Starship's Mage: Episode 3

by Glynn Stewart

  Grimly, Damien held the shield as the car turned around and Jenna slammed on the accelerator. Bullets continued to splash off for a few moments, and then they were clear. The young Mage slumped, leaning on David for a second as they screamed around another corner, turning onto a different route to the landing pad.

  “Damien!” Kellers shouted. “Up ahead!”

  Blocking the way to the road and rumbling towards them was a tank. Damien barely got his shield forward in time, and was slammed back into his seat when the first shot from its main gun slammed into his defense.

  He took a deep breath as the world seemed to slow down around him. The soldiers in the Hall had brought stunguns – they hadn’t been trying to kill him and his friends, so he’d tried not to kill them. Now he was being shot at, and he was out of patience.

  Surging back to his feet, Damien thrust his right hand out in a clenched fist. Bright light flashed around him as he moved, a field of super-hot plasma coalescing around him without touching his skin, and then blasting forwards with the motion of his fist.

  The bolt met the tank shell coming the other way and incinerated it before slamming into the tank’s turret. Molten metal exploded away from the top of the armored vehicle, and then Damien slammed a second plasma bolt into the main chassis.

  This one went clean through the tank, and hit the ammunition on the way. From sixty meters away, the explosion rocked the car the Blue Jay’s crew had stolen, the heat blasting against Damien’s face.

  Exhaustion collapsed him back into the seat and it felt like his head was exploding as a vicious migraine stabbed into his skull. Blinking against the pain, he put his hands to his face – and at a warm wet feeling, pulled them away to see them spattered in his own blood.

  “Damn it Damien, you’re bleeding from everywhere but your eyeballs,” David hissed, tossing him a package of gauze from somewhere in his suit. “I saw Kenneth after he overdid it, I won’t bury two Mages!”

  Wincing at the fierceness of David’s speech and the migraine, Damien shook his head. “Not likely,” he half-whimpered.

  “I’ve got something!” Kellers suddenly snapped, turning the volume up on his personal computer.

  Most of what they heard was static, but a few words came through: “Pad… attack… took off… your way.”

  “That’s Kelzin,” Jenna exclaimed. “Where is he?”

  “Not close enough,” Kellers replied grimly, as they reached the end of the road with the burning tank, and a second light battle tank emerged from the greenery at the side of the road. Another APC and a dozen infantry had dug in behind a temporary barrier to block the road behind the tank.

  “Shoot them!” David ordered, suiting actions to words and opening fire with the stungun. The weapon’s range was impressive, but the SmartDarts couldn’t penetrate military body armor. The Captain ducked back down next to Damien as more bullets rattled off the hull.

  Damien tried to rise; to see if he could shield them again, but David easily forced him back down as the migraine stole his balance.

  “What do we…” Kellers’ voice was cut off by the roaring of rockets as their shuttle came screaming overhead. Down-facing thrusters sent the soldiers scattering as the shuttle set itself down, its back ramp opening.

  The tank started to train its gun on the shuttle, and then a new sound ripped the sky. Modern armor-piercing rounds ripped through its armor like tissue paper, each bullet carrying only the tiniest of explosive charges – but the accumulation of a hundred rounds enough to shatter the tank’s armor and leave it a burning mess.

  “Get over here!” Kelzin shouted, stepping around the shuttle as he loaded another pair of magazines into the carbine. “These guys are not playing nice!” Fitting actions to his words, a hail of gunfire landed around the pilot, who ducked behind his shuttle before returning fire.

  Jenna slammed the car into a screeching stop, throwing her door open and leaping out. Kellers followed her, but paused to look back at David and Damien.

  “Can you walk?” David asked as Damien struggled to his feet. Gunfire echoed around them, and before Damien could work up the energy to reply, the Captain looked at Kellers. “Grab him,” he ordered.

  Strong arms grabbed each of his shoulders and dragged him forward. He stumbled, struggling against the migraine and the exhaustion wracking his body.

  “I can’t do this,” he muttered to David. “I’m not an Enforcer.”

  “Cover us!” David shouted forwards, continuing to drag Damien forward. “You’re my Ship’s Mage,” he said harshly. “I don’t need you to be a soldier!”

  They rounded the shuttle to discover there was no cover between them and the Chrysanthemum soldiers now except the second burning tank. Jenna had made it into the shuttle, and was returning fire with a carbine she’d grabbed from inside.

  Kelzin was next to them, pumping careful bursts at the locals.

  “Go first, I’ll cover you,” the pilot ordered.

  Damien felt more than saw David nod, but managed to struggle enough to his feet that he wouldn’t be completely useless when they ran.

  “Go!” Kelzin snapped.

  David and Kellers took off, half-supporting, half-carrying Damien as he ran with them. For a moment, gunfire echoed around them, but then it diverted. A few steps behind them, Kelzin followed, spraying bullets with abandon to keep the soldiers’ heads down.

  Damien slumped into a seat on the side of the shuttle as David and Kellers released him, breathing a sigh of relief as Kelzin followed them in and slammed the button to close the hatch.

  The young pilot opened his mouth to say something, but stopped with an expression of shock on his face as blood exploded from his stomach. A heavy sniper round slammed into the shuttle wall next to Damien as Kelzin collapsed to the ground.

  Jenna dropped her carbine and was at the pilot’s side in a moment.

  “Toss me the medkit,” she ordered. Kellers was quick to obey, passing over the white box with the green cross.

  “Can you fly this thing, boss?” the engineer asked David.

  Damien forced himself to a sitting position, knowing the answer the Captain was going to give. David shook his head, and met Damien’s eyes.

  “Can you fly?” he asked.

  “I can fly anything,” Damien replied, as confidently as he could with his face covered in his own blood and a migraine eating at his skull.

  “That wasn’t the question.”

  “It’s fly or die,” the Mage replied. “Someone’s going to have to carry me to the cockpit.”

  #

  The heavy cargo hauler had been built tough. Even as Damien was hauled into the cockpit and strapped in, the soldiers continued to spray it with rifle and machine gun fire, but it lifted smoothly into the air when he engaged the thrusters.

  That was the cue for the remaining soldiers to scatter, hiding behind their APCs as the shuttles thruster fused hydrogen to blast the street with masses of ionized particles as the ship blasted for orbit.

  Damien quickly brought up the various displays, checking their height, velocity, and acceleration. Three gravities of acceleration pressed them into the chairs, and he prayed silently that the pressure wasn’t making Kelzin’s wounds worse.

  “We’re clear?” David asked, and Damien shook himself, focusing on the displays again.

  “We have enough fuel to make it to the Blue Jay,” he reported. “Can we com her yet?”

  The Captain was in the copilots seat and checked the communications panels for a moment before shaking his head.

  “We’re clear of the jamming, but I’m getting nothing from the ship,” he told Damien. “Most likely they’re being jammed too.”

  Damien nodded, blinking against his migraine, and then blinking again as a set of indicators began flashing on the console. It took him a minute to remember what they meant and bring up the radar display.

  “We have a problem,” he told the Captain quietly. Before David could ask, the Mage pointed at the s
creen he’d just opened, which showed two atmospheric interceptor jets at the maximum range of the shuttles sensors.

  “Can you evade them?”

  Damien checked his fuel gage, and then the computer’s estimate of the jets closing speed.

  “I have barely enough fuel to reach the Blue Jay,” he said grimly. “If I push hard enough to evade them, I won’t be able to slow down for rendezvous. I can evade if they fire on us, but I can’t escape them.”

  He flipped two timers up on the screen. “Left is time to orbit – these guys can’t follow us that high,” Damien told David. That timer showed just over ten minutes. “Right is time to when they’ll range on us.”

  That timer showed seven minutes.

  “You’re done for magic,” David told him flatly. “This ship has no weapons. All we can do is hold on tight, and hope you’re good enough to dodge missiles.”

  “No pressure, I see,” the Mage replied, gently massaging his temples. “Let’s see what happens.”

  The next minutes passed in a terrifying silence as Damien watched his fuel gage, his height, and the distance to the jets. After five, Jenna clambered in against the acceleration and dropped into the last seat.

  “Kelzin will live,” she said flatly. “The round pierced his intestines, and he’ll need serious medical care once we get him aboard, but the bullet went through cleanly otherwise. Patched up what I could and have compresses on it. He won’t die before we make it home.”

  “Unless the rest of us do,” Damien muttered. “Have any ideas about evading atmospheric interceptors?”

  “Be somewhere else?”

  “Working on it,” the Mage replied, running through a series of menus, trying to see if he could eke any more acceleration out of the ship without spending more fuel than he could afford.

  “Watch it!” David snapped. “Incoming!”

  Damien snapped his gaze back to the main screen, wincing against the sharp movement. It looked like he’d underestimated the interceptors range. With four minutes before they passed beyond the region of the atmosphere where the air-breathing craft could follow them, the fighters had each launched two missiles.

  A moment later, he had a timer to impact up, and kept an eye on it as he twisted the ship slightly, arcing their course away from the missiles.

  “What do we do?” Jenna asked, her voice very small.

  “Pray,” David told her grimly, his eyes on the radar as the missiles came screaming in, far faster than the shuttle could fly.

  “That might not hurt,” Damien told them absently, his mind on the missiles, the shuttle… and the shuttles ridiculously overpowered engines, designed to lift it from a planetary surface into orbit.

  “I’d also recommend hanging on,” he finished, grabbing onto the manual controls as the missiles entered final acquisition. “This is going to suck.”

  The shuttle had no ECM, no defenses and wasn’t maneuvering. Presented with an easy target, the smart missiles had clustered together, sweeping in from one vector, with no more than a hundred meters between each of them. As they screamed in on the shuttle at several thousand miles an hour, Damien jerked the ship about, pointing her nose up and away from the missiles before hitting the engines at maximum power.

  For a moment, half a dozen beefy men sat on the Mage’s already bruised chest. Then the engines cut back to normal strength, and the shuttle stabilized.

  The impact counter had gone negative. David reached over and shut it off, looking at Damien in surprise.

  “What was that?”

  “That was running air-breathing missiles into the blast of four fusion rockets at maximum power. They’re designed for atmosphere – not the equivalent of a point blank solar flare,” Damien explained.

  “We’re clear of atmo,” he continued. “They’re breaking off.”

  The Captain breathed a deep sigh.

  “Alright, Damien. Get us home,” he instructed.

  #

  Chrysanthemum orbit was quiet. After everything they’d seen on the surface, Damien was expecting some kind of resistance as they shot towards the Blue Jay, decelerating to make rendezvous now.

  “Can you see anything?” David asked.

  “The tanker is still attached,” Damien replied. “There’s nothing else moving that I can pick up, but the shuttle isn’t big enough for decent heat sensors, and the radar is stupidly short-ranged.”

  “We’ll see if we can fix that,” the Captain replied. He touched a command on the screen again, and then twitched in surprise as it actually turned green. “We have a connection,” he told Damien, before leaning forward.

  “Blue Jay, come in, this is Captain Rice,” he said over the channel. “Singh, please come in. Someone tell me what’s going on over there.”

  “Oh thank gods,” a female voice – Kelly’s voice, Damien realized in relief – answered. “Captain, it’s good to hear from you.”

  “What the hell happened? Where’s Singh?” Rice demanded.

  “They tried to board us through the shuttle bay,” LaMonte told them, her voice weary. “Singh took that suit and half a dozen of the crew with carbines to stop them – he said they were mercs of some kind, not local troops.”

  “The locals certainly had a hand,” the Captain told her grimly. “Where’s Singh?”

  “I don’t know,” the young engineer replied. “I’m in touch with engineering via the hardline, but the jamming cut off all contact with him and his team – the last I heard they were fighting in the shuttle bay, but twenty minutes ago a bunch of shuttles fucked off from the tanker. Looks like they were meeting up with someone – scanners show a jump-yacht running for the jump zone at crazy speed.”

  “The jammer must be on one of the shuttles,” Jenna murmured. “They took it with them when they ran. Why would they run?”

  “We would have been visible to decent sensors twenty minutes ago,” Damien told her.

  “Kelly, can you send us the sensor telemetry?” Rice asked. “We’re coming in through the shuttle bay, we’ll check up on Singh on our way in.”

  “Okay,” she replied. After a moment’s pause, she asked softly, “Is Damien okay?”

  “He’s the only reason any of us are,” the Captain said bluntly. “Get us that telemetry – we need to get the hell out of this star system before those gunships launch.”

  Damien blanched as the Blue Jay’s sensor data started to come up on his screen. He hadn’t even thought of the four gunships they’d delivered. If he managed to rest and make it to the Jay’s simulacrum, he could take them, but if he tried in his current state, he likely wouldn’t survive to jump them out.

  “They know what you did to the ship,” David said quietly. Damien glanced over to the screen the Captain was working on. He’d pulled together a projection of the shuttles’ and the jump-yacht’s courses. “The Navy – and most people – treat two million klicks as the maximum range of an amplifier – and their course will pull them out of that range before we can get aboard. They wanted to make sure they were clear before you could take them out.”

  “How would they know that?” Damien asked.

  “I don’t know,” David admitted. “But if one set of mercenaries does, others do. That makes us a target.”

  “I don’t know about you guys, but I think we were already a target,” Jenna interrupted. “Let’s see if we can get out of this trap before we start worrying about the next one, okay?”

  Damien nodded in agreement, his attention suddenly consumed by the final maneuvers as the Blue Jay rapidly expanded in the screen ahead of them.

  #

  The Blue Jay’s shuttle bay was a mess. The bay the shuttle normally belonged in was filled with the burning wreckage of the end of the boarding tube, while the main length of the tube was occupying a third of the door.

  Bodies, weapons, and debris floated in the zero-gravity, all coated and obscured by a faint pink haze of loose blood. Damien swallowed down a moment of nausea as he oriented the shuttle on a s
pare rack and slowly locked the ship into place.

  “We’re down,” he told the Captain. “There’s almost no atmosphere outside – the main door won’t be able to close until we remove that tube.”

  “I saw,” Rice replied grimly. “There are breathers and coveralls in the shuttle. We need to get into the ship.”

  “I didn’t see Singh,” Damien said quietly. “Just his handiwork.”

  David nodded grimly and set off for the back of the shuttle. Carefully, wary of his still-fragile balance, Damien followed. Kellers had already pulled out five sets of coveralls and, wearing one himself, begun the careful process of sliding Kelzin’s unconscious body into one.

  The emergency coveralls were designed to be quick to put on, and had decent enough gloves that Damien was able to take one of the carbines and be confident he could use it. The suits weren’t designed for long term duration – they lacked plumbing connections, if nothing else – but would do to cross the bay and deal with any mercenaries left behind.

  “Watch out for hostiles,” Rice told the others. “Just because we know some of them fled doesn’t mean they didn’t leave anyone behind.”

  Damien nodded, carefully controlling his movements in the shuttle’s zero-gravity. The magic he’d normally use to provide his own personal gravity field would be too much for him in his current state, so he’d have to move through the microgravity like everyone else.

  Kellers slammed the button to open the ramp, and then scooped up Kelzin carefully. Jenna and Rice kicked off first, launching themselves into the blood-soaked bay, carbines moving in gentle patterns to track potential targets without throwing themselves off-course.

  Damien followed, relying on them to have kept the room clear as he lacked the training to track targets without sending himself spinning. He landed gently next to the emergency airlock leading forwards into the ship.

  Six men in ship’s clothes with the Hyper-Kevlar vests he and Singh had picked up were collapsed around it. The body armor was pocked with marks where they’d stopped dozens of rounds, but in the end they’d been too little. From the almost twenty bodies floating in the shuttle bay, they’d given a good account of themselves with the carbines in their hands, but the professional boarders had taken them down.