“Where is my son?” he demanded.
“In the morgue of the destroyer Guardian of Honor,” David told him quietly. “We didn’t have the facilities to properly preserve his body.” Or the spare manpower to clean up the awful mess Kenneth had left of himself, but the medical team the Guardian had sent over had taken care of that too.
“What the hell did you do?” McLaughlin snarled. “I sent my son with you so he’d stay safe, not so you’d get him killed!”
“Kenneth saved our lives,” David told him. “We were ambushed by pirates – he jumped early, saving everyone else aboard.”
“Pirates don’t find ships at random anymore. What the hell are you involved in Rice?” the Mage-Governor demanded.
“Your son died a hero,” the captain repeated, his voice even quieter. “I have no idea how the pirates found us.”
“Heroes happen when other people fuck up,” the McLaughlin said sharply. “You won’t be dragging any more children of Sherwood into your disaster, Rice. Get out of my system.”
The connection terminated, and Rice stared at the screen wordlessly, glad none of his crew had been on the bridge. Getting out of Sherwood wasn’t an option, not with no Mage and the damage the Blue Jay had taken. Staying in the McLaughlin’s system after he’d told you to get out wasn’t wise, though.
Before he could begin to come up with a plan the communicator announced the second call he’d been expecting – this one from his insurance company.
With a sigh, he opened the channel.
#
The medallion of a Mage opened a lot of doors – even for an unemployed Mage like Damien. When he’d heard that a new freighter was coming in, he’d made his way down to Sherwood Prime’s zero-gravity hub. His medallion had earned him a respectful nod from a security guard as he entered an observation lounge he’d normally be barred from.
There was a neatly marked and signed line between the zero-gravity hub and the luxury lounge. The signs warned Damien, so he was ready when his feet dropped sharply towards the ground when he crossed over the rune-inlaid carpet. Like so much else, artificial gravity could be created with magic, but runes like those woven into the carpet required recharging by a Mage at least once a week. Only warships, with their multiple Mage crews, would expend the resources to have gravity throughout the ship.
Damien reveled in the experience of full gravity for a moment as he made his way to the massive windows. Even the rotating rings only maintained about seven-tenths of a gravity, but this lounge was spelled to Sherwood’s nine-tenths. Weirdly, the slightly heavier weight he was bearing was… relaxing.
The lounge was quiet at this time, roughly midnight by the station’s clocks, which was likely part of why the gold medallion at the base of his throat had been enough to get him into the lounge unquestioned. Lounges like this were the only ones in the hub with tables and chairs, and he settled into one by the windows.
The windows were impressive. Normally, an ‘observation lounge,’ even on the hub, was just a set of viewscreens, but the Angelus Gravity Lounge had managed to get itself a place right on the edge of the station’s hull – and right above the main docking arms. The owners had then paid an astronomical sum of money to magically transform the complex ceramic and metal composite of said hull to be transparent.
Damien ordered a small coffee from the cute but tired waitress and settled in. From here, he could see the Gentle Rains of Summer at a far docking arm, having cargo containers slowly maneuvered into locking positions on the massive ship’s keel. Closer, a fast passenger liner, its sleek lines suggesting that it, like the Angelus Lounge, had magical gravity, rested at another docking arm.
Eight of the slender docks were visible from the cafe, half of the civilian docking arms on the Station. The other eight were on the other side of the hub of Sherwood Prime’s ever-rotating wheel. Of those sixteen docks, four were full. Sherwood wasn’t one of the Core systems around Sol and Mars, but it was a hub of interstellar trade by Midworlds standards, let alone the Fringe further out.
The distinctive star-white flare of an antimatter engine took Damien’s attention entirely away from the incredibly good coffee the waitress delivered. No civilian ship used an antimatter torch, and the young Mage stretched his eyes for what he knew had to be out there.
The Protectorate destroyer swum out of Sherwood’s corona like a swimmer from the surf, carefully short bursts from its rockets slowing it as it guided its charge home. An even pyramid, one hundred meters on a side, at this distance its hull was a smooth white, the weapons it bristled with invisible.
He was so shocked by his first sight of one the famous Martian ships that he almost missed what the ship was doing. Massive cables, only visible by the occasional glint of sunlight on them, linked the destroyer to a long and rounded container ship. Like the Gentle Rains of Summer, this ship had a long solid keel with four rotating ribs arrayed around the keel and cargo like an old egg-beater.
The ship was about a third of the size of the Gentle Rains, and even from several hundred meters distance, Damien could see someone had worked the freighter over hard. Scorch marks marred an already dirty gray hull, with the engine so battered the Mage wasn’t surprised that the ship had needed a tow.
From the looks of it, the freighter might need a Mage but, sadly, he didn’t think they were going to be hiring one anytime soon.
Wondering both at the sharp lines of the destroyer and the battered curves of the freighter, Damien sipped his coffee and watched the Blue Jay arrive at Sherwood.
#
A full day after finally easing the Blue Jay into the docking arms at Sherwood Prime David Rice found himself walking the ship with the insurance agent, a thin man in a cheap gray suit. The agent said very little as they walked the docking arm, viewing the exterior damage from the windows. He occasionally took a picture with his PC, and spent much of his time making notes on a keyboard only visible to him.
When they reached the entrance to the Blue Jay so they could survey the internal damage, they were interrupted by the agent’s PC buzzing,
“Excuse me, Captain Rice,” the man told David before stepping aside to answer the call. Only the occasional small exclamation was audible of the conversation, but when the man returned, his closed exterior was replaced with a wicked grin that belonged on a prank-pulling schoolboy, not an insurance agent of a company notorious for nickel and diming every claim they ever received.
“I’m pleased to inform you, Captain Rice, that my superiors have confirmed that the damage to your ship is covered under the piracy clause in your contract,” the agent told Rice. “As such, only half the usual deductible will apply as the damage is entirely beyond your control.”
“I thought that was what you were here to assess?” Rice asked, and the agent shook his head.
“I’m assessing the value of the damage,” the agent told him. “I have no authority on my own to confirm or deny your claim – the branch head retains direct control over all claims related to starship damages.”
“Ah,” Rice observed. “So if I may ask, what is the joke I’m missing?”
The agent’s smile faded slightly, but not completely. “Off the record, my manager is the worst I’ve ever met for rejecting claims on any grounds,” he admitted quietly. “But Mage-Captain Corr called the office and let us know that he and his crew would be perfectly willing to supply their professional analysis of your telemetry data if there was need to support the piracy claim – and then reminded him that the Guardian of Honor is slated to be on-station for the next two years, so they couldn’t even push it off until the ship left. It feels good to watch that tightwad get stuck in a corner.”
“I see,” Rice agreed, understanding at least part of the other man’s thoroughly unprofessional glee, and grateful for the Martian officer’s assistance. Without Mage-Captain Corr leaning on the insurance, it would have taken longer to get the claim cleared, and if they’d managed to declare it an accident, it would have doubled how
much of the repairs he had to pay for – a difference that would almost have bankrupted him.
“Shall we go see how much we have to fix then?” he asked the agent, gesturing back towards the ship.
#
The rest of the tour with the agent was much more pleasant than the exterior tour had been, as if the certain knowledge that he wasn’t going to be forced to screw the ship’s crew took a large weight off the man’s shoulders.
David was finally relaxed for the first time in days when he settled in at his desk to call the Ship’s Mages Guild to post for a new Ship’s Mage. The video screen on his desk showed the gold icon of the Guild, the same three stars that every Jump Mage wore carved onto the medallion at their throat and the Guild’s Latin motto: “Per Magica Ad Astra” – “Through Magic The Stars.”
The young woman who answered the call did not wear any such medallion – no one would waste a Mage on reception and booking duty. She did wear a fetching skirt and blouse combination in green and white that accented her black hair in a manner that reminded David it had been two years since his divorce.
“Sherwood Ship’s Mage’s Guild, Melanie speaking, how may I help you?” she chirped cheerfully.
“Good afternoon Melanie,” David greeted her calmly, refocusing his attention where it belonged. “I need to put up a posting for a Ship’s Mage position.”
Among its many roles and tasks, the Guild maintained the ‘job board’ on the System communication net. A ship’s captain could be fined for posting a Ship’s Mage role on a more general classified board, and none of the Jump-qualified Magi in a system would be looking for jobs anywhere else.
“Of course!” Melanie told him. “That will only take a few minutes. Do you have an account with the Sherwood office?”
Of all the wonders that magic had given humanity, one that the Magi hadn’t managed to pull off was any type of large-scale interstellar communications. A few facilities, massive monstrosities of runes and power, allowed a Mage to transmit their voice to a specially built, equally massive, receiver, but data transmission of any kind was impossible. It wouldn’t matter if David had accounts with every other Guild Office in the Protectorate, he would need an account for Sherwood.
“I do,” he told the girl. He’d hired Kenneth in Sherwood, though that hadn’t been through the Guild but through a favor to an acquaintance in the government. He reeled off the account number. “Captain David Rice, aboard the Blue Jay,” he concluded.
Melanie cheerfully started inputting data into a computer below the edge of the screen, and then stopped in confusion.
“I’m sorry Captain,” she said slowly. “I’ve never seen this before, but I have a note here that your ship is blacklisted and I can’t authorize any job postings or hiring contracts.”
The ground fell out from underneath David in a way the rapid rotation of the Blue Jay’s ribs to create gravity didn’t explain.
“I can put you through to a manager and you can try and sort out what it would take to get you un-blacklisted?” she offered, still fully in ‘help the customer’ mode. The girl didn’t realize what a system-wide hiring blackout meant to a man like David. The McLaughlin had just killed his ship.
“No,” he said faintly. “I will contact them later. Thank you Melanie,” he managed to squeeze out before cutting the connection, staring at the screen as it dropped back to an automatic rotation of the cameras around the docking bays, showing him the Blue Jay and the other ships in dock.
Miles James McLaughlin, it seemed, did not fuck around. When he’d said that David would drag no more of Sherwood’s Mages into his affairs, the Mage-Governor had clearly leaned on the system’s Guild to block him hiring any Mage in the system. Since David hadn’t committed any of the acts – lack of payment, for example – that would normally result in being blacklisted, he knew it wasn’t a Protectorate-wide blacklist. He could send a note on another ship to another system’s Guild, hire a Ship’s Mage sight unseen and ship them to Sherwood.
The risks and price tag of that option made him sick, and the shifting images on his screen weren’t helping. He touched the screen, freezing the picture on a single camera, and then stopped in thought.
Off to the side of the camera view he was watching was the Gentle Rains of Summer. Four times the Blue Jay’s size and capacity, the ship likely had more than one Mage aboard, and Andrew Michaels was an old friend of David’s.
Maybe they could work something out, at least to get the Blue Jay out of this ill-begotten system with its vengeful overlord.
#
With his rooms tucked away deep in the cheaper areas of Ring Seven, Damien didn’t think that anyone knew where he was staying – he certainly hadn’t given anyone the name of the cheap hotel or his room number, so when the buzzer for his door went off, he had a moment of panic.
Remembering after a second that he was paid up for a full week and it was unlikely to be the landlord, Damien opened his door. Waiting on him was the last person he expected: Grace McLaughlin, one of the two McLaughlin mages who’d beaten him out for the Gentle Rains’ junior Ship’s Mage slot… and his on-again, off-again lover from the Jump Mage program.
“Hi Damien,” she greeted him with a mischievous grin. “Hurry up and invite me in, this is one shitehole of a neighborhood you’ve picked to slum in.”
Damien was too surprised to do more than wordlessly step back and gesture her in. The petite redhead ducked under his gesturing arm and closed the door behind her, rapidly finding the room’s sole ragged couch and perching on it, eyeing him like a cat with a favorite toy.
“You know, I know you’re trying to save money, but would it kill you to have asked for a little help?” she asked him. “I don’t know what you’re paying, but I’m sure we could have found you somewhere nicer for about the same – the family always knows somebody.”
“It doesn’t work that way for most of us,” Damien told her quietly. He’d spent a lot of time around the various McLaughlin scions of his age, and continued to wonder at their view of the world. They weren’t arrogant, they were too driven to help and serve to be arrogant, but they knew that everyone on Sherwood would happily do them favors at the drop of a hat.
“It works that way for family,” Grace told him, locking her gaze on him. “And you went to school with six of us and Granddad likes you – you practically are family.”
Grace, as Damien had not found out until after he’d shared her bed, was the eldest daughter of the Governor’s eldest son. She was the only adult in the entire system that would refer to the McLaughlin as ‘Granddad.’ Damien wasn’t so sure the Governor liked him – he’d barely met the man after all.
“How did you even find me?” he asked finally. “It’s not like I even told your Captain where I was staying.”
“Casey,” Grace answered simply. “First rule of being shipboard – the Bosun can always find out what they want to know. I asked her, she sent me to Casey, who apparently lifted your address from your PC while he was saving your life. An incident, I’ll point out,” she said sharply, “that you didn’t mention to me, my sister, or my cousins.”
As usual when dealing with Grace, Damien was starting to be overwhelmed. He was never sure why the woman had picked him to be her lover, though he would never have dreamed of complaining. She ran at roughly twice his speed on a good day.
“Everyone involved is spending a very long time as guests of System Security,” Damien told her. “Beyond that, what was the point of telling anyone?”
Grace sighed loudly, and pushed Damien down onto the couch to hop into his lap, snuggling up against him in an extremely pleasant way.
“Because, you adorable dolt, we actually care and worry about you when we don’t hear a peep for weeks?” she told him. “To hear about you getting beaten up from the spacers on my new ship on top of that is not my idea of a good day.”
Damien hugged her back, not sure of what to say.
“I’m sorry about the Gentle Rains,” she con
tinued after a moment, her voice quieter. “I wasn’t expecting Mom to call in favors quite that heavily. If it helps, she promised to make sure the next Captain heard about you first.”
Arya McLaughlin was, as well as the daughter-in-law of the system governor, Head Administrator for Sherwood Prime. Her prodding ship captains about Damien couldn’t hurt him, but he felt uncomfortable at the thought of strings getting pulled on his behalf.
Before he expressed that thought aloud, however, Grace laughed, and kissed him.
“You, of course, have an even greater portion of pure Sherwood Scot stubbornness than any of the family,” she told him. “Which is a small, teensy, portion of why I’m spending my last night on the station here.”
“You leave tomorrow?” Damien asked, surprised.
“Yeah, we ship out at eleven hundred hours station time,” Grace told him. She sat up straight, remaining on his lap but creating some distance between them. “Which, given that I need to be on-ship two hours beforehand, means we only have about twelve hours. I’d better get business out of the way.”
“What business?”
She slid a tiny data disk out of her cleavage and dropped it on the side table.
“That’s from Captain Michaels,” she told him. “It’s the contact info for Captain David Rice on the Blue Jay – they’re the ship that came in damaged from a pirate attack a couple of days ago. Trick is, they lost their Mage on the way in – but for whatever reason, the Sherwood Guild has blacklisted them. Rice can’t post for a new Mage.”
“You mean…” Damien said slowly.
Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) Page 3
