Starship's Mage: Episode 1

by Glynn Stewart

  Damien shook the big man’s hand and gestured to the several empty seats at the table he’d taken.

  “Feel free,” he agreed. “I’m Damien Montgomery – the new Ship’s Mage, as you guessed.”

  “The Captain, he is a lucky man!” Singh boomed as he conjured a stew-like dish from the food prep units. “Rumor I heard was that the Governor blacklisted us!”

  “I had my reasons to ignore that,” Damien told him. “I also never officially heard about it, so I don’t think it counts as breaking it.”

  Singh boomed laughter, echoing off the previously sterile and silent walls of the mess.

  “I like your style, Montgomery!” He told the young Mage. “It isn’t disobedience if you didn’t hear the order – ‘communications failures’ are good for that in shuttles!”

  Damien was about to ask about the ‘First Pilot’s role when the ships public address system clicked on with a slightly noticeable, almost definitely artificial, buzz.

  “Now hear this, now hear this,” Jenna’s voice rang clearly throughout the ship. “We have confirmed loading times with Sherwood Prime Docking and will have a twelve hour loading shift commencing at oh-nine hundred OMT. Please secure all items for zero-gravity.”

  “I repeat: we will have twelve hours of zero-rotation in the ribs starting at oh-nine-hundred Olympus Mons Time tomorrow. That is all.”

  Singh pumped his fist exuberantly. “Brilliant!”

  “What is?” Damien asked, thinking through the announcement. It made sense, though he’d never thought about it, that they’d have to stop rotating the ribs to load the cargo. The Blue Jay’s ribs were two hundred meters out from the ship’s center, which meant they rotated around the ship three times every two minutes, preventing anyone from attaching cargo to the central keel.

  “We have a cargo – with the blacklisting, we might not have found one,” the dark pilot explained. “The Captain, he is brilliant!” He paused, swallowing down some of his spiced stew. “I’ll need to check on the shuttles,” he continued after a moment. “We’ve been using them to help with repairs, but we’ll need to get the beasts set up for cargo handling again.”

  With a shudder at the thought, Narveer Singh started inhaling his food so he could get started. Damien simply watched in amazement and nodded goodbye to the pilot as he left, charging towards the aft of the ships and the shuttle bays.

  #

  “And this is your working area of the ship,” Jenna told Damien as she drifted up to a handhold near another hatch. They’d started their tour of the keel of the ship at Singh’s shuttle bay at the rear end of the ship and worked their way down the central corridor of the keel in zero-gravity. “The last Ship Mage called it the ship’s ‘Sanctum.’”

  Damien followed Jenna through the hatch and saw that the central corridor dog-legged ahead, around a chamber he knew would be exactly one-hundredth the length, height, and width of the Blue Jay’s exterior structure. Even if Jenna hadn’t warned him what he was approaching, that dogleg would have suggested he was approaching the starship’s simulacrum chamber.

  Runes coated the outside of the chamber: swirling patterns of silver inlay that Damien knew cut through the wall and were visible from the inside as well. From here, they linked into other patterns that marked carefully calculated routes out to the outer hull of the Blue Jay.

  “Your workshop is over here,” Jenna continued, gliding neatly up to a side hatch leading off the dog-legged main corridor. “Watch your step,” she warned, “Kenneth put in gravity runes, but they’ve been finicky since…” she trailed off.

  “They likely haven’t been charged recently enough,” Damien told her as he joined her by the workshop door. “Runes like that need to be renewed weekly.”

  Jenna hit the panel to open the hatch, and it slid aside to reveal what Damien judged to be a relatively standard Mage’s workshop – a Wonderland-esque cross between a research lab, a jewelry workshop, and a private office. On the far wall, a centrifugal casting unit occupied the center of a workbench, surrounded by soldering irons and etching tools.

  Another wall held a desk with three massive work screens, touch-driven interfaces that were currently combining to show a pseudo-three-dimensional view of the space around Sherwood. The opposite wall held a spectrometer, a microscope, and a set of micro-scale manipulators – for the really fine rune work.

  The floor plating was the same plain steel as the rest of the ship, but here someone – Kenneth, presumably, or possibly an even earlier Ship’s Mage – had inlaid the silver pattern of runes that provided artificial gravity equivalent to the spinning ribs.

  Even from outside the room, however, Damien could tell that the runes were almost uncharged, spitting out tiny bursts of gravity that would make the entire room a tripping hazard.

  “Hold up a moment,” he told Jenna, and focused. He needed to touch the runes without worrying about spinning off, so he oriented himself with the floor of the workshop and slowly created a gravity field underneath himself. He drifted downwards and then settled his feet onto the floor in a comfortable half-gravity before kneeling and removing the glove on his right hand.

  As soon as the rune on his palm was within a few centimeters of the runes on the floor, both began to glow gently. Damien focused on that glow, and fed energy into the gravity runes. The glow rapidly spread out from his hand, and Jenna’s gasp behind him suggested that it was bright enough the ship’s first officer saw it.

  After about fifteen seconds, the entire room’s floor was glowing brightly to his eyes, and Damien closed his hand into a fist, cutting off the connection between his own power and the runes on the floor.

  He rose to face Jenna, standing in his own personal field of gravity as he met the gaze of the officer floating in zero-gravity beside him. “It’ll be safe to enter now,” he told her. “It doesn’t take much to maintain a room this small; it just has to be done regularly.”

  “You don’t actually need to deal with zero-gee,” she answered accusingly, reminding Damien of what he was doing.

  He released the spell, though without motion he remained standing on the deck initially.

  “Not really, no,” he admitted. “We’re taught not to show off magic though,” he explained. “It tends to attract unfortunate attention.”

  “I can see that,” Jenna agreed. “Is there anything you need to check in here?”

  Damien took a glance around the workshop. All the equipment looked relatively standard. “Nothing that I can check quickly,” he told her. “I’ll need a few hours to get used to the gear and the setup before I do much of anything, but you said we have a few days?”

  “We do,” she confirmed. “Enough of the crew is living aboard that we need to rotate the ribs during the night, so we can only load for one of Sherwood Prime’s twelve hour shifts each day. Even with all of their gear, it takes two full shifts to attach three hundred ten thousand ton containers to the keel.”

  “That’ll give me time to review the gear, and go over the ship’s rune matrix,” Damien told her. He had never had a chance to inspect the rune matrix of a jump ship in detail before. He saw and identified power flows and purposes better than any other Mage he knew, but it still took time to examine as complex a spell as a jump matrix.

  “Speaking of which,” Jenna gestured carefully towards the simulacrum chamber. “The rest of your Sanctum awaits you.”

  Damien didn’t wait for her to catch up with him once he’d kicked off, and touched the panel next to the hatch. It slid gently open, and he slipped into the only space from which he would be able to jump the ship.

  The same runes that coated the room on the outside were visible on the interior as well, continuing up onto the roof and the floor and coating the room on all sides. The inlaid silver runes stood out against the thousands of tiny optical diodes around them that projected the image of the outside of the ship. Right now, Damien saw the docking arms and the base of the hub of Sherwood Prime, but beneath him fell away the bl
ack of space, and if he looked carefully up and to the side, Sherwood itself was visible past the bulk of the space station.

  In the exact center of the room, unsupported yet utterly incapable of moving from that position, was the simulacrum. Forged by magic from molten silver when the ship was built, it exactly mirrored every part of the ship’s exterior. The Blue Jay’s four ribs rotated around. Her forward radiation shield still showed the damage where the last repairs were being done. Damien drifted, unthinking, to the model – exactly one-thousandth the size of the ship itself, catching himself on the immobile engines. His hands on the simulacrum, he felt the ship, and with the screens around him, he saw what the Blue Jay saw.

  “This place is always awe-inspiring to me,” Jenna said quietly from the edge of the room, and Damien glanced up from the impossibly perfect model of the ship to look at her. “I don’t understand any of how what you do works, but this room… this is the key to the stars.”

  “That was the Compact,” Damien half-whispered, reveling in the power pulsing around him. “Peace between Mage and Mundane, between Mars and Earth… and in exchange, we gave you the stars.”

  #

  “How’s the firewood loading going?”

  Captain David Rice turned around, carefully, in the bridge’s zero-gravity to face his executive officer.

  “I think the company paying for a million tons of premium hardwood would be… displeased if it was used as firewood,” he observed drily. “Or were you referring to the forty-five containers of luxury furniture made from said hardwood?”

  Jenna shrugged, grabbing a handhold and positioning herself to review the video screen Rice was watching. On it, the dozens of manipulator arms of a major docking station were carefully maneuvering the Protectorate’s standard ten meter by twenty meter by fifty meter; ten thousand ton rated mass; cargo containers onto the Blue Jay’s keel.

  “Did you follow up on the secondaries?” he asked her.

  “Yep,” she confirmed. “Corinthian is just major enough that people are shipping there, and just minor enough that no one has shipped out for two months.”

  There were dozens of cargos to be shipped between the worlds under the protection of the Mage-King of Mars, but few of them would justify filling even a three megaton freighter like the Blue Jay. The usual policy was to book a standard container, fill it with your cargo, and list it as a secondary cargo on a station like Sherwood Prime. As soon as Rice had the contract to ship a hundred and forty-five containers to Corinthian, he’d had Jenna put in a notice to Prime of which world they were shipping for.

  All secondary shipping contracts to Corinthian would now be loaded onto the Jay, along with a massive data upload to be transferred to the other system’s communications net. The data transfer fees alone were a hefty part of the freighter’s operating costs, but it was the primary cargo contracts that paid the bills.

  “How’s our young Mage working out?”

  “He seems dedicated and smart so far,” Jenna told him. “I showed him around Kenneth’s lab – he fixed the gravity in about two seconds flat. Last I saw, he was going over the runes in the simulacrum chamber with a magnifying glass.”

  “He thinks they may have been damaged?” Rice asked, remembering Damien’s comment to that effect with a shiver.

  “I don’t think so,” she replied. “From what he said, I think it’s the first chance he’s ever had to really examine a jump matrix, and he wants to make sure it all… ‘flows right’ was how he described it.”

  “Good,” David let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d taken. “We’ll have all of the rest of the repairs finished by the time the primary cargo is loaded. We’ll hang out a day or so after that for any new secondaries, but then we need to get to Corinthian.”

  “That wood isn’t exactly going to rot in our hull, skipper,” his executive officer pointed out.

  “No,” David agreed, looking around the empty bridge carefully before continuing quietly. “But I don’t think our pirate friends are deaf and dumb either, and I’ve got an itchy feeling between my shoulder blades. The sooner we’re out of Sherwood, the happier I’ll be!”

  #

  The Martian Runic script defines a spell matrix in the same way that a programming language defines the 0s and 1s that allow a computer to function. With seventy-six characters and fourteen different ways of connecting them, the script is complex and difficult to read – and the Blue Jay’s jump matrix contained the equivalent of sixteen million lines of code.

  Damien read Martian Runic fluently, but he couldn’t go over that many runes in detail with less than a month of solid reading. Unlike every other Mage he’d ever known, though, he didn’t need to. He saw the flow of energy along the patterns and read the purpose and flow of entire blocks and sub-matrices at a single glance.

  On a small matrix, like the ‘warning spell’ in Captain Michaels’ office, he often read the entire structure of the spell, from its triggers to its actions, in a few seconds. Larger spells would take him some time, but it was minutes where another Mage would spend hours.

  He’d never done it on a spell matrix as large as the Blue Jay’s jump matrix though, so when he hit the first utterly wrong sub-matrix he assumed he was misreading it.

  The sub-matrix was at the core of the spell, one of the seventeen that linked into the simulacrum at the center of the ship. The other sixteen sub-matrices fed energy out from the simulacrum, but the seventeenth interfaced with the others and changed the energy flow somehow. On certain criteria, it redirected energy away from the main matrix.

  Damien spent an hour reading the runes on the sub-matrix, and then took another long, hard look at the energy flows. Sub-matrix clusters came in primes and squares, so it was theoretically possible that the seventeenth sub-matrix was unnecessary, but it made no sense. Shaking his head, he made a note on the matrix diagram he’d inherited from the ship-mages before him. It was the only current notation on the file, all the previous notes were ‘sub-matrix in this location damaged by crate impact, repaired’ or similar minor fixes.

  Still confused, he moved on, following the rune matrix forward towards the prow of the ship.

  #

  At the front of the ship, where the lengthy connecting sub-matrix expanded into the runes that covered the inside of the immense radiation shield, he found another ‘wrong’ sub-matrix. Four of the sub-matrices made sense, channeling the power of the jump spell out into space, but a fifth, again interfacing with the other four, siphoned off energy if criteria were met. The criteria didn’t make sense to Damien, the runes basically redefining the standard teleport spell that the matrix would amplify.

  From the empty, echoing void beneath the radiation cap, Damien made his way into Rib One, following the chains of runes that linked together the major sub-matrices into the locked down decks. At the far extreme of the rib, the links broke apart to create seventeen sub-matrices, spread along the length of the outer rib, the extreme exterior of the ship. The central matrix, the one linking all seventeen together, was ‘wrong’ again. Like the runes in the simulacrum chamber and the radiation shield, it channeled away energy on criteria that read like a description of a jump spell.

  By the time Damien had followed the rune matrices around to the central part of Rib Two, he wasn’t surprised to find almost the exact same rune matrix as he found in Rib One. He noted the slight differences on his matrix diagram. It almost looked like all three of the matrices were redirecting energy towards the same place if it met the same criteria.

  In Rib Three and Rib Four, he didn’t even try to follow the linking matrices, heading directly to where he knew he would find the strange matrices. Each was basically an ‘if-then’ line of code, redirecting energy to a single point in the jump matrix if their criteria were met.

  He floated in an empty maintenance space on Rib Four with his personal computer up, reviewing his notes on the sub-matrices. The six patterns had more to do with each other than with the hundreds of other sub-mat
rices and millions of other runes that made up the jump matrix, and they made no sense to him.

  All six redirected energy away from the matrix, where the entire purpose of the runes was to multiply a spell that would transport Damien, personally, roughly ten thousand kilometers at best into a spell that would transport an entire ship a full light year.

  The calculation he’d set to run finally finished, and the computer spat out an answer – all six runes were directing energy to the same place, likely a seventh and final sub-matrix. If his calculations were correct, it was in engineering.

  #

  Drifting into the engineering spaces in zero-gravity almost got Damien crushed as a load of containment cylinders of some kind swung through the space just inside the door. Only an instinctive jerk of magic pulled him back from a dangerous collision, and a voice bellowed across the cavernous space at the rear of the freighter.

  “Watch what you’re doing, you dimwits! That’s the only damn entrance; let’s try not to kill ship’s officers, eh?”

  Damien remained motionless for a long moment as a white-faced assistant engineer caught up to his wayward cargo. The man gave Damien an apologetic glance before regaining control of the floating cart from his datapad. Tiny jets flared on the cart, redirecting the cylinders – which he now noticed had a ‘Warning: Explosion Hazard’ sign on them – away from the Ship’s Mage.

  A dark-skinned man, not much bigger than Damien’s own slight frame, appeared out of the depths of the engineering space, zipping across the empty space and grabbing a support loop with practiced skill, turning bright blue eyes on the Mage.

  “Only one folk on a ship like this wears that gewgaw,” he said gruffly. “Welcome to Engineering, Ship’s Mage Montgomery. Chief Engineer, James Kellers.”

  Damien carefully shook the engineer’s hand, keeping his feet and spare hand carefully wedged to keep him in place. Releasing the handshake, he looked around the engineering room in awe. There were no rooms, corridors or dividers in the working space at the rear of the ship. Designed to function in zero-gravity, the space around the engines was festooned with hundreds of devices and consoles that he didn’t begin to comprehend.