Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) (6 page)

Damien wasn’t sure if the bottom fell out of his stomach due to the memory of the lectures he’d had on over-exerting his magic, with attendant pictures of the results, or the sudden acceleration induced shift in apparent gravity.

“Are pirates common?” he asked slowly, holding onto the safety railing and determinedly ignoring his inner ear’s confusion.

“In the Fringe and the UnArcana Worlds where the Navy is sparse, they can be,” she said quietly. “But normally a major Midworlds system like Sherwood is so safe as to be boring.”

The sensation of gravity changed again as the elevator stopped accelerating sideways and Damien’s stomach lurched as the pod shot outwards towards the rib.

When it finally came to an apparent halt, there was a comfortable sense of about half a gravity of centrifugal force, and Damien breathed a sigh of relief.

“The elevators take some getting used to,” Jenna told him with a grin. “But you
do
get used to them.”

She led the way out of the elevator, pointing out the stairs leading ‘down’ towards the outside of the ship. “Each rib is arranged in four decks,” she explained. “The outermost deck is storage, systems, and radiation shielding. Quarters are on the inner two decks, and working spaces on deck three. Follow me; I’ll take you to your cabin.”

Damien’s cabin, it turned out, was on Deck One of Rib Three – the innermost deck.

“The ribs are about two-thirds the length of the overall hull,” Jenna told him as she led him along the corridor. “Even after curvature, shielding, and the rotation motors, there’s about five hundred meters of usable length on each one, so we have no shortage of space. There’s a saying in the merchant fleet – ‘cubage is cheap, mass is expensive.’” She gestured at the doors they were passing. “We have individual cabins for one hundred and sixty people, almost twice our crew, but crew are restricted to less than one hundred kilos of personal possessions.”

“Do we ever carry passengers?” Damien asked.

“Sometimes,” she confirmed. “We keep Rib Four’s cabins empty for just that purpose, actually. I’d say we have passengers maybe a quarter of the time – we’re no luxury cruise liner though.”

She palmed the scanner by one of the cabins and the door slid open. “Put your palm on the scanner,” she ordered, and Damien obeyed. After a moment, the device beeped at him.

“It’s now keyed to you,” Jenna told him. “The captain or I can override it if we have cause, but no one else can enter your rooms.”

Damien almost missed the plural until he stepped into the cabin. The room was bigger than the space he’d rented on Sherwood Prime, though it only contained a single, extremely lightweight, couch, an entertainment screen, and a desk.

“Bedroom to the right, bathroom straight ahead,” Jenna told him. “You can pick up some furnishings on the station if you want, but, like I said, one hundred kilos max. The Captain and I have the same restriction – mass is expensive,” she concluded with a grin.

“Thank you,” Damien told her, looking around the living room with a small degree of shock. “Are all the cabins like this?” he finally asked.

“This is an officer’s cabin,” she admitted. “The crew cabins are only a single room and the workspace requires you to sit on the bed, but they still have the couch and entertainment screens.
Blue Jay
’s first owners outfitted her for the long runs in the Fringe – it makes sense to keep the crew in style if you’re in the boonies for months at a time.”

The Mage nodded, dropping his single bag –
much
less than a hundred kilos – on the bench, and looking around for a moment.

“Where is the simulacrum chamber?” he finally asked, figuring getting to work was probably a good idea.

Jenna laughed. “You’ve been on the ship less than ten minutes, and we aren’t leaving port for at least three days,” she told him. “In any case, I have to get back to the bridge for a conference call with the repair company and our insurance agent. How about you get unpacked and grab a bite to eat, and I’ll give you the grand tour at eighteen hundred hours?”

Damien looked around the somewhat excessive cabin and at his tiny bag. Unpacking wouldn’t take him long, but he could probably order some useful items through the communications net for delivery if he had three days.

“Call it a plan,” he agreed.

#

Damien took about forty minutes to unpack his few belongings and lock them away in the drawers set into the wall of his bedroom next to the lightweight bedframe. The bedroom shared the front room’s lack of any major pieces of furniture, containing only the bedframe and two sets of shelves set into the wall. A handful of the drawers contained the multi-point clips that substituted for hangars when you were traveling in zero-gravity, so he placed his two dress jackets and the eight half-necked dress shirts that were formal wear for mages in them to keep them un-wrinkled.

Fully unpacked, he found himself with over an hour before he was supposed to meet Jenna for the tour of the ship, so he pulled up a map of the ship on the screen in his sitting room and began to study it.

His stomach allowed him long enough to locate the mess hall on Rib Four before loudly growling at him, and he realized he hadn’t eaten since before Grace had arrived at his hotel. With a grin at his own forgetfulness, he took mental note of the location of the mess and headed out into the ship’s halls.

The half-gravity that
Blue Jay
maintained wasn’t much lighter than the inner area of Ring Seven where he’d been staying and the layout of the Rib was straightforward – each floor had a single corridor down the center, and the mess hall spread from one side of the hull to the other at the end of that corridor on Deck Two.

There was no one in the mess hall when Damien entered it, giving him a minute to take in the plain, lightweight table bolted to the floor, and the similarly lightweight magnetized chairs. One of four mess halls on the ship, this one had enough tables and chairs for sixty people – half again the number Jenna said would live on a rib, and almost three-quarters of the crew.

There was a kitchen, set up to function in gravity but be easily secured for zero-gravity, and a number of reasonably high quality food prep units. They were glorified vending machines, but they happily spat out a sandwich and a cup of coffee for Damien with only a little coaxing.

He was half-finished his sandwich when someone else wandered into the mess. A bulky, dark-skinned man with a black turban wrapped around his head, the newcomer flashed bright white teeth at the sight of the gold medallion on Damien’s throat.

“So! The Captain did find us a Mage!” the stranger boomed, stepping over to Damien and offering his hand. “I am Narveer Singh, First Pilot aboard the
Blue Jay
. May I join you?”

Damien shook the big man’s hand and gestured to the several empty seats at the table he’d taken.

“Feel free,” he agreed. “I’m Damien Montgomery – the new Ship’s Mage, as you guessed.”

“The Captain, he is a lucky man!” Singh boomed as he conjured a stew-like dish from the food prep units. “Rumor I heard was that the Governor blacklisted us!”

“I had my reasons to ignore that,” Damien told him. “I also never officially heard about it, so I don’t think it counts as breaking it.”

Singh boomed laughter, echoing off the previously sterile and silent walls of the mess.

“I like your style, Montgomery!” He told the young Mage. “It isn’t disobedience if you didn’t hear the order – ‘communications failures’ are good for that in shuttles!”

Damien was about to ask about the ‘First Pilot’s role when the ships public address system clicked on with a slightly noticeable, almost definitely artificial, buzz.

“Now hear this, now hear this,” Jenna’s voice rang clearly throughout the ship. “We have confirmed loading times with Sherwood Prime Docking and will have a twelve hour loading shift commencing at oh-nine hundred OMT. Please secure all items for zero-gravity.

“I repeat: we will have twelve hours of zero-rotation in the ribs starting at oh-nine-hundred Olympus Mons Time tomorrow. That is all.”

Singh pumped his fist exuberantly. “Brilliant!”

“What is?” Damien asked, thinking through the announcement. It made sense, though he’d never thought about it, that they’d have to stop rotating the ribs to load the cargo. The
Blue Jay
’s ribs were two hundred meters out from the ship’s center, which meant they rotated around the ship three times every two minutes, preventing anyone from attaching cargo to the central keel.

“We have a cargo – with the black-listing, we might not have found one,” the dark pilot explained. “The Captain, he is brilliant!” He paused, swallowing down some of his spiced stew. “I’ll need to check on the shuttles,” he continued after a moment. “We’ve been using them to help with repairs, but we’ll need to get the beasts set up for cargo handling again.”

With a shudder at the thought, Narveer Singh started inhaling his food so he could get started. Damien simply watched in amazement and nodded goodbye to the pilot as he left, charging towards the aft of the ships and the shuttle bays.

#

“And this is your working area of the ship,” Jenna told Damien as she drifted up to a handhold near another hatch. They’d started their tour of the keel of the ship at Singh’s shuttle bay at the rear end of the ship and worked their way down the central corridor of the keel in zero-gravity. “The last Ship Mage called it the ship’s ‘Sanctum.’”

Damien followed Jenna through the hatch and saw that the central corridor dog-legged ahead, around a chamber he knew would be exactly one-hundredth the length, height, and width of the
Blue Jay
’s exterior structure. Even if Jenna hadn’t warned him what he was approaching, that dogleg would have suggested he was approaching the starship’s simulacrum chamber.

Runes coated the outside of the chamber: swirling patterns of silver inlay that Damien knew cut through the wall and were visible from the inside as well. From here, they linked into other patterns that marked carefully calculated routes out to the outer hull of the
Blue Jay
.

“Your workshop is over here,” Jenna continued, gliding neatly up to a side hatch leading off the dog-legged main corridor. “Watch your step,” she warned, “Kenneth put gravity runes in the workshop, but they’ve been finicky since…” she trailed off.

“They likely haven’t been charged recently enough,” Damien told her as he joined her by the workshop door. “Runes like that need to be renewed weekly.”

Jenna hit the panel to open the hatch, and it slid aside to reveal what Damien judged to be a relatively standard Mage’s workshop – a Wonderland-esque cross between a research lab, a jewelry workshop, and a private office. On the far wall, a centrifugal casting unit occupied the center of a workbench, surrounded by soldering irons and etching tools.

Another wall held a desk with three massive work screens, touch-driven interfaces that were currently combining to show a pseudo-three-dimensional view of the space around Sherwood. The opposite wall held a spectrometer, a microscope, and a set of micro-scale manipulators – for the
really
fine rune work.

The floor plating was the same plain steel as the rest of the ship, but here someone – Kenneth, presumably, or possibly an even earlier Ship’s Mage – had inlaid the silver pattern of runes that provided artificial gravity equivalent to the spinning ribs. They were a common luxury for a Mage’s work room, providing a sense of ‘down’ even the Simulacrum Chamber lacked.

Even from outside the room, however, Damien could tell that
these
runes were almost uncharged, spitting out tiny bursts of gravity that would make the entire room a tripping hazard.

“Hold up a moment,” he told Jenna, and focused. He needed to touch the runes without worrying about spinning off, so he oriented himself with the floor of the workshop and slowly created a gravity field underneath himself. He drifted downwards and then settled his feet onto the floor in a comfortable half-gravity before kneeling and removing the glove on his right hand.

As soon as the rune on his palm was within a few centimeters of the runes on the floor, both began to glow gently. Damien focused on that glow, and fed energy into the gravity runes. The glow rapidly spread out from his hand, and Jenna’s gasp behind him suggested that it was bright enough the ship’s first officer saw it.

After about fifteen seconds, the entire room’s floor was glowing brightly to his eyes, and Damien closed his hand into a fist, cutting off the connection between his own power and the runes on the floor.

He rose to face Jenna, standing in his own personal field of gravity as he met the gaze of the officer floating in zero-gravity beside him. “It’ll be safe to enter now,” he told her. “It doesn’t take much to maintain a room this small; it just has to be done regularly.”

“You don’t actually need to deal with zero-gee,” she answered accusingly, reminding Damien of what he was doing.

He released the spell, though without motion he remained standing on the deck initially.

“Not really, no,” he admitted. “We’re taught not to show off magic though,” he explained. “It tends to attract unfortunate attention.”