by J. J. Green
Dark Mage Rises
Star Mage Saga Book 2
J.J. Green
Cover Art: Amalia Chitulescu Digital Art
Editing: L.M. Lengel
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Books of Star Mage Saga
Prequel: Star Mage Exile
Book 1: Daughter of Discord
Book 2: Dark Mage Rises
Book 3: Wildfire and Steel
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter One
As Carina Lin returned to consciousness, she struggled. Her wrists and ankles were tied and a gag was wrapped tightly around her face. Being captured and trussed up was becoming a bad habit, she decided.
The hard floor she lay on was vibrating ever so slightly, indicating she was aboard a starship. Wriggling around and pushing with her elbows and knees, she maneuvered herself to a sitting position. The room she found herself in wasn’t much larger than a clothes closet and it was entirely bare. The door was smooth and featureless with no way to open it from the inside. She’d clearly been put in some kind of holding cell for prisoners, so the vessel was a military craft. Was that preferable to a criminal outfit, like human traffickers? She didn’t think so. Though she hadn’t been able to get a good look at the attackers who had boarded the shuttle she’d stolen, she had a strong feeling they were the very last people she wanted to meet.
The second-to-last people she ever wanted to see again were the Sherrerrs. After her mother’s experiences at the hands of those arrogant, aggressive meatheads, Carina was certain that if she encountered another Sherrerr before she died it would be far too soon.
She doubted they would say the same about her. The clan would be very happy to have their shuttle back and a family of mages returned to their control. Yet there was another faction in that galactic sector that posed an even greater threat to Carina.
She had no idea how much time had passed since she’d been stunned. Perhaps an hour or longer, judging by how stiff and sore she was from lying on the hard floor. She recalled a brief battle, during which she’d managed to wound three of the shuttle’s boarders. It was the last thing she remembered before coming to.
As she waited, leaning against the wall with her knees drawn up, she reflected that her captors’ decision to gag her seemed a particularly stupid move. What did they think she was going to do, shout her way to freedom? Then she recalled that time she’d bitten Stefan Sherrerr’s neck. If she’d only managed to sink her teeth a little deeper, she might have killed her mother’s rapist and torturer. She smiled grimly. Perhaps a gag was a good idea after all.
Carina twisted her hands and feet, attempting to improve the blood flow to her extremities. When would they come for her and what would they do? Her thoughts turned to her half-siblings. She’d managed to Transport them all to the planet surface, using up the last of the elixir. Little Darius would be safe with Parthenia, her oldest half-sister. The twins, Ferne and Oriana, were together too. And nasty Castiel, who was a couple of years younger than Parthenia, was with his sister-acolyte Nahla.
Carina recalled Castiel’s claims that he possessed mage powers and shuddered. Parthenia, Ferne, Oriana, and Darius could be trusted to uphold the mage philosophy of never intentionally hurting anyone, but Castiel could not. If he was telling the truth, she dreaded what he might do. He was as evil as his father had been.
She’d been forced to Transport her friend, Bryce, alone to the surface, but he would be okay. He would find a way to return to his family on Ithiya. She was more worried about her mage siblings. They’d been brought up in sheltered luxury and hadn’t developed the skills required to survive in a harsher environment. Even more dangerous to them was the fact that they didn’t have any practice at concealing their mage skills. Ma had known all about the dangers of revealing her abilities to strangers, yet she’d still been captured and subjected to a life of enslavement and misery. What chance did the woman’s naive offspring have?
If Carina escaped she had to protect them, but it would be hard to find them. Parthenia had given Carina one of her bracelets, but she no longer had it. Everything had been taken from her except her clothes. Parthenia had also given one of her bracelets to the twins, so they would be able to Cast Locate and reunite with her. Maybe with the four of them working together they might remain safe.
As well as worrying about them, though they had only been parted a short time, Carina already missed her brothers and sisters. In the few weeks she’d spent with Parthenia and her other mage siblings, she’d grown to love them. Yet only a few months previously, she hadn’t even known she had a family.
If they ever got the chance to be together again, she would take them on a journey to find Earth, the planet where mages were rumored to have originated. In that remote place they might create a sanctuary where all mages could live openly without fear of capture. For the moment, however, that was all a dream.
Carina sighed and tried to clear her mind of gloomy thoughts. Escape was what she needed to focus on. There was a slim chance she was wrong about whose ship she was on. If she wasn’t wrong, there was an even slimmer chance that her captors wouldn’t discover that she’d crossed them in the past. She was in need of a lot of luck.
A metallic click sounded, and the door slid open. A man in uniform entered. His head was shaved, making it difficult for Carina to tell his age, though from his bearing he appeared to be a high-ranking officer. As he stepped closer, she saw the starburst insignia on his collar. Her luck was all out. He was working for the Dirksens.
The guard who entered behind him was carrying a chair. After she set the chair down, the officer waved her away. The door closed and the man sat, crossing his legs. As far as Carina could see, he wasn’t armed. He was in the room alone with a prisoner but carried nothing to defend himself. That didn’t seem very smart, but before making a move, Carina waited to hear what he had to say.
The officer leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He said nothing, only gazed at her. Carina returned his gaze. She wasn’t cowed,
if that was his intention. She had endured plenty of intimidation and beatings in her eighteen years. She could endure some more and she would take her revenge if she got the chance.
The officer held eye contact for a while, not blinking.
“Eeeeennnnnoooor-e?” Carina asked through her gag.
He got to his feet, took two steps over to her and pulled off her gag. He then returned to his seat. “What did you say?”
“I said, is this a new torture method?” Carina worked her mouth to ease its dryness. “Because it isn’t very effective.”
A corner of the man’s mouth lifted but then his eyes turned serious again. “I know your kind. We could go through the usual steps: I could ask you what you were doing aboard a Sherrerr shuttle, days from the site of a recent battle, yet not wearing a Sherrerr uniform. You’ll stoically refuse to answer me. I’ll tell the guard to rough you up a bit. You’ll still refuse to respond. I’ll threaten more pain and humiliation but after the guard does her job again, your lips will remain sealed. And so on and on. All very messy and distasteful and ultimately unlikely to bring either of us any satisfaction.”
He tilted his head before continuing. “I know you. Where do I know you from?”
Carina’s stomach clenched. This was it. She was going to be identified, and then everything would be over for her. It was a shame she wouldn’t see her family again.
The officer leaned forward and peered at her. “I’m right, aren’t I? I do know you.”
Damn. He’d read her reaction to his words in her face. Carina fought to calm herself and clear her mind as Nai Nai had taught her. This interrogation was turning out to be harder than she’d expected. Pain, she could withstand. This officer’s methods were subtler.
“Hmm… Shut down your emotional response, have you?” he asked. “So you’ve been trained to do that. Perhaps you rank highly in the Sherrerr forces. Maybe you’re a spy. That might explain some anomalies.” His gaze roamed her features closely. “Yet you’re too young to be a high-ranking officer. You’re even younger than you look, I think.”
Carina looked at him defiantly yet didn’t trust herself to respond, not knowing what he might interpret from her words. She wasn’t going to hand the answers to him on a plate.
His dark eyes were thoughtful. “Don’t have anything to say? You were quite talkative a moment ago, trying to speak even though you were gagged. Do you find my observations unsettling? I’ve caught you unprepared, haven’t I? You were expecting something quite different, and I’ve shocked you into silence. Not so cocky now, huh?”
The officer stood and straightened his trousers. “You’re quite the enigma, but that’s fine. I enjoy a puzzle. I’ll figure you out.” He rapped the door with a knuckle and was let out.
As the door closed Carina cursed. It was childish, she knew, but she wished she’d thought up a smart comeback to the smug bastard’s assertions. He’d been right about nearly everything. Though he hadn’t raised a hand to her, she felt defeated somehow. Even his lack of a weapon had been an attack, she realized, and he’d won. He’d been demonstrating that she posed no threat to him. He’d been right. His words had disarmed her.
Had he seen a vid of the attack at Orrana? Was that how he knew her? It had to be. The Dirksens never forgave anyone who opposed them. Carina had known that when she’d agreed to take on the job with her merc band. Though she would never for a second regret what she’d done, her past was catching up to her.
The Dirksen officer was clever. He would discover what she’d done sooner or later, though what would happen then depended on what else piqued his curiosity. He reminded her a little of Calvaley, a Sherrerr commander who had deluded himself into believing he was fighting an ethical war for the betterment of human civilization.
The smart ones were the worst enemies, not those who were only naturally aggressive, belligerent, and evil. People like Calvaley and the Dirksen officer were intelligent enough to weigh up the pros and cons of what they were doing, yet do it anyway.
Carina shivered. She was sunk.
***
Hours of boredom took the edge off Carina’s tension, and eventually she dozed. Some time later—she didn’t know exactly how much time had passed—the door opened again. The shaven-headed, dark-eyed Dirksen came in carrying an interface and looking pleased with himself.
Carina eyed the screen with dread. She knew exactly what he was about to show her. How should she respond? She had no idea how to react to make things go better for her. She didn’t think there was a reaction that might have that effect.
“I knew I’d seen you before,” the officer said. “I have a good memory for faces, but even so, I don’t think I would have recognized you if you hadn’t taken off your helmet.”
Taken off your helmet?
“No need to fake looking puzzled,” said the officer. “Or maybe you aren’t faking. It doesn’t matter. The resemblance is unmistakable.”
Carina’s stomach dropped as she remembered the moment when she’d removed her helmet. This was looking worse than she’d hoped.
The officer dragged his chair over to her and sat down before holding the screen in front of Carina’s face. “Does this look familiar?”
The scene was indeed familiar. The interface showed the interior of the smelting plant on Orrana. Her merc band had been tasked with rescuing a kidnapping victim from there—the Dirksens had abducted a Sherrerr child.
Carina had thought the Dirksens might have vids of the first attack on the plant, when her band had gone in through the reception, but this scene was from the second attack after the first had failed. She was looking at the room where the Dirksens had held the child.
A soldier burst in. She was wearing merc armor. It was herself.
Carina watched calmly, trying not to betray any emotion. In the vid, the soldier squatted down, and as the camera tracked her movement the kidnapping victim came into view. Little Darius looked even more terrified than she remembered, and it was no wonder. The Dirksen thugs had tortured him to try to make him confess his mage powers—unsuccessfully. Her brother was a tough young man.
But at that moment, he’d been frozen with fear. So to show him she wasn’t as scary as she looked, she’d… There it was. The soldier took off her helmet.
The Dirksen officer paused the vid. He was smiling. “Those helmet visors make it hard to identify faces. Thanks for making it easier for me. So you aren’t a Sherrerr. You’re a merc, though why you were aboard a Sherrerr shuttle remains to be revealed.”
Carina didn’t reply. She couldn’t stand the man’s gloating, and she shrank from what was probably coming next along with all its repercussions.
“But that isn’t all, is it?” said the officer. “You aren’t just a merc who took on a bad job. You know, that’s what I like about you. You’re so interesting. Right. I’ll show you what I mean. I won’t bore you with the slow bits.” He forwarded the vid, skipping over the part where Carina persuaded Darius to come with her and they left the room. “Here it is.” He slowed the vid to normal speed. “You carry the boy to a vent. Smart move. He would have been hurt if you’d tried to take him through the fire fight going on at the stairs. Your band’s shuttle was up on the roof, and you figured you could climb through the network to reach it, didn’t you? Only things were getting heated. You had a limited amount of time to reach the roof or your companions might have died waiting for you. One of them did die, in fact, I think.”
Carina’s heart ached. Poor Captain Speidel.
“Sorry,” said the officer, “I didn’t mean to bring back bad memories.”
“Get to the point,” Carina said between her teeth.
“I’m getting there, my young conundrum. No need to rush me. So, let’s see. This is the time stamp for when you took the kid into the vent. Then here you are on the roof, only seconds later. You didn’t have time to climb through the vent tunnels, especially with a kid encumbering you. So how did you manage it?”
Carina didn’t r
eply. She’d Cast Transport in order to get Darius and herself up to the roof before the shuttle left.
“What a pity we didn’t have surveillance cameras inside the vent system, huh?” the officer asked. “I would have loved to see exactly what you did. We had the boy because we guessed the Sherrerrs were pulling some weird shit. It looks like we were right, and that whatever it is, you can do it too. Is that why you were running from the Sherrerrs? Did you get tired of meeting their demands?”
When Carina still stayed silent, he went on, “Thanks for not insulting my intelligence by claiming ignorance. I appreciate it. I wish I could extend you some mercy in gratitude. Unfortunately, that isn’t going to be possible. We lost the Sherrerr boy, but now we have you instead. And after that attack on our shipyard, my superiors are keener than ever to find out what this strange ability is. I can assure you they’ll be expecting you to use it in their favor.”
Chapter Two
The vibrations that were coming through the floor ceased. It had been several long hours since the Dirksen officer had left Carina’s holding cell, but it looked like something was about to happen, and probably to her.
Carina wasn’t certain where the ship was. So much time had elapsed since she’d been captured it might not be at Ostillon, where she’d Transported her siblings and Bryce. The Dirksen vessel had been on the move so long, it could have traveled to another planet or even to another system. Or it might only have been in orbit all the time.
What were the Dirksens even doing on Ostillon, if that was where the ship had stopped? According to the scant information Carina had managed to discover, the planet was one of two inhabited worlds in the Floria System, which was way off the main routes. As far as she’d been able to tell the system wasn’t under Dirksen or Sherrerr control. Neither clan had taken an interest in the place, so it was officially “disputed territory.”
Whatever the reason was for Dirksens to be lurking there, Carina guessed she might soon find out. Once more, her powers had placed her in a dangerous position. After witnessing what had happened to her mother after her abilities were discovered, Carina was prepared to fight to the death to avoid the same fate.