Starship's Mage: Episode 3

by Glynn Stewart

  The conversation was interrupted at that point by the return of the waitress, who silently poured tea and wine for each man before stepping back out, making subtle eyes at the sharply carved physique of the cyborg guarding the table.

  Ricket picked up his glass and offered a toast to Rice. “To loyalty to one’s subordinates, and to you Captain Rice. This was Mage Montgomery, I presume? I have heard… some of what occurred with him.”

  David sipped his wine, trying to cover his surprise. From the other man’s smile, he suspected he failed.

  “I think introductions are in order, Captain Rice,” Ricket continued. “I am the Vice-Director in charge of UnArcana Affairs for the Legatus Military Intelligence Directorate. I should say that, if your young Mage has achieved what some of our analysts think he has…” the Vice-Director shook his head. “You have the most valuable civilian ship in the Protectorate, Captain,” he said quietly. “To anyone, that is, who was not opposed to any but the most necessary use of magic.”

  David couldn’t help himself from sighing in relief.

  “Carmichael did not tell me that he was sending me to the Legatus government,” he replied. “I’m not sure he and I have the same idea of ‘under the radar.’”

  “Oh, I believe you do, Captain,” Ricket told him with a smile. “LMID,” he pronounced it el-mid, “tries to keep a very low profile with Protectorate authorities. And you are in luck,” he continued, “in that I do need a jumpship, and your Blue Jay will fit my needs perfectly.”

  “What do you need, Mr. Ricket?” David asked. The Legatan held up his hand, though, as the food arrived at just that moment. Bowls of rice, meat, and veggies covered in steaming sauces were laid out in front of each man, and a third place for the Augment.

  Once the waitress had left without violently attacking anyone, the cyborg bodyguard joined David and Ricket wordlessly and dug in to the food himself.

  “What is your personnel transport capacity, Captain?” Ricket asked as he dug into his food with the provided chopsticks.

  “We can carry eighty or so comfortably,” David said carefully. The food was spicier than he expected, but extraordinarily good. “Depending on how comfortable they are crowding, we could easily double that.”

  “Excellent. And you’re rated for three megatons of mass, correct?”

  “We’re a Venice class, so yes. Three hundred cargo containers.”

  “This won’t be cargo containers, Captain,” Ricket told him. “As it happens, a Crucifix-class gunship masses three hundred thousand tons unloaded, and is of a size that will fit inside your ships rotating ribs. I need four gunships, cadre crew of twenty per ship, and a thirty man security team transported from Legatus to the Mercedes system. Under the radar, as you say.”

  “That’s a bit different from our usual cargo,” David said slowly, trying to buy himself time to think. “And riskier.”

  “That’s why I think your ship is perfect,” the Legatan spy told him. “Also, the security team are Augments. I would recommend that you simply let any pirates board, and allow them to deal with the issue.”

  “We are also prepared to pay handsomely for this delivery,” Ricket continued. “Would five times your normal delivery fee be reasonable for the risk?”

  David almost choked on his dumpling. He’d been hoping for a high risk-reward job to provide the seed capital they would need for a Fringe run. Twice his normal delivery fee, plus the existing reserves he had, would have done.

  “I keep the Augments the hell away from my Mage,” he tried to insist calmly.

  “Of course,” the Legatan agreed. “That’s only sensible.”

  “All right. We’ll do it.”

  #

  Where David’s appointment took him into the luxury of Interface Station’s wealthy sections, Damien and Singh’s took them into the dingy corridors of the Station’s cheaper warehousing section. When the Station had been built, a significant chunk of the outer arc had been left hollow. Standard ten-thousand cubic meter cargo containers had been brought in, welded into place, and turned into row upon row of dingy, cheap, warehousing space.

  “Row seventeen, level K, box nine is where we’ll find our man,” Singh told Damien, leading the way to a rickety-looking elevator. It clanked and chugged its way up seven layers of the cargo containers and disgorged them onto a catwalk that looked only slightly safer.

  “Is this place safe?” Damien asked, following Singh along the catwalk and looking for the haphazard mix of pre-fabricated signs and glorified graffiti that marked the various sections of the warehousing section.

  “Not a chance,” Singh said cheerfully. “That’s why we’re carrying guns.”

  Something about the cheerfully deadly Sikh pilot, however, got them through the sparse crowds and darkened catwalks without incident. They reached the box they’d been told to go to, and a youth with most of his hair shaved away, leaving a row of spikes down the center of his skull, popped the door open for them.

  Two more spiked-hair youths, a man and a woman, were waiting inside with blocky but effective looking carbines.

  “Leave the guns here,” the woman ordered in a hoarse voice. “Nobody sees the boss armed.”

  Damien followed Singh’s lead in unslinging the shoulder holster and leaving it on the table the ganger pointed at.

  “This way,” she instructed hoarsely, leading the pair of officers from the Blue Jay into the next room. There, sitting cross-legged on a table surrounded by black metal cases, waited the tiniest adult man that Damien had ever seen.

  The wrinkles and lines on the face showed the man’s true age, as did his head, out of scale with his body. The small man wore his black hair, streaked with iron gray, shoulder length – and he leveled his gaze on Damien and Singh like a gun turret.

  “Narveer,” he said flatly. “I really didn’t believe you’d have the balls to try to deal with me after the last time we parted.”

  “That was duty, never personal,” Singh replied calmly. “And this is business – not personal.”

  Before Damien could react, the man was off the table and pointing an immense pistol directly at Singh. The gun was almost comically mis-matched to the man’s size, but the barrel didn’t waver or tremble in the slightest.

  “You’re unarmed. What’s to stop me blowing you away as a down payment for that cargo?”

  “Damien, roll down your collar,” Singh instructed calmly. Damien reached up, slowly so as not to disturb the dwarf, and rolled down his collar – revealing the gold coin declaring him a Mage. “Even here, he can use magic in self-defense,” the ex-soldier reminded the smuggler.

  The gun remained trained on Singh’s head for a long moment, and then was tossed aside with a massive guffaw.

  “Damn Singh, you got me,” the dwarf announced, and turned to offer his hand to Damien. “Victor Rotha, gunrunner, smuggler, and former pilot for the Protectorate Navy. Until this lunk turned me in for the whole gunrunning thing.”

  “You got sloppy,” Singh told him sharply. “I couldn’t turn that much of a blind eye!”

  “Nah, and you gave me enough of a heads up that I could get out,” Rotha allowed, turning back to the tables with the gun cases. “So, you need guns. What are you after?”

  “Sidearms, body armor and carbines for sixty,” Singh said immediately. “Decent stuff, not any of that MidWorlds manufactured crap.”

  “Ha, you think I can get away with selling Amber or Corinthian guns in Legatus orbit?” Rotha replied, digging through the cases. He opened one and passed the box over to Singh.

  “Legatus Arms 71 Model 2445 heavy pistol,” he announced. “Fires a seven point one millimeter, high muzzle velocity, solid round. The LSDF discontinued their use earlier this year as they lack the penetration to get through the level of body armor they wanted from their side-arm. They traded up for the Model 2450, which uses a sabot penetrator round, but is less effective against unarmoured targets.”

  The case held ten of the guns. As soon as
Singh took it, Rotha dived back into the pile of cases.

  “Got racks of the twenty-four-forty Hyper-Kevlars,” he said over his shoulder. “Lauren, grab me four standard cases of those, and seven more of the twenty-four-forty-fives.”

  The spiky-haired woman promptly leapt to obey, clearly more aware of how the cases were organized than her boss.

  “This is what you want,” Rotha finally announced, returning with longer black metal case. He popped it open to reveal four matte-black carbines.

  “This is just going into service with the LSDF shipboard marines,” he continued. “Legatus Arms SC-5 battle carbine, Model 2454. Caseless rounds, electronic firing, electromagnetic round advancement. It’s a block of metal and molecular circuitry – not a single moving part. Takes two fifty round magazines of a five millimeter bullet – standard load is one frangible, one armor-piercing. Box of a hundred of ‘em just fell out of a shuttle as I was walking by, and I just couldn’t leave ‘em lying there!”

  “Sounds good,” Singh replied. “We’ll sixty each of the pistols, the armor, and the carbines.”

  “Oh ho ho!” Rotha replied, his gaze settling on an unrelated box, the height of a man. “And you’ll take this too, if you know what you need!”

  The small man ran over to the casket and popped the lid, swinging it open to reveal a man-sized suit of full body armor.

  “Martian Armaments Mark Seventeen Combat Exosuit,” he announced proudly. “The Legatans just switched over to a home-grown combat suit, so a bunch of these were being destroyed. I saved a few for better fates. Still qualified on this monster, Singh?”

  Damien looked from the Exosuit to the Pilot, and back to the Exosuit. He sighed. Whatever Captain Rice had given them as a budget had to cover it, because from Singh’s expression, they weren’t leaving without the suit.

  #

  “Is Narveer back aboard with those guns?” David asked Jenna as he re-entered the bridge.

  “Not quite,” his First Officer responded, checking her console and the radar. “He took Damien with him and they checked in about ten minutes ago – their contact is delivering them, along with the goods, in his own shuttle. Their ETA is about another twenty minutes.”

  “That’ll work,” the Captain accepted, settling into the acceleration couch next to his console as he brought up the navigation software. “Is anyone else off-ship?”

  “Kellers and his engineers are out for dinner,” Jenna replied. “I got the impression LaMonte tried to go out alone with Damien, but Singh had already grabbed him for gun-shopping. Why?”

  “We have cargo inbound that’s self-mobile,” David explained. “We need to be clear of the station and in a steady orbit in about ninety minutes. Have you heard from Kellers?”

  “I’ll check in with him. Make sure they won’t have to pour Kelly back onto the ship.”

  David shook his head with a chuckle. “Is Damien holding a grudge over her getting him arrested?” he asked. “For that matter, is our high school love fest being a problem at all?”

  “Nah, the rest of the crew just thinks they’re being idiots,” his XO replied calmly. “Which they are - Damien isn’t holding a grudge. He’s just oblivious. Self-mobile cargo?” she finished.

  “We’ll be carrying four gunships, plus skeleton crew, to the Mercedes system,” David told her. “We’ll also be taking on a security platoon of Augments. Can you get someone to check through the quarters on Ribs Three and Four to make sure they’re presentable for a hundred and ten strangers?”

  “We can double up some of the cabins and fit them in,” Jenna confirmed. “How long do we have?”

  “About two hours,” David told her. “Ricket moves quickly. And pays well,” he added. “It’ll be worth it.”

  #

  With the Blue Jay separated from the spinning wheel of Interface Station and floating in its new assigned high orbit, Damien floated in the middle of the simulacrum chamber in zero-gravity. The screens surrounding him showed the busy space around the ship.

  The freighter’s external ribs, usually in motion while the ship was orbiting, were frozen in place. Beyond them, five sets of engines flared as the Legatan ships approached. Damien gestured on his control panel, zooming in on the squadron.

  Four Crucifix gunships, all in what the Captain had referred to as ‘Squid Mode’, decelerated carefully towards the freighter. In the midst, a single shuttle shaped its own, slightly different, course. The Blue Jay’s computer told Damien it was an assault shuttle, of a class unique to the Legatus Self Defense Force.

  The assault shuttle, probably chock full of the Augments assigned to guard the tiny but deadly squadron the Blue Jay had been hired to transport, hung back as the gunships slowly approached the freighter.

  They approached closer than any full size ship had ever come to the Blue Jay, the pinpricks of their engines cutting out as they expanded into the hulls fully visibly from Damien’s cameras and sensors. Each gunship was a hemisphere, forty meters deep and as many around, to which four twenty meter cubes were linked by sixty meter long cylinders. With the modules swept behind them, the ships were sixty meters across at their widest, and a hundred and twenty meters long.

  The ships were tiny next to the Blue Jay. As the first slowly slid between Rib One and Rib Two and fired small thrusters to arrest its motion and bring into the freighter’s hull, Damien realized that four gunships was nothing against the normal volume of cargo they carried. The plan was to lock a single ship in each quarter of the hull, but they could just as easily have locked all four ships nose to tail along one side of the ship, and carried sixteen of the gunships all told. Of course, the Blue Jay could only have carried the mass of eight of the ships.

  The lower mass was a factor in some of his jump calculations. He was starting to update the course he’d been plotting when the buzzer sounded for entry to the simulacrum chamber.

  “Come in,” he instructed.

  The door slid aside, temporarily blocking off part of the view of the outside universe as Kelly LaMonte drifted in.

  “Figured I’d find you here,” she said softly. “Do you know how to not work, Damien?”

  “That shuttle,” Damien said quietly, pointing at the small spaceship now shaping a gentle arc towards the Blue Jay’s shuttle bay, “carries twenty-eight men and woman who voluntarily submitted to life-altering surgery to allow them to hunt and arrest Mages like me. It’s a little sobering.”

  The engineer caught herself on the platform next to where Damien floated and settled onto it.

  “We get this job done, we get out of UnArcana space, and we never deal with these crazies again,” she told him. “Why get hung up on their issues?”

  “It’s nerve-wracking to realize that anyone hates you that much,” Damien shrugged.

  Kelly carefully laid her hand on his shoulder, balancing perfectly in zero-gravity.

  “Not your problem,” she said forcefully. “You didn’t break their laws, didn’t use magic on the station. Besides, if they cause problems on the ship, the Captain will throw them out the airlock.”

  He looked ‘up’ at her, somewhat disbelievingly.

  “He won’t stand for his officers being harassed, you’ll see,” she promised.

  “Fair,” he allowed. After a moment, he reached up to cover her hand with his own. Her skin was warm against him. They floated there in zero-gravity in silence for a long moment.

  “I was starting to wonder,” she said quietly, “if you were still mad at me for getting you arrested. James told me it was nothing of the sort. He said you were just young and oblivious.” Kelly took advantage of her better leverage to turn Damien around to face her. “So, Damien, let me be as obvious as I can. Want to come back to my quarters and I will cook you dinner?”

  Even he wasn’t that oblivious.

  #

  David was waiting in the shuttle bay with Narveer and Kellers when the Legatan shuttle came aboard. The three officers floated behind a safety shield, watching the pilo
t neatly slow the ship to a halt in the exact center of the bay, and then gently connect her to the deck with a tiny burst from the top-side maneuvering thrusters.

  The shuttle was a thick, dark-painted wedge, designed to be equally at home in space or in atmosphere. Each side of the wedge bore the golden cog with the lightning bolt cut out that was the symbol of Legatus’s Augment Corps. Hatches on the front likely covered weapons systems designed to clear the way for the platoon of soldiers aboard. A larger hatch, roughly halfway back the port angle of the wedge, opened shortly after the shuttle settled onto the deck.

  An eerily skinny man with iron gray hair, clad in a blue-trimmed black uniform with the Augments golden cog at his collar, exited the ship first. He saw David and his officers and kicked off from the shuttle, neatly directing himself to grab the blast shield and efficiently orient himself to face them.

  “Major James Niska, commanding Security Team Alpha-Seventeen,” he reported crisply, giving a credible zero-gravity salute.

  “Welcome aboard the Blue Jay, Major Niska,” David greeted him. Behind the Major, more black uniformed men and women spilled out of the ship. Each carried a duffel bag and a slung rifle, and they quickly aligned themselves in neat lines behind their commander. “How was your flight?”

  “Utterly boring. It was perfect,” the Augment replied cheerfully. “All of the gunships looked to have hitched on correctly. Are their crews aboard?”

  “They are coming in through the maintenance outriggers,” David confirmed. “My First Officer is checking up on them. If you want to meet up with them, I can have my First Pilot,” he gestured carefully to Narveer, “show your men to their quarters.”

  “That would be perfect,” Niska agreed, gesturing for one of his team to approach him. “Karl, take the platoon and get them settled in. Follow Mr…?”

  “Singh,” Narveer replied, shifting forward to face the platoon. “Narveer Singh.”

  “Follow Mr. Singh,” Niska finished. “We’ll sort out the rotation and guard schedules once I’ve had a chance to sit down with Captain Rice.”