Starship's Mage: Episode 3

by Glynn Stewart

“We just received a course from the automated traffic system – we’re cleared through to Interface Station,” the stocky officer adjusted some of the controls on her screen and David felt a slight pull as the ship re-directed. “It looks like we’re staying well above most of the traffic and stations.”

  “Makes sense,” David replied. “From what I’ve heard, they don’t like letting jumpships close to the planet – something about not trusting Mages.”

  “You’re not making me feel better about this,” his First Officer replied. “Have you seen what they want me to dock with?”

  A slip of his finger across the touch controls brought Interface Station up on the screen. Suspended in a high orbit, further out from Legatus than Luna was from Earth, the station was a simple ring, roughly five kilometers across, which continually rotated to provide gravity.

  “There’s no steady docking section,” she pointed out. “I have to match the rotational velocity.”

  “It’s five kilometers across,” David told her calmly. “It’s barely rotating once every three minutes. Should I get Narveer up here to fly us?” he asked dryly.

  “The only other people qualified to fly this heap are you and Damien,” she retorted. “And he’s barely out of school, and you haven’t touched the controls for something this complex in a decade. I’ll get us in.”

  “Of course you will,” David agreed. “It’s why I hired you.”

  “Great. Now shut up,” his First Officer ordered. “This is not as easy as you want to make it seem.”

  #

  One impeccably executed docking later; David Rice climbed a ladder against the centripetal acceleration now providing pseudo-gravity into Interface Station. The hallway he entered, a personnel access way never intended to hold cargo or supplies, appeared to be little more than an ordinary station corridor, with a series of arrows marking where people boarding the station should go.

  As David set off down the corridor towards customs, he realized that someone had taken the time to actually decorate the plain metal of the corridor. It was small things, a few curving lines not part of the directions here, a subtle mural worked into the metal on the wall there, but it was more than he’d usually seen outside of the luxury docking points reserved to passenger liners and yachts.

  The corridor passed by another seven hatches, marking docking tunnels like the one he’d entered from, before he emerged into Legatus Customs Five. The corridor widened into a large room, blocked by a series of security gates watched over by the re-hinged bones of a Legatus Megarex.

  The fact that the room was tall enough to fit the bones of the five meter tall predator should have been a shock on its own, but the looming bones were something he’d never expected to see aboard a space station. Named for its resemblance to Earth’s pre-historic Tyrannosaurus Rex, the Megarex was Legatus’s top predator before man arrived – and like most planets’ apex predators, it was near extinction now. The bones were likely a century or more old, and easily worth millions.

  “Captain Rice?” a voice interrupted his shocked gaze at the dead lizard, and he turned to his gaze to a young, dark-skinned, gentleman in a plain gray working uniform. “I am Customs Officer Ryan Shallot,” the man introduced himself. “I see that Maggie Five has made her usual impression.”

  “Maggie Five?” David couldn’t help asking.

  “Somehow, the first one of them they brought up was nicknamed Maggie,” Shallot shrugged. “Since we ended up with one in each customs section, they ended up just being numbered by the section they watch over.”

  David nodded his understanding as he gestured for the young officer to precede him. Shallot led him to a small cubicle next to one of the security gates. Each gate had a cubicle, though six of the eight gates were closed.

  As they approached the cubicle, a second figure appeared out of a semi-hidden alcove next to it. The woman was tall, towering over David’s stocky solidity and Shallot’s slim averageness alike, and moved with a grace that belied the heavy black armor she wore locked over her limbs and torso.

  The guard wore only one piece of insignia: a golden cog with a lightning bolt carved into it pinned to her collar.

  “Hold out your arms,” she ordered flatly. David looked into her eyes as he did so, and blinked as he saw her square pupils and the tiny blinking red light behind them as she looked him over. The woman hadn’t used any kind of scanner to check him for weapons. She was the scanner.

  “Captain Rice, this is Augment Talia,” Shallot introduced the cyborg.

  “He’s clean,” she reported sharply, ignoring the introduction. “No weapons, no unauthorized thaumic signatures.”

  David dropped his arms and inclined his head. “Greetings, Augment Talia.”

  Reputation said the Augments were trained Mage-killers, born, raised and cybernetically modified to identify, track and destroy Mages who tried to operate in Legatus. Reputation also declared them soulless robots, but David swore he saw a spark of appreciation for him and Shallot treating her as a person in Talia’s strange eyes as she returned his nod.

  Entering the office, Shallot opened a drawer and removed a chip tray, lowering a mass data interface over the chips as he interfaced the personal computer wrapped around his arm with the cubicle’s systems.

  “What is your business on Legatus, Captain Rice?”

  “I’m looking for cargo,” David explained calmly. “I was given a man to make contact with who I was told was looking for reliable carriers.”

  “Not a lot of jumpships come to Legatus on spec, Captain,” the Customs Officer observed, making entries on his computer.

  “It’s a favor to the man recommending it as much as anything else,” David lied smoothly. “He said it would be worth going this far out of my way.”

  “I never tell a man how to run his business,” Shallot replied cheerfully. “Now, I can run a pass for just you, or any member of your crew you wish. What is your plan?”

  “I’m planning on allowing my crew to take a day or two of shore leave while I track down my contact,” David told him. He slid a chip containing the data on his crew over. “If we can get passes for everyone to Interface Station, and myself and my First Officer down to the planet, that would be best.”

  “Of course. You wish a pass for your Mage?” the youth asked, looking questioningly at David. “Those are quite expensive, and come with a large number of conditions.”

  “I and Mr. Montgomery are aware of them,” the Captain replied firmly.

  Shallot nodded wordlessly, hitting a command on his computer that beeped at him. The data transfer array over the chip tray starting blinking a progress light.

  “Passes will be ready in a moment,” the young man told David, then blinked as he glanced at something on his personal computer. “We have a physical package for you,” he continued, sounding surprised. “Give me a moment.”

  The Legatan returned a minute or so later with an archaic paper envelope, just as the chip tray beeped its completion. He pulled the tray from the writer and passed it and the letter to David.

  “Each chip is marked with the name of the individual it’s a pass for,” he explained. “They will all allow access through the security gates here after a basic security scan. Only the ones for yourself and Miss Campbell will allow you aboard shuttles away from Interface Station, but we have most amenities aboard the station itself.” He glanced down at the letter in David’s hand. “I’m honestly not sure what the letter is for,” he admitted. “It arrived shortly before you docked.”

  “Thank you Officer Shallot,” David told him. “I’ll be back shortly once I’ve turned the passes over to my crew.”

  He shook hands with the Legatan and walked away, aware of the eerie eyes of the Augment guardian on him until he’d made it around the corner.

  Curious and concerned, he juggled the tray carefully to allow him to open the envelope and remove the single sheet of paper inside it. The text was very short.

  Captain Rice.

&nb
sp; Meet me at the Silver Lion Restaurant at 19: 00 tonight. Come alone.

  BR

  It seemed he didn’t have to go hunting for Bryan Ricket after all.

  #

  Damien was in his lab, working on a course plan that would take them through about half of the Fringe worlds, hitting the five that the Captain had said they had to visit, when his armband computer chirped with an incoming call.

  “Damien,” he answered absently, hitting the button while looking over the demographic data of yet another world that exported only food.

  “It’s Singh. Want to get on station?” the ship’s senior pilot asked.

  “I figured that wasn’t the best of plans,” the Mage observed.

  “On your own, sure,” Singh agreed. “But you come with me, you’ll be perfectly safe! Plus, I have a meet for the guns, and I don’t trust this man – but I just bet he’s scared of Mages.”

  “I can’t do anything on station, not without being thrown in jail,” Damien pointed out, but he was shutting down his workstation and digging out the station-pass the Captain had given him.

  “You are allowed to act in self-defense,” Singh reminded him. “And I don’t expect a firefight anyway, it’s just business. Meet in the flight bay in ten?”

  “Okay,” Damien replied, standing up and slowly shaking his head. The pilot did tend to run rough-shod over anyone who wasn’t entirely compliant with his plans.

  He stepped out of his lab, swinging carefully from the magical gravity he maintained there into centrifugal pseudo-gravity Interface Station’s spin imparted to the rest of the ship. The normally zero-gravity keel had a series of panels that folded out to turn the large, cylindrical, corridor into a giant spiral staircase running down the middle of the ship.

  Heading ‘down’ towards the flight bay at the stern of the ship, he ran into Kelly LaMonte coming ‘up’ from Engineering.

  “Hi Damien,” she greeted him with a bright smile. “I was just coming up to find you. Can I steal you for that dinner station-side?”

  Damien returned her smile, warmed as always by her greetings, but shook his head.

  “Can’t – I’m heading up to the shuttle bay to meet Singh. We’re going shopping,” he finished dryly.

  “Shopping?” she asked, turning around to walk with him towards the shuttle bay.

  “The Captain asked Singh to line up some weapons,” Damien told her quietly, glancing around the ‘stairwell’ to be sure no one else was in hearing. LaMonte was at least an officer, but he wasn’t sure how far the Captain wanted the knowledge that they were bringing weapons aboard spread. “He apparently has a contact, and figures that having a Mage around in an UnArcana system should be respect-inducing.”

  “Guess that makes sense,” Kelly said quietly. “Be careful, will you? I feel bad enough over what happened in Corinthian without you ending up in trouble again!”

  “We’ll be fine,” Damien assured her. “Singh scares me a lot more than any Legatan arms smuggler is going to!”

  The engineer smiled at him, slightly less brightly than when she’d arrived, and shook her head as they reached the access to the flight bay.

  “Just come back, okay?” she asked. “You still owe me dinner!”

  “I’ll remember that,” he promised, and headed into the flight bay. The cavernous expanse holding the Blue Jay’s shuttles echoed with his footsteps. All of the freighter’s small craft were locked carefully into their individual bays, secured against the gravity this part of the ship rarely felt outside of acceleration.

  “Damien, over here!” Singh boomed. The dark-skinned and turbaned First Pilot was standing by a set of lockers that Damien had never noticed before, one of them open as Singh was taking objects out.

  “Here,” the pilot continued as the younger man arrived, shoving a vest, belt, jacket and gun at him.

  “What’s all this?” Damien asked.

  “Model Twenty-Four Forty Hyper-Kevlar,” Singh began, pointing at the vest. “Absorbs most small arms fire, once or twice.” He passed over the gun. “Macy-Six – that’s Martian Armaments - Caseless 6 millimeter. Twenty rounds in the grip, fully automatic. Belt to hold the gun. Jacket to cover it.” The pilot eyed him for a moment. “Can you cover your medallion with that shirt?” he asked.

  Wordlessly folding his collar over the gold coin declaring him a Mage and shrugging on the ballistic vest, Damien looked over the pilot. He was wearing the same vest, with the same sleek black pistol mounted under his shoulder he’d handed Damien. The young Mage copied the arrangement of the shoulder holster he’d mistaken for a belt, and then checked the slide and safety of the MA-C 6, carefully keeping the weapon aimed at the blank wall next to the lockers he now realized were the Blue Jay’s armory.

  “Good, you do have a clue,” Singh said approvingly as Damien holstered the weapon. He went over the youth’s holster belt quickly, tightening and tucking it to fit under the jacket. “I know Navy Mages are pistol-certified, you?”

  “I lived in the Sherwood countryside,” Damien told him. “There were still creatures in those woods that hadn’t worked out that humans were dangerous, so we had to go armed. That said,” he glanced down at the weapon nervously, “I haven’t fired a pistol since I started school, and I’ve never fired a full automatic.”

  “You shouldn’t have to,” Singh replied calmly. “If anything happens, well,” the big man shrugged, “you spray bullets in the bad guys’ direction to keep their heads down, and I’ll take care of any that don’t.”

  #

  The Silver Lion Restaurant’s entrance occupied the center of one side of a raised courtyard around a decorative pond. Five restaurants, all of which looked out of David Rice’s normal budgets, had clearly combined their water rations and financial budgets to build the water feature, which had lilies and fish he was sure had to be robotic. Between the pond, a dropped ceiling, and careful paintings of the walls, it was hard to tell you were on a space station.

  At the far end of the pond, across a bridge that might actually have been wooden, a pair of silver-painted lions flanked an entrance covered by a deep red silk curtain. A dark-haired and -skinned woman in a black silk dress stood behind a podium next to the entrance, watching all prospective guests approach.

  “Do you have a reservation, sir?” she asked, her voice smooth as silk. “We do not have tables for unexpected guests, I’m afraid.”

  “I believe so,” he told her. “I am here to meet a Bryan Ricket.”

  The woman nodded calmly, her fingers tapping out commands on a holo-screen that was being projected directly to her eyes by the podium.

  “Captain Rice?” she asked after a moment, and David nodded. “Vice-Director Ricket is waiting.” She conjured a younger version of herself, in a matching black silk dress. “Saffron will lead you to him.”

  Vice-Director was not a title that David had been expecting to hear associated with the man Carmichael had sent him to meet. He swallowed his questions and followed the young waitress into the restaurant.

  Starship Captains were not poor men. David had personally signed for a credit note worth almost two hundred million Martian Dollars when he purchased the Blue Jay, and had paid back every penny of it before rescuing Damien.

  The restaurant behind the curtain was entirely outside of his experience. Each table was at a slightly different level, separated from the others by burbling artificial brooks and real, growing, trees. He’d seen something similar planet-side once, but to encounter this extravagant a use of space and water on a space station was a level of wealth beyond his experience.

  The gorgeous waitress led him across two brooks and around one perfectly trimmed hedge to an archway formed of living trees. The table beyond was sized for six, but only held one man. Another man stood just beside the entrance, and stopped David as he entered the booth.

  “Hold still, Captain Rice,” the man ordered. He slowly looked David up and down, reminding him vividly of the Augment in customs. Somehow, he was not s
urprised to see the tiny pin of a golden cog with a lightning bolt cut out of the middle on the man’s collar when he looked.

  “He’s clear, Mr. Ricket,” the Augment reported.

  “Apologies for the security, Captain Rice,” the man at the table said calmly. “Please, take a seat.”

  Feel utterly out of his depth, David took the offered seat directly across from Ricket. The Vice-Director, whatever that was, was a slim man with a shaved head, clad in a plain gray business suit.

  “I took the liberty of ordering for us all,” Ricket continued. “I suspect you have not encountered true Old Chinese cuisine in your travels?”

  “I have heard of the country,” Rice admitted, “but I haven’t encountered the food, no.”

  “You will be pleasantly surprised then,” Ricket said calmly. “Like I was, a few hours ago, when my fellows in System Security passed a report on from one of our sterling Gunship Commanders telling me that a jumpship Captain was in system, looking for me. Tell me, Captain Rice, why exactly are you here?”

  The last sentence was delivered softly, gently, and so utterly flatly that David knew that the wrong answer would have the Augment behind him disposing of a body very quickly.

  “I worked in Corinthian with an information broker named Carmichael,” David answered slowly, picking his words carefully. “We ran into some trouble with Protectorate authority, and in exchange for a warning to him, he suggested that I look you up. He said that you would be able to find us a cargo that was under Martian radar.”

  “And Travis told you nothing of what I do, I take it?” Ricket asked.

  “Nothing, sir,” David replied.

  “Your honesty does you credit, Captain. What trouble did you encounter with our erstwhile Martian friends?”

  Rice took a deep breath.

  “One of my crewmen was arrested on charges I didn’t agree with,” he explained. “It looked like it wouldn’t be a fair trial, so we… liberated him.”