“What was it you do, Mr. Carmichael?” he asked politely, wondering how this man could speak so authoritatively.
“Ah,” the man sighed appreciatively as he swallowed a mouthful of chicken. “This is good, Bistro,” he said to the Magnate at the head of the table, then turned back to David. “I am an information broker,” he explained. “I deal in being aware of events across as many systems as possible, and providing that knowledge to men like Bistro here for a fee.” He glanced down the table, at the mostly silent faces of David’s crew, wisely focused on the food.
“In fact, Captain, you may be able to assist me,” he continued. Laying down his fork and carefully cleaning his fingers, he removed an archaic paper card from the breast pocket of his suit. “I like to get the first-hand impressions of ship’s captains of the systems they’ve visited – the kind of details that don’t make it into the news download. There would be some compensation if you could make time for me.”
David shrugged and took the card.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said noncommittally. His time for the next few days would be tied up quite tightly. On the other hand, having an information broker owing you a favor was never a bad thing.
“Enough dreary talk of business,” Bistro interjected, somewhat boomingly and then directing his attention down the table. “Young Montgomery! I take it Corinthian is the first world you’ve visited since you left home, correct? What do you think of the Spindle?”
#
The dinner ran late in the night, with large quantities of very good wine. Damien awoke in his hotel room the next morning late and bleary eyed. Unfortunately for him, healing with magic required even more years of training than he already had, so he settled for a solution older than spaceflight: aspirin and a giant glass of water.
That, combined with a shower, left him feeling almost human as he maneuvered his way through the docking cylinder of Corinthian Prime to the Blue Jay. If Kellers’ comments on their way to the dinner last night were correct, the conduit work should be done and ready for him to check around it for rune damage.
The Blue Jay’s corridors were busier than they’d been in days. Between the access port and the main engineering spaces he ran into two teams of four of the freighter’s crew, both with panels open as they checked portions of the ship’s electrical grid for burnouts caused by the ship’s damage.
Busiest of all, though, was the engineering space itself. The massive chamber that contained the reactors, engines and life support of the freighter was a single open space, allowing a small crew to operate on them all in anything from zero-gravity to two gravities of emergency acceleration.
The main fusion reactor quietly hummed away in the center of the space, ringed by a catwalk aligned with the ship’s main engines. Up, down and sideways were all arbitrary when the ship wasn’t under acceleration, and all parts of the wall and much of the empty space was taken up with hardware and the catwalks for operation under acceleration.
The arbitrary up-down axis of the engineering space was generally agreed to be that ‘up’ was towards where the RFLAM turret was mounted, and ‘down’ was towards the massive primary heat exchanger directly opposite. Currently, Kellers and a dozen crew members were pulling spools of fiber optic cable down through a hole in the ‘upper’ wall – the connectors for the new turret being installed.
Damien was more concerned about the power conduits for Engine Two and Engine Three. They ran on either side of the heat exchanger, which meant they actually passed over some of sub-matrixes connecting the jump matrix to the aft hull of the ship. It also meant they were close to the sub-matrix that had been carved into the heat exchanger itself – the matrix that, in an unmodified jumpship, converted any non-jump spell into heat energy and dumped it into space. There was some risk that the engineers would have damaged the runes, so they needed to be checked over by a trained Mage.
Spotting his approach, one of the crew pushed off from the cables and drifted to land close to Damien.
“Mage Montgomery, good morning!” she greeted him cheerfully.
“Good morning Kelly,” Damien greeted her. Kelly LaMonte was the most junior of the Blue Jay’s three actual engineers. “Did we get the conduit repairs finished up?” he asked her politely, gesturing at the conduit for Engine Three, just behind where the engineer had landed.
“Got them finished up last night,” she confirmed. “You don’t need to worry about them though – since you weren’t around they had their own Mage check the runes.”
Damien froze in place, locking his gaze on the junior engineer, who was maybe a year older than him.
“She was working on the colony ship in the next bay over,” Kelly said in a rapid-fire blurt of words. “They wanted to be able to sign off completely for the insurance last night, and you were at the dinner with the rest of the officers.”
Wordlessly, Damien maneuvered around her, dropping himself to ‘stand’ where the other Mage would have had to be to check the runes under the conduit. The scar on the heat exchanger where Kellers had cut through the rune matrix with a blowtorch was clearly visible, and served to draw attention to the smooth area around it where Damien and the Chief Engineer had burned away the matrix. Any Mage sufficiently trained to be able to check the rune matrix under the conduit would have known something was wrong as soon as the scar drew their eye.
“It’s okay, Kelly,” he said quietly, realizing he had been silent for a long time and the blond engineer was wilting further by the second. “We were just hoping to get all of the review done by me.”
“She wasn’t going to charge us,” she explained hopefully. “We… you and the Chief had been working like dogs; we wanted to ease your mind a bit.”
Damien smiled tightly. The only way his mind would ease now would be when they left the system.
“What’s the meaning of this?” a voice bellowed, training projecting it to fill the entire vastness of the engineering chamber. Damien and Kelly both turned to see what Kellers was shouting about, and Damien’s heart collapsed out of his chest at what he saw.
Two black-robed and black-armored figures stood in the entrance with magnetic boots locking their feet to the hull of the ship - and providing enough stability for the two Mage Enforcers to fire the ugly black battle rifles each carried.
“What the hell are you doing on my ship?” Kellers continued, the Chief Engineer managing to cross engineering to land in front of the Enforcers in a handful of breaths.
“We have a warrant,” a voice said coldly, and a third figure stepped out between the two Enforcers. The third Mage also wore magnetic boots that matched his plain gray suit. From halfway across Engineering Damien couldn’t make out the symbols on the man’s medallion, but he could guess.
“We are here to inspect this ship’s Rune Matrix, on the authority of Guildmaster Varren,” the suited Mage, almost certainly a senior Rune Scribe, continued. “You will stand aside.”
Damien was frozen. He just stood there as the three Mages crossed engineering to him. One of the Enforcer’s subtly tracked Kellers with his eyes and rifle, but the other locked his gaze on Damien and held the Mage’s attention as they approached.
The scribe ignored Damien and Kelly, stepping around the two Blue Jay crew members and over the conduit, his gaze on the scar and the space around it where the rune matrix should be. It felt like the entire room was holding their breath as the man stepped up to the exchanger and ran his fingers over the warm metal, down to where the rune matrix began.
“So it’s true,” he said simply, and turned back to the Damien, who realized the Enforcers were now on either side of him.
“Mage Damien Montgomery,” the older Mage said quietly, “you are under arrest for a Class A Violation of Mage Law.”
Still frozen in shock, Damien did nothing as the Enforcers slapped heavy, rune-inlaid, manacles on his wrists.
#
David Rice had lived aboard ships and space stations for his entire adult life and afte
r twenty years as a spacer, he could count the days he’d spent planet-side on his fingers. Along the way, he’d mastered the complex, somewhat contortionist, art of typing in zero-gravity. He worked through the documents on his screen, signing off on each of the reports on the repairs completed the previous day for the insurance company, with the occasional wince at his part of the price tag.
He was just beginning to go through the documentation around paying off the remaining principal of the note financing the Blue Jay when the door to his office was thrown open.
“What is the meaning of this?” he demanded as two men marched through the door on magnetic boots. Both were dressed in the dark blue on black uniform of Corinthian Security, and carried ugly-looking black carbines.
“Sir,” the older of the two security men greeted him politely. “Please come with us – this ship is being evacuated.”
“This is my ship,” David snapped back. “No one is evacuating me!” Even docked, the main authority aboard a starship was its captain.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the officer told him. “The Ship Wright’s Guild has declared the vessel unsafe for use, we’ve been ordered to remove everyone from the vessel for their own safety.”
“What do you mean, unsafe?” David demanded. “I am not leaving my ship.”
“We don’t have any details, sir,” the security man told him. “I am sorry, but you will have to come with us.” The man’s carbine, David noted, carried an under-barrel stungun, which was now, ever-so-subtly, pointing at David.
“I demand to speak to someone who can explain this,” he ordered.
“I can do that, sir,” the officer agreed quickly, “but you’ll have to come with us.”
His options appeared to be to either go with the officers, or get shocked into compliance. David sealed his computer, transferring the data to a chip to take with him, and floated away from his desk.
“Take me to whoever is in charge of this,” he ordered.
The senior officer nodded calmly, leading the way out of the office. The magnetic boots the two security men wore clanged softly against the freighter’s metal floors as they made their way down the corridors to the tube connecting to the station.
The halls and corridors of David’s ship were empty. He had expected to run into at least one of the parties he knew were working on the electrical grid, but all he saw was an open set of paneling where one of the teams had been working.
When they exited the ship, he found the docking tube already under guard. Four security officers, each equipped with the same black carbine/stungun combination as David’s escorts, manned a barricade blocking entrance or exit from his ship.
He finally began to understand what the hell was going on when he saw the man in charge of the operation. Standing amidst the security guards, keeping David’s crew back with nothing more than his black-armored robe and a flat glare was the readily identifiable figure of a Guild Enforcer.
“Sir, we found Captain Rice,” the officer who’d been doing all of the talking told the Enforcer. “He insisted on speaking with you.”
The Enforcer turned to face Rice, his magnetic boots clicking sharply on the ground. David found himself floating in the zero gee as he met the Mage’s gaze, and wished he had magnetic boots of his own. They wouldn’t have allowed him to be any more intimidating to the Mage soldier, but they would have let him feel less ridiculous.
“Is everyone off?” the Enforcer asked the security officer, ignoring David.
“We left the Captain to last,” the man confirmed. “One last team is sweeping the ship right now, they’ll be out shortly.”
The Enforcer turned to the four men on the barricade. “As soon as the sweep team returns, lock down the ship under a Security Code,” he ordered. “Provide the Code to Guildmaster Varren’s office, then maintain security over the docking tube,” he met David’s gaze levelly, “just in case.”
“What is the meaning of this?” David finally demanded, done with being ignored.
“I am Enforcer Evan Santos,” the man introduced himself calmly. “Your ship’s rune matrix was reviewed by a Rune Scribe this morning, under warrant from Guildmaster Varren,” the Enforcer continued. “Based on that review, your matrix was judged unsafe for use. There was also a noted risk of feedback and other issues that render the vessel unsafe for current habitation. Your Ship’s Mage has been arrested for illegal experimentation – you are damned lucky no one was hurt!”
“I was aware of the change to the rune matrix,” David responded. “There have been no issues from it, and it may have saved our lives.”
Santos shrugged.
“I am not an expert on these things,” he replied. “However, we escorted James Marlow, a senior Rune Scribe who is an expert, to review the matrix, and that was his judgment.”
“So, how, exactly do I get my ship back?” David asked.
“That will be up to Guildmaster Varren,” the Enforcer told him. “You will need to make an appointment with him – I was merely charged with evacuating and securing the ship your Mage made a deathtrap.”
“What happens to Damien?” David asked.
“If he saved your lives as you say, you might be able to argue some clemency,” Santos replied. “But I wouldn’t count on it – the Guildmaster cannot risk being seen as weak in disciplining Mages.”
#
Six walls, one door, zero-gravity. The walls that surrounded Damien were covered in silver runes that suppressed his gift, locking the nature of reality so that no magic could be done inside the cell. A hammock hung from one corner and the intimidating hoses of a zero-gravity toilet in another.
The cell was somewhere in the core of the Spindle, the cylinder that ran through the heart of the habitation zone of Corinthian Prime. Here, the rotation of the outside station was nonexistent, helping create a high security prison in the heart of the station.
Strangely to Damien, the runes that suppressed his ability to wield magic didn’t do anything to his gift for reading the flow of it. He spent the first few minutes after being tossed in the cell floating in shock, but then he’d turned to deciphering the runes to help keep his mind engaged.
Following the lines of energy revealed that the rune matrix binding the cell was surprisingly fragile. If he’d had the tools to do it, there were four connections tying together different components that would break the entire matrix if severed.
If he had the tools to do it.
Given that he was in the cell for illegal experimentation with rune matrices, Damien doubted that his captors were going to casually leave silver inlaying tools floating around the high security cell.
Mage Law was notoriously bad for laying out just what crimes fell under what category. Some were easy to guess – the standard ‘example’ given for a Class A Mage Law Violation was Pre-meditated Murder by Magic – but for a lot of the more esoteric crimes, the only people who really knew were Judges and Enforcers.
What Damien had been taught, though, was the penalties. The Class A Violation he was charged with carried a minimum sentence of twenty years forced labor. Mages put to forced labor weren’t hauling stones or swinging pickaxes, and the living conditions were supposed to be decent – but the work was things like ‘conjuring antimatter’. Mage prisoners did some of the most dangerous jobs in the Protectorate. Civilian and military Mages doing the jobs they made prisoners do were extremely well paid. Prisoners… simply had to do them.
That was the minimum sentence. There were rumors about the maximum sentence, rumors Damien wasn’t sure he believed. The Protectorate Charter forbade the death penalty for anything except treason… but the rumor was that if you were convicted of a truly heinous Class A crime, they would take away your magic.
And then let you go.
#
“So?” Jenna asked when David entered the hotel bar where his remaining officers were waiting. A bottle of expensive whiskey was set amidst the three of them, and Kellers silently poured David a glass after seeing h
is face.
“Apparently, this whole situation isn’t enough to get anything resembling urgency out of the Guildmaster’s staff,” he said quietly. “They may have impounded my ship and imprisoned one of my officers in a high security cell, but they can’t make time in the Guildmaster’s schedule for two days.” He sighed.
“I took the appointment, obviously,” he continued, “but Guildmaster Varren is in control of both the Blue Jay’s impoundment, and Damien’s imprisonment. No one else can do anything about either.”
“What about the system government?” Singh demanded. The turban-wearing pilot gestured energetically with a cup of milky tea – he was the only one not drinking the whiskey being passed around.
David took a slug of the whiskey, letting it burn its way down his throat as if that would help.
“It’s Mage Law,” he said bluntly. “The Compact says the mundane government can’t interfere unless they have evidence of a flawed trial.” The Compact was one of the two documents that underlay the legal structure of the Protectorate – the Charter defined the rules and laws that governed everyone, and the Compact defined how Mage and Mundane dealt with each other. Simplest of those rules: Mages tried their own, unless they were clearly abusing the privilege.
The table was silent for a long moment as the whiskey bottle made its way around.
“So what do we do?” Singh finally asked.
“The note on the Blue Jay is almost paid off,” David said quietly. “If everything falls apart, I pay out the crew, return to Mars and finance a new ship. If you’re willing to come, I’d be pleased to have you all with me.”
“Fuck that,” the pilot said bluntly. “I meant: what do we do about Damien?”
“We wait,” David replied. “I’ll keep paying the crew until we know for sure what’s happened with the ship, and I’m not going anywhere until I have a chance to speak for Damien.”
Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) Page 10
