Starship's Mage: Episode 4

by Glynn Stewart

  The second transfer of cargo went as smoothly as the first, and the third as well. As the six shuttles headed back towards the Jay, Captain Seule opened communications again.

  “I think my shuttles can grab the last two containers,” he told Captain Rice. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with a competent crew, Captain Rice. If we’re ever together in more civilized space, look me up. I think I owe you dinner.”

  “I’ll take you up on that,” Rice replied. “For now, I think we’d both like to be a long way away from this place. It gives me the creeps.”

  “I hear you,” Seule replied with a laugh.

  The last two containers were loaded onto the shuttles. They then paused, orbiting the Blue Jay for a few moments as the asteroid Damien had picked up on passed through the space between the two ships.

  “That’s strange,” the senior Luciole pilot, a gruff-faced man named, of all things, Vera, said over the channel. “I’m getting an energy reflection off that rock.”

  Damien took a look at the rock on the scanners and blinked. It wasn’t a reflection – all along the dead rock, fusion thrusters were blasting to life.

  Without thinking, he grabbed the Jay’s Simulacrum and merged with the ship. The power of the amplifier, the runes woven throughout the ship, sank into him and he breathed out, focusing his gaze on the asteroid as the ships that had been hiding on the asteroid.

  He didn’t recognize them – they were small and narrow, almost missile shaped but significantly larger. Before he could say more, though, all fifteen of them fired off main engines – and blasted for the Blue Jay at eight gravities.

  “Boarding torpedoes!” David shouted, and Damien finally recognized the threat.

  He had only seconds before the tiny attack ships reached the Blue Jay, but he was linked into the amplifier. Time slowed as he shifted his consciousness into the runes, slowing reality just enough to let him channel his magic.

  A whip of fire, the deadly close-range attack spell he’d been practicing from the Enforcer manuals, appeared in deep space and slashed across the ships. His magic and the deadly fire danced from torpedo to torpedo, shattering hulls, detonating engines – and ending lives. He didn’t know how many men each of the fifteen boarding torpedoes carried. Even one might carry enough men to take the Blue Jay if he let them board.

  The last boarding torpedo died a hundred and twenty meters from the hull of the Jay, as Damien unleashed the fury of a fully functioning amplifier on his ship’s enemies.

  #

  “What the fuck?” Seule exclaimed over the comms channel.

  “Those were boarding torpedoes, old Navy issue,” David said grimly. “Someone was trying to sneak up on us – if Damien hadn’t been practicing, I think at least some would have made it through.”

  Unlike his Mage, David knew that each of those torpedoes was rated to carry eighteen soldiers, and that Damien had probably just killed almost three hundred people.

  “I meant, what the fuck did your ship just do?!”

  “You’re alive, Captain Seule,” Rice told him flatly. “I suggest you stop asking questions you don’t want to know the answer to and collect your shuttles.”

  The red-shirted man on the other ship threw up his hands.

  “Fine, keep your secrets Captain – they ain’t no business of mine, you’re right,” he told Rice. “But what the hell gets someone to launch that kind of op to try and catch you?”

  “Money and revenge,” Rice said grimly. “We hurt a bounty hunter bad a few weeks back – if he could find us, he’d throw that at us.”

  He didn’t need to explain the value of the Jay’s amplifier. If the other man guessed what Damien had just done, he could guess why the Syndicate would want David’s ship.

  Seule sighed.

  “Listen, Captain – you need to get out of everyone’s sight it seems,” he told Rice. “Head to Darkport – you should be able to bury yourself in the mess there, maybe upgrade your ship and find some extra cargo to take wherever you’re going.”

  “Darkport is a myth,” David pointed out. Rumor mentioned a place by that name – an asteroid complex in an otherwise uninhabited system, where no authority ran. Amber was Libertarian – but Darkport was an anarchic hellhole, if it even existed.

  “It exists,” Seule told him. “More importantly for your little problem, it’s a neutral zone for bounty hunters – if they try and claim a bounty on the station, they’re banned for life. Assuming they survive to leave at all.”

  “Sounds like somewhere we could begin to recharge,” David admitted. “But since I didn’t even believe it existed, I don’t have the co-ordinates.”

  “Sending them over,” Seule told him with a grin. “Tell ‘em Seule sent you, that’ll get you a docking berth if nothing more.”

  “David, the Graveyard!” Jenna suddenly interrupted, shouting and pointing at the screen in a moment of panic.

  Graveyard Station was just over eight light seconds from where they’d rendezvoused – almost two and a half million kilometers. Emerging over the shadow of the stations massive, sensor-blocking bulk was the characteristic white flare of antimatter thrusters.

  A familiar looking jump yacht came around the alien station, the same ovoid vessel that had picked up the shuttles from the failed boarding attempt in Chrysanthemum. This time, however, the other ship clearly wasn’t planning on running. As soon as the bounty hunter ship was clear of her cover, she opened fire.

  Whatever the ship had originally been built as, she’d clearly been heavily upgraded since. No less than twelve missiles shot forward from the front of the ‘yacht,’ already carrying a significant velocity before more antimatter thrusters flickered into existence.

  These weren’t the normal, dirt-cheap, fusion thruster rockets of an ordinary pirate. The missiles blazing towards the Blue Jay were the missiles the Martian Navy had used during David’s own service twenty years before – and would cross the eight light-second gap in under three minutes.

  “Clear the RFLAMs,” he ordered Jenna. “Get us a course directly away from that asshole. Damien – the RFLAMs are not rated for military grade missiles. Can you do what you did to the boarding torps?”

  Damien lifted his gaze to meet David’s through the camera, and the Captain was shocked to see that the youth’s eyes were bloodshot and exhausted, like he’d just finished an all-night bender.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered, barely loud enough for David to hear. “I don’t think I’m strong enough.”

  “Do what you can,” David told him. “You’ve already saved us all once today.”

  The young man nodded slowly, and returned his hands to the silver miniature of the Blue Jay.

  David returned his own gaze to the sensors showing the space around him. Acceleration was pressing him back into his chair now, as Jenna pointed his freighter away from the pursuing bounty hunter. The Blue Jay’s three gravities of emergency acceleration was nothing compared to the pursuing missiles.

  “Entering laser range,” Jenna said grimly, her fingers dancing across her console as she opened fire. The ship’s computer superimposed the invisible laser beams on their screen, and a pair of missiles disappeared as she scored direct hits.

  Then the entire region of space around the missiles dissolved into gray static on the screen as the missiles, real military weapons, engaged their electronic counter measures and turned the Blue Jay’s sensor beams to hash.

  “I can’t get a bead,” Jenna exclaimed. “I can’t even estimate time to impact.”

  David hit a button on his controls that took over direct control of the turrets from her, and then brought up a program he’d ‘borrowed’ from the Martian Navy years before. The turrets started to fire again, sweeping cuts designed to try and cover as much space as possible.

  He glanced at the link to Damien. The Mage could see slightly better through the Jay’s sensors than they could. What the laser pattern missed, the Mage might be able to stop – but David wasn’t sure
he’d like the price.

  The static cloud of the missiles grew ever closer to the Blue Jay. There was a flash that might have been the lasers hitting a missile. A couple more. Even in the best case, he couldn’t stop the remaining missiles before they reached his ship.

  For a long moment, David Rice knew, once again, that he and his crew were going to die.

  Then an immense explosion erupted in space where the missiles had been. Antimatter flared and died as dozens of sub-munitions swept through the bounty hunters salvo. The static flashed and disappeared, revealing a single surviving missile, still running desperately towards the Blue Jay.

  The Luciole swept past it, a military grade missile defense turret swatting it from space contemptuously as her own missile launchers spat fire back at the bounty hunter, and the image of Captain Seule appeared on Rice’s screen.

  “I was starting to feel hurt that everybody had forgot us,” he said cheerfully. “Get out of here, Captain. I aim to teach a lesson here - one that fils a putain de lignage déloyal won’t forget!”

  #

  “Do you have the co-ordinates Seule sent us?” David asked over the bridge link as Damien gently massaged his temples.

  “I’ve got them,” he replied, slowly. “I’ll need at least an hour to run the calculations and recover from the attack before I can jump.”

  On his screens, Damien watched the running battle between the Luciole and the bounty hunter. Recognizing the greater immediate threat, the bounty hunter had launched a second salvo of missiles at the blockade runner – which had responded by demonstrating that it mounted four military grade battle-lasers concealed under its radiation cap.

  They’d scored at least one hit, and then the bounty hunter ship had turned and run. Blazing away at a full ten gravities – the ship had to have magical gravity – the bounty hunter had ducked behind Graveyard Station even as Seule had used a second multi-warhead missile to wipe away the missiles aimed at his ship.

  Then Damien felt the strange, almost indescribable to a non-Mage, sensation of a nearby jump. The hunter was gone.

  Resting his head in his hands against the Blue Jay’s own acceleration, he checked that his computer was running the new jump details for the first jump of their course to Darkport. A glance at the co-ordinates themselves revealed why Seule had suggested they head to the outlaw port. Darkport was in a system less than ten light years from Excelsior.

  That system was supposedly completely uninhabited. It had no habitable worlds, and lacked the extra appeal of multiple exposed planetary cores that had brought a dedicated mining operation to Excelsior. It held just a single gas giant, a sparse asteroid belt, and a couple of heat-seared rock balls orbiting a bloated and radiation-spewing giant red star.

  Seule’s ship was quickly lost in the debris field of the Lagrange point as the Blue Jay flew outwards, towards the spaces clear of debris that Damien could jump from. He needed the time to recover from defending the ship against the first attack more than anything else.

  He wondered how many people he’d just killed. He knew nothing about boarding torpedoes, and he knew that looking them up right now was probably a bad idea. His defense had cut so close that he suspected if he hadn’t been spending his time studying the more advanced Enforcer combat spells he wouldn’t have been able to stop them all.

  If someone had been judging what a Mage with Damien’s formal training and an amplifier could do, and based their attack plan on that… they’d planned exceedingly well. He would have failed, and his friends would have been captured or killed.

  The spell had taken a lot out of him though. Not as much as a jump – he would be ready to jump before the calculations were complete – but more than any defense spell he’d known before. He couldn’t repeat that kind of attack.

  Sighing, Damien starting reviewing the complete parts of his jump calculation. Stopping the boarding torpedoes had proven one thing to him – he wasn’t strong enough. An Enforcer or a Navy Mage would have been able to do what he did and then carry on and take out the missiles too. A Navy Mage might be better trained for it, but a lot of it was also sheer power.

  If they ever had to face a true warship, with a functioning amplifier and trained Navy Mages, there was nothing Damien would be able to do to save the Blue Jay.

  #

  Deep space jump layovers were the safest place Damien knew of. Exhausted and battered from defending the ship and jumping, he passed out almost as soon as he made it back to his quarters. He barely registered Kelly joining him several hours later, waking up barely enough to shift over for the engineer to join him.

  They were both violently awoken by a sudden burst of emergency acceleration that threw them from the bed as the clanging acceleration alarm began to ring throughout the ship.

  Damien, half-naked, stumbled to his intercom and triggered it.

  “What’s happening?” he demanded.

  “The hunter is here,” Jenna told him. “Get to the Simulacrum Chamber – fuck he just launched missiles.”

  Damien was already moving by the time the XO had stopped swearing. He didn’t even bother with a shirt, directing his personal field of gravity to sling him out of his quarters and along the corridor of Rib Four. Whatever damage Seule’s Luciole had done to the bounty hunter’s ship clearly hadn’t been enough.

  In the back of his mind, he was counting seconds as he charged through the ship. Everyone else aboard was crushed to the side by the three gravities of acceleration, but he burned magic recklessly to pull himself through the ship.

  With thirty seconds to spare, he saw the Simulacrum Chamber at the end of the hallway. Breathing deeply, he kicked off and added his magic to the three gravities of acceleration the Blue Jay was pulling. A flick of power popped the door open before he hit it, and then he was in the Chamber, heading for the Simulacrum and the platform under it for when the ship was under acceleration.

  He missed the Simulacrum.

  His right leg hit the platform and snapped, the heart-wrenching noise echoing through the oval chamber at the heart of the ship as the pain slammed into him.

  Damien didn’t check to see where the missiles were. He didn’t look to see how close he’d cut it. He somehow drove the pain down, and slapped his bare palms onto the silver Simulacrum.

  He looked up to see the missiles screaming towards him, in final acquisition, and jumped.

  #

  He realized when he woke up in the ship’s infirmary that he’d passed out from the pain. His leg was numb and stiff, and when Damien glanced downwards, he saw it was wrapped in the dark blue extruded plastic casts that the ships auto-doc robot applied to broken limbs.

  Standing next to him, putting away a hypodermic, was Jenna. Kelly hovered behind her, he realized, and David was on the intercom screen from the bridge.

  “The auto-doc is screaming at me that this is irresponsible and dangerous,” Jenna said quietly, “but we needed you awake. We jumped an hour ago – about five seconds before those missiles were about to split all four Ribs in half.”

  “Split the Ribs?” Damien asked, blinking away the fuzz as the amphetamine the XO had injected him with began to course through his bloodstream.

  “Yeah – the missiles had split into four groups and were making kinetic attack runs on the ribs,” Jenna explained. “Given their velocity, they’d have snapped the ribs in half but left the keel intact. I have no idea why.”

  Damien winced at her use of the word ‘snapped,’ then paused as he thought about it.

  “If they severed the Ribs, it would break the amplifier matrix,” he said quietly. “The matrix might work with one of the Ribs broken – two would be a stretch, and I wouldn’t want to even touch the Simulacrum if we’d lost three or four.”

  “He was trying to cripple us, so we couldn’t run or fight,” David said grimly from the intercom. “That makes sense, even if I have no idea how he found us.”

  “It’s supposedly sort of possible to make out a vector in an outgoing
jump flare,” Damien said quietly. “You need really good sensors to even start to get a ghost, and supposedly you can’t narrow it down more than twenty or thirty degree arc.”

  “I’m guessing this prick is a bit better than that,” Jenna said drily.

  Kelly snuck up next to Damien’s bed and took his hand. He gave her a pained grin, and then turned back to the Captain and XO.

  “Any sign of him yet?”

  “Nothing,” David told them. “But if he could follow us from the Graveyard…”

  “He can follow us again,” Damien agreed, sighing and wincing as the motion moved his leg. “My guess is that he’s got two Mages aboard, and is waiting until both can jump. That way, even if I pull a Kenneth and can jump away when he gets here, he can follow us. And with only one Mage aboard…”

  Everyone in the room winced at the mention of Kenneth McLaughlin, the Blue Jay’s previous Ship’s Mage who had died saving them from a pirate attack before they arrived at Damien’s home world of Sherwood.

  “What’s your guess?” David asked.

  “If I’ve been out an hour, maybe four hours,” Damien replied. “Given what they were prepared to sacrifice in that boarding attempt, I just bet they’re willing to risk a Mage jumping a little too early – that isn’t fatal. Just very painful.”

  “So what do we do?” Jenna said quietly. “Our turrets can’t stop military missiles. Damien can’t jump us away. Do we just sit here and die?”

  “If he’s following us, where will he jump in?” Kelly asked, interjecting herself into the conversation and squeezing Damien’s hand.

  “At a guess, he’ll try for about the same position as last time,” Damien replied. “They can probably jump the same exactly one light year as I can, so they’ll come out almost exactly where they were before relative to us.”