War Mage Chronicles- Part One

by Charles R Case

  “How are you holding up, Commander?” Cora asked through the room’s speakers.

  Grimms gave a grumpy smile. “Oh, just peachy, Captain. Nothing like what you must be going through, though, having them all poking and prodding at you like you’re a lab rat.”

  Cora laughed. “It’s not like they’re climbing into my tank. I can ignore them most of the time. To tell you the truth, I’ve been catching up on my TV shows.”

  Grimms cocked his head. “You can watch TV in there?” he asked, surprised the activity would be an option for her.

  “Oh, yes. I can access pretty much anything that has to do with electronics. I have to do something to pass the time, while these scientists set up their equipment and argue over how best to gauge the tests. I only sleep for a few minutes every couple of hours, so I have a lot of down time,” she mused. “I’ve been going over the core’s data, but there is so much… I need to take breaks. The history of humanity is, well, long,” she said with a smile.

  Grimms grunted his assent. “Any more info on the core design? We’re going to be dead in the water if we can't provide cores for the ships the Navy has started building from the new plans.”

  “Sara and Boon are working on it. They’re done with the debriefings, and have had a little time to collect their thoughts. She said she would update me when she found something. In her classic, cryptic fashion, she said they had ‘a lead’, as if she were some detective from an old movie,” she said, the eyeroll obvious in her voice.

  Grimms could feel she wanted to say more, so he stayed quiet.

  Eventually, Cora continued. “I don't know what to do with her sometimes. She’s brilliant, but she’s always hiding things she thinks I’ll disapprove of, so I don't have any clue if she’s heading into danger or not.”

  Grimms considered her assessment. He respected Sara as a captain, and her willingness to fight for her people made him swell with admiration, but Cora was right in some respects. Sara did play her cards a little too close to the vest for his liking. She was a captain of a warship—it was his opinion that she needed to keep her people more informed of her plans.

  “I feel the same way,” he finally agreed. “Which is why I have Baxter looking out for her.” He took a sip from his mug.

  “You sent Baxter to follow her? She’s not going to like that,” Cora said, a little shocked at the bold move. “Actually,” she chuckled, “she might like it just fine, if their last interaction was a clue.”

  Mezner stuck her head in the ready room’s door. “Sir, they’re ready for you.”

  “Thank you, Ensign. I’m on my way.” Grimms downed the rest of his coffee, almost choking on the hot liquid, before placing the mug in the coffee bar’s dish recycler. “You ready, Captain?”

  “I’ve been ready since I woke up on that moon over Colony 788. Let’s get this started,” Cora said enthusiastically.

  Grimms stepped out onto the bridge and made his way to the projection table between the front view screen and Sara's command ring. A holo projection of the surrounding star systems rotated slowly, with a golden icon hanging over the Sol System, indicating the Raven’s position.

  Dr. Hess stepped up beside him and gave him a nod. The Elif doctor had been given a position on the assessment team due to his knowledge of ancient human ship designs and culture. He was working with Dr. Romis, his colleague—and his lover, if the rumors were to be believed—along with several human scientists that had come aboard for the tests.

  “Dr. Hess, I hear you’re ready to begin?”

  The tall, middle-aged Elif gave a nod, tugging at one of his ear tips. “Ready as we can be. I want to start with this new jumping ability Cora has been talking about.”

  Grimms nodded. He wanted to try it out, as well. From what Cora had described, it was a little like warp, but without all the pesky traveling between locations. She would be able to jump instantaneously from one location to another—not for long distances, compared to the vastness of space, but it would still grant them a huge advantage in battle.

  “Will we need to provide coordinates?” Grimms asked, and it took Dr. Hess a moment to realize he was talking to Cora.

  “No, I don’t need to be accurate. In battle, I’ll need Sara to guide me to exact positions and headings, but for this test, I’m just going to point toward empty space,” Cora said.

  “All right. Doctor, are you recording or whatever it is you are doing?” Grimms asked, turning to Dr. Hess.

  “We are ready, Commander.”

  “Cora. You have the conn. Take us out at your leisure,” Grimms said, zooming in the projection to show only the Sol System and their golden icon in high Earth orbit.

  They had come out past the moon’s orbit, and were positioned far from any other ship, just in case. There were a few probes monitoring outside the ship to determine what impact the jump would have on the space around them.

  “Three, two, one,” Cora counted down softly, her voice flat with concentration.

  Grimms waited a beat, but felt nothing. He looked around the room and saw a few other baffled faces.

  “Oh, by the Seven,” Dr. Hess breathed.

  Grimms noticed that he was closely observing the holo display. When Grimms took a closer look himself, he saw that they were halfway across the Sol System, out around the orbit of Jupiter.

  “Well, that was intense,” Cora gushed, sounding a little giddy. “I pushed it pretty hard on that one. My Aether well took a big hit, so I wouldn't recommend a jump that far if we’re going into battle. I don't think I could charge an Aether cannon for a few minutes afterward.”

  Connors spoke up from the helm. “I have us at just over a billion kilometers from our starting position, sir.”

  “Well, that’s impressive,” Grimms said, leaning over the holo display and getting a good look at the planets’ new positions. “What is our elapsed time of flight? And why didn't we feel anything?”

  Cora answered before Connors could speak. “The time was less than a picosecond, so not instantaneous, but close enough to call it such. And we didn't feel anything because, technically, we didn't move. Space moved around us. Sort of.”

  “You’re going to have to explain that better, Captain. We have obviously traveled a billion kilometers,” Grimms said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Basically, I dematerialized the ship then rematerialized it, and in that instant, we no longer existed—we were completely in the Aether. The power I used pushed us through the Aether, to rematerialize here. So we skipped space entirely, and, from a relative perspective, space moved around us.

  “I still can’t tell if we were moving in the Aether or not, but I’ll know more when we do the next jump. I plan on only doing a short one, to compare times, but I would bet it’s the determining factor to distance traveled. When we are in the Aether, my well flows out at an incredible rate; only when we rematerialized did it stop. The timing is what the core controls, otherwise I wouldn't be able to think fast enough to get us back out,” Cora said, obviously making a few discoveries of her own.

  Grimms thought about this for a minute then said, “So, we died and were reborn a picosecond later?”

  Cora considered this. “I suppose you could think of it that way.”

  “Amazing,” Dr. Hess said, his eyes wide in wonder.

  Chapter 13

  Grimms looked over the report of the morning’s tests, leaning back in the swivel chair in the ready room. In front of him was another cup of coffee, along with a light lunch that someone had left for him while he was in the last test. With one hand, he undid the clasp at the collar of his uniform, trying to relax as best he could before the warp test in an hour.

  In all, Cora had made twenty-two jumps throughout the Sol System. After her initial long jump, she started over at the bottom of the distance scale, making a short jump of only a few hundred meters. She concluded that she could make an even shorter one if Sara were there to give her a precise location. From there, she slowly expanded the jum
p distance, gauging her Aether well after each jump to determine just how nimble she could be in a fight.

  After the single jumps allowed her to get a baseline for the amount of Aether it took to make them, they did a multiple jump test. At first, it was only two jumps, one after the other in quick succession, but they ended with a ten-jump string that had taken them nearly two billion kilometers when the sequence was finished. Cora reported that she would still be able to power the Aether cannon at least twice after the ten jumps.

  “It looks like the Aether requirement uses the inverse-square law,” Grimms said after swallowing a bite of his sandwich.

  “Good eye, Commander. That’s what my calculations show, as well; twice the distance equals four times the power. I’m working on an optimal set of jumps for distance, and one for power conservation. Honestly, I think those numbers are going to change, though,” Cora said, slightly distracted.

  Grimms put down his sandwich, wiping crumbs from his beard. “Why do you say that?”

  Cora huffed a breath. “Well, I can't say for certain just yet, but I feel like me and the core are… I guess you would call it ‘getting to know one another’. The more I use my Aether, the better the core seems to be able to distribute that power. If you take a look at the jump distances on that ten-jump run, you’ll see what I mean.”

  Grimms pulled the numbers up and scanned them. “The distance increased a little with each jump. You didn't do that on purpose?”

  “No. I was trying to keep my Aether output the same for all ten jumps. I may have gotten it slightly wrong, but not that wrong. There’s a nearly twenty percent difference in the distance, for the same energy output, between the last jump and the first one. There is a bit of a precision problem, without me having an exact position to jump to, but I don't think it would account for twenty percent,” Cora said.

  “So you’re becoming more powerful?”

  “No, not more powerful. The core is just using my ‘brand’ of Aether—for lack of a better term—more efficiently. It’s as if the core is talking with my Aether flow and coaxing more out of it. I honestly don't see what it’s doing differently, mechanically, so it has to be a question of efficiency,” Cora reasoned, and Grimms thought she would have shrugged if she still had control of her body.

  “It could be a question of potency,” Grimms mused, leaning back again and picking up his coffee.

  “Hmm, I hadn’t thought of that. How would it make the Aether more potent, though?”

  Grimms gave a shrug. “I don't know, I’m not a mage. I can barely channel enough Aether to activate a lighter, much less the level of Aether you’re channeling on a daily basis. I’m just the idea guy,” he said with a smile while stroking his short, white beard.

  “Well, it’s an idea… it may even be the answer, but I have no way of testing it ‘til Sara finds out how the cores are made. Right now, we don't even know what element it’s made from; nobody wants to damage it by studying it too aggressively, and a surface scan just throws up errors, as if it can’t get a sample, or even recognize the structure on a molecular scale.” Cora sounded defeated.

  “Don’t worry. Sara will find something; even if she has to blow up a city to find it,” he said, with a chuckle. “You two are more alike than you are different, you know. You’ll push yourselves beyond any reasonable level to get the results you need to do what’s best for your people. Honestly, I’ve never felt safer than I do when I’m here on the Raven.”

  “Even though we’re being pushed to the front line of an ancient conflict?” Cora asked quietly.

  Grimms gave her a smile he wasn’t entirely sure she could see. “Especially when we’re being pushed. You work harder under pressure; that’s a trait I love to see in my captain.”

  Cora laughed lightly. “Commander Grimms, that sounded like a compliment. Don’t go all soft on my account.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it, ma’am,” he said, taking the last bite of his sandwich.

  “God, I miss sandwiches. And beer,” Cora whined. “When I come out of this tank, you’re taking me to go get sandwiches and beer. That’s an order.”

  Grimms gave a laugh at that. “It would be my pleasure, ma’am.” He checked his watch before continuing. “It’s time for the next test. You ready?” he asked, getting up and circling around the desk, making his way for the door.

  “Oh yeah. It’ll be good to get out and stretch my legs.”

  Grimms entered the bridge just as Mezner was approaching. She stopped and gave him a quick salute before taking a seat at her station. Grimms stepped down to the holo projector, occupying the space next to Dr. Hess, and placed his coffee mug on the flat surface of the table-like projector, causing a small distortion in the image of the local star systems.

  “Do we have a heading?” Grimms asked the doctor.

  Dr. Hess nodded. “Intelligence gave us the coordinates. According to the information they gathered from our communications network, it should be far from any traffic.”

  “Good. The last thing we need is to run into an enemy ship without Captain Sonders onboard. How far is the warp?” he asked, noting the two icons in the projection—one golden and one flashing blue—a good distance from any systems.

  Dr. Hess referenced his notes, then said, “We are making a fairly long first warp, about halfway to my home system. Just over twenty-five hundred light years.”

  “How long does it take an Elif ship to travel that far?” Grimms wanted to know.

  Dr. Hess looked to the ceiling, doing some quick math. “At a hard burn, it would take roughly six of your days.”

  “One hundred forty-four hours,” Grimms calculated. “Let’s see if we can't cut that down a bit, Captain Cora.” He smiled with anticipation. Before the core was installed, their first journey to the derelict shipwreck had been estimated to be around two thousand light years, and Cora had managed that one in three days. He was eager to see what she was capable of now.

  “You got it, Commander. Engaging warp in three, two, one.”

  The view screen smashed its image down to a pinpoint, as the destination and their current location connected through a thread of Aether. After a slight shudder under Grimms’ feet, the image began to slowly expand again.

  “Mezner, what is our ETA?” he asked the blonde woman.

  She was already checking her calculations, and quickly said, “Twelve hours and sixteen minutes, sir.”

  Dr. Hess began excitedly tugging on his ear tip at the news, his eyes wide as he mumbled, “Amazing. Simply amazing.”

  Grimms smiled. “Ten times the speed of the Elif ships. Impressive, Captain.”

  “Thank you, Grimms. I could probably have eked out a little more power, but I didn't want to go all out, just in case.” Cora sounded to be in high spirits.

  Grimms picked up his coffee mug and took a sip. “We really need those cores. I hope Captain Sonders is making headway.”

  “I’m sure she is,” Cora said, her voice not quite as confident as Grimms would have liked.

  Chapter 14

  “Atlantis?” Boon asked, double-checking that her new Aetheric armor was strapped into the shuttle’s cargo compartment for the third time.

  Sara had requisitioned the shuttle and two personalized Aetheric suits of armor from the UHFC, saying they were taking them out to field test some of her powers, away from the public eye. Word had traveled around of what she was, and the display on the beach the previous afternoon had convinced the requisitions officer that it was a good idea for them to leave the city.

  The suits were printed up from the personalized scans in their files, and an hour later, they were ready to go.

  “That’s what Silva called it. Though when I asked for the exact location, she pointed me to the Azores,” Sara said with a slight grin, adjusting her brown leather jacket.

  They had changed back into their tee shirts and jeans, and Sara had printed them some jackets on the hotel’s public printer to prepare them for the cooler temperatures t
hey were bound to encounter. She never liked the way artificial leathers felt on her skin, but she was not about to drop the kind of money a real leather jacket would cost.

  Silva, draping her skinny ferret body around Boon’s neck, gave Sara a chittering rebuke, to which the captain threw up her hands. “Okay, it’s Atlantis,” she said with a light laugh.

  “Wait, the Azores? The islands out in the Atlantic?” Boon asked, walking over to the controls and reaching for the button to close the ramp.

  There was a metallic clunk that made her spin around in surprise.

  A large man in full Aetheric armor had stepped onto the ramp, and was advancing on her. She held up her hands defensively as the armored man reached up and activated his faceplate to fold back into the helmet.

  “You have room for one more? I’ve always wanted to go to the Azores,” Baxter said, flashing a bright white smile.

  Boon stood up, dropping her hands, her mouth hanging open. “Sergeant Major?”

  “Baxter. What the hell are you doing here?” Sara demanded hotly, stepping around Boon to face off with the much bigger man.

  Baxter gave her a shrug. “Colonel Grimms asked me to keep an eye on you. I think he just wanted someone watching your back,” he said, the smile never leaving his face.

  Shit. How are we supposed to talk with the pixies if he’s tagging along? I can't even mention them around anyone that’s not a War Mage; I don't know what would happen if we actually tried to bring him to their city.

  Sara sighed, crossing her arms. “Are you serious? We’re War Mages. I’m pretty sure we can protect ourselves.”

  Baxter’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead, and he looked over Sara's shoulder at Boon, noticing the ferret for the first time. “Well, I’ll be damned. How the hell did that happen?”