room. “Since you’ve just the one bag, stow the cart there.”

Damien obeyed, carefully propping himself as he slung the bag back over his own shoulder.

“Through here is the rear access point for the ribs,” Jenna continued, launching skillfully and catching the handle by the open door out of the loading zone. The room beyond the door held four ‘elevators’ that would spin up to match the ribs, and then slide into tubes heading out to the edge of the ship.

“Your cabin is on Rib Three,” she told him, “the same cabin as the last Ship’s Mage.”

“Don’t worry,” she said after a pause, “we already sent all of his stuff onto his family.”

“What happened to him?” Damien asked, following her into one of the elevators

“We were jumped by pirates,” Jenna told him grimly as she carefully oriented herself feet-first towards the outside of the ship before hitting the button to start the tiny cab rotating around the ship. “Kenneth jumped us before he should have and burnt himself out.”