Yesterday's Spacemage

by Timothy Ellis

  "Yes, as far as the power source will let you. It’s the same with what I can do. The more complex you make it, the more energy it requires."

  She was already pressing buttons.

  "Use this. It’s a secondary power plant used by the container loading system. I hope it's enough."

  It was enough. I let go of the shields, and the indicators began to rise immediately. The generator wasn’t anything like as powerful, but I drew on it without any resistance, since it wasn’t being used for anything else.

  "Launch."

  I concentrated on the icon showing the missile, and shifted my awareness to the missile itself, going inside, seeking the wall, and vanishing it.

  The missile exploded.

  "Keep going!"

  There were twenty three more.

  Thirteen

  The last three hit us, but the shields held. The problem was it took me too long to do each, one at a time. And they were far enough apart, each explosion had no impact on the others.

  "Can you punch a hole in each ship?"

  "In theory. Where is softest?"

  "Bridge windows. Maybe the airlocks. They'll be looking to board us, so there'll be someone on the bridge, and someone at the main airlock."

  I cast my sight at the nearest ship, and observed the bridge windows. Inside, there were two figures. In doing so, I became aware of the ship's own shielding.

  I grinned.

  "Whatever you thought of, get it done before the next salvo launches."

  The main docking airlock was beneath the bridge. There were six people there.

  I gathered all the energy I could from the other ship's shields, and as if I was standing next to the hull, I punched twice. The ship staggered, debris came pouring out of the two holes, and it continued on its way, now off on a direction away from us.

  "Do it again, fast."

  I did it again, fast. And a third time. The last ship launched its missiles a second time, but these were easy for me to deal with.

  "Show me how to turn the engines off," I asked her.

  "How much of the bridges are left?"

  "Not a lot of actual damage, but I can't tell if the controls still work."

  Schematics came up. She pointed at a control panel.

  "That bank of switches in the engine room. Turning them off will shut down main power. Why do you want to?"

  I grinned at her.

  "Aren't they pirates?"

  "Yes. What has that to do with it?"

  "How would you like their firepower? And their engines?"

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  I didn’t answer her immediately, but took a few moments toggling switches. All three ships stopped accelerating, and remained ballistic.

  I looked at her.

  "This ship has no defenses. Right?"

  "Right."

  "It's a standard sort of trader ship?"

  "Yes."

  "You could never afford to upgrade it?"

  "I was working on that."

  "So we have three perfectly good ships out there. Why don’t we take them, and use them to upgrade?"

  "You're crazy!"

  "No I'm not. Admittedly I know nothing about ships at all, but I should be able to position the ships against your hull wherever you want them put, and join all four in a way they could be made to work together."

  She thought about it. And sighed.

  "Damn it. I didn’t want any of this. But you're right. It's too good an opportunity to pass up. What do you need?"

  "Something which shows me where to place each ship. Step one is mount them in the right place. If you can show me where, I think I can make them secure."

  "And step two?"

  "Will be up to you. I can probably put the holes to connect things in, given time, but only you can connect the systems of the ships together."

  "I could probably jury rig something to fire the missiles. But anything else is beyond me."

  "Do you know anyone who could help?"

  "Yes."

  She went silent, and her face went hard.

  "Who?"

  "Not now. Let's get these prizes, and work out how to do the next steps later. How close do you need to be?"

  "No idea. Closer the better?"

  "Figures. Well we have one thing going for us at the moment."

  "What?"

  "These three were obviously the only armed ships docked here. Nothing else is coming after us. At least for now. Shut up, and let me work."

  I sat there, using my sight to examine the three ships. They were almost identical, a lot of the differences now determined by how I’d damaged each one. There was no life on any of them now, and no air. For the time it took, and to see if I could, I patched the holes.

  By the time we'd matched course and speed with the nearest ship, she had a diagram on a screen showing how she'd mount the three ships on her own. The result was going to almost double the mass of her ship, and I could see she'd tried hard to keep the engines aligned, and all the missile turrets free to fire.

  "Drop the shields."

  She did so.

  I summoned all the energy I could from my remaining generator, wondering if turning off the power on the ships had been a good idea or not. I reached out as if to grab the ship in my hand, and gently pulled it towards us. It moved, but not enough, and with not enough control.

  "Careful!" she yelled at me. "We can't take a collision. Kiss it onto us, or don’t do it."

  I didn’t have enough power for the control I needed. I searched around for more, and found the shield generator. The power there was hardly being used, and I focused on what it was doing. Ahead of the ship was a minor shield, designed to stop anything from hitting the hull as the ship moved forward. I carefully left enough energy to power it, but used everything else the generator had.

  My energy hand carefully moved the ship into position over our hull, and brought it down, until the two hulls were almost touching. Instead of allowing them to touch, I imagined the two hulls forming a single one, and it was done. A wave of fatigue rolled over me, but I ignored it.

  I grinned at her. She gave me a look back which suggested I was some sort of alien. Maybe I was.

  Twice more we did this, matching course and speed, me moving the ship close in, and merging hulls. The second one had me reeling after the hull merge, but I recovered a bit while we closed on the third.

  The last hull merge went as well as the previous two, with one exception.

  I passed out.

  Fourteen

  I woke up on a bed. I was desperate to use the facilities, my head was throbbing badly, and I had no idea where I was.

  First things first. The bathroom was en-suite. It was clean, had towels and soap set up, and I took the opportunity to relieve myself, and then shower. I sniffed my clothes before putting them back on, and they seemed ok. But I'd need to do something about changes in the near future.

  My backpack was on a desk in a corner of the bedroom, my pad sitting next to it. I thumbed it on, and a ship layout became visible. I was apparently in the third stateroom, which predictably was the smallest. The ship apparently only needed a crew of three, most of it being either engines, and what they needed, or cargo space.

  There was one bottle of water left in my pack, so I opened it, and emptied half of it in one go. Carrying the bottle, I stepped out the door, and the pad directed me a short way to the kitchen.

  She looked up as I entered. There was food for two on the table, so I sat at the other position. The dress was gone, and in its place was black leather, with a blood red shirt under the jacket.

  "Ship told me you were in the shower," she said.

  "How long was I asleep?"

  "About thirty hours."

  I looked at her stunned for a moment.

  "You put me to bed?"

  "Hell no. I had the cleaner bots do it. Fortunately all my stuff was in the pallets you liberated, so we had sheets and everything, but the
bots just dumped you on top of the bed."

  She indicated the food, and resumed her own eating. I started in on what was a very tasty, something.

  "Where are we?" I asked.

  "Hiding inside the rings of one of the outer gas giants. You did a good job of joining the ships, but until we get them cross connected, the ship is unbalanced. I've had the repair bots cutting holes and running cables. Job should be done shortly, and then we should be able to fly a lot faster, not to mention a lot more stable. In the meantime, I had the pallets unpacked, and things put back where they're supposed to be. Hence, food."

  "Did you get some sleep yourself?"

  "I've had two six hour naps during your thirty. Is sleeping that long normal for you?"

  It suddenly occurred to me why my head was throbbing. I’d missed a tablet. I concentrated for a moment, the bottle of tablets appeared in front of me, I shook a tablet out, washed it down, and moved the bottle back to my backpack.

  "How the hell do you do that?" she demanded.

  I looked at her, and waggled my eyebrows at her. Her frown deepened.

  "Magic."

  She opened her mouth to bullshit me, but closed it again.

  "Seriously?"

  "Yes."

  "Wow. I didn't think there was any such thing."

  "There isn’t."

  Her eyes narrowed at me.

  "There isn’t now," I corrected. "I'm not from here."

  "Where from?"

  "It's a long story."

  "We have time. But before you start, we better properly introduce ourselves. I'm Jenna."

  "Thorn."

  "Just Thorn?"

  "Just Jenna?"

  "Quite. Okay Thorn, how the hell did you do all that shit?"

  "The short version goes like this. I was born way in the past, and I don’t know how far back, when magic was relatively common, and the idea of flying among the stars would have had you locked up as being a lunatic. I tested out as good at most things, including the military and magic. But before I had more than basic training at anything, I was forced to flee. In getting away using magic, there was too much energy hitting me, and I found myself in this time instead."

  "So you’re an untrained natural talent?"

  "You could put it that way. Enough training to know how to think things out, and try them. I wanted to be a Battle Mage, but never had the training."

  "I’d call you a battle mage now, after what you did. You never had training for any of that?"

  "The whole concept of space ships and missiles wasn’t even a rational thought process where and when I was born. But it seems in moving to technology, we lost our magic. It took me a year to get it back after the jump, and I'm still figuring things out."

  "Well I'm glad you did. How do you get to the station?"

  "Same way you did I suspect. I made a mistake trying something out, and was captured by a slaver. He knocked me out somehow by shooting me, and I woke up on a ship. They'd already killed someone, and I accidentally killed them trying to keep them from killing me. The ship was set to come here, and since I know nothing at all about ships, all I could do was wait until it got somewhere. After weeks, it docked at the station, and I snuck off. I was just in the process of working out this new place, when I quite literally bumped into someone in the string you were on, and saw you."

  "And you figured I’d be grateful if you saved me?"

  "At first I wasn’t thinking. I was following some sort of guidance to start with. When I found out you were a pilot, it made sense to try. I was hoping to buy you. But we both know how that went."

  "Where did… No, don’t tell me. I assume you have funds now, which didn’t get spent?"

  "Ah, yeah."

  "Well I thank you for rescuing me, but we need to get some things straight."

  "Such as?"

  "This is my ship. I'm the owner and the captain. At best, you're temporary crew. I call the shots. You do what I tell you to."

  "Technically I could make a claim to owning a bit less than half the mass now. That would make us partners."

  "Fuck!"

  I grinned at her. She didn't grin back.

  "No. The ship is mine, but actions and mass cuts you some slack. I'll want more magic from you in the future, but I won't ask you to do menial ship work. Deal?"

  "Deal."

  "Don't ever touch me. There isn’t going to be any thank you for saving me sex, so don’t even think about it. I owe you bigtime, and as I said, I'll pay up appropriately. But we are not friends, not lovers, and if you’re not actually crew, you're also not a passenger either."

  She stopped, and looked at me.

  "What do you want?"

  "Take me home."

  "Where is it?"

  "Well, that is the problem. I don’t know. It's two weeks travel from the station."

  She sighed.

  "Could be anywhere then. Fine, I'll take you home. When we figure out where it is. In the meantime, your primary task is keeping us from being captured by slavers again."

  "I can do that. But we need to work on a power source for me, if I'm going to do anything like any of that again."

  "Which brings me to our first mission."

  "Mission?"

  "We need to rescue my engineer. I can't integrate four ships. I'm a pilot. We need someone with actual shipbuilding skills. We need my engineer."

  "Can I assume he was sold at the same auction as you were?"

  "Yes, she was."

  Fifteen

  Whoever thought of bolting four different ships together to make one bigger one, obviously knew nothing about space ships.

  Oh yeah, that was me.

  I spent the next few hours turning hull joins into hatchways, and adding stairs so you could climb from the main ship into each of the new ones. Fortunately, the gravity was aligned the same way, or it would have been dangerous moving between them.

  I also made proper airtight cross junctions for all the wiring going both ways. By the time I was finished, each of the weapons systems could be used from the main bridge, and two of the three other ships could add their engine power.

  The third ship was the middle one, and for the time being, I was going to use it solely to power my magic. The bots cleaned out the main cabin, and I moved in there. The idea was, I used that ship as home, so as not to get in Jenna's way.

  She gave me a quick course in basic ship functions. Turning on and off lights for example, and what a few of the displays on the bridge meant. I was almost as clueless when she finished as when she started, but I wasn’t going to tell her.

  The hardest change for her to make, was linking the two bridges, so she could pop up information on my screens when I needed it. She'd tried hard to show me how to access it myself, but she could see my eye's glazing over. In the end, she ran a link line from her secondary screen to my main screen, so what she showed me wouldn’t interrupt her flying the ship.

  I was tempted to ask her why I was being banished, but the more I thought about it, the more I really didn’t want to get an answer just yet.

  I also wasn’t asking about the no saved-me-sex comment. On the one hand, I was annoyed she felt the need to go there, obviously thinking it was my primary motivation. Aside from the pretty girl thing, sex hadn't entered my mind at all, let alone as a motivation. And on the other hand, having it out in the open now, I was also annoyed it wasn’t going to happen. Go figure.

  With the ship flyable, and we hoped fightable, Jenna brought us out of our hiding place, and headed once more out-system. We'd lost nearly two days, and this was both good and bad. The good was being unpredictable. The bad was not being out of the system before the pirates could mount a blockade, and in Jenna's engineer being so much further away from us.

  Banished to my own little world, I sat my bridge, watching our progress, practicing accessing the ships available energy reserves, and trying to come up with ideas for getting us past the next obstacle.

  Jenna had painted a
picture of the ship threading a needle, being shot at by who knows how many ships. She explained the needle thing to me, but I still didn’t understand it. Space was big. Why you needed to do needle work, was quite beyond me.

  Info popped up on the main screen, showing me ships in the distance. Six of them, and all at the same place.

  "We need to go through the middle of them," Jenna said over the com link. "Can you make us invisible, without compromising our shields?"

  "I can try. When do you want it?"

  "Now. Any chance you can deactivate our ship ID as well?"

  "Why?"

  "They can see our ship ID now. Ship ID but no visible ship, isn’t likely to fool them long, especially since you already used this back on the station." There was a pause. "And we need to disable the other three as well. At the moment we're appearing to be a small fleet very close together. That’s not good, especially since three of them are pirate."

  "Show me the specification for the ID."

  It popped onto the screen. I looked at it for a moment.

  "Should be just a matter of pulling out the central chip. Why can't you do it?"

  "Because it's embedded in the central beam, which braces the hull. No-one can get to the ship ID."

  "Ah. Ok."

  I concentrated for a moment, and the chip dropped into my hand.

  "How's that?"

  There was a silence. I wondered what her face was doing.

  "Whatever you did, did it. Do the other three. I hope you didn't break it?"

  "Oh, now you tell me."

  I ginned, which she couldn’t see, and listened to her swearing.

  "Is it important?" I went on.

  "Yes. Without one, honest systems treat you like a pirate."

  "So when we're not hiding, it needs to be on?"

  "Yes."

  "Fine, tell me when."

  There was another silence, during which I pulled the other three chips. I enclosed each one in a small box, with the ship of origin labeled on it. I did the same for Jenna's. The last thing she'd be wanting was me getting them mixed up when the time came for hers to go back in.

  "You didn't break it, did you?"

  "No. The chip is in my hand, in a small box to keep it safe. I can put it back anytime you want."