They passed by the entrance to the cell block, where Damien couldn’t resist sagging against the restraint, glancing over the security desk’s metal detector and armed guards. He’d seen it before, and the only thing that stood out was the black case someone had left floating in the waiting area beyond the security gate, latched to one of the hooks set there for just that purpose
The Enforcer yanked a little, pulling Damien a little faster up to a door surprisingly close to the front entrance.
“Gravity in the room is that way,” he said kindly, pointing and helping Damien orient himself before opening the door. “Your Captain has twenty minutes,” the Enforcer continued. “I’ll be back for you then.”
Damien drifted through the door and dropped slightly onto the runed steel of the floor. Behind him, he heard the Enforcer’s mag-boots clicking against the door as he returned to the front desk.
The room was undecorated beyond the runes on the floor generating gravity, with only a desk and two chairs sitting in the middle. Captain David Rice was sprawled lazily in one of the chairs, and gestured Damien to the other.
“How’re you holding up?” the Captain asked quietly once Damien was seated. “This place looks like a precursor to hell.”
“They gave me a library,” Damien said dryly, “or I’d be going nuts. It’s damned weird – I know there are other prisoners in here, but I haven’t seen any.”
“From what I’ve been told, that’s as much to keep you safe from them as anything else,” David told him. “Most people in here killed someone, and the reasons were rarely good.”
“It’s terrifying,” Damien admitted, glancing up at the cameras and audio pickups in the corner. “I… just want this over. However it ends, I just want it over.”
“You know how they want it to end,” David said flatly.
“It’s not set in stone,” Damien argued. It was only in the worst cases that he’d lose his magic. More likely was twenty or thirty years at labor – he could live through that.
“The Guildmaster’s already made up his mind and summoned a Hand,” his Captain replied, and Damien felt his stomach drop out beneath him.
A Hand had already been summoned. Without trial or chance to defend himself, he had already been effectively sentenced to the worst punishment the Mages could inflict on their own. Up to that moment, he’d kept some hope for mercy – given the alternative, he’d have happily gone to work making antimatter for the rest of his life. Now, with David’s words, he had no hope.
“Oh,” was all he managed to say.
His Captain looked down at the time on wrist computer.
“I don’t think it’s fair or just,” he said quietly. “They’ve condemned the Blue Jay as well, and I’m honest enough to admit that has pissed me off, but what they’re doing to you isn’t fair. It isn’t justice.”
For a moment Damien felt hope, and then his heart fell again. They couldn’t do anything – he was inside a secured facility in the heart of a main planetary space dock. Between Enforcers and security systems and guards, there was no way they could save him – they’d only drag themselves down with him.
“Please Captain,” he said quietly. “Don’t try anything stupid – I beg you. I couldn’t live with myself if anyone else was dragged down with me.”
“That’s noble of you Damien,” David replied, checking the time on his wrist-bound personal computer again, “but, unfortunately, about twenty minutes too late.”
Damien had barely opened his mouth to ask what his Captain meant when a series of loud cracking noises echoed through the security door. The young Mage started to turn towards the door and realized that David was not surprised at all.
“Take this,” David ordered, passing David a plastic respirator he’d pulled from inside his coat. “There were two gas grenades in with the flash-bangs,” he explained. “The entire front section of the jail is going to be full of knockout gas for the next few minutes.”
David waited for Damien to put the respirator on, and then opened the door out to the corridor. He gestured for Damien to hang on to his shoulder, and then strode away, his magnetic boots clicking sharply on the metal floor.
They passed the Enforcer who’d escorted Damien to the room, suspended in the strange sagging position of someone passed out in zero-gravity while wearing magnetic boots. Another uniformed CSS officer was just inside the door to the reception, hit by the rapidly expanding cloud of gas.
The four guards in the front security office were out cold, and the metal cylinders of David’s grenades spun lazily in the middle of the room.
“Watch yourselves,” a voice said gruffly, oddly muffled by the respirator he wore. Singh was standing in the center of the reception area, magnetic boots locked to the ground and a stubby-looking carbine-like weapon in his hands. “CSS is good – they’ll have officers in gas masks here before the Nix-Six wears off.”
“Wrists,” David ordered, carefully settling Damien against the security desk. Still in shock and confused, Damien offered his hands forward. Singh slid a set of cutters across the desk and David went to work. Fifteen seconds later, the mage-manacles fell off.
The potential of the universe flowed back into Damien like a breath of fresh air, and his feet locked to the ground as he conjured his own personal gravity field.
“Told you we didn’t need to bring him boots, boss,” Singh said cheerfully. “Now, DUCK!”
Damien and David obeyed as a uniformed CSS guard wearing a respirator and mag-boots stepped through the corridor. Singh’s weapon cracked with the sound of chemical propellants, and a dart appeared on the officer’s shoulder.
For a quarter of a second, nothing happened. Then, long before the CSS man could do anything, the stungun SmartDart leapt into action, delivering its carefully calibrated sequence of electric shocks. The security officer went down in a convulsing heap.
“Can we get out of here?” Damien asked.
“One last thing,” David told him. “The payment for our help.” The Captain slotted a datachip into the security desk and started working.
“Gas is clear,” Singh reported. “Anyone hit by it will be down for an hour, but rapid response teams will already be on their way.”
“Got it,” David replied. “Six cells opened.”
“Do we stick around to say hi?” the pilot asked.
“Not a chance,” the Captain answered, stepping through the security gate and taking the stungun from Singh, who promptly produced another of the stubby weapons from under his coat. “Let’s get out of here!”
#
David had memorized the route back to the dock, so he quickly took the lead. The Spindle’s central core was an intentionally confusing mess of corridors and galleries, designed to help frustrate any attempt at boarding the immense station.
Their trip was initially unopposed, though. The Captain quickly realized that he and Singh, in their magnetic boots that required very careful walking, were slowing Damien down. The young Mage’s personal gravity field would have allowed him to sprint down the path, dodging any attempt to slow him down or stop him.
“Where is the security?” the Mage asked as they made their way rapidly through the core.
“That’s what we bought by opening those six cells,” David said grimly. “One of the station’s major gangs is making a very noisy attempt to rob a bank in one of the Spindle’s larger towns. Hopefully by the time anyone realizes it’s a distraction, we’ll be at the Blue Jay.”
Shortly afterwards, they ran into the still-manned security checkpoint between the Core and the docks, where four armed CSS officers quickly fanned out to cover the lines of approach when they saw them.
“Stop right there,” the leader told them. “We have word of a breakout from the Core cells; we’ll need to check your ID.”
“Our friend left his personal computer on the ship,” David lied desperately, gesturing towards Damien’s bare wrist with his chin. Unfortunately, that only drew attention to Damien’s ha
nds, and the silver runes inlaid into the youth’s skin.
The guard officer’s eyes went wide.
“That’s the Mage!” he barked, and his men went for their guns.
With his hand halfway to his gun, the officer jerked as if struck, and started to spin around to look behind him. A quarter second later, he convulsed and collapsed as a stungun’s SmartDart delivered its calibrated charge.
The other guards had enough time to realize their commander had been shot before half a dozen men in plain gray coveralls swarmed them. The electrified batons they carried weren’t as effective or as safe as a stungun’s darts, but the officers were outnumbered two to one and swiftly disabled.
Kelly LaMonte, the Blue Jay’s junior engineer, emerged from the docks with a bright smile lighting her green eyes at the sight of Damien, and the stubby barrel of a stungun in her hands.
“Thought that if we hid out and waited for a ruckus, it would be you lot,” she said cheerfully.
“What’s with the clubs?” David demanded. A stungun’s SmartDart was almost guaranteed not to kill someone – so much so they could be used as impromptu defibrillators – but the electrified batons were nowhere near as safe. “Kellers should have had a crate of twenty stunguns!”
“He did,” Kelly agreed. “But that wasn’t enough, and he figured that we’d need more of the guns at the docks if the distraction worked. Come on, let’s get going.”
“Wasn’t enough?” David asked. “How many of the crew joined us?”
One of the coverall-clad spacers smiled gently at the Captain.
“We all did,” he explained. “What else did you expect?”
#
Kelly led them through the docks as quickly as was humanly possible. The entire area was quieter than Damien had ever seen a space dock before. They saw no one on their way through what should have been a busy industrial dock.
“Where is everyone?” he finally asked.
“Our distraction seems to have gotten out of hand,” David said grimly, glancing down at his personal computer. “I don’t think anyone’s been killed, but the bank robbery has managed to turn into a mid-scale riot – apparently they covered their escape by dumping about ten million dollars in cash on the street. It hasn’t spread, much, but I think people are keeping quiet.”
“No lockdown yet?”
“Only in the Spindle,” David replied. “It takes a lot of paperwork to get through a dock shutdown. I suspect our ‘friends’ plan is to sneak everyone out on a liner that’s scheduled to leave in two hours – it’ll take more than that to get a shutdown order in place to stop the ship leaving.”
He was cut off by the buzz of his personal computer announcing an incoming call.
“Captain, you got the package?” Kellers’ voice demanded once David answered.
“We do,” David confirmed.
“Good,” the engineer replied. “We have a problem at the door – an Enforcer-type problem.”
“We’ll deal with it,” the Captain replied, cutting the channel before turning to Damien as they jogged through the station. “I think you’re up, Ship’s Mage.”
“An Enforcer?” Damien asked, shocked. The Guild’s police Mages weren’t the war-trained Mages of the Royal Martian Marine Corps, but they still had a lot more combat training than he did. And any Mage who’d qualified to be an Enforcer was probably a stronger Mage than Damien too.
“No one else in the crew can take him,” David replied grimly. “He’s between us and the ship, and if you can’t get him to step aside, all of this has been for nothing.”
For worse than nothing, Damien realized. If they couldn’t escape, then every member of the Blue Jay’s crew was going to go down with him now.
He was silent for the last few minutes it took them to approach the Blue Jay’s berthing dock, where they met Kellers. The black-skinned man looked uncharacteristically grim, while behind him Jenna was busy organizing and co-ordinating the growing mob of Jay crew members.
“What do we do?” the engineer asked bluntly. “There’s a station-wide alert out to security – we were hoping the Enforcer would answer the call. Instead he sent the CSS officers and settled in here himself – he’s watching the only way in like a hawk.”
“Do we have any gas grenades left?” David asked.
“Won’t work,” Damien told him, cutting into the conversation. “You took the Mages at the cells by surprise – forewarned to expect trouble, that wouldn’t even work on me.” The young Mage considered the access to the dock. It was a single wide corridor leading to the hatch, big enough for small cargo and completely lacking in cover or gravity.
“They’re only guarding the personnel lock,” Singh interjected. “I can steal a shuttle and take everyone over.”
“That would work for twenty of us, but the rest would be arrested before we could come back for them,” Damien told the pilot, still distracted and thinking.
“Gas grenades won’t work,” he repeated. “But do we have any flash-bangs left?”
#
There was no point in trying to sneak up on the Enforcer, so Damien simply came around the corner, slowly approaching the man while keeping his hands visible.
“Damien Montgomery,” the Enforcer greeted him. The black-armored man was helmetless with short-cropped black hair that accented the face of an older officer, his face carved with the laugh lines and slight ruddiness of a man who lived happily and well.
“Enforcer,” Damien greeted him, inclining his head slightly as he stopped, about two meters away from the man. The Enforcer had a stungun to hand, but made no move to aim it.
“I somehow doubt you’ve returned to the scene of the crime to surrender,” the older Mage said quietly, “though it would make life easier and less painful for everyone – including you.”
“No,” Damien admitted. “I don’t suppose I could talk you into stepping aside?”
“Why in the stars would I do that?” the Enforcer asked, clearly surprised by the thought.
“Either that ship is the deathtrap that the Guildmaster thinks it is, or it’s safe to jump,” the Ship’s Mage said bluntly. “Letting me and those who want to risk it aboard the ship doesn’t hurt anyone except us if we’re wrong. It might even save you time! And if the ship still works… has there really been a crime?”
The Enforcer shook his head, finally starting to lift the stungun. “You’re crazy, you know that right?” he said conversationally. “If you jump that ship, you and everyone crazy enough to go with you dies. Some might call that evolution in action – I call it something I’m supposed to stop.”
“What’s your name?” Damien asked, his eyes riveted on the stungun. He honestly wanted to know.
“Mallory,” the Enforcer told him, the gun rising to point at Damien’s chest but still unfired. “James Mallory. Why?”
“Because you’re a good man, James Mallory,” Damien told him quietly. “And I’m sorry for this.”
He flipped the two flash-bangs that he’d been dragging along behind him up and over his head, closing his eyes and shielding his ears with magic as they went off next to his head – and barely two meters from the unprepared Enforcer.
Mallory lurched backwards in shock, raising his hands to paw at his suddenly blind eyes. Damien dove forwards, augmenting his lunge with a little extra gravity, and grabbed the stungun from the Enforcer’s suddenly limp hands.
The guard hadn’t even begun to recover from the grenades before the SmartDart slammed into his neck and disabled him in a spasm of electricity.
#
Hands of the Mage-King of Mars did not, as a rule, help jump their own ships. When Alaura had ‘borrowed’ the latest-model destroyer from the Royal Navy, they’d lent her the crew too – with a reasonable degree of grace even!
Something about the situation in Corinthian, though, made her want to rush. Adding herself to the cycle took them from two Mages making four jumps a day to three Mages, which let the warship make twelve light y
ears a day.
She’d insisted that the last jump would be hers as well. There was a reason for that, which was glowingly clear to the handful of crew, including both other Mages standing in the simulacrum chamber of His Majesty’s Starship Tides of Justice. Where most Mages only had silver runes inlaid into their palms, allowing them to interface with rune matrices, Alaura had a series of runes wrapping around her left arm back to the elbow, carved into her flesh by the Mage-King himself.
Those runes glowed with a brilliant white fire as she jumped the ship with a greater degree of accuracy, and far closer to the planet of Corinthian, than any of her crew could have managed. The Tides of Justice erupted into normal space less than half a million kilometers from Corinthian Prime.
Traffic Control, understandably, panicked.
“Unidentified vessel, identify yourself immediately!” a voice barked from the radio, and Alaura took personal control of the communications.
“This is the Hand of the Mage-King Alaura Stealey,” she said flatly. “I am arriving by request of the Guildmaster to take over a Mage Law case.”
Silence answered her, then a sigh of relief.
“Thank the Gods you’re here,” the voice replied. “We’re having a situation – there’s been a riot and a prison breakout, no one has any idea what’s going on!”
That was obvious.
“Prison breakout? Who escaped?” Alaura demanded.
“I don’t know!” the anonymous traffic controller replied.
The Hand sighed.
“Transmit the Dockmaster’s office’s co-ordinates to my ship,” she ordered. “Tell him to have the details of the breakout ready for me; I will be meeting with him in five minutes.”
“You can’t possibly dock and get here in five minutes!” the bureaucrat replied.
“Ma’am, look!” one of the sensor technicians in the simulacrum chamber exclaimed, pointing at a sudden flare of light on the screens surrounding them. The stereotypical four-keeled shape of a freighter had released itself from the station, flipped up ninety degrees to clear the station, and then brought its drives up at maximum emergency acceleration.
Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) Page 13
