A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10)

by Glynn Stewart

  “You…completed an entire new generation of military technology with private funding?” Villeneuve asked, making sure he was understanding Casimir correctly. Nova Industries was a huge corporation, and Casimir was unbelievably wealthy, but he was talking a multi-trillion-dollar investment at least.

  “Enough civilian and secondary applications have already arisen from BugWorks to cover a third or so of the costs,” Casimir pointed out. “Even if the military applications fall through, we will earn back our costs eventually just from those.

  “But the military possibilities are…transformative,” he continued. “Including the hyperdrive, we have developed four systems we believe that the UESF will want on every ship. I brought you here today so we could demonstrate them for you.”

  “If you want me to sell them to my Captains, the people who are the reason you didn’t get funding for this, they’d better be fantastique—impressive,” Villeneuve warned.

  Elon Casimir grinned, managing to look even younger than his thirty-odd years.

  “Oh, believe me, Admiral Villeneuve, you are going to be impressed.”

  Casimir proceeded to drag Villeneuve out onto an observation shuttle—a luxuriously appointed craft over three times the size of the UESF standardized shuttle the Admiral had arrived on. Every part of the passenger compartment except the floor was covered in high-quality monitors, allowing the two men to watch the big space station drop away beneath their feet.

  “Over to your left, you can see the yard where we’ve been building the XC ships,” the CEO told Villeneuve. “They’re our ‘Experimental Cruiser’ hulls, a modular design with a frankly ridiculous power-generation capacity that we’ve used as a platform for all of our tests.

  “Ahead of us you’ll see XC-Zero One,” he continued. With a brush of fingers through the haptic interface suspended above the screen, Casimir adjusted the view to zoom in on the ship.

  Villeneuve studied it with a practiced eye. There was little to compare its size to as they approached, but the ship seemed large for an experiment. It followed similar lines to the UESF’s current battleships, a squished cigar-shape tapering to a flat prow at the front from the engines at the back, except…

  Unlike a UESF ship, the cigar tapered both ways.

  “Where are the engines?” he asked.

  “That’s the first tech we’re going to demonstrate,” Casimir told him. “Since I know you’re wondering,” he continued, “XC-Zero One, also known as Raptor, is five hundred and eighty-six meters long with an average beam of one hundred meters. She masses just over two million tons—though that’s due to reasons we’ll discuss in a few minutes.”

  “That’s a cruiser,” Villeneuve observed dryly. “Right. A cruiser that’s a third longer than my battleships and masses almost three times as much. How much of that is fuel? Which also brings me back to my original point: where are her engines?”

  Casimir held up one finger in a “hold on a minute” gesture and took a small microphone from a concealed holder on the bar.

  “Captain Anderson,” he said into it. “Begin the demonstration.”

  There was no audible response, but Raptor started moving…accelerating impossibly as the big ship turned into a blur that rapidly receded into a barely visible dot. Villeneuve stared in shock as Casimir used the display interface to zoom in on the ship, blurring along at an impossible velocity—only to make a physically impossible turn and blaze back to the observation shuttle at the same impossible speed.

  “Raptor and the other XC ships are equipped with what the scientists and engineers at BugWorks call a ‘gravitational-hyperspatial interface momentum engine,’ he said calmly. “The crews working with them just call it the interface drive. It’s capable of accelerating from zero to forty percent of lightspeed in just over six seconds with no inertial effects.”

  Villeneuve stared at the ship as it came to a halt in front of them again.

  “Elon,” he said slowly, “that’s impossible. That violates the laws of physics.”

  “So does the hyperdrive,” Casimir pointed out dryly. “BugWorks has spent the last ten years playing with the consequences of hyperspatial anomalies on our understanding of physics. The interface drive is, so far as our experiments can prove, almost one hundred percent inertialess. The drive pushes anything smaller than about a tenth the size of the effect field to the side and…well, you’ll see what happens when it hits something larger than that shortly.”

  The Admiral stared at the strange ship, considering the potential. His current generation of warships was built around heavy lasers and lots of massive missiles. Those missiles couldn’t even catch Casimir’s XC ship.

  “You said you had more technologies to show me,” he said levelly, trying to control the urge to hyperventilate.

  “Of course,” Casimir confirmed. The shuttle—still, thankfully, using what looked like normal fusion thrusters—continued on its course. They orbited over the big asteroid that the Research Station orbited beside, and a second of the impossible ships appeared on the screens. The CEO gestured and zoomed the display in on it.

  “XC-Zero Two, Hammer, is also equipped with the interface drive,” he noted. “She won’t be maneuvering much herself, though. She has a different system to demonstrate.”

  Once again, Casimir grabbed the microphone and ordered the Captain to begin the demonstration.

  Hammer moved smoothly, with a grace to the cruiser’s motions that just looked wrong to a man who’d grown used to the fusion torch battleships and cruisers of Earth’s Space Force. The experimental cruiser angled away from the asteroid, aiming herself at another, smaller, rock that Casimir promptly highlighted in the display.

  “That is asteroid five-two-zero-zero-nine-five,” the CEO told Villeneuve. “Ninety percent nickel-iron by mass, roughly eight hundred thousand tons.”

  The mass and nickel-iron percentage lined up very neatly with the UESF’s current battleships. Somehow, the Admiral doubted that was an accident.

  “Watch,” Casimir instructed, zooming the screen in further.

  As Hammer passed the big rock, moving at a speed Villeneuve recognized as a crawl for the strange ships, there were six bright flashes of light. That was it, all that could be seen with the naked eye, even at this zoom.

  Villeneuve blinked and looked to the asteroid, only to swallow hard. The asteroid was gone.

  “Can you rewind that?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  The image went backward in slow motion, the vaporized metal of the asteroid recombining into the chunk of iron and rock. The impact points appeared, then turned into streaks of white light that connected with Hammer.

  “What were those?” Villeneuve finally asked.

  “A logical development of what you saw with Raptor,” Casimir told him brightly. “Point four cee was the best we could achieve for anything we wanted humans to survive on, but by pushing a smaller craft and being willing to accept levels of radiation instantly lethal to humans, we could build a smaller device capable of sustaining sixty percent of the speed of light for roughly sixty seconds.”

  “A missile,” Villeneuve breathed.

  “Exactly. We didn’t bother with a warhead,” the CEO continued. “It hits at point six cee, Admiral. Despite the drive shunting anything much smaller than its effect field aside, impact with something larger results in a catastrophic collapse—one that releases the full kinetic energy of the drive’s contents and velocity. Any warhead we’ve developed would be redundant. It’s a smart inertialess weapon. If you don’t shoot an interface missile down, it will hit.”

  And hit with gigatons of force, Villeneuve noted. He could do that math, at least to an order of magnitude. If even one of these XC ships fell into the wrong hands, the Space Force was dead.

  “What have you created, Elon?” he breathed. “This is a monster.”

  “It is necessary to sometimes look beyond the immediate,” Casimir said very quietly. “You know as well as I do that Dark E
ye is starting to intercept some really odd modulated-energy patterns as we scan the nearby stars. I agree with the conspiracy nuts on this one, Admiral—they’re alien comms. Someone has moved into the neighborhood and we don’t know what they’re here for. If they’re moving around faster than light, they have hyperdrives—which means they have the interface drive, Jean. It’s a logical progression.”

  “You built these to keep humanity safe from bug-eyed monsters?” Villeneuve asked. He wanted to disbelieve, but the man was very earnest…and the Admiral had no hesitation admitting that Elon Casimir was smarter than him.

  “Hence BugWorks,” the CEO continued. “Any alien with a hyperdrive will have these weapons, Admiral. Some kind of defense was needed.”

  “You mean you have a plan to give me something other than nightmares?” the older man asked dryly.

  “All of these systems are for sale, Admiral,” Casimir returned. “But yes. If you look over here”—he highlighted and zoomed in on a different spot in the screen to reveal a third of the XC ships—“you will see XC-Zero Three: Scapegoat.

  “For reasons that will shortly become obvious, Scapegoat is a drone,” he noted. “We have four systems to demonstrate, Admiral. You’re aware of the hyperdrive, and you’ve now seen the interface drive and the interface missiles in action.

  “If you wait a few minutes, you’ll see everything.”

  The Terran Privateer by Glynn Stewart

  Interested in reading more? The Terran Privateer is available now.

  About the Author

  Glynn Stewart is the author of Starship’s Mage, a bestselling science fiction and fantasy series where faster-than-light travel is possible–but only because of magic. His other works include science fiction series Duchy of Terra, Castle Federation and Vigilante, as well as the urban fantasy series ONSET and Changeling Blood.

  Writing managed to liberate Glynn from a bleak future as an accountant. With his personality and hope for a high-tech future intact, he lives in Kitchener, Ontario with his partner, their cats, and an unstoppable writing habit.

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  CREDITS

  The following people were involved in making this book:

  Copyeditor: Richard Shealy

  Proofreader: M Parker Editing

  Cover art: Jeff Brown

  Faolan’s Pen Publishing team: Jack, Kate, and Robin.

  Other Books by Glynn Stewart

  For release announcements join the mailing list by visiting GlynnStewart.com

  Starship’s Mage

  Starship’s Mage

  Hand of Mars

  Voice of Mars

  Alien Arcana

  Judgment of Mars

  UnArcana Stars

  Sword of Mars

  Mountain of Mars

  The Service of Mars

  A Darker Magic

  Mage-Commander (upcoming)

  Pulsar Race: A Starship’s Mage Universe Novella

  Starship’s Mage: Red Falcon

  Interstellar Mage

  Mage-Provocateur

  Agents of Mars

  Duchy of Terra

  The Terran Privateer

  Duchess of Terra

  Terra and Imperium

  Darkness Beyond

  Shield of Terra

  Imperium Defiant

  Relics of Eternity

  Shadows of the Fall

  Eyes of Tomorrow (upcoming)

  Exile

  Ashen Stars: An Exile Prequel Novella

  Exile

  Refuge

  Crusade

  Castle Federation

  Space Carrier Avalon

  Stellar Fox

  Battle Group Avalon

  Q-Ship Chameleon

  Rimward Stars

  Operation Medusa

  A Question of Faith: A Castle Federation Novella

  Peacekeepers of Sol

  Raven’s Peace

  The Peacekeeper Initiative

  Raven’s Course

  Drifter’s Folly (upcoming)

  Scattered Stars: Conviction

  Conviction

  Deception

  Equilibrium

  Fortitude (upcoming)

  Vigilante (With Terry Mixon)

  Heart of Vengeance

  Oath of Vengeance

  Bound By Stars: A Vigilante Series (With Terry Mixon)

  Bound By Law

  Bound by Honor

  Bound by Blood

  Science Fiction Novellas

  Excalibur Lost

  ONSET

  ONSET: To Serve and Protect

  ONSET: My Enemy’s Enemy

  ONSET: Blood of the Innocent

  ONSET: Stay of Execution

  Murder by Magic: An ONSET Universe Novella

  Changeling Blood

  Changeling’s Fealty

  Hunter’s Oath

  Noble’s Honor

  Fae, Flames & Fedoras: A Changeling Blood Universe Novella

  Teer & Kard

  Wardtown

  Blood Ward

  Fantasy Stand Alone Novels

  Children of Prophecy

  City in the Sky