The sight beyond the two people in there, made me look again.
This wasn’t a ship on the sea.
We were in space!
Four
"I'm not telling the boss she's dead," said the one on the left. "You did it, you tell him."
"Do we have to tell him?"
"Dumbo! We went there to prove we could, and the instruction was bring back one of each sex for assessment on their worth as slaves. And you buggered the girl, and killed her. How do you intend telling him why we only have one prisoner?"
"We could say she died trying to escape."
"You think the boss will believe that?"
"He will if we kill the other one too."
"Are you nuts? We didn’t get told to bring back two bodies."
"But if both of them are dead, there's no reason for anyone to doubt we had to shoot them to prevent them escaping."
"But you didn't shoot her."
"A minor detail which can be fixed. I'll shoot the other one at the same time."
"I think not," said a voice, making the two turn suddenly towards me.
It took me a moment to understand it'd been my voice. By the time I figured it out, both of them were raising guns in my direction. Being seated slowed them down, but they were fast enough all the same.
My left hand formed a fist and jerked at the one on the left. The force punch took him in the chest, and smashed him into the console. There was a snapping noise as his back and one arm broke, and the top half of his body continued onto the console itself.
The right one got a shot off at me, but it bounced off my shield. I concentrated on his gun, and removed it.
He screamed, as blood started gushing from the stump of his arm. In my haste, I'd removed his hand as well as the gun, well above the wrist. He tried to stem the loss of blood, but the artery had been severed without being cauterized, as if I'd used a sword and cut it off, and he bled out while I stood there gaping at him.
I obviously needed some practice. I'd hoped to keep at least one of them alive for answers. And for flying the ship. Now I had to hope there was someone else on board. Someone still alive.
The ship flew on. I stood there, not knowing what to do next, and the ship continued flying. Obviously some sort of auto-pilot had control. There was nothing I could see which told me where we were going. And no way of stopping us going there. And while I dithered, we were getting further away from where I wanted to be.
The pool of blood eventually stopped spreading. Movement behind me made me turn suddenly, shield back up, and fists clenched, but it was only a metallic spider like robot, about as big as a large dog. It stopped when it registered I was in its way. I stepped back to see what it would do, and it walked into what I now knew was the bridge of a space ship. I'd seen plenty of entertainment about them, and this was definitely a bridge. Even if no-one making the entertainment had any idea space ships were real.
Three more followed it, and between them, they lifted the two bodies, and carried them out. Blood dripped a trail down the passageway, but this was quickly removed by a lot of smaller robots, and any evidence of death vanished.
I decided to follow them, and this was where things became really weird. The little robots were cleaning off the blood on the deck, but only the blood on the deck. They ignored all the other crud, resulting in a nice clean trail through an otherwise filthy environment. As I followed them, I pondered why anyone would limit cleaning robots to just dead bodies and blood.
By the time we reached what looked like a hospital room, and the cold storage room on the other side of it, I could think of only one group who'd constantly want blood removed.
Slavers.
Five
Knowing you're on a slaver ship, isn’t actually useful information. Sure, at some point I was going to need to deal with whoever met the ship, presumably also slavers. I could hope the ship would be intercepted by some sort of police force, but there was a chance they'd simply destroy the ship, and ask questions later, which wasn’t much use for me. Having almost died twice in two years, I wasn’t looking forward to the next time.
The girl was also in the cold store, so it contained three bodies. I shut the door on them.
I spent the next few hours searching the whole ship, but I was now completely alone. I sat in a now clean bridge seat, and pondered what to do.
I knew nothing about spaceships. Nothing around me was in any way intuitive, or even helpfully labeled. There was no way I was going to be flying this ship. Which meant, I was going to wherever it was going.
The next problem was, I didn’t know where it was going, or how long it was going to take to get there. Or who would be there to meet the ship. Or how they would react to three dead bodies on board.
Or more importantly, how whoever met the ship was going to react to finding me on board, with three dead bodies, especially since two of them were my handiwork, and I couldn’t prove the other one wasn’t.
My stomach rumbled, pointing out a more immediate problem. I’d found what looked like a kitchen, but on first inspection, I wasn’t at all sure how food was prepared, and exactly what was food.
The ship wasn’t all that big, so remembering where each room was, hadn't been hard.
The kitchen at least, was clean. I hunted around until I found bottles of what I assumed was water, and did in fact turn out to be water. I downed one, threw it in what I assumed was the trash hopper, and started in on another one.
Behind another door, I found a stack of sealed oblong containers, which had labels indicating they contained food. It was about the size of a buffet tray. I ripped one open, and if it was food, it was highly processed, and almost unrecognizable.
Adapting to processed food had been one of the easy things to do, accounting for not a small amount of the rounding of my midriff area. Deserts especially I'd been delighted to discover, and it had taken a medical specialist to persuade me to limit my intake.
Kitchen technology had been a little more difficult, but net time provided understanding and instructions. The tech here was different, but I took a guess the glass door with the handle on it, with an inside just a tad bigger than the food container, was something akin to a microwave oven.
I took down another one, pulled the door, pushed it in, and closed the door. There was an immediate hum, and a few seconds later, a ding. I pulled the door, pulled the container out, and took it to a table, where I sat in front of it. This time, the top wrapping came away easily, taking the sides with it, and leaving just a tray, revealing a meal.
I went back looking for eating utensils. My conversion to these had been the subject of much mirth at the home's dinner table, and it had taken more than a few meals, and laughter from everyone else, to adapt. Even now, I tend to cut everything up into bite sizes, and then use the fork as a scoop for the whole meal.
I dug into one end of the food, which tasted like chicken, with four kinds of veg. The other end turned out to look like, and taste like, an apple crumble.
I finished the meal and the water, and trashed the remains. Pulling another water, I went back to the bedrooms, looking for one worth trying to sleep in.
The first was the biggest, and sometime since I'd poked my nose in here before, the room had been cleaned, and the bed made. But black satin sheets were definitely not my thing.
The second bedroom was a bit smaller, and was more tastefully sheeted with white. Boring, but ok. I poked my nose into the Ensuite, found the facilities also recently cleaned, figured out how to use them by trial and error, used them, and flopped down on the bed.
I woke some six hours later with a throbbing head, and it was at this point, I realized I didn't have my backpack, which was sitting on my bed back at the home, waiting for my return. In it, were my migraine meds.
I made my way to the medical bay, and sat there for a while, trying to concentrate. One of the things I'd discovered early on, was meds are expensive. They were also not given away lightly. After a day in maj
or pain, and no tablet to ease it, I'd snuck into the room storing the home's meds in the middle of the night, and borrowed the bottle. I spent all night trying, and failed to duplicate the tablets. The bottle was easy, meds are not. However, I solved this the next night, by taking a walk to the nearest med store. I stood outside in a dark place, and both bottle and tablets duplicated precisely into my hand.
The thing to remember about creating anything, is you need the raw materials at hand. The closer they are, the easier it is. When you copy something, you don't need to know what's in it. Just have access to everything needed. Your intent allows the copy to take place. So outside the med store, I first copied a tablet, and took it immediately, with a corresponding reduction in head pain shortly after. I upped the intent to the full bottle. I also linked the intent to the med store for future duplications. After that, I was able to create a new bottle from my room, anytime I wanted.
There is a downside to this of course. The ingredients for the tablets were coming from somewhere inside the store. Which meant, most likely, they were either coming from actual tablets, or being leeched out of anything which had what was needed. I hadn't focused the intent to this level, so didn’t know what was happening. Although over time though, the med store did take on a certain reputation for some meds not working properly. I wonder why?
I could have just moved actual bottles from the store to my hand, but that would have been actual stealing. I was creating from what was available, not stealing. I even managed to convince myself.
I had a feeling I was too far away to do it now, especially with a full on migraine. I concentrated on just a tablet, and just using what was within this room, and it materialized in my hand. I took it immediately, and waited to see if it had the right effect.
One of the downsides of creating something you actually eat, is the only way to be sure about it, is to eat it. Consequently, this is not recommended for all but experienced magic creators. But needs drive, and I was my own guinea pig. Getting it wrong, could kill you. But I'd done this enough times, I was either going to get a tablet which worked, or more likely, not get one at all. It worked.
As the pain receded, I created a whole bottle. And with nothing to put it in, I made a new backpack as well. I’d done several over the previous two years, so this one was easy.
Head feeling much better, I took myself back to bed.
As sleep was coming on, I idly wondered what had happened to the backpack I’d left behind, and what people had thought about me disappearing without it.
Six
Weeks went by.
I found a routine which worked. Eating, sleeping, gazing at the stars, and practicing magic. Not necessarily in that order.
The food was filling, if mostly the same. If there was a breakfast menu, I never found it. Sleep was easy, as was staying clean. The ship seemed to have unlimited water, but perhaps one person wasn’t stressing the system very much.
I spent long hours gazing out the various windows. In my early teen years, I’d done a lot of stargazing, but during the last two, there hadn't been much to see. Too much light in a city. Now though, I saw the galaxy in its wondrous majesty, and I couldn’t get enough of it.
There was however an urgency to figuring out how to survive getting wherever the ship was going. I'd go to bed with the intent of waking the moment any ship came close, something docked, or the ship docked. My worst nightmare was being woken up by slavers, and marched into a cell. Or the same cell, only by police. I had both nightmares, but they turned out not to be real.
Magic is like anything. The more you practice, the better at it you get. Also the more you do, and the more you stretch your limits, the stronger you become. Within the limits of your power of course. My training had been cut short, so the one thing I didn’t know was how much power I really had. After choosing, it was one of the things you normally found out. Masters liked to know such things, even if it left the student exhausted for a week. So, me, clueless. Or put it another way, I'd need to find out the hard way. When something I tried to do failed dismally.
Although, the fact I had the last five yes votes, showed to some extend my potential power. No-one had multiples in the last lot without more than normal power. And let's face it, I'd jumped through time, and even with a power assist from others, I couldn’t have done it if I didn’t have a lot of it.
The ship needed cleaning, so I cleaned it. Magically. Dust, dirt, grime, marks, debris, all vanished section by section, at first in small amounts, but over the weeks, in bigger and bigger amounts, until the final room cleared with one application of intent.
An interesting side effect of doing so much work, was my migraines decreased in intensity. As soon as I stopped, they went back to normal. Interesting, if not particularly useful. Once I tried to make something really complicated, on the theory doing so might actually cure my migraine, but it only made it worse. More pondering required. Part of said pondering suggested a key part or material wasn’t on the ship, and the stress of trying to create the uncreatable, had the reverse of the desired effect. Pondering also scared me to death, when I realized if I tried to create something, and hull material was used to do it, I might find myself with a hull breach, and die shortly after.
So I limited my magic to doing things, rather than creating things. The most obvious were strengthening shields, and practicing being invisible. For the first, I found one of the ray guns, played around with settings until I found which did which, again without danger to the hull, and in the process put some nice big holes in walls. These were quickly patched, and although I wondered where the material came for, I never found where. I practiced shielding, and aiming the gun at my shield, but in such a way it wouldn’t hit my body. All the same, I received several nasty burns, and had to spend time doing healing work on myself. Burns were easy though. The first weeks of healing magic had you spend time with the smithies, who always managed to burn themselves. Good healers were well received by them.
Eventually I was confident even the highest strength setting on the gun would bounce off my shields, and would do so, even if I didn’t know the pulse was coming at me. Of course, I wouldn’t know for sure, until one hit home by surprise, but I thought I had the shielding set right. I continued to practice it every day.
I'd never been truly alone before, and the silence on the ship was at first quite daunting. Village life allowed you a few stolen hours alone, but there was always sisters, cousins, adults, and classes to intrude on good honest alone time. In the home, solitude was harder to find. Too many kids in too little space. Making alone time became a challenge.
But actually being alone for weeks on end? It had never happened to me before. I had to learn new skills. When your life is full of people, and suddenly there are none, and dead bodies don't count, you're suddenly confronted with yourself as your only companion. It's times like these when you discover if you truly like your own company or not, and I found I wasn’t all that happy with mine.
Who are you really? It only takes a few days before solitude raises such a simple question. But it’s a very difficult one to answer. Easier perhaps when asked later in life, but I sincerely hoped I was still early on in mine. I knew what I could do. I knew what I’d done, a lot of which had landed me in a lot of trouble. I'd watched the other kids, wondered at how they did some things so easily, and wondered why they found other things so hard.
And magic. I'd rediscovered it, but in doing so, had set myself apart. Girls looked at me strangely, and I didn’t see in their faces what I saw when they looked at other boys. I wasn’t sure what it was, just they didn't feel the same way about me.
And then I was alone. Just me to talk to. Just me to fill in the silence. Not that I tried to all the time, since stargazing really doesn’t need words.
It took time, but I learned to be alone, to like it, and find it comfortable.
And suddenly, being alone ended.
Seven
I awoke abruptly.
Th
e internal alarm told me something had changed. When my feet hit the deck, I could feel the absence of the slight vibration which indicated the engines were on. So the ship had stopped.
I dressed hurriedly, drew my backpack on, and headed for the bridge. I'd added water to my pack in case I needed to hide out somewhere for a while, but I hadn't been able to add food. However they made food for ships, it didn’t last if you failed to eat it, and it wasn’t edible if you didn’t cook it first. Eating might be a challenge in the near future, but for now, avoiding trouble was my main aim.
Before reaching the bridge, I slid a shield around myself, and added invisibility. My other alarm for someone having come onboard, hadn't activated yet, but I was taking no chances. The bridge was empty, but the view outside was not.
Nearby, a small ship was moving towards. In the distance though, what I assumed was a space station caught my attention, and held it. It was huge, and far away. But it was also close by. Getting my head around the contradiction was interrupted by the ship passing out of my view range, and shortly after, metal on metal sounds, which I assumed were docking noises. The alarm went off in my head shortly after.
I left the bridge immediately, since anyone who came through, would presumably be coming here first, and there was not anywhere there to safely remain concealed. Even if you couldn’t be seen, you could still be bumped into, or stepped on.
There were two sets of boot falls coming towards me, and I headed away from them, taking the long way to the airlock. Exclamations of surprise echoed through the ship. The boot falls split up.
The airlock was open, and I walked into what seemed to be the main cabin of a small ship. No-one was there, and I peeked into both the front area, where I assumed a pilot would sit, and with no-one there either, peeked into the rear area. I saw plenty of equipment I knew nothing about, monitors displaying stuff I didn’t understand, and again, no-one else.
Yesterday's Spacemage Page 3
