Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  The rune matrix woven throughout the massive freighter allowed a Mage like Damien to teleport it between the stars – but that was all they were supposed to do. Damien had broken that limitation, though, and used the matrix to amplify a self-defense spell to destroy the pirate who’d attacked them.

  “You don’t know?” Singh asked.

  “I know they aren’t legal,” Damien admitted. “But the thing about Mage Law… it’s vague, and the punishments aren’t spelled out unless you break them. The idea is to keep us from breaking them at all.”

  “Then let’s make sure no one goes poking around the runes unsupervised,” Rice ordered. “On top of everything else, the last thing we need is problems with the Guilds!”

  #

  David Rice sighed in relief when the Blue Jay finally approached close enough to Corinthian Prime for the scanners to make out the familiar white pyramid shapes of two destroyers of the Royal Navy of the Mage-King of Mars. While they hadn’t seen any sign of the pirates since the attack when they’d left Sherwood, the Protectorate destroyers were always a sign of safety.

  He watched carefully over Jenna’s shoulder as she gently adjusted the freighter’s course, aligning carefully on the immobile docking end of the cylindrical station, and brought up the communications himself.

  “Corinthian Prime, this is Captain David Rice of the freighter Blue Jay out of the Sherwood system,” he informed them. “We are carrying a data download and several cargo contracts, but be advised that we were attacked by pirates and currently only have one functioning main engine.”

  A few moments later, a traffic controller came on the channel.

  “Blue Jay, this is Corinthian Control. Message received. What is your maneuvering status – do we need to arrange a tow?”

  “Negative, Control,” David told them after a long moment of thought and a glance at his XO. “Maneuvering thrusters are fully functional, we should be able to maneuver to dock without issues, but our acceleration is heavily reduced.”

  “Understood Blue Jay, please proceed to Dock Seven,” the controller ordered. “It’s the most accessible for repair craft,” he continued. “Please contact your deliveries as soon as possible to arrange offloading. Welcome to Corinthian, Captain Rice.”

  “Thank you Control,” he replied. “Maneuvering to Dock Seven.”

  A tiny diamond appeared on his screen, bracketing the indicated dock as Jenna began to adjust the cargo ship’s course. Dock Seven, he saw, was designed for the much bigger heavy container ships. A Venice class ship like the Blue Jay would be surrounded by plenty of empty space on all sides – the best working space for repairs short of slotting her into an actual shipyard. Dock Six, right next to them, was of a similar size and currently contained the large module components of a pre-fabricated colony ship in the process of being assembled.

  “The yards must be full,” he muttered aloud. A colony ship’s components could be assembled easily in a standard dock, but it was faster and easier to slot the cylindrical modules together in a real shipyard.

  “See any issues getting us in?” he asked Jenna. “I think the neighbor is the biggest issue,” he added, watching the small swarm of repair ships guiding one of the modules in.

  “I could get us into that dock blindfolded with just the maneuvering jets,” his first officer replied. “We’ll be fine.”

  “All right. I’m going to contact the company receiving our cargo,” Rice told her, heading into the office just off of the bridge.

  The Blue Jay carried three hundred ten thousand ton cargo containers, but a hundred and sixty of them were the ‘main cargo’ – the contract that covered the fuel, salaries and other operating costs required to get the immense starship from Sherwood to Corinthian. The other hundred and forty containers were filled with over three hundred single and partial container contracts, but those Rice would leave to the ship’s three clerks to contact the customers and arrange delivery.

  He always handled the main cargo personally. Problems with that contract could easily bankrupt him, so he made a point of knowing who he was dealing with. It was a matter of moments for him to pull up the communications codes for the company receiving their load of raw hardwood and luxury furniture.

  A cheerfully redheaded girl who looked barely out of school answered the call.

  “Bistro Manufacturing, Jessica speaking, how may I help you?” she spieled off brightly.

  “Good morning Jessica,” Rice replied, checking the station time on the corner of his screen as he spoke. Like most ships and stations, Corinthian Prime ran on Olympus Mons Time and the twenty-four hour day of Earth and terraformed Mars, but it was always good to check.

  “I have a cargo for delivery to Bistro from the Sherwood system,” he continued. “My contract says to arrange delivery with Mister John Bistro himself.”

  “The starship delivery!” the girl squealed, and David barely concealed his wince at the pitch of her voice. She was very young. Given that Bistro Manufacturing was easily in the top twenty corporations on Corinthian, David was pretty sure he knew her last name. “Mr. Bistro will want to speak to you straight away, please hold,” she finished.

  A corporate boilerplate hold screen pulled from a template Rice had seen on at least twelve worlds covered the screen as he waited for the girl to get her boss, the manager and sole owner of a billion-dollar planet-wide enterprise, on the line.

  He was considering looking for a book when the hold screen evaporated to show a different room entirely. John Bistro was an iron-haired older man who could have passed for brothers with Mage-Governor McLaughlin, the overlord of Sherwood who’d left Rice with so many troubles.

  “Captain Rice, it is an absolute pleasure to hear from you,” the industrial magnate announced. “I have to admit, every time I send a few dozen million out-system to purchase a cargo, I never really relax until the cargo makes it back to Corinthian. You had no issues, I trust?”

  “Unfortunately, I can’t say that,” Rice told him dryly. “We were attacked by pirates just outside Sherwood, but I don’t believe any of the cargo containers were damaged. I would recommend,” he continued after a moment’s thought, “that you have your staff check over the cargo as quickly as possible, so we can include any damage in the insurance claim.”

  Bistro blinked rapidly for a moment. “Pirates?!” he said incredulously. “What were they going to do with a million tons of raw hardwood?”

  Rice cut off a chuckle quickly, but he saw the smile on the magnate’s face and returned it. The image of the Blue Star Syndicate trying to fence hardwood through channels normally reserved for drugs, guns, and slaves was certainly… interesting. He wasn’t going to admit to the other man, though, that the pirate attack had been directed at him personally.

  “I imagine they were after some of the smaller, high value, items in the secondary shipment,” he told Bistro after a moment. “Thanks to some ingenuity on the part of my Ship’s Mage, however, we saw them off with only hull damage.”

  “That is good news, Captain,” Bistro agreed. “I’ll have my people co-ordinate offloading our cargo with Prime control. Do you have any time restrictions we should be aware of?”

  “Only the standard ones,” Rice told him. Basically, that if he wanted to off-load for more than one shift in a row, he’d be responsible for the hotel bills for the Blue Jay’s crew. The four ribs that rotated around the starship’s keel to provide gravity couldn’t do so while offloading, and policy in the merchant fleet was to avoid having people sleeping in zero-gravity.

  “Of course,” Bistro replied. “I will be shipping up to Prime to audit some of the review of the cargo myself. Would you and your ship’s officers be available to meet with myself for a dinner in, say, four days?”

  Rice was taken aback. Normally, he was wined and dined by the people looking to hire him, not the people he’d just completed contracts for.

  “We can arrange a direct transfer for the payment at the dinner, once we’ve reviewed the c
argo, and I may have another commission for you,” Bistro continued when Rice didn’t immediately respond.

  “My officers and I will be pleased to meet you for dinner, Mr. Bistro,” Rice agreed. “Though I will note that the Blue Jay will be under repair for some days after the cargo is off-loaded.”

  Bistro made a throw away gesture with one hand, blinking rapidly again. “This is interstellar shipping, my dear Captain. You should know better than I that nothing moves quickly between the stars!”

  #

  The description of the central portion of Corinthian Prime’s segmented cylinder as ‘an artificial eco-system’ failed to prepare Damien for the reality of it. He stepped out of the elevator from the motionless docks onto the outer rim of the station and into a glass-roofed atrium in the middle of a forest.

  He blinked at the sight, taking a moment to put it into scale. The atrium was, obviously, set into one end of the cylinder, so it was only surrounded by trees on the interior side. The trees themselves were trimmed and maintained, planted in the neat lines typical of a ground-side park… but were very real trees.

  A man standing near the elevator cleared his throat, bringing Damien’s gaze back down to the room he was standing in. The other five occupants of his elevator had already cleared through the security checkpoint leading into the main segment, and the security guard was gesturing Damien forward.

  “Welcome to the Spindle, Mage Montgomery,” the guard said after reviewing Damien’s ID for a moment. “First time on Corinthian Prime, I see. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “I’m looking for the Jump Mage Guild,” Damien told him. The Blue Jay had been blacklisted in Sherwood, so they had been unable to register his contract with the ship in his home system. Unlike most things, however, Jump Mage contracts could be registered anywhere. The details would be included in the encrypted download the Blue Jay would take with it to any system they jumped to.

  “Ah, yes,” the guard nodded calmly. “The main path from the atrium meets up with LengthWay Seven about forty meters Yard-wards. From Seven, you’ll want CircleWay Twenty-Six.” The man looked at Damien’s blank expression and chuckled. “It does make more sense if you think about it,” he insisted, “but since the Guild is halfway across the Spindle from here, I suggest you grab a cab when you reach the LengthWay. They’re pretty common, and decently priced.”

  “Thank you,” Damien told him, agreeing with the assessment of the directions after a second. LengthWays ran the length of the center cylinder – apparently called the Spindle by the locals – and CircleWays ran around the exterior of the cylinder.

  If they followed the Protectorate’s standard one hundred meter blocks, CircleWay Twenty-Six was over two and a half kilometers away, which was a bit further than he’d been expecting to walk.

  Stepping out of the atrium into the open air of the Spindle, however, he found himself considering it. To both sides of him, the artificial world rose gently up in the slope of the cylinder. From where he stood in the trees outside the atrium, he could see the entirety of the segment – there was no horizon, only a slight misting of water vapor in the air as he looked across or down the cylinder and the brilliant light of the central spire made it hard to see directly across the cylinder.

  Five kilometers long and fourteen hundred meters in diameter, the Spindle represented more square footage than many cities in the MidWorlds, and much of it was covered in greenery. A neat grid of roads split the surface into blocks, and rarely did he see more than two blocks together of houses or industry. It was so unlike the compressed corridors in the many rotating rings of Sherwood Prime that it took Damien a long minute of standing in the shade of the trees to wrap his head around the sight.

  Damien started walking down the LengthWay, looking for signs to tell him the numbers of the CircleWays that crossed it. It took him a few minutes to leave the cultured forest the Corinthians’ had chosen to wrap around the entrances from the civilian docks, and that was when he saw the building.

  The trees had blocked his view of it before, but now he wasn’t sure how he’d missed it. The structure rose in blocks of black iron, softened somewhat by trees growing in terraces atop the blocks, but it remained a sprawling fortress in the middle of one of the more spectacular stations built by man.

  A tiny whirring noise caused Damien to turn and spot the promised cab – a low slung vehicle with a cloth cover and two seats behind its driver.

  “Can I give you a lift?” the driver asked.

  “Sure,” he answered. “I need to get to the Jump Mage’s Guild.”

  The driver’s gaze flicked down at Damien’s collar, then he spat over the side. “Sure,” he said flatly. “We don’t call it the Guild though, here.”

  “What?” Damien asked quickly.

  The driver pointed at the fortress Damien had been staring at.

  “Mages don’t trust us lot not to burn their homes down around their ears,” he said bluntly. “They built that thing when the Spindle was finished. It’s the home of your Guild, but we just call it the Citadel.”

  #

  Security at the Guildhouse Citadel seemed lower than the cab-driver’s words and its fortress-like structure suggested. The gates in the artfully concealed fence that surrounded the fortified compound were wide open, and foot traffic passed in and out in a slow but steady stream.

  Passing through those gates, though, Damien spotted the two men just inside who were all the security the Guildhouse needed. Both were clad in dark robes over matte-black combat armor, and the gold medallions at their throats bore a single sword, compared to Damien’s three stars and a quill. His three stars marked him as a Jump Mage. Their sword marked them as Enforcers, the police officers of the Guilds, and the only fully combat-trained Mages outside of the Mage-King’s military.

  Those two men could stand off an entire battalion of conventionally armed troops, at least for long enough to close the gates. For all that efforts had clearly been made to soften the appearance of the Citadel with the trees and gardens, they were still being very careful.

  The thought was sobering as Damien entered the main hall, looking for the sign to direct him to the Ship Mage’s Guild. Corinthian was a major MidWorld, hardly one of the UnArcana worlds where Mages weren’t allowed to set foot on the surface, but the Guilds here clearly felt threatened.

  With a shake of his head, he stepped into the Ship Mage’s Guild office, relaxing slightly in the surroundings of the dozens of plants they’d used to soften the stark angles of the building’s walls. A single desk stood in the middle of the room, with no one waiting to see the older woman sitting at the desk.

  “Can I help you?” she greeted him bluntly.

  “I’m here to register a Jump Contract,” he replied, pulling the chip containing the formal contract between himself and Captain David Rice from the pocket of his blazer.

  She grunted. “Give it here.” He passed her the chip, and she slotted it into the reader on her desk. A holographic screen shimmered into existence at a wave of her hand, displaying the information.

  “This says you signed the contract in the Sherwood system almost two weeks ago,” she observed. “You should have registered it there.”

  “It slipped our minds while we were preparing for departure,” he told her. In truth, the Mage-Governor of Sherwood had unofficially blacklisted the Blue Jay from taking on a Jump Mage, so he and David hadn’t believed that they would have been permitted to register the contract in Sherwood.

  The woman at the desk grunted, clearly unconvinced, and hit a few more keys on her projected keyboard.

  “Well, it’s registered now. Charge to your ship?”

  “Yes,” Damien confirmed, then reeled off the local account number for the Blue Jay.

  “Done,” she said, ejecting the chip and passing it back to him. “Anything else?”

  Damien shook his head, but paused as he turned to leave.

  “Do you know why the Guildhouse here is so fortified?” he a
sked. Anything further from the airy, sprawling complex of bungalows in Sherwood City that served his home was hard to imagine.

  She sighed. “Corinthian Prime was built fifty years ago,” she told him. “Just before that, there was a bombing in Corinth City that killed two Mages and twelve bystanders. Two more Mages were killed in the ensuing riots, and both the Guilds and the Governor agreed that moving the Guilds somewhere more securable and out-of-the-way was a good idea.”

  The woman, a senior ranked but still mundane employee of the Guild, shrugged. “It’s only been ten years or so since it became illegal to bar Mages from a restaurant or store,” she told him, some of her earlier gruffness lost in the sad tone of her voice. “If the government didn’t think flouting the Charter laws around segregation was going to impede their effort to get the first MidWorlds Fleet Yard, I think you’d still see every second or third restaurant with a ‘No Dogs or Mages’ sign.”

  Damien winced.

  “That’s… different than I’m used to,” he admitted. “Thanks for explaining.”

  She shook her head.

  “Wish I didn’t have to,” she told him. “Step carefully, Mage Montgomery. There’s a reason your kind built themselves a fortress here.”

  #

  The first day on station was a blur for David. Bistro had taken them up on the offer for twenty-four hour offloading, so he’d had to arrange hotels for everyone. He’d then touched base with his insurance, a surprisingly non-confrontational appointment where they’d taken his telemetry data and confirmed within twenty minutes that they would cover the repairs under the piracy clause.

  He settled into his hotel room, an expensive one in the docking area with magical artificial gravity that allowed him a view of the Blue Jay from the window. David watched the ships and robot arms swarm over his ship, detaching the cargo containers and slowly transporting them to the station. From there automated transfer tubes whisked them away to either destinations on the stations, or transfer shuttles to carry them to the sky-tether that would deliver them to the surface.