Star-Born Mage

by David Estes

  “Good. Leave me alone.” She stumbled as another swell of hollowness rose inside her, sapping her strength. “Godstars,” she breathed, slumping back into the jumpseat.

  “It’s the withdrawal,” Miranda said. “I heard about what you did at the Miss Universe pageant. How you saved all but one of the contestants. Many of the spectators too. Your bravery was caught by the security cameras. Someone leaked it on the galactosphere. The vid has already gone galactic.”

  “I couldn’t save them all,” Vee said, remembering the bodies, many of them twisting and convulsing as the pure aura—basically poison to normal humans—shot through their bloodstream. If not for her genetic disposition to processing magical energy, she’d be dead too.

  Miranda’s voice softened. “What you did was heroic. And illegal, technically. That spell you cast…the Jackals’ attack made the magical sensors go haywire…but the video leaves no doubt that it was a Class 5 spell.”

  “What? No, there must be some mistake. Each spell was only Class 1. I’m only Class 3.” She shook her head, fear chasing away her denial. She knew all too well that casting spells of a lesser Class in short succession to create an effect equivalent to a greater spell was the same thing as casting a single, greater spell. She’d broken the law, but what choice had she had? “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “Nothing.”

  Vee cocked her head to the side. “I don’t understand.”

  “Like I said, the sensors were out. There’s no proof of the Class of spell you cast. Plus, there were extenuating circumstances. Any magical tribunal would take that into account, especially given the intragalactic visibility of the pageant.”

  Of course, Vee thought. This wasn’t about her. This was about public appearance. The Alliance couldn’t be seen as evil. And meting out a harsh sentence on someone who had saved a bunch of lives during a very public terrorist attack would only paint them one way. For the first time since the attack, the MAG/EXP meter she’d once been so obsessed with caught her attention. Holy holy holy… 76,999. In one fell swoop, she’d doubled her magical experience points. I’m a quarter of the way to Class 4, she thought, gaining confidence.

  Vee looked up at the woman who’d ruined her life. “Killing you back at the Academy would’ve been heroic.” Miranda’s expression didn’t change. “What I did at the pageant was self-defense.”

  Now, Miranda laughed in that haughty way of hers, all the previous softness hardening into an expression forged of steel. “Godstars, you haven’t changed, have you?”

  “Not when it comes to you.”

  “Fine. We’ll do it your way—always the hard way, right? You need aura. No one—not even the stubborn fire mage Verity Toya—can go cold turkey. You need aura,” she repeated, emphasizing the word that had been echoing in Vee’s mind for the last several minutes: Need. “And I can give it to you.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “Cut the bullshit!” Miranda snapped. “I’ll give you plenty of aura and you give me what I need.”

  Vee hesitated, sensing the desperation in this woman’s voice. Miranda was obviously feeling the stress of her own situation, and Vee couldn’t help but to be curious as to what would make a hard-edged warrior mage so on edge. “What do you want?”

  Miranda took a deep breath, once more cloaking her expression in icy calm. “Dacre Avvalon. I need you to find him for me. I mean, for the Alliance.”

  Vee uttered a curse in Threshan.

  Chapter 4

  Gimme all your aura

  Dacre Avvalon knew he was a damn fool for a lot of reasons, but what he was doing—what he was finally doing—was smart.

  Wasn’t it?

  He sighed, running a hand across his stubbly chin before dropping his faceplate and activating the command for mask. Shadows fell across the glass but didn’t impede his vision. Anyone trying to look in, however, would see only darkness.

  He strode through the doors of the Magical Reserve Bank of Archimedes, which opened automatically for him. He knew he wouldn’t get far. The security, a retinue of half a dozen low-Class mages, was watching him carefully, close-knit frowns appearing on their faces. But that didn’t really matter. This wasn’t a social call.

  He drew his unauthorized mag-rifle and shouted something he’d always wanted to say, “Gimme all your aura!” and then hastily sketched a glyph on his weapon’s spellscreen. Frozen. When he squeezed the trigger a burst of blue/white light shot from the barrel, freezing everything in its path. That included the spells that the security guards had also fired, at least three of which were solid Class 2 conjurations. Luckily, frozen was a Class 4 spell, though Dacre was technically not authorized to use such advanced magic. When he’d been kicked out of the Mage Academy, he was on the verge of graduating from Class 3. But what self-respecting mage initiate didn’t try out advanced spells in their free time?

  The spell was perfect, and it stopped the guards in their tracks before they knew what was happening. Any opportunity to cast additional counterspells to block the ice was lost when they froze, their expressions twisted as they struggled to break free. Even their spells were frozen, the glyphs beautiful and icy, hanging in the air.

  Dacre barely felt the effects of the spell, his well-trained body processing a portion of the aura from his base of ice while his weapon took care of the rest.

  Dacre hefted the mag-rifle onto his shoulder. Overall, he found the weapon to be unwieldy, but effective enough for the present situation. Had he used his mag-blade, he’d be identified immediately as a mage knight. Then again, technically one had to graduate from the Academy to be knighted. Then again, technically he was never eligible to enter the Academy in the first place.

  Then again, the world operates on technicalities all the time, he thought.

  Dacre strode forward, passing through the mage detector and ignoring the flashing lights and incessant beeping as the mechanism identified him as “possessing a high level of aura.” No kidding, he thought. Thanks for the info. The magical capabilities meter implanted on his retina read CLASS 5+, and the MAG/EXP count noted 1,500,000+. Back in the Academy he’d had to use magic to suppress the reading, always pretending to be nothing more than an advanced student.

  If they only knew…

  He refocused on the here and now. Past the security zone, men and women of various races were in motion, some ducking behind their desks where they were surely pressing big red buttons that would relay the message—PANIC—to a dozen enforcer units within a distance with a reasonable response time. Dacre wasn’t worried about reinforcements, however, as he’d already mapped out and timed the fastest routes and knew this would all be over well before any help could arrive. Seven minutes, he thought, setting the clock in his helmet, which began to tick down second by second in bright red numbers on the edge of his vision.

  Calmly, as cold as ice—heh heh heh, he laughed internally at his own stupid joke—he walked up to one of the main desks, labeled “Aura Transactions- Six millileter max.” The current rate was also listed: 10,000 vectors (s) per millileter. I’ll take the five-finger discount, thanks, Dacre thought.

  Behind the desk, there was a woman wearing a silver-lined blue dress suit, jamming her hand repeatedly on, get this, a big red button. As if pressing it more than once would make help arrive faster. Fear and panic did funny things to even the smartest of people’s minds, Dacre knew. “Did I stutter?” he said to the woman, who looked ready to pee herself as she stared up at him with enormous eyes the color of a Threshan sunrise—the brightest of yellows. She was human and didn’t appear to have any Gremolin blood in her, so the eye color had to be artificial.

  “I don’t have access to more than the maximum per transaction,” the woman lied. It was what she was trained to say, the words coming out so smoothly they might’ve been believed by someone who hadn’t already been ready for them.

  “Wrong answer,” Dacre said, feeling slightly bad for what he was about to do. Ice, he drew on his weapon, a
weaker version of the frozen spell he’d cast earlier. A Class 1 spell, child’s play, literally. He’d practiced the spell as a kid growing up in this very godstar system on the neighboring planet of Bellonia.

  “Please, I swear I don’t—” The rest of the woman’s lie was literally frozen on her tongue as the ice encased her, her hand a breath away from punching that damn button again. Someone screamed, and Dacre turned toward the sound. A man was on his feet, staring in horror at the frozen woman. Six minutes.

  “A friend of yours?” Dacre asked nonchalantly.

  “My fiancé,” the man said, sounding breathless, his hands shaking. He was a silver-haired Dynastian with skin as pale as distant starlight.

  “Oh, sorry about that.” Perfect. “Shall I break her into a million pieces?” It didn’t really work that way, but this man likely didn’t know that. Most non-magical users, even those who sold aura, didn’t really understand how the stuff worked.

  “No, please.” The man dropped to his knees, his hands clutched together as if praying to the local godstar. Dacre felt really bad now. Stop, he chided himself. Think of the bigger picture.

  “I won’t hurt her if you give me what I want. All your aura.”

  The man stared at him, aghast. “How? That would weigh a metric—”

  “Ton? No problem. I brought my own star-rig. Fill ’er up.”

  “Where?” The man craned his neck to look around Dacre, as if he might find a massive rig parked in the bank’s atrium.

  Dacre pointed the barrel of his mag-rifle at the ceiling. “Roof. The same place you take delivery of the stuff. I just need you to input the right codes to unblock your security system. We’ll do the pumping. Self-service works for us.”

  “I’ll need—”

  “Two other authorized employees’ fingerprints and retinal signatures,” Dacre said, reading off his internal screen, where he’d brought up the employee manual he’d hacked from the galactosphere. “You and you.” He pointed to two other workers, each of whom were trying to inch away from him. One was of indeterminate racial background, though her grayish skin implied Minot somewhere in her family tree. The other was clearly a Jhinn, a small narrow-eyed creature with red-freckled green skin. “Join your friend at his terminal. Or his fiancé becomes ice chips. If you comply, she’ll only wake up with a bad ice cream headache and a nasty case of the chills.”

  They crawled over hesitantly, wasting more time than Dacre liked. Five minutes.

  “If you stall again, I will break her,” Dacre said, pointing his mag-rifle at the frozen woman.

  “We won’t,” the fiancé said, taking control of his machine and beginning to tap commands directly onto the surface of the desk, which glowed to life.

  “Forgive me if I don’t believe you. Angle your screen toward me.”

  The man obeyed, and Dacre watched as one screen cycled to the next, bringing up what appeared to be a security authorization override for a large transaction. The Dynastian practically dragged each of his fellow workers over to the pad to swipe their fingers and scan their eyes. “I’ll need to figure out a way to trick the machine into thinking the magic has been paid for,” the man muttered, frowning. He wasn’t lying, Dacre knew. The Alliance would rather have an entire facility of its employees slaughtered rather than have its reserves of aura stolen.

  “Good thing I brought my -card,” Dacre said, tapping his gloved fingers together in a rhythm known only to him to call up a holographic three-dimensional image of a card with a nineteen-digit number. “There’s enough there, I promise you.” The thought of all those Vectors made Dacre almost giddy. His benefactors had recently become wealthier than anyone else in the galaxy.

  The man, now fully focused on the task at hand, didn’t pause, narrowing his eyes as he entered the numbers into the system, snatching a wireless scanner from the desk and holding it out for Dacre to swipe his fingerprint across. Then he lifted it to Dacre’s face, reading both eyes.

  “Transaction authorized,” a woman’s voice droned. She had a Faslandian accent, and, he had to admit, sounded rather sexy. “Thank you for your business, Mr. Klaus.”

  “My pleasure,” he said, snapping his -card back into his palm. Four minutes. “Have a nice day.”

  “Wait,” the Dynastian man said. “What about her?” He gestured toward his still-frozen fiancé.

  “Give her time. She’ll melt. If you’re impatient, use a hairdryer.” He flashed a grin, turned tail, and ran, firing several parting spells over his head for good measure. Icicles formed on the ceiling, beginning to crack and fall like blades to the floor, preventing anyone from giving chase.

  Somewhere in the distance, sirens wailed, the first of the responders—likely hoverriders—making their way toward the Reserve.

  On the roof, his benefactor’s rig was pumping inordinate amounts of aura into its massive tank. A minute later, it would be gone.

  Dacre pressed a button on his suit and it collapsed into itself, helmet and all, leaving him wearing the jumpsuit of a lowly service mechanic with a name badge on the left breast that read Marco. He stuffed the ball of plasticloth and his mag-rifle into a waste receptacle. He snatched a sandwich from his pocket and stuffed it in his mouth, chewing loudly.

  I’m just another peon on my lunch break, he thought, turning a corner and walking away, making for the rendezvous point.

  Chapter 5

  Trillions

  Vee felt cold, so cold. One of the soldiers had draped a blanket over her, not saying a word. It hadn’t helped. The cold wasn’t exterior, after all, but coming from inside her, a chill that spoke of need. Vee wondered if an x-ray would show a body empty of organs and bones, a hollow shell of the woman she’d once been.

  I’ve always been a hollow shell, she thought. Ever since that day.

  She could still remember the way her hand had shaken as she’d accepted the discharge screen from the Academy Master. Dishonorably discharged. She knew those two words would haunt her for the rest of her life.

  A particularly violent tremor shook her body and she clamped her teeth on the edge of the blanket until it passed. Nearby, Miranda Petros shook her head. “Don’t be a fool. If you help me find Dacre, I’ll give you all the magic you need to get through the withdrawal.”

  “Do us all a favor and throw yourself into a black hole,” Vee managed to get out before her teeth started to chatter again.

  In a strange contradiction to the severe cold, she felt a sweat break out on her forehead and the back of her neck. All she wanted to do was sleep it off, but this wasn’t like any aura hangover she’d ever experienced. Her only hope was to distract herself until it passed.

  “Was my friend okay when we left?” she asked, aiming the question toward the other soldier who’d been with Miranda back in the medical facility. “Minnow. He was hit by a Jackal dart too.”

  The man, who didn’t bear the mage sigil, deferred to Miranda to answer. “I’ll tell you if you help us,” she said.

  Vee sighed in fustration, her throat feeling tight now, like it was closing up. “Why do you want to find”—the name stuck in her throat—“that bastard? Hoping to get back together?” Before Miranda could answer, she continued. “You should. Snakes belong together.”

  “Like Dacre tried to tell you four years ago, there was nothing—”

  “Lies are still lies,” Vee said. “Time doesn’t twist them into truth, even if your deranged brain wants to think so.”

  “Look, Dacre stole something from the Alliance. We want it back. Simple. So if you agree to help us, we’ll give you the aura you need right now, no questions asked.”

  “What if I take your aura and then go back on my word.”

  “You might not like me, but when have you ever known me to be a fool? You’ll be signing a binding contract.”

  Vee cringed. Of course. Even a mage couldn’t reverse a contract bound in magic. “What did Dacre steal from the Alliance?”

  “You don’t have the clearance for that.�
��

  It was Vee’s turn to laugh. “Let me get this straight. You’re going to watch me suffer from aura withdrawal, refusing to tell me whether my friend is okay, and not give me any information about the man—who, oh yeah, happens to be my ex-fiance, a man I despise—who you want me to find?”

  “That sums it up,” Miranda said.

  “Screw you. You want my help? I need something first.”

  “Such as?”

  “Minnow. Is he okay?”

  “Yes. He will survive. He is weak, but small doses of aura will get him back on his feet eventually. He might never kick the addiction, however. Few do.”

  Vee took a deep breath. Thank the godstars. “Thank you. Was that so hard?”

  “Your turn. You know Dacre better than anyone. Where would he go to hide?”

  “Give me a shot of aura and I’ll tell you.”

  “First the information, then the aura.”

  Vee closed her eyes and slumped back, yawning. “A nap sounds nice.” Despite her cock-sure attitude, sleep was out of the question. Besides the way her body continued to tremble, her mind was racing. What had Dacre stolen that could be so important to the Alliance that they’d track down his ex-fiance to help them find him? And why had he stolen from them in the first place?

  “No information, no aura,” Miranda said.

  Stubborn woman, Vee thought. At the same time, she felt a sense of satisfaction that she’d managed to prise the information about Minnow from her without giving up anything. She suspected the warrior mage wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, however. Another tactic was needed.

  “Why did the Jackals attack the pageant?” she asked.

  “You don’t have the security clearance to—”

  “The way I see it,” Vee interrupted, “it was a common terrorist attack. A flexing of their wings, so to speak. A reminder that they continue to harbor the largest reserve of aura in the Godstar Galaxy. But wait…why would they do that knowing the full force of the Alliance would strike back? Hmm, doesn’t make sense, does it?” Vee cringed as her very bones trembled. The cold was becoming unbearable, and she wasn’t certain how much longer she could hold out.