“How are the flying lessons going?” he asked her after a moment’s silence, nodding towards the main screen, which had one of the Jay’s many exterior cameras zoomed in on the shuttle Damien was flying. “I thought you were in Flight Control?”
“After about five minutes, I looked up Damien’s flight qualifications and realized I was redundant,” Jenna told him dryly. “Why didn’t you mention that to Singh?”
“I honestly assumed that Singh knew Jump Mage flight qualifications from the Navy,” David admitted. “Once I realized he didn’t,” the Captain shrugged. “I figured letting him run with it might loosen some of the tension around here.”
“Telling the crew where we’re going might do that too,” Jenna told him. The Captain shrugged, and with a flick of his fingers across the screen on his chair, threw the contents onto the main screen to replace the view of Damien’s shuttle.
A three dimensional model of the star systems that made up the Protectorate of the Mage-King of Mars filled the screen. One hundred and eleven stars were lit up in several colors, forming a rough sphere centered on the single gold star of Sol. Scattered through the colored stars were almost four times as many gray stars, indicating systems no one had colonized.
Twelve stars were silver, showing the oldest, most industrialized and most populated systems known as the Core.
Thirty-three were green, systems with solid industry, fleet presences and economies – the MidWorlds.
Fifty, scattered around the edge of the sphere, were blue. These were the latest wave of colonies, systems still struggling to find their feet and desperate for any shipping they could get – the Fringe.
Lastly, a wedge of fifteen red stars, starting at one of the silver stars which had a red band around it, cut out towards the edge of the sphere from the center. These were worlds where magic was outlawed outside the ships that delivered cargos and news – the UnArcana Worlds.
“The Core all have RTAs except Legatus,” David said calmly, a flick of his hand causing all of the silver stars except the one banded in red to turn dull. A Runic Transceiver Array was an immense construct of runes and magic that allowed a Mage to communicate verbally with a Mage in another RTA, no matter how far away. “Corinthian didn’t, but as soon as they get a ship to Sherwood, every system with an RTA is going to have us on a watch list,” he concluded. “That takes these systems out.”
Over half of the green lights and a single blue light turned dull.
“Anywhere that will have been reached by ship from Corinthian before we get there will also be looking for us,” David continued, overlaying a new layer which turned most of the remaining MidWorlds dull in a sphere around Corinthian.
“So we go to the Fringe,” Jenna answered, gesturing at the massive swathes of blue stars. “This ship has the fuel bunkers and food storage for the long Fringe runs – she was built for it. We both have contacts out there – so does James, I think.”
The Captain nodded. “He does, though he’s been busy making sure there’s nothing in our data download that incriminates us.” James Kellers was the ship’s engineer, and he’d been face-down in the normally sealed portion of the ship’s computer that carried downloads of all news and financial transaction data between systems since they’d left Corinthian.
“He can do that?” Jenna asked, shocked.
“Can’t get into the bank data, but he can open up the news and law enforcement downloads and modify them – undetectably, he insists.”
The First Officer whistled. The RTAs only allowed verbal communication. The ‘mailbox’ present on every starship carried the large-scale electronic data transfers required to keep a modern economy and integrated society functioning. Supposedly, only the Royal Post offices in each system could upload and download from them, which meant that, for example, the Blue Jay’s mailbox carried the most up-to-date listing of her crew’s own finances – data that local banks would use to authorize withdrawals and spending.
“Contacts or not, though, we can’t go straight to the Fringe,” David finally concluded, touching a control that made the blue stars flash gently. “Fringe shipping is speculative – we’d have to pick up a cargo we know they’ll buy and take it in, with no contracts or guarantees. That means we need the capital to buy said cargo, and we don’t have it.”
Jenna looked at him sharply, and David shrugged. “I can cover operating expenses for two years, but even if I put all of that in, it wouldn’t cover a tenth of a full cargo for this ship. Three million tons of anything is expensive.”
“So what?” she asked.
The red-banded silver world, on the edge of the Core, flashed on the screen.
“Legatus,” David answered. “The first UnArcana world. No Mages, so no transceiver array. Shipping is rarer than in the rest of the Core, and the Navy leaves system security to the Legatus Self Defense Force. We get a contract there; build up our cash reserves as we head outwards. Use the cash to pick up a cargo of survey satellites and combine harvesters in the MidWorlds somewhere, then do the long sweep of the Fringe.
“Once we’ve done an eighteen month sweep of the Fringe, we won’t be on the top of everyone’s list,” he concluded. “We’ll be able to pop back into the MidWorlds for a new cargo, so long as we don’t draw attention to ourselves.”
“What makes you think we’ll find work in Legatus?” Jenna demanded. “I thought most of the shipping through there was locked up by big lines willing to play their games.”
“Carmichael gave me a name,” David admitted.
“We played Carmichael and left him to face the music when a Hand arrived,” Jenna pointed out. Carmichael hadn’t got anything he’d been supposed to out of the deal he’d brokered between David and a mob boss.
“The name was in trade for warning him about the Hand in time,” David replied. “I think the man will help us.”
His First Officer crossed her arms and looked at him crossly.
“If you’ve already made up your mind, why are we still chatting instead of letting the crew know?” she asked.
“Because until I said this all aloud, I hadn’t made up my mind,” David told her. “I can still change it if you have a better idea?”
Jenna shook her head slowly.
“Fine boss,” she conceded. “The belly of the beast it is!”
#
Rice was waiting for Damien when he and Singh exited the shuttle, carefully, into the zero-gravity of the Blue Jay’s shuttle bay. As the final test of his skill, the old Sikh pilot had made Damien slot the cargo shuttle into its bay, one of the seven on the ‘roof’ of the bay. Like everything else Singh had asked, Damien did it slowly, carefully, and without a single mistake.
“I’ll hook up the fuel lines and check her over,” the pilot told Damien as they spotted the Captain waiting for them. “Looks like the Captain wants you.”
“Thanks,” Damien told Singh and then, gently, launched himself across the shuttle bay to the freighter’s commander.
“We have a destination?” he asked Rice.
“We do,” Rice confirmed. “Let’s go to your lab, I want to pull some data up for you.”
Damien’s lab slash office was situated at the heart of the ship, just behind the simulacrum chamber that occupied the jumpship’s exact center and allowed him to teleport her through space. Unlike the rest of the ship’s core, though, his office had gravity due to a set of runes the previous Ship’s Mage had carved into the floor.
Entering the tiny space, which combined the best and worst aspects of an office, a chemistry lab, and a jeweler’s workshop, Rice dropped himself into the chair next to the workstation. Three screens were set up on the desk, creating a pseudo-three-dimensional image of the space the freighter was suspended in.
That space was unusually empty. They’d made six basically random jumps after leaving Corinthian minutes ahead of a pair of Navy destroyers, and now sat in the dead black space between stars, light years away from even the normal jump zones.
&
nbsp; “Carmichael gave us a contact who can probably get us work, regardless of our questionable legal status,” Rice finally told Damien, the heavyset Captain looking over the screens at the Mage. “There’s two problems – first, we’re talking a long way away, and second, he’s in Legatus.”
Damien watched carefully as Rice manipulated the controls on the workstation, zooming in on the star in question. The Captain was faster with the software than he was, though even now most of his experience with it had been in school. He leaned in over Rice’s shoulder, and read the course projection the computer was providing.
A computer’s projection of the course a Mage could take was always slightly off, but it would give him a starting point to work from.
“That’s forty-two light years away,” he observed quietly. “Two weeks in transit. Can we risk it?”
Damien was trained and qualified to perform a one light year jump of a ship like the Blue Jay every eight hours. In practice, he could probably cut that down to six hours, and he’d known Mages who could jump after as little as three hours – but those paces weren’t sustainable. To travel halfway across the Protectorate, he’d stick to the safe pace.
“They don’t have a transceiver in Legatus,” Rice replied, “and they don’t get as much shipping as you would think. I think we’ll still have a few days' leeway before the news gets there.”
“Legatus is a Core World, isn’t it?” the Mage asked.
“It’s also the first UnArcana world,” Rice told him grimly. “One of the first colony ships after the Mage-King revealed that the Mages could take humanity to the stars – the colonists got to Legatus, got off the ships, and told the Mages who’d brought them to go to hell.
“You’ve never been a real UnArcana world,” the Captain continued, “so I wanted to warn you where we were going. You won’t be allowed on planet. Use of magic off of the ship is grounds for imprisonment – I suggest you stay aboard.”
Damien swallowed, looking at the innocent looking yellow star again.
“Do we have a choice?” he asked finally. Heading to a system where he’d be hated just for breathing sounded unappealing.
“We need to make a big payday, fast,” David admitted. “If we do, we can pick up a bunch of high tech gear the Fringe worlds won’t care who delivers on our way out, but without enough capital, we’re trapped trying to find contracts. Anywhere we can get a contract for; the Protectorate will find us sooner or later.”
And then they would strip Damien’s magic. That had been made very clear on Corinthian.
“I’ll start plotting the jumps.”
#
Two days and six jumps later found Damien back in his lab, slumped in the chair by his monitors as they projected the calculations for the next days’ worth of jumps. A cold bulb of coffee rested on the corner of the desk, long ignored when the sound of the admittance buzzer jerked him awake.
“Hey Damien, are you in here?” the soft voice of Kelly LaMonte, the junior-most of the ship’s engineering officers, asked.
“Yeah,” he answered blearily, checking the time stamp on the screens to be sure he hadn’t slept right up to his next jump. This wasn’t the gap between jumps he’d scheduled for sleep – that was after the jump that was coming up in four hours now. “Come in.”
The door slid open and the dark-haired engineer lithely grabbed the top of the door, swinging gently through the transition from the keel’s zero-gravity to the lab’s magical gravity zone and landing softly to smile brightly at Damien.
“Is something up in Engineering?” he asked, wondering what had brought the young engineer down to the center of the ship.
“I wanted to check up on you,” she answered, her gaze flicking around the empty coffee bulbs and the most recent cold one. “I haven’t seen you since we started jumping towards Legatus.”
Damien shrugged, glancing at the calculations on the screen and the starscape they were overlaid on.
“Keeping an eye on things here,” he told her. “I don’t want to risk any mistakes.”
“You joined us for lunch most days on the way to Corinthian,” she reminded him, stepping closer and perching on the edge of the desk, looking down at him.
He didn’t respond immediately. She was right, though he hadn’t realized it until she’d pointed it out. On the trip from his home system to Corinthian, his only previous jump route with the Blue Jay, he’d made the time to eat with the junior engineers and pilots regularly – they were the only people aboard his own age. He worked with Kellers, Rice and Campbell, but those three were all ten years or more his senior.
The girl sitting on his desk looking concernedly at him was the same age as him, with a degree in starship engineering to his degree in thaumaturgy.
“I wanted to apologize for what happened,” Kelly finally said into the silence, and Damien winced. His own age and pretty or not, Kelly was also the one who’d allowed a strange Mage onto the ship to discover the modifications he’d made – which had directly resulted in his arrest.
“They were going to take my magic away,” he finally replied, looking away from her and the computers to stare at the bare metal walls. That was the fate that Rice and the crew of the Blue Jay had saved him from, at the cost of them all becoming fugitives from Protectorate Law.
“Singh told me,” she admitted. “I am so sorry, Damien – I didn’t know.”
Damien looked directly back at her, meeting her eyes and noticing for the first time how brilliantly blue they were.
“You didn’t know,” he repeated back to her. “We didn’t tell anyone what I’d done to the matrix. Even if we had, it’s not like you know Mage Law.”
“The whole mess was the exact opposite of what I was trying to do,” she said with a sigh. “I was trying to make your life easier, not get you arrested!”
“I’d say the thought was appreciated, but, well, arrested,” Damien replied dryly.
“Let me make it up to you by buying you dinner,” Kelly told him suddenly, a bright smile returning to her face.
Damien glanced from her to the starscape behind his calculations.
“We’re roughly five and a half light years from any star system,” he pointed out. “Seven from anywhere with a restaurant, and still almost two weeks from Legatus – a system where I shouldn’t leave the ship. Where are you planning on this dinner?”
“Anywhere not your lab, and any meal not made of cold coffee. Deal?”
The reference to the forgotten coffee bulb made Damien wince again.
“Okay,” he agreed. “Deal.”
#
Every jump from deep space to deep space was very much the same, even to Damien. Memorize a set of calculations, focus on the small, impossibly perfect, replica of the Blue Jay at the heart of the ship and channel energy into it to move the vessel and all of its contents across a full light year of space.
It was exhausting, incredible, and done three times a day, became surprisingly routine.
After the first jump of the day, Damien would review the calculations for the next jump, and then have lunch with Kelly and the other junior officers. He would then carry out the second jump of the day, review the calculations for the last jump, and spend part of the day wandering the ship, studying the ship’s rune matrix and making tiny modifications where his ability to see the flow of magic through the runes revealed inefficiencies in the centuries-old design.
To his knowledge, no one had ever successfully modified the jump matrix of runes carved into the hull of every civilian starship – not since the first Mage-King of Mars had drawn up the design in the twenty third century. Removing the limiters that prevented the matrix being used for any spell except jumping was the first step, but given the time to go over the runes closely he realized it was improvable in dozens of small ways. Many of the changes were, he suspected, tied directly to his own use of magic.
He couldn’t make the ship jump further – that seemed tied unavoidably into his own ability to channel pow
er – but he could make the jumps take a little bit less energy from him.
The routine consumed almost two weeks, until the night before they arrived in Legatus, when Rice invited the ships’ senior officers to dinner.
#
Rice normally found the fact that the designer of the Venice type freighters like the Blue Jay had included a dining room in the Captain’s Suite vaguely ridiculous. The room wasn’t large enough to host a meal for all of the freighter’s dozen or so officers, but was really too large for the Captain to eat alone.
The round table was sized for six, barely enough for a business meeting or a gathering of the ship’s senior officers – him, the First Officer, the First Pilot, the Chief Engineer and the Ship’s Mage.
He greeted each of his officers as they arrived and poured them drinks himself from the small set of vacuum-sealable carafes on a side counter. Jenna, as always, went at his right hand, and he sat Damien, the youngest and newest of the senior officers, at his left.
When he served the dinner himself, Damien looked at the plates in surprise.
“You cooked this, Captain?” the youth asked.
“Welcome to my culinary experiments club, Damien,” David told him with a smile. “I like to cook, but I don’t normally have time. I foist my creations on my senior officers occasionally.”
He smiled to himself as the young Mage silently took the food, clearly not quite sure what to make of having a Captain who cooked. David continued to serve up the plates, an old recipe he’d found involving potato dumplings and diced ham.
The quiet sound of enthusiastic chewing proved that he’d done well, again. The room was quiet until the food was mostly devoured, and then James and Narveer, opposite David, began to talk over some of the repairs to the shuttles.
David turned to Damien, who was looking uncomfortable at the social setting.
“This is just a quiet get-together,” he told the youth. “We’re going to be stuck together on this ship for a while now, if we can’t socialize with each other, we’ll all go mad.”
Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) Page 15