Starship's Mage: Episode 5

by Glynn Stewart

David waited for a moment to be sure the Mafia made man was done talking before turning on his recorder again.

  “I get it,” he said flatly. “We’ll be docking in,” he checked the system, “twenty hours and thirty-one minutes. We’ll negotiate trade good value when we arrive.”

  He ended the recording and turned to his XO.

  “They sound wonderfully welcoming, don’t they?” he asked dryly.

  “They just want our money,” she replied. “Speaking of which…?”

  “We have physical transfer chips,” David confirmed. The small black chips contained a specific amount recorded into it by a bank, and were registered ‘to the bearer.’ The Protectorate Council made noises every few years about banning the last form of cash currency, but an anonymous form of interstellar payment was too useful to too many people for that to happen.

  “I didn’t want to let the Family know that right off the bat though,” he continued. “I suspect that hunter ship came from here, and those missile boats make me nervous. I don’t want to give them ideas about taking the ship.”

  “So you’re assuming they haven’t heard of us, then?” Jenna asked, and David winced.

  He hadn’t exactly forgotten that the bounty hunters seemed to know that Damien had transformed the Blue Jay’s jump matrix into a fully functional unrestricted amplifier for magic, but it hadn’t occurred to him as a factor.

  “If they’ve heard about us, they’ll want the ship anyway, won’t they?” he admitted aloud. “There’s not much we can do about that, except hope that the bounty ban works in our favor.”

  “Keep guards on the doors and guards on anyone who goes on-station?” she suggested.

  “Given the rules and the threat level, I think I need to take Damien,” David said grimly. “His magic is the deadliest short-range weapon we have, and he won’t rip a hole in the hull.”

  Jenna looked at the asteroid on the screens and grimaced. “Is this place as bad as I think it’s going to be, boss?” she asked quietly. “Do you really want Damien to see that?”

  “Even here, they won’t pick a fight with a Mage,” the Captain told her. “It’ll be an unfortunate wake-up for him, but I don’t think we have a choice.”

  #

  Damien watched their missile boat escorts carefully as the Blue Jay began their final approach to Darkport. The two heavily armed shuttles had met them well away from the asteroid and accompanied them in, as if they expected the unarmed freighter to cause trouble.

  With Damien standing at the simulacrum at the center of the ship, his gloves off and the silver runes inlaid into his palms ready to complete the freighter’s amplifier matrix, the ship was hardly unarmed. He hoped that Darkport’s masters didn’t know that.

  “Those look familiar,” Jenna said over the bridge link, and Damien looked up at that screen to see what she was pointing at.

  Floating gently in space was a pair of familiar looking jump-yachts. A quick query of Blue Jay’s computers proved them to be the exact same model as had pursued them at Chrysanthemum and Excelsior.

  Despite a momentary panic, Damien was quickly able to confirm they were, at least, different ships. With the scanners focused in on the two vessels, he was able to tell they had different armaments from the first hunter ship – but were both definitely armed.

  “Hunter ships,” David confirmed. “There’s another docked with the asteroid,” the Captain pointed out. “We’re putting our lives in the Falcone family’s hands here – if any of those guys want to break the bounty ban, this could get messy fast.”

  “They’re criminals. Can we trust them?” Damien asked softly. The Blue Jay’s computer was now identifying missile installations on the surface of the asteroids – easily half a destroyer squadron’s worth of launchers.

  “The Falcone trace their origins back to Sicily on Earth – in the nineteenth century,” David explained. “They’ve been criminals since before we had spaceflight – and they’ve survived because they have a code, and they mean it. You won’t get a Falcone to sign a contract or make a vow lightly, but the keep their word.”

  “So when they say they’ll kill anyone who breaks the bounty ban…” Jenna asked.

  “They will,” David confirmed. “The problem is what those rules don’t say. There’s nothing about the Falcones collecting bounties in there. We’ll need to watch our backs.”

  “Damien, you’re with me,” he ordered. “I don’t want to carry military-grade weaponry on that station, but we can’t afford to appear weak. Meet me in the shuttle bay in ten.”

  On the screens that covered the walls of the Blue Jay’s simulacrum chamber, a massive hangar was now visible, carved into the asteroid beneath them. They were almost on top of the asteroid, moving at a handful of meters per second. If anyone was going to attack them, they’d have done it by now.

  “All right, Captain,” Damien agreed. “Let’s be about it.”

  #

  Damien didn’t know what he’d expected of the central marketplace of a pirate station, but the Grand Bazaar of Darkport was not it. The docks and the tunnels away from them had lived down to his expectations – dark and dreary holes blasted out of the asteroid rock with cheap explosives. The ventilation ducting and power piping had simply been bolted into arbitrarily selected walls of the zero-gravity passages. There were no safety warnings, no hazard labels – just neatly lettered signs providing directions to the various chambers of the pirate asteroid.

  They’d followed the signs to the Grand Bazaar, and came out into brightly lit and brightly colored chaos. Someone had either taken a natural cavern, or one that had been blasted out while extracting ore to build the station, and installed a massive cylinder a hundred meters across and five hundred meters long.

  That cylinder was now spinning at an eye-tearing three times a minute, producing a full half-gravity on its outside edge. That outside edge, all sixteen hectares or so of it, was covered in a garishly colored mess of tents, shacks, and stalls.

  “How many people are in here?” Damien asked aloud.

  “Thousands,” David responded quietly as they stood on the edge of the tunnel that led into the center of the cylinder. “There’s a lot more people here than I expected – they’ve got to see a lot more business than even my worst fears.”

  With a sigh and a shrug, the burly Captain gestured Damien onto one of several platforms, clearly large enough for significant amounts of cargo but also the only way to the ‘floor’ of the Bazaar. The controls blinked at them until David sighed again and fed it a small black chip. The system ground for a moment, and then allowed them to descend.

  Damien looked at the chip in interest. In all of his twenty-six years, he’d never actually had to use a physical bank transfer chip. The presumably-small-denomination one his Captain had just paid for an elevator ride with was the first one he’d ever seen. Charging for an elevator-ride seemed petty to him, but he wasn’t the one running a black market on the edge of nowhere.

  The ride was surprisingly slow, and the young Mage took advantage of the opportunity to look around. He and David were both dressed in casual clothes over body armor. The Captain wore a black leather jacket that covered the armor neatly. Damien wore the armor under a mock-necked turtleneck, clearing showing the black leather collar around his neck with the gold medallion marking him as a Mage.

  Even here, he was sure that medallion would buy him a bit more respect and security.

  “Do we know where we’re going?” he asked David as they reached the ground and they stepped out into the pseudo-gravity.

  “Not really,” his Captain admitted. “From what I saw from the center, it’s pretty disorganized. I thought I saw a collection of starship parts that way,” he continued, gesturing along the cylinder, “and I’m hoping they have a missile launcher or two we can mount on the Jay.”

  Damien nodded, and the pair set off through the crowds. Many of the stalls and structures were open-roofed, taking advantage of the lack of weather in a cylind
er like this. Even the open-roofed structures, though, had fully-enclosed storage areas, often with complex looking locking mechanisms and always under the eye of someone carrying a weapon.

  The area right next to the elevators seemed to be mostly personal items. Clothes, food, and an array of illegal weaponry beckoned the eye of the newcomer to Bazaar. Jewelry, likely stolen in pirate raids in Damien’s opinion, glittered from behind glass display cases under the eyes of heavily armed guards.

  A massive banner hung over the way forward, two simple Latin words that Damien had learned in school: Caveat Emptor.

  Buyer beware.

  #

  The Bazaar was a cacophony of sights, sounds, and smells. Every fourth or fifth stall was cooking food – and every stall keeper was shouting out their wares at Damien and David as they passed by. They were offered medications, guns, jewels, and mercenaries in the first five minutes.

  The pair was halfway to the starship parts section David had spotted when Damien clearly made out one of the offers directed at him and nearly stopped on the spot in shock.

  “Hey young man, want a girl? We got all kinds, all sizes – rent by the hour, or buy ‘em to keep! Guaranteed docile and well-behaved.”

  Damien spun around at the voice and found himself staring at an older man in one of the roofed stalls. The area behind him had been set up as a pseudo-lounge, with red leather couches and thick carpeting. A trio of young women reclined on the divans, clad in flimsy negligees that barely managed to leave anything to the imagination. All three also wore dainty silver collars locked around their necks, each connected to a solid looking chain attached to the couch.

  David’s hand locked, hard, on Damien’s shoulder and pulled him away even as the young Mage’s mouth opened to say something intemperate in response.

  “Not here, not now,” the Captain hissed. His grip was hard enough to hurt as he yanked Damien along with him.

  “But those girls are…”

  “Slaves,” David said bluntly. “Kidnapped and forced into slavery, yes. Darkport is the center of the slave trade, and that trade is Falcone business. If we do what both of us would like to do, they will kill us.”

  Looking around now, Damien spotted several groups of men and women with metal collars. Often, the entire group was linked together with small chains tied to the waist of the men or women around them. Elsewhere, single collared individuals were scattered around. Some had chains linked to the wrists or waists of their companions, others were on their own, their body language meek and defeated.

  “What hell-hole is this place?” Damien demanded.

  “Darkport,” his Captain said flatly. “The darkest underbelly the Protectorate has. I’m sorry you have to see this – I knew what it would be like, but I needed you with me as security. This place is not safe.”

  The shock of the slave girls broke Damien’s distraction by the exotic and gaudy nature of the bazaar. Now he kept his gaze sharp, looking past even the obvious guards and weaponry for the even darker layer hidden underneath.

  There were no children here. A marketplace like this, he would have expected to see them running everywhere – the children of the stall-keepers if no others – but no one would bring a child to this place. Alongside the medications being offered was a full suite of illegal drugs, from the mundane he’d heard of like Hyper-X, to something called Dreamy White he didn’t want to hear of.

  As they approached the parts store, they came across the remnants of a firefight. It wasn’t clear who had started it, but three men lay on the ground. One was still whimpering in pain as they approached, until a single gunshot silenced him to allow the killers to loot the bodies uninterrupted.

  Finally, after an eye-opening fifteen minutes through the twisting mess of the alleys and stalls, they arrived in a small open space in front of the junkyard they’d spotted. The pile of starship parts was easily eighty meters across and as many deep, and the owners had cleared a space around the only entrance.

  A terrifying-looking black weapons turret sat beside that entrance, a massive man with milk-white skin watching the crowd with cold eyes.

  “Whatcha business?” he asked as David and Damien approached.

  “We’re looking for starship weapons,” David told the guard. “Willing to deal in trade or currency chips.”

  The big pale man nodded and tapped something on a screen in his turret, invisible from the courtyard.

  “Just Captain,” he said after moment. “Mage stays. Safety promise.” He patted the big black turret affectionately as he said the last.

  “Stay here,” David told Damien. “Keep your head down, don’t go too far, and don’t cause trouble.” After a moment’s thought, he slipped Damien a handful of the black chips. “Your PC can tell you how much is on each,” he told the Mage. “If you see anything useful to you, check it out – just stay in sight of this gentleman,” he nodded towards the pale guard.

  The guard drew himself up sharply at the gesture. “Will watch Mage, no trouble, promise!”

  With this apparently agreed, David approached the gate next to the guard’s turret. The door swung open, and the Captain passed through.

  Behind him, Damien exchanged glances with the guard, who gave him as reassuring a smile as the massive beast of a man was capable of.

  “Anyplace decent for food near here?” the young Mage asked after glancing around the courtyard. After considering for a moment, the guard pointed at a specific stall, about thirty yards away and still easily in sight of the turret.

  “Angie’s. Good steak!” he said enthusiastically.

  Damien accepted the recommendation with a nod, and set off down the courtyard.

  #

  After an expensive but surprisingly good steak, Damien found himself wandering the edge of the courtyard, checking out the various stores. Few of them had any items of interest, until he reached what looked like an almost stereotypical ‘gypsy seer’ stall.

  The owner had assembled a cloth ceiling to bring the stall into murky shadow, and then covered the furniture in brightly colored cloth that stood out even in the shadow. The inventory seemed haphazardly scattered about the tables, but Damien’s trained eye picked out the patterns that would show any missing item clearly.

  Most of said inventory was crap, the usual pseudo-mystic forgeries and frauds inherited from the old ‘New Age’ movement, given new life by the discovery of real magic. At the back of the store, under a gentle white light mostly concealed from the main courtyard, was a single table of other items. The shopkeeper, wrapped in so many layers of gaudily colored fabrics their gender was unidentifiable, watched Damien carefully as the Mage reviewed the items.

  Runic artifacts generally required a Mage to charge them, and none of these had been charged. To Damien, though, their runes were as clear as day. He traced the tiny remnants of power woven into the runes of a silver and green hand-made bracelet that would, if recently empowered by a Mage, actually stop bullets.

  Next to that bracelet was another whose runes took more interpreting for him. After several moments, he realized that the runes on the jade arrowhead necklace were medical in nature – a field of magic he was extremely unfamiliar with – and, he was quite certain, would duplicate the effects of virility drugs.

  “What do you seek, young Mage?” the store owner asked as he ran his fingers over the items. “You are trained and wise, what brings you to the shadowy corners of Erena’s store?”

  “Spending time while the ship is docked,” Damien replied. It had the virtue of being both true and saying absolutely nothing.

  “Ah yes, the new ship. The one here for safe haven from the bounty hunters,” Erena, said in a voice pitched so as to conceal the user’s accent and gender. “So, young Mage, do you seek to hide then? Or to flee?”

  Damien looked up at the garishly clad storekeeper. “Nothing you have here is of any use to me,” he told them. That wasn’t entirely true – he was tempted by the shield bracelet, if only to make Kelly we
ar it – but there was nothing here he couldn’t easily make if he had the time and energy.

  “Ah,” Erena said triumphantly. “So you seek power do you, little Mage?”

  Something in the fake gypsy’s tone and voice caused Damien to narrow his eyes.

  “What are you after?” he asked bluntly.

  “I have… an item,” the shopkeeper said slowly, as if trying to draw out the anticipation. “A rune, to call it what it is. This rune was taken from the arm of one of the Mage-King’s Hands – and I have seen with mine own eyes the wonders and terrors that the Hands can invoke in His name!”

  “And you think this rune is what allows that?”

  “I know this to be true, young Mage,” Erena replied with a flash of bright teeth under the shawls. A box materialized from behind the shopkeeper’s desk, and Erena opened it carefully. A scanner demanded finger- and thumb-prints before the case finally opened, revealing its contents.

  The strip of material inside was thirty centimeters long and ten wide. It took Damien a good ten seconds to realize it was actually tanned human skin – the skin of the man they’d taken the rune from.

  Silver had been inlaid into the previous owner’s skin, a weave of power unlike anything Damien had ever seen in his entire life. Every other rune he had ever seen had been written in the Martian Runic Script, with its multitude of characters and connectors that almost met the true lines and flows of power only Damien saw.

  This rune had never been written in a Runic Script. Where the Script had defined characters and connectors, this had been shaped as the power flowed – an exact match for the truth of magic, not the Script’s re-usable approximations.

  Damien turned his gaze on the silver in the dead man’s flesh and looked at the power that had once flowed through it. The rune had been tied into the man’s own magic, reflecting and re-doubling it. It was everything the shopkeeper said it was.

  And it was utterly useless to anyone.

  His Sight, his ability to see the flow of magic, told him the truth – this rune had been intimately tied into the magic of the man who’d worn it. If Damien were to carve this rune into his own flesh, it would kill him.