Starship's Mage: Episode 2

by Glynn Stewart

  “In exchange, we’ll free one of your people when we break Damien out, and pay you one million Martian dollars.”

  “Nix-Six is not an easy item to acquire,” Carney observed. Nix-Six was the common name for ‘Neutralization Solution Six,’ the current standard knockout gas issued to police riot suppression squads.

  “Corinthian System Security has it as standard issue,” David replied. “Do you expect me to believe that if the CSS has it, you don’t?”

  The mob boss chuckled, a smile momentarily even reaching his eyes.

  “True,” he conceded. “But a million dollars…” he shrugged. “A million makes almost no difference to the value of your offer, and one rescue is far too little. No deal.”

  David started to rise to leave in silence, but the mob boss waved him back to his seat.

  “No deal at that rate,” he clarified. “I don’t want your money Captain. But understand that System Security swept up a cell of my best operators six months ago.”

  “I’ll get you your gear – hell, I’ll throw in body armor and I think I can get you the codes to unlock the cells in the Core – but we’ll do this on my terms. I have six guys in the cells in the Core. You’ll free them all.”

  David winced. It was a better deal than he’d hoped for, but he knew what kind of ‘operators’ ended up in the Core – hit men and the most violent of pimps and extortionists. He needed the gear and the backup though.

  “We’ll do it,” he said simply.

  “All right then Captain,” Carney replied, leaning forward across his desk. “What’s your plan?”

  #

  Jenna and Kellers were waiting in David’s room when he and Narveer returned to the hotel. Walking into the room, David dropped the case he’d received from Carney – the first part of the requested gear, mostly the flash-bangs and Nix-Six canisters – next to the door.

  “Well?” Jenna asked.

  “Is it safe to talk?” David asked, glancing at Kellers.

  The engineer nodded, pointing at a small black box sitting on the table by David’s bed. “There’s only a standard, accessible-by-court-order-only, recording box,” the engineer told him. “That’s showing an empty room right now. It looks like we haven’t attracted enough suspicion to rate special attention.”

  “Good,” the Captain answered, looking around his officers. It would take a warrant for System Security to bug his hotel room, but given that one of his people was in a high security cell, he would have given the warrant if he was the judge.

  “Carney’s in,” he continued. “Basic gear is in that case,” he gestured, “and we have a drop-off location for a crate of stunguns and SmartDart ammo.”

  “A crate is a few more stunguns than the four of us can use,” Kellers observed, glancing around the room.

  “We need manpower,” David admitted. “Carney’s people have promised to draw the guards away from the Blue Jay, but we’ll need to get ourselves and Damien from the security cells to the dock – and believe me, CSS is going to know what we’re doing. Much as I wanted to avoid it, we’re going to have to involve the crew.”

  “Unless you were planning on flying the ship with half a dozen people, we needed to anyway,” Jenna reminded him. “We need at least twenty of the spacers aboard if we want to be able to get anywhere without the ship coming apart around us.”

  “Conveniently, we’re getting a crate of twenty stunguns,” David said dryly. “I want each of you to approach the people you trust most in your departments and feel them out. Make sure they all know that anyone who stays is being released with two months’ pay – it’s the least I can do for our crew, this wasn’t their fault.”

  “You might want to try bribing them to be involved, not to leave,” Narveer boomed with a laugh. “I don’t think we’ll have an issue,” he continued. “The pilots will be in.”

  “Don’t commit anyone to this until you’ve talked to them,” David warned. “Kellers – I want you to pick up the stunners and ammo. Let’s try not to draw attention to ourselves.”

  “I have a scheduled meeting with Damien tomorrow evening,” he continued. “That gives us at least twenty-four hours before the Hand should arrive, based on what the Guildmaster said.”

  “We only get one shot at this,” David reminded his people, glancing around the hotel room, his gaze finally settling on the case of grenades by the door.

  “If we mess this up, we join Damien in the High Security cells,” he finished quietly.

  “Or we can watch the boy who saved our lives swing, and lose our ship,” Singh summarized bluntly. “Is anyone here not in?” the Blue Jay’s First Pilot demanded.

  Silence answered him.

  #

  After the one visit from his lawyer, Damien had seen no one except the pair of Enforcers who came to escort him to the gym to exercise and eat. Time didn’t quite blur together, as the day after the lawyer visit they at least gave him a tablet with access to a basic entertainment and education library.

  While the library wasn’t exactly up to the minute on current news – at a guess, someone had to manually review what articles and events could be included – it did allow him to research the previous cases of Mages attempting to modify their rune matrices.

  There weren’t that many cases anyone was certain of. There were a dozen or so where observers, with hindsight in place, had managed to reasonably prove that the Mage aboard the ship which had come apart into pieces when jumping had been experimenting.

  The only two cases where a Mage had actually been brought to trial, it sounded like they’d got it half right – some of the ship had survived the jump, enough that the Mage had been alive to arrest. One had committed suicide before his trial, and the legal case study Damien found on the other ended with the ominous note of ‘Turned over to the Hand of the Mage-King for justice.’

  There was very little sanctioned experimentation with jump matrices. The rune matrix hadn’t been noticeably changed in the two hundred years since the first Mage-King and his people had built the very first jump ships.

  The only person who had ever done anything with the standard jump matrix, in fact, was the first Mage-King himself. No improvements since. Almost no research since. The few experiments that had occurred had uniformly ended in death and tragedy.

  Damien was starting to suspect that he really was crazy when his door slid open, revealing one of his Enforcers, a pair of rune encrusted manacles in his hands.

  “You have a visitor Montgomery,” the Enforcer told him. “We both know you’re not gonna cause trouble, but I’ve got to put these on you anyway. Gonna make an issue of it?”

  Damien shook his head, resignedly holding his wrists out as the mag-booted Enforcer manacled him and gently pulled him out of the cell. There was only one Enforcer today, though Damien saw a few of the uniformed Corinthian System Security officers guarding the cells as well.

  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 hands, 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’s 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.”