Both were waiting for her at the exit from the Blue Jay’s shuttle bay as she and Mage-Lieutenant Harmon disembarked from the Navy shuttle that delivered them to the freighter. She had decided to allow Amiri to accompany them after the Hunter started making paranoid noises, though the younger woman was remaining in the shuttle as a most-likely-unnecessary security precaution.
Years of practice allowed her to reach the two men without any undignified flailing, and she greeted them with a calm nod.
“Is there somewhere private we can discuss?” she asked. “This may be a long conversation.”
Rice nodded carefully, one hand keeping him stable in the microgravity. “Follow me,” he instructed.
The trip deeper into the trip was silent. Alaura had no intention of playing any of her cards yet, and the two men seemed a little shaky. Twenty minutes ago, she suspected, they had known they were going to die. Now a complete stranger held their fates in her hands.
Rice led them onto the elevators that linked to the ships rotating ribs, and Alaura breathed a concealed sigh of relief as the rotational pseudo-gravity took hold. She did not like microgravity, and it would have been rude to use magic to provide her own footing on someone else’s ship.
Finally, they reached a plain conference room, the type found on any merchant ship for staff and business meetings. Rice led the way in and took a seat at the head of the table, with Damien at his right hand. Alaura remained standing, looking at the two men and considering.
“I take it from the absence of the Azure Gauntlet that Mikhail Azure has met with an accident?” she asked.
“He did,” Rice replied calmly. “He attacked us, and we defended ourselves. I believe that is still our right under Protectorate law?”
“Your right, Captain?” Alaura asked. “Your privilege! We owe you a debt of gratitude. Azure has been a thorn in our side for years.”
“Dropping a few charges would go a long way to showing that gratitude,” Damien murmured, and Alaura raised an eyebrow at him.
“I guess I should clear that up to begin with,” she told them. “You are not facing any charges in the Protectorate – I had the charges with regards to the Blue Jay’s modifications struck as soon as I arrived in Corinthian. Those related to breaking Mr. Montgomery out of jail I had dropped after I realized how much effort you’d put into preventing casualties – successfully, I might add.”
“After today, I doubt any of the galaxy’s crime lords will be chasing you either. My count is now four major crime lords that have ended up either dead or in jail after crossing your path,” she continued. “You are probably safer than you’ve been in years.”
“Four crime lords?” the Mage asked, surprised.
“James Azure, some five years ago now, died resisting arrest after Captain Rice directed us to him,” Alaura pointed out. “You intentionally left Alistair Carney to catch the fall on the Spindle. He was taken alive, and will be spending the next twenty years a guest of a Martian jail. Julian Falcone surrendered Darkport to my forces to gain assistance saving his people, and will be facing a court on Saratoga shortly. And now, Mikhail Azure has very directly died by your hands.”
“That’s a track record many of our investigators would envy,” she added. “But it does lead us to why Azure and half a dozen bounty hunters were chasing you.”
“The Blue Jay has a fully functioning amplifier,” Damien admitted. “I converted the jump matrix.”
“I know,” she said calmly. “Unfortunately, I am assured by those who understand these matters that any competent Rune Scribe, given a few weeks, could duplicate what was done to the Jay. She represents a template that any of the galaxy’s crime lords could use to manufacture a fleet of undetectable raiders.”
“The Blue Jay, bluntly, represents an unacceptable risk to the peace of the Protectorate,” Alaura told them flatly.
“You just saved us, and now you want to destroy my ship?” Rice snapped. “Who do you think you are?!”
“I think I am a Hand of the Mage-King of Mars,” she replied. “Captain Rice, the Protectorate owes you and your crew a deep and abiding debt for allowing us to remove Darkport and for removing Mikhail Azure. I am prepared to compensate you well above market value for this ship. Indeed, I believe we would be able to hand one of the Navy’s Archon transports over to you as a replacement vessel.”
That shut the Captain up. An Archon was one of the largest freighters built, mustering a fifteen million ton cargo load – five times the Blue Jay – and carrying a limited but effective suite of self-defense weapons.
“Please Captain,” she pleaded gently. “I do not want to take away your livelihood or your hard built equity. But I cannot allow the Blue Jay to sail away. You must understand.”
“She’s right, boss,” Damien Montgomery said quietly. “Any ship I did that to… it’s why everyone has been chasing us for the last six months. She’s offering you the best she can.”
Rice nodded choppily. “Can we at least evacuate our things?”
“Of course,” she agreed. “All of your personnel and possessions will be transferred to the cruiser Rising Sun of Gallantry. They will transport you to the Tau Ceti fleet base, where the Captain will make sure you take possession of your new ship.”
“If the Blue Jay is a threat, what guarantee will you need that Damien won’t do the same to another ship?” Rice asked, and Alaura sighed.
“Mister Montgomery has an exceptionally rare gift,” she said, turning to look the Mage in the eyes. “I assume that to destroy the Gauntlet you have marked a Rune of Power on yourself. Show me,” she instructed.
Slowly, uncomfortably, the young Mage rolled up the sleeve of his turtleneck, revealing the lines of silver she’d expected.
“Untrained and unaware, you are a worse threat than the Blue Jay,” she said quietly. “You also, when in possession of the perfect raider, believing yourself wanted for crimes you hadn’t committed, and chased to the edge of civilization, still acted with honor and integrity.”
“Because of this, if you insist, I will let you go,” she promised. “But I have an offer for you.”
Montgomery gestured for her to continue.
“You are a Rune Wright,” Alaura explained. “Only a Wright can see the flow of magic, and only a Wright could have turned a jump matrix into an amplifier.”
“You have no idea what you can truly do with that gift,” she continued. “There is only one person in the Protectorate who can teach you. If you come with me, I will take you to him.”
“And then what?” he asked.
“Most likely? You would be assigned to the Hands to assist us, if not made a Hand yourself,” Alaura admitted. “With your gifts and our support, you would be in a position to do good few others could match.”
“Unfortunately, I need you to decide now,” she told him.
The conference room was quiet for at least a minute, the young Mage looking down at his hands as Alaura watched him, hoping he would make the right choice. Finally, he looked back up at her and nodded once.
“I will need to say goodbye,” he said quietly. “But then, I am yours, Hand Stealey.”
#
The Rising Sun of Gallantry turned out to have an observation deck, a massive slab of magically transformed transparent steel that allowed people to look out onto deep space. As Damien and the rest of the crew of the Blue Jay occupied that deck, however, the ship had been turned so it faced the Jay.
Even at four kilometers distance, the massive freighter was clearly visible. The Ribs were no longer rotating, but the running lights were still on, outlining the ship against the black of the space between the stars.
“Scanners confirm no life signs,” a voice carried over the intercom. The ship’s Captain was piping an audio feed from the bridge to the observation deck, a small courtesy Damien appreciated.
Everyone was off the Blue Jay. Their hundred kilograms of possessions each had come with them. The ship’s cat was apparently sharing Jen
na’s quarters aboard the cruiser, though she hadn’t brought the animal to the observation.
“All ships confirm minimum safe distance,” another voice reported. “We are fully clear.”
“Fire tube one,” the soft contralto of the Gallantry’s captain ordered.
A flash of light struck out from the cruiser. At thirteen thousand gravities, the missile crossed four kilometers in a blink of an eye, a bright streak that didn’t, quite, connect the two ships.
Then the warhead detonated. A filter automatically darkened, shading the watcher’s eyes from the glare of a one gigaton antimatter explosion.
When the light faded, nothing remained of the old ship, vaporized in a single moment.
Damien blinked away tears, and felt Kelly cuddle up to him.
“It’s sad,” she said softly. “It’ll be better when we get to Tau Ceti and see the new ship the Captain’s been promised.”
“I’m not coming to Tau Ceti,” Damien admitted. Evacuating the ship had been a rush. Now was the first moment of relative quiet he’d had with Kelly, for all that he knew it was probably the worst possible time.
“You’re not?” Kelly sounded a lot calmer than he’d been afraid of.
“I’m going with Stealey,” he told her awkwardly. “She knows someone who can train me in my gifts, and then I think I’m going to be working with her. Trying to make the Protectorate a better place.”
The engineer turned away from him, and he laid his hand gently on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“We’re spacers, Damien,” she told him after a long pause. “I always knew we would never last forever. Always figured you’d find some cause that would drag you away – you’re that type. I just hoped we would have more time.”
“Me too,” he admitted. “I always seem to be leaving people behind, wherever I go. I’m going to miss you.”
“But not enough to stay.” It wasn’t a question. She laid her hand on top of his and squeezed hard. “I get it, Damien.” Her voice was choked with unshed tears. “I get it. But with everything else, it hurts.”
He wrapped her in his arms.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
#
Damien walked through the unmarked stone corridors Alaura had led him to in silence. The walls pressed in on him oppressively, and he honestly wasn’t sure where they were. The underground facility they had entered was immense, but it wasn’t as if the Protectorate didn’t have dozens of facilities that would meet that description.
They’d spent sixteen days jumping, so they could be almost anywhere in the half of the Protectorate on this side of Sol. Alaura had taken an almost childish delight in not telling him where they were going, and they arrived on planet via a Marine drop shuttle – which noticeably lacked such amenities as windows.
Now the Hand led the way through the tunnels with calm assurance, while Damien tried not to be distracted by the complex twists of silver runes snaking across the walls and roof around them. They moved too quickly for him to read them, but they seemed to be an amplifier matrix of a scale he could barely comprehend.
The runes and the Hand led him to the same place, and they stepped out into a single massive chamber at the heart of the mountain, and Damien gasped in shock.
The air above them was filled with a scale model of a star system. Everything from the sun at the center, to the three massive gas giants, to the asteroid belts and even, he was sure, the tiniest of ships was duplicated in floating molten silver sand that carried every minutiae of the reality of the system. It was a simulacrum, but unlike anything he’d ever seen.
“It affects most people who see it for the first time,” an amused deep voice told him, and Damien looked up to see the only occupant of the room. He was a tall man, with silver hair but an unlined face, and he stood before a throne carved from the solid stone of the mountain – a throne that all the runes of the amplifier and the simulacrum ran to.
“This is the man I meant,” Alaura Stealey said softly. “The only person who could even begin to train a Rune Wright.”
“Damien Montgomery, be known to my master: Desmond Michael Alexander the Third, Protector of Man, and Mage-King of Mars.”
###
Damien’s story will continue in:
Mage-King’s Hand
Coming September 2015
If you liked the novella, please leave a review!
Follow Glynn Stewart on Twitter @faolanspen or on his blog at www.glynnstewart.com
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Children of Prophecy – Released November 2014
An epic fantasy of coming of age, love, duty and honor.
Space Carrier Avalon – Coming May 2015
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Starship's Mage: Episode 5 Page 9