One of the spells he knew, however, was explicitly intended for just this situation. It was draining, but it had a range of forty or so thousand kilometers. Normally, that was utterly useless, but here and now, he could take down a missile in its last six seconds or so of flight.
“Sixty seconds to impact,” Jenna announced. “RFLAMs engaging.”
The lasers were invisible on the visual screens that surrounded Damien, though they lit up the sensor feeds. Their results weren’t. One missile and then another disappeared in fireballs that were clearly visible in the zoomed in screen.
A third missile detonated, and then the last came within Damien’s reach. His power flicked out through the simulacrum’s matrix and conjured a tiny fireball, not much more than a spark.
Conjured inside the missile’s fuel cells, it triggered a reaction that blew the missile apart.
#
Even as Damien breathed a sigh of relief, something was bothering him. A niggling thought at the back of his head. The spell he’d cast hadn’t felt right. It wasn’t a spell he’d cast many times before, but most of the time he had he’d been in deep space, casting through a window or viewscreen on the side of a ship.
This wasn’t the first time he’d cast it from the simulacrum chamber of a starship – but it was the first time he’d done so only a short while after casting the jump spell. The feel of the two spells should have been very different to his mind. The jump spell was tied into and amplified by the rune matrix throughout the starship, but the defense spell was only using the simulacrum to allow him to see what he was aiming at.
Both spells had felt exactly the same when he’d cast them. His energy had fed into the matrix that ran throughout the ship, and he swore that the defense spell had started the same amplifying feedback loop that the jump spell had… and then it had simply continued on as normal, as if that loop had broken.
He ignored the pursuing ship as he dove into the ship’s operating system, looking for something he knew had to be there.
“More missiles incoming,” he heard Jenna’s voice report. “I think the RFLAMs have their measure now, but keep your eyes open Damien.”
The missiles were still two minutes out when he found what he was looking for. The usage level of the main heat converter popped up on his side screen, tracking back in time… to a massive heat spike when he’d cast the spell.
He stared at the spike in shock, understanding what the strange matrices he’d found did at last. There was no difference between a jump matrix and the spell amplifier a warship would carry – except that those seven sub-matrices would break the amplifier loop for any spell but the jump spell.
His moment of realization shattered when the Blue Jay leapt under his feet. Five megatons of mass jumped like a startled puppy, and then he was in zero-gravity.
#
“What the hell happened?” Rice demanded. The RFLAM turrets had only just started to engage – the missiles had been tens of thousands of kilometers out, nowhere near close enough to actually hit the ship.
“Three of the missiles were decoys,” Jenna said grimly. “They were augmenting their radar signatures, and we nailed all three. The fourth was an x-ray laser. It blew up at twenty thousand klicks and hit the engines.”
X-ray laser warheads were rare and expensive – so expensive that even the Martian Navy didn’t use them normally. A small atomic bomb triggered a lasing reaction in specially treated crystals, providing a deadly and precise stand-off weapon.
Rice flipped up a link to engineering. “Kellers, how bad is it?” he demanded.
“We’ve a giant hole through the main conduits for Two and Three,” the engineer snapped back. “The conduit for One got clipped – that might be repairable, but if we fire up Two or Three before a shipyard’s been at them, we may as well just set off a nuke back here.”
“Get me at least one engine back Kellers,” Rice ordered. He turned back to Jenna, and she answered his question before he asked it.
“It’s gained them forty minutes,” she said quietly. “Maybe as much as a full hour.”
An inexperienced Mage jumping with anything less than a six hour wait between jumps risked the same fate that Kenneth McLaughlin had suffered. Rice looked at the link to Damien, knowing that the youth would likely risk it. If they pushed it close enough, it might even work – assuming the pirate didn’t open them to air and let them suffocate. The bounty on Rice’s head would be paid as happily for a vacuum preserved corpse as for a live prisoner. He met the young Mage’s eyes and saw something there he wasn’t expecting: hope.
“Captain, I have an idea,” Damien told him.
#
He ran for the front of the ship, power flaring through the runes in his palm as he formed his own ‘down’ in the zero-gravity of the ship. A bag of tools, soldering irons and silver wire, banged against his side as he dodged around Singh, who trying to make his way backwards along the keel. The big Sikh stared at him in surprise, then flashed him a thumbs up.
“Whatever you’re doing Montgomery, good luck!” he shouted after Damien, who barely heard him as he caught a support bar and redirected his personal gravity.
With a bruising thump, Damien slammed into the underside of the ship’s radiation cap, where the sub-matrix diverted energy away if it wasn’t a jump spell. He focused his gaze on it, following the lines of energy and noting where they detoured.
With a deep breath, he pulled the soldering iron and embossing tools out. With a single slash of the iron, he severed a rune. Molten silver followed, new runes taking shape that loop the energy back into the general matrix.
One link done, he slid sideways and repeated the process. Runes were something to carve carefully, with time, precision and detailed calculations. Without time, Damien relied on his sight, on knowing how the energy would flow.
The forward matrix took him fifteen minutes to disconnect, and then he ran again, redirecting gravity to speed him towards Rib One.
He had mere hours to change the entire nature of the rune matrix, and all he could do was pray he was doing it right.
#
Damien had made it to Rib Four when the ship lurched out from beneath his feet, his spell failing to compensate for the entire kilometer-length of the vessel jerking a full meter sideways. He slammed into the wall, gouging his hands and cracking his jaw.
Carefully feeling his jaw for any major injuries, he opened a link to the bridge.
“What the hell was that?” he demanded.
“They have a laser,” Rice said shortly. “And we no longer have a forward turret. You’re out of time, Damien. Whenever that thing recharges, we lose the rear turret, and then we either jump or die.”
Damien looked at the sub-matrix for Rib Four. Most of the runes were severed, with only one rune chain still linking it. With a deep breath, he focused on the lines of energy, and slashed with the soldering iron. If he’d judged it right, he’d broken the rune without creating a dangerous feedback loop, but at this point he could only hope.
“Computer, connect me to engineering,” he ordered his PC as he charged rearwards for the simulacrum chamber.
“Kellers, it’s Montgomery,” he told the engineer, focusing his gravity spell so that he fell towards the rear of the ship.
“I’m a little busy trying to keep us from blowing the fuck up kid, this better be important,” the engineer snapped.
“You know those runes on the main heat exchanger?” Damien asked, grunting as he slammed into the ladder leading to the keel. He hadn’t slowed himself enough, but he hadn’t broken any bones.
“What? What about them?” Kellers demanded. “Watch that hydrogen line,” he bellowed at somebody else. “Do not connect that thing to the conduit yet; hold off till I tell you to hook it up.”
“I need you to break the rune chains connecting them to the rest of the ship’s matrix,” the Mage told him.
There was silence on the other end of the line as Damien forced his bruised, weary, legs to carry him towards
the keel.
“And how the fuck am I supposed to do that?” Kellers finally demanded.
“It shouldn’t matter,” Damien told him honestly. He was pretty sure that destroying the other six matrices would render the one in engineering utterly ineffectual – but he couldn’t be certain. “Weld it, gouge, burn it – take an ax to it for all I care, but I’ll be in the simulacrum chamber in two minutes, and I need those runes disconnected when I get there.”
Another pause. “You owe me one hell of an explanation Montgomery, but I’ll see what I can do,” Kellers finally said.
“If we live, I’ll explain with diagrams,” Damien promised, and then redirected his gravity spell towards the simulacrum.
As long as he made it to the simulacrum in time, he didn’t care if he broke something anymore.
#
Leaving the door to the simulacrum chamber open had been one of his better ideas. He fell through the door, barely slowing himself at the last minute. With a deep breath and steeling himself against the result, Damien grabbed onto the simulacrum to slow himself.
The simulacrum couldn’t move. He barely held his grip, and one of his arms was clearly going to make him pay later, but he stopped.
He looked up at the bridge link and met Rice’s eyes.
“They have a six minute recharge on the laser,” the captain told him. “It’s no Navy gun, but it’s plenty for their purposes. We are now out of defenses, so I hope your idea works.”
“We’ll see,” he said quietly, opening a link to engineering. “Kellers?”
“It’s done,” the engineer replied. “You have no idea how scared shitless I am right now.”
“Join the club,” Damien told him. “Everyone hold on.”
With a deep breath, he placed the runes on his palms on the model, and became the ship.
This was the true purpose of the matrix. He knew it the moment he linked in. Before, only trying to cast the jump spell had linked this completely to the ship. Now, just completing the matrix changed everything.
He saw as the ship saw. Felt as it felt. The scars where the turrets had been burned away hurt as badly as his own strained limbs. The broken engines burned as if his own skin had been seared with fire.
And the Blue Jay’s eyes were his eyes. He saw in radiation and heat as clearly as day, and saw the pirate ship closing on them, certain now that it had disabled its victim – so certain they hadn’t even demanded their surrender.
This time, he had no intention of scaring anyone off. The simple self-defense fire spell every Mage learned leapt to his mind and power leapt from his hands into the runes of the ship. He sensed the power loop through the ship, repeating and building so quickly no one outside the spell would have sensed it.
Fire lit the darkness of deep space as his magic lit a tiny sun and flung it across the void. His senses and power followed it the entire way, waiting for the pirate to try to dodge.
They never even saw it coming. Super-heated plasma ripped through their hull, tearing a hole through the length of the ship, until the fireball reached the antimatter storage that fueled the pirate’s engines.
The ship vanished in the searing white flame of annihilating matter.
#
As the Blue Jay drifted in space, the senior officers gathered on the bridge. Damien joined Kellers, Jenna and the Captain and found himself the center of attention.
“What did you do?” David asked.
“I turned our jump matrix into an amplifier,” Damien explained. “There were limiters built into the spell matrix to make it only amplify the jump spell – I removed them.”
“That’s possible?” Jenna exclaimed.
“A week ago, I would have said no,” the young Mage said. “We’re discouraged from looking too closely at the Jump Matrix – messing with it in flight is illegal. I just had no choice.”
“Can we still jump?”
“Yes,” Damien replied, unhesitatingly.
“Good enough,” Captain Rice replied, turning to Kellers. “What about the engines?”
“We’ve fixed the conduits for One, but Two and Three are gone until we get to Corinthian.”
The Captain nodded, looking around at the officers.
“Then, whenever you’re ready Mr. Montgomery, let’s be on our way.”
###
2
Damien Montgomery floated at the core of the starship, his hands resting on the tiny scale-model of the ship that sat at its exact center. The simulacrum of the ship allowed his magic to stretch to every corner of the immense, kilometer-long, vessel and made the young Mage, in a strange sense, the ship’s engine.
Around him, viewscreens showed the stars arrayed around the freighter, and under his hands, the simulacrum reflected the damage the ship had taken in the pirate attack eleven jumps and four days before.
“You may jump when ready, Mage Montgomery,” David Rice, Captain of the Blue Jay, ordered from the tiny window on the all-surrounding viewscreens that lined the starship’s heart.
Damien nodded to the video screen, and focused his magic on the tiny model itself. The ship’s rune matrices leaped to life with an eagerness that was still strange to him, born of the changes he’d made to the matrix to allow him to fight off the pirate attack a mere handful of days ago.
It picked up his magic in that eagerness, reflecting it from the bow of the ship to its mighty fusion engines, only one of which was still working, building strength with each reflection.
Then, with a deep breath, the Mage grabbed that power and moved.
The Blue Jay jumped into the Corinthian system.
#
With the jump complete, Damien made his way through the ship to join the other ship’s officers in the conference room on Rib One, one of the flattened structures that rotated rapidly around the Blue Jay’s central steady-state keel to provide a semblance of gravity as the ship coasted.
Entering the tiny conference room, he slid into the last of the five chairs, nodding his thanks to the ship’s first officer, Jenna Campbell, as she slid a steaming hot cup of coffee in front of him. He was always exhausted immediately after jumping, but this meeting was important.
The stocky blonde exec smiled at him, gesturing at the carafe in the center of the table to make it clear there was more coffee left.
To the Mage’s right sat the ship’s First Pilot Narveer Singh, the man in charge of the ship’s several heavy lift shuttles. Dark-skinned and wearing a blue turban, the pilot flashed a bright grin, baring stunningly white teeth.
Just past Narveer, looking even darker-skinned than usual next to the dusky Sikh, was the ship’s Chief Engineer, James Kellers. The bags under his eyes were almost invisible on his near-black skin, but Damien could see the man’s exhaustion regardless. The Blue Jay had limped from jump zone to jump zone for four days since they’d been attacked, and only the engineer’s skill and determination had kept her together.
At the end of the table drinking his own coffee was the dark-haired and squat figure of their Captain, David Rice, looking surprisingly calm for a man whose ship had nearly been blown out from under him.
“How are we doing James?” the Captain asked once Damien was seated. “Are we going to make it into Corinthian Station?”
“Engine One is fully up and running with no flaws or cracks that I can detect,” the engineer replied. “Two and three… we’ll need to get fixed at Corinthian. We can make half a gravity without straining anything too hard though, so we’ll start decelerating a bit sooner and drift in a bit later – nothing worth worrying about.”
Damien let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, and he wasn’t the only one. The laser strike had almost destroyed the ship when it had ripped through the freighter’s engines, and it had been entirely possible they wouldn’t have any of the main engines. Thankfully, the magic that teleported them across the stars didn’t need engines, but Damien could only bring them so close to a gravity well.
“That’
s good to hear James,” Rice told him. “Well done.” He brought up a picture of the planet on the screen along the wall of the room, a massive silver three-part cylinder hovering in the corner of the picture.
“I think James and I are the only ones here who’ve visited Corinthian before, so here’s the run-down,” the Captain continued. “Corinthian is the most heavily industrialized system outside the Core, and Corinthian Prime is, among other things, a first class shipyard that’s better than some in the Core.”
He tapped the cylinder.
“Top part of the cylinder is civilian docks, bottom part is the shipyard, and the middle is a rotating habitat with an artificial eco-system, including parks, trees, and semi-wild animals. It’s an impressive station, unique in the Midworlds, and only possible because of Corinthian’s industry.
“Our raw materials are for the factories and our luxuries for the factory owners,” Rice continued. “We’ll trans-ship on the station and get repairs done – there’s nowhere better.
“Now, Corinthian is a world to step carefully on,” he warned. “The factory workers are better off than most, but they compare themselves to the factory owners, who compare themselves to the even richer magnates. The entire culture is obsessed with moving up that ladder by their bootstraps… and they occasionally run rough-shod over anyone in the way. Corinthian Prime’s dock module is home to some nasty organized crime, and we are going to stay far out of their way, clear?”
All of the ship’s officers nodded, Damien feeling a little intimidated. Rice didn’t help that feeling by focusing his gaze on Damien.
“Damien, you especially have to tread carefully,” he warned. “Corinthian isn’t an UnArcana world – magic is legal – but they don’t like Mages.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Damien said quietly. “I should probably stay on the ship regardless – the last thing we want is Guild Mages looking at the rune matrix. I’m… not sure how legal my modifications are.”
Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) Page 7
