Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  Michaels looked at the plaque and then back at Damien. “You mean I got scammed, don’t you?” he asked.

  “A little bit, sir,” Damien admitted. “Like I said, have your Senior look at it; I may be wrong—I haven’t seen a spell like that before.”

  As he left the office, though, Damien knew the Captain had been thoroughly scammed. He hadn’t misread a rune matrix since he’d started studying his Gift at thirteen years old.

  The same spacer escorted him out of the ship but clearly sensed that the young Mage wasn’t interested in talking. Damien had contacted Captain Michaels as soon as the posting had gone up on the Sherwood internet—he knew he’d been the first to apply; the Captain had even told him so.

  Nonetheless, he’d lost the position before he’d even boarded the ship. He thanked the spacer and crossed back to the twelve-kilometer-long cylinder that was the central hub of Sherwood Prime. He quickly grabbed one of the transit tubes that took civilians up and down the central hub to any of the twelve immense rings spaced evenly along its length, each rotating around the hub to provide the semblance of gravity. The sooner he was off the Hub, the happier he was—he was as comfortable without gravity as anyone born with it could be, but that didn’t mean he liked its absence.

  His rooms were on Ring Seven. Flanked on either side by five more similar immense rings rotating around the hub once a minute, the central two rings were generally inaccessible by ship. This made Rings Six and Seven the cheapest places to live and eat on the immense space station.

  At age thirteen, every child on a planet under the Protectorate was tested for the Mage Gift. For the children born to the noble Mage families that served the Mage-King of Mars and bound His Protectorate together, the testing was a formality, as they were all Mages. For the vast majority of the rest of the population, it was also a formality but for the opposite reason—children like Damien who had no Mage parents and became Mages were barely one in ten million.

  Damien found himself wandering Ring Seven aimlessly. He paid for his room out of the small stipend the Mage-King provided every unemployed Mage. While his parents had lived, they’d received a larger stipend—an encouragement to have more children since they’d proven they would likely have Mage children. Damien’s younger brother and sister had died in the same crash that had killed his parents, long before either was old enough to be tested.

  The discovery of his Gift had changed his life, though. The Royal Testers, men and women who reported to the Mage-King, not the McLaughlin’s government of Sherwood, had arranged for his education to expand and for him to eventually attend the elite school of magic that trained the noble children—Mages by Blood, versus Damien’s Mage by Right—of Sherwood.

  Despite that, the Testers couldn’t provide the interlinking web of connections processed by the Mages by Blood—especially the grandchildren, nephews and nieces of a man as powerful as the McLaughlin, recently re-elected Mage-Governor of Sherwood for his seventh term.

  Lost in his thoughts, Damien realized he’d wandered off of the central concourse, which was brightly lit and patrolled by security even on as cheap and dingy a section of the space station as Ring Seven. He was still in public corridors, but these hallways didn’t have wide-open storefronts and bright lights.

  Instead, easily a third of the lights were broken, and sealed doors with small nameplates or even just numbers were the only exits. Finally starting to pay attention, Damien realized that someone had scratched out the corridor numbers on the intersection nearest him, and touched the medallion around his throat for reassurance—no matter how run-down the area was, no one was going to attack a Mage.

  Conceding that his funk had resulted in his getting very lost, he brought up the map function on his personal computer, a black plastic band wrapped around his left wrist. Its holographic display flickered in the air for a moment, with a small warning in one corner about connection issues, and then identified his location and a route back to his rooms in the main concourse.

  “Nice PC,” a voice said behind him. “Too nice a PC for so small a bit, don’tcha think?”

  Damien slowly turned around to find four large men, the smallest easily twice his own size but carrying a length of black piping where the others were unarmed. He was hoping that the sight of the medallion would cause them to back off, but the largest man simply grinned at the sight.

  “Waay too nice a PC for a tiny Spark, boys,” he repeated. “Why don’tcha jes’ take it off and pass it over? Avoids anyone getting hurt.”

  The PC turned off, the holographic display and interface disappearing back into the band around Damien’s left wrist as he stepped back away from them.

  “None of that now, little Spark,” the big thug told Damien. “You PC, you cash, and that lovely gold medallion—or we start breaking limbs. You can’t spark with no hands, can you?”

  Damien drew on memory for a self-defense spell, reaching for the glove that covered the silver runes engraved on his palms, but a massive fist slammed into his stomach before the glove came off.

  “Oops, me fist slipped,” the man told the Mage with a grin. “Guess the Spark won’t play nice, will he?”

  The massive fist wrapped itself around Damien’s throat and lifted him off the ground. Damien was small and slight; the man likely lifted arm-bells that weighed more than him.

  “Like I said,” he said directly into Damien’s face, “The PC, the cash, and the medallion.”

  He reached for the medallion and Damien closed his eyes, finally remembering the spell he was after—and knowing what would happen when the thug touched the gold coin.

  The security spell carved into the runes under the collar holding the medallion flared into action as soon as it was forcefully removed from Damien’s neck. A blast of super-heated air shot out in all directions, burning the thug’s hand and throwing him back with telekinetic force.

  Damien hit the ground and released his own spell. A mental baseball bat slammed into the leader’s knees, and he heard one of the man’s kneecaps crack as the spell hit them. His face half-burnt and a kneecap broken, the man fell to one leg with his hands over his face.

  Before Damien even started to run, however, the thug was moving again. With one eye closed and his face bleeding from the heat burns, the thug rose on his one good leg and grabbed Damien with both hands. He threw the slight Mage bodily into the wall, crushing the breath out of him.

  Still balancing on one leg, the thug slammed one hand around Damien’s neck, crushing him against the wall, and then smashed his other fist into the Mage’s stomach.

  Unable to breathe, Damien began to choke, his vision graying out and pain tearing through his body as the thug struck him again. And again.

  Then one of the other thugs flew bodily into the leader’s back. Still, the man remained on his feet, dropping Damien as he turned to see who was interrupting.

  Damien barely recognized the spacer from Gentle Rains of Summer before the “liberated” length of black piping crashed into the leader’s head. The thug wavered for a moment, and then the piping slammed up between his legs, and the mountain of a man finally crumpled.

  Damien’s consciousness crumpled with him.

  Captain David Rice figured he was about to die.

  The pirate ship had been waiting for the container ship Blue Jay when they emerged from their second-to-last jump en route to the Sherwood system. Compared to the freighter’s four spinning ribs wrapped around its core and containers, the hundred-meter-long cylindrical ship was tiny.

  Unlike Blue Jay, though, the pirate ship had antimatter thrusters, a Mage who hadn’t just jumped, and fusion-rocket long-range missiles. The last were the cause of the muscular Captain’s sense of incipient mortality.

  He stood on the freighter’s bridge, watching the display from his ship’s cheap but functional sensor suite with one eye, and the video link to the simulacrum chamber at the center of the ship showing his Ship’s Mage’s exhausted face with the other. The sensors show
ed the pirate just less than two million kilometers distant—and the missile salvo it had fired several minutes before, accelerating toward them at over two thousand gravities.

  “Four missiles,” his first officer, Jenna Campbell, reported in a strained voice. “RFLAMs engaging.”

  The ship had two Rapid-Fire Laser Antimissile systems: defensive turrets containing a dozen rapidly charging gas-chambered pulse lasers. The ship mounted one at the bow, where the four ribs and the central keel combined into the protective shield dome. The second was at the rear of the ship, where it guarded the vessel’s immense engines.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Kenneth McLaughlin told Rice through the video link, the Mage closing his eyes and reaching out. Even from the simulacrum chamber, no Mage could reach very far, and jumps were exhausting. There was no way McLaughlin would save them.

  “RFLAMs each got one,” Jenna reported grimly. “Two more inbound—shit! One’s out of the gun’s field of fire!”

  “Got it,” Kenneth said grimly. A third blinking icon on the screen disappeared as the Mage reached out and turned part of the missile into superheated plasma.

  It wasn’t enough. The immense, multi-megaton mass of Blue Jay lurched as the last missile slammed into the forward RFLAM turret. Rice expected to die in that moment, only to blink as nothing more happened.

  “What the hell?” he demanded.

  “Either it was a dud or a straight kinetic,” Jenna told him harshly. “Not that it matters—the RFLAM is gone, as is half the bow dome. We try any major maneuvers and we’ll open up like a rusty tin can.”

  “I am not dying like this,” Rice told her, engaging the maneuvering controls himself. He took it gently, trusting the XO’s assessment, but he slowly turned the ship so her main fusion rockets—and the last laser turret—faced her attacker.

  “We’re being hailed,” Jenna told him. “Playing it.”

  “Captain Rice,” a sardonic voice told him. “I do believe your ship may be a bit banged up! Please don’t run too hard; you might hurt yourself.”

  “Shit, shit, shit, SHIT,” Jenna exclaimed as the hull lurched again, this time much less noticeably.

  “What?!”

  “Asshole painted us with an x-ray laser while we were busy listening to his transmission,” she said bitterly. “Now the aft RFLAM is gone.”

  Jenna didn’t wait to play the second transmission; she just threw it on when it arrived.

  “In the name of the Blue Star Syndicate, I order you to heave to and be boarded,” the voice ordered. “Continue running, and I will put a kinetic warhead through your bridge and then collect your cargo and bodies from the debris field.”

  Rice shared a helpless look with Jenna and McLaughlin. If the Blue Star Syndicate boarded the ship, he was dead. If they blew out Jay’s bridge, he was dead.

  Now Captain David Rice knew he was going to die, and his crew with him.

  The Ship’s Mage took a deep breath and looked him in the eye.

  “Not happening, sir,” he said quietly. “Ready the ship for jump.”

  “You just jumped,” Rice told him. “You can’t jump for at least a few hours!”

  Regulations said a Mage should jump every six hours. If you had a strong, brave Mage, you could jump after three…once. They’d arrived at the final jump zone short of Sherwood barely twenty minutes before.

  “I’m sorry, David,” Kenneth said quietly. “I won’t let everyone on this ship die.”

  The camera to the simulacrum chamber cut out, and David turned back to look at the sensor board and the pirate ship closing. Then the indescribable sensation of teleportation took hold, and the whole bridge faded out.

  When it slowly faded back in, the sensors were clear. They were a day’s regular flight out of Sherwood Prime.

  “Get the camera back,” he ordered Jenna. “Kenneth, answer me, dammit!” he snapped.

  The monitor flipped back on, and Rice swallowed hard. The simulacrum chamber was at the center of the ship. It had no gravity, only the small model that was always, somehow, at the exact direct center of the ship it was a copy of.

  One of Kenneth’s hands was caught in the model. The rest of him had started to float away when his eyeballs had exploded out of his head.

  Blue Jay’s only Ship’s Mage, the youngest son of the Mage-Governor of the planet they’d just arrived at, was very, very dead.

  Starship’s Mage by Glynn Stewart

  Interested in reading more? Starship’s Mage is available now.

  About the Author

  Glynn Stewart is the author of Starship’s Mage, a bestselling science fiction and fantasy series where faster-than-light travel is possible–but only because of magic. His other works include science fiction series Duchy of Terra, Castle Federation and Vigilante, as well as the urban fantasy series ONSET and Changeling Blood.

  Writing managed to liberate Glynn from a bleak future as an accountant. With his personality and hope for a high-tech future intact, he lives in Kitchener, Ontario with his partner, their cats, and an unstoppable writing habit.

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  CREDITS

  The following people were involved in making this book:

  Copyeditor: Richard Shealy

  Proofreader: M Parker Editing

  Cover art: Jeff Brown

  Typo Hunter Team

  Faolan’s Pen Publishing team: Jack, Kate, and Robin.

  Other books by Glynn Stewart

  For release announcements join the mailing list by visiting GlynnStewart.com

  Scattered Stars: Conviction

  Conviction

  Deception

  Equilibrium

  Fortitude

  Huntress (upcoming)

  Castle Federation

  Space Carrier Avalon

  Stellar Fox

  Battle Group Avalon

  Q-Ship Chameleon

  Rimward Stars

  Operation Medusa

  A Question of Faith: a Castle Federation Novella

  Exile

  Ashen Stars: an Exile Prequel Novella

  Exile

  Refuge

  Crusade

  Duchy of Terra

  The Terran Privateer

  Duchess of Terra

  Terra and Imperium

  Darkness Beyond

  Shield of Terra

  Relics of Eternity

  Shadows of the Fall

  Eyes of Tomorrow

  Starship’s Mage

  Starship’s Mage

  Hand of Mars

  Voice of Mars

  Alien Arcana

  Judgment of Mars

  UnArcana Stars

  Sword of Mars

  Mountain of Mars

  The Service of Mars

  A Darker Magic

  Mage-Commander (upcoming)

  Pulsar Race: A Starship’s Mage Universe Novella

  Starship’s Mage: Red Falcon

  Interstellar Mage

  Mage-Provocateur

  Agents of Mars

  Peacekeepers of Sol

  Raven’s Peace

  The Peacekeeper Initiative

  Raven’s Course

  Drifter’s Folly

  Remnant Faction (upcoming)

  Vigilante (With Terry Mixon)

  Heart of Vengeance

  Oath of Vengeance

  Bound By Stars: A Vigilante Series (With Terry Mixon)

  Bound By Law

  Bound by Honor

  Bound by Blood

  Standalone Science Fiction Novellas

  Excalibur Lost

  ONSET

  ONSET: To Serve and Protect

  ONSET: My Enemy’s Enemy

  ONSET: Blood of the Innocent

  ONSET: Stay of Execution

  Murder by Magic: an ONSET Universe Novella

  Changeling Blood

  Changeling’s Fealty

  Hunter’s Oath

  Noble’s Honor

  Fae, Fl
ames & Fedoras: a Changeling Blood Universe Novella

  Teer & Kard

  Wardtown

  Blood Ward

  Fantasy Stand Alone Novels

  Children of Prophecy

  City in the Sky