Interstellar Mage

by Glynn Stewart

  “My board is green,” Jenna Campbell reported from the executive officer’s navigation station. “Armstrong reports they’re ready to pull umbilicals and reminds us not to activate main engines within ten thousand kilometers of the station.”

  She paused.

  “They’re repeating that and requesting confirmation,” she observed with a smile. “I wonder why?”

  “Because nothing in space short of a battleship has bigger engines than we do,” David replied. “And they’re not used to big antimatter rockets on a civilian ship. Let Armstrong know their signal is received and I intend to observe a fifteen-thousand-kilometer safety radius on the antimatter engines.”

  “I’m sure they’ll appreciate that,” his old friend said. She still looked pale and weak, but she was moving under her own power again, and their new doctor, Jaidev Gupta, had cleared her for this much duty.

  “Umbilicals withdrawing,” Campbell reported after a moment. “Docking clamps released. We are floating free.”

  “Has Tau Ceti f Control given us a flight path?”

  “They have.”

  “Take us out, secondary thrusters only.”

  Fully loaded and fueled, Red Falcon massed somewhere in the region of thirty million tons: six million tons of starship wrapped around twenty million tons of cargo and four million tons of fuel. Her massive antimatter-fueled main engines could fling that around like a toy with surprising efficiency—but they would melt Armstrong Station’s hull with equal efficiency.

  Instead, a suite of several hundred ion thrusters, fundamentally unchanged in principle for half a millennium, lit up and began to move Falcon away from the massive bulk of the space station. It wasn’t much acceleration, but it added up quickly.

  At two meters per second squared, however, it would still take over an hour for David’s ship to clear the safety zone he’d specified. On the other hand, once he opened up Red Falcon’s main engines at ten gravities, he’d reach flat-enough space for Soprano to jump them in just over five hours.

  The trade-off seemed fair.

  “Mage Soprano.” He opened a channel to the simulacrum chamber in the middle of the ship. “Any concerns?”

  “None,” the ex-Navy officer replied cheerfully. “The rune matrix checks out. All tests I can run, both magical and visual, are done. We’ll be clear to jump once we’re far enough out.”

  “I’m currently estimating six and a half hours,” he told her. “There isn’t much point to you and your people hanging out in the simulacrum chamber until then. I’ll make sure we let you know half an hour before jump.”

  Soprano’s lips pursed.

  “Right, one-light-minute jump radius,” she said, somewhat sourly. “I forgot about that.”

  Navy ships’ full amplifiers meant they could jump far closer in to gravity wells than a civilian ship’s jump matrix. She would be used to the ten-gee acceleration but not the full eighteen-million-kilometer safety radius for the jump.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he promised.

  He had, after all, grown used to having the ability to jump from farther in himself, and the fact that Blue Jay had been modified to have an amplifier was why his old ship had needed to be destroyed.

  While it was certainly possible to provide magical gravity for the simulacrum chamber at the heart of a starship—it was done on every Navy vessel—Maria had decided to instead provide magical zero gravity. No matter what maneuvers or acceleration Red Falcon underwent, the core of the ship would remain untouched.

  As they approached jump time, she floated against the wall of the chamber, surveying her domain with careful eyes. Every part of the outside of the chamber was covered in screens and silver runes. The screens showed the feed from hundreds of cameras across Red Falcon’s surface, allowing someone at the heart of the ship to see as the ship saw.

  The runes linked into the matrices of runes that wove throughout the starship’s entire hull, feeding and channeling power into the liquid-silver model at the exact center of the chamber and the exact center of the starship.

  That liquid silver model would change and flow to match any adjustment to the ship around it. It currently showed the rows upon rows of ten-thousand-cubic-meter cargo containers that made up Red Falcon’s cargo in perfect detail. The only difference between the model and the ship it represented were the runes swarming across its surface in glowing colors, two clear spaces on the model marking where the jump mage would put their hands to interface with the spell.

  The young Asian woman floating next to the simulacrum looked nervous, but Maria gave her a reassuring smile. She was perfectly confident in Xi Wu’s ability to make Red Falcon’s first jump. If it hadn’t been the very first jump they were ever going to make, she wouldn’t even have been supervising the younger jump Mage.

  “I make it ten minutes,” a voice she wasn’t expecting said from behind her.

  Maria turned in the air to level a calm glare on Red Falcon’s third officer, their newly hired tactical officer. Iovis Acconcio was an olive-skinned heavyset man she’d served with before, and he gave her a careful zero-gravity bow as she turned.

  “Shouldn’t you be on the bridge?” she asked.

  “Captain stood everyone down,” Acconcio replied. “I wanted to watch the jump, if you’re okay with that?”

  “You were a Navy Warrant Officer,” Maria pointed out. “You have to have seen what, five hundred of these?”

  Chief Warrant Officer (Gunnery) Iovis Acconcio had been Mage-Lieutenant-Commander Soprano’s strong right hand when she’d been second-in-command of the tactical department aboard the cruiser Righteous Declaration of Justice. He wasn’t much older than she, but that extra five years of experience had been enough for him to earn a noncom’s warrant as an alternative to a commission. He’d taken her under his wing then, and so, when he’d applied for the job on Red Falcon, she’d recommended him to Rice as highly as she could.

  It hadn’t been needed. There had been very little legitimate competition for the role.

  “Never been on the bridge, for one,” he admitted. “My place was missile control.” He shrugged and smiled. “And now my place is on the bridge, but the bridge isn’t the simulacrum chamber. I’ll leave if I’m a distraction, but I want to watch.”

  Maria shook her head at her old friend and looked over at Xi Wu.

  “Xi, you’re jumping us this time,” she told her subordinate. “Your call.”

  If Wu wasn’t comfortable, she could let Acconcio watch the next jump, in two hours. That one would be Maria herself. Then her other two subordinates would each take one, after which Wu would have had the eight hours’ rest required between jumps and would take the next one.

  Four mages would allow Red Falcon to move twelve light-years in a day. In addition to her sheer size and defensibility, the big AAFHF was also incredibly fast.

  “Won’t be a problem,” the young woman replied, the extra distraction apparently evening her confidence out. An audience could do that.

  Xi Wu wasn’t a Navy Mage, but she was an entirely acceptable civilian Jump Mage. If Maria had managed to recruit ex-Navy Mages, Falcon would have been even faster—civilian Jump Mages had to be able to jump every eight hours, which was also the standard the Guild set for the most they were allowed to do.

  Navy Mages had to be able to jump every six. With four Navy Mages aboard, Falcon would have moved sixteen light-years a day and been able to keep up with Martian warships and task groups—which was, of course, the point in her design.

  “If the jumping Mage says you’re okay, you’re okay,” Maria told Acconcio. “Distract her for one second, though, and you’re out.”

  Acconcio managed another zero-gravity bow.

  “Of course, my dearest Ship’s Mage,” he promised. Living up to his promise, he promptly settled against one wall of the simulacrum chamber to watch Maria and Wu work.

  “Mage Soprano.” Rice’s voice echoed through the chamber as an intercom window popped up on the scr
een. He paused as the return image came up, then the Captain bowed his head in apology.

  “And Mage Wu,” he greeted the junior Mage as well. “Ship’s scanners report all gravimetric interference at low enough for jump. Do you have our course plotted for the Cinnamon system?

  “We do,” Maria confirmed. Xi Wu might be making the first jump, but the young woman was doing it with figures and distances that Maria had calculated for her. She was confident in her junior Mages, but there were limits to what she could risk.

  “Then the ship is in your hands,” Rice told them. “We are cutting engines to zero and standing by for jump.”

  With the zero-gravity field in place, there was no way to feel that the engines had halted. The bright white flare of Red Falcon’s antimatter engines slowly faded off the camera views, however, and the ship ceased accelerating.

  She was still moving through space at a measurable percentage of lightspeed. That was something Maria had included in her calculations, but was also something that Wu would have to adjust for.

  Rather than explicitly watching over the younger woman’s shoulder, she’d mirrored the display from the simulacrum platform to her own wrist-comp, checking her subordinate’s calculations in real time.

  “Adjusted calculations for current velocity,” Wu said in a soft voice. “Stand by to jump.”

  She waited for long enough that Maria could have interjected if something had gone wrong in the calculations, and then closed her hands onto the simulacrum, linking her magic into the multi-megaton bulk of the starship.

  Then reality shifted and the stars on the screen were different. They were somewhere new.

  Acconcio looked around the simulacrum chamber in awe. In Maria’s opinion, it wasn’t much different to see the jump from here than anywhere else in the ship with a camera screen, but he seemed taken by the experience.

  Xi Wu, on the other hand, looked like she’d been punched in the stomach. That was a relatively normal state of a Mage post-Jump, however, so Maria simply kept an eye on her.

  “Jump complete,” Wu reported over the intercom to the bridge. “We are at Tau Ceti-Cinnamon Jump Zone One.”

  “Navigation confirms,” Rice told her. “Well done, Mage Wu. Mage Soprano? Next jump?”

  “Two hours,” Maria confirmed, drifting over to the simulacrum platform and waving for Wu to go get some rest. “ETA in the Cinnamon system just over seventy-two hours.”

  “Prompt and efficient service,” the Captain said with a smile. “Thank you, Mage Soprano. Let me know if there are any concerns.”

  10

  However unusual and terrifying David’s last Ship’s Mage had turned out to be, Montgomery had still only been one man. A single Mage could move a ship only so fast.

  With four Mages aboard, the speed that Red Falcon was moving between systems seemed blisteringly fast to David. In just under three days, they’d traveled over thirty light-years, erupting into regular space about a light-year and a half away from Cinnamon.

  Not only could his new ship carry more cargo than most of her competitors, she could also deliver it faster. The economic potential of that was still dizzying to David, though it was also easily offset by the sheer cost of operating Falcon.

  Mages weren’t cheap. A four-hundred-strong crew wasn’t cheap. Antimatter, for all that most systems had a secured space station where Mage criminals created it, definitely wasn’t cheap. Red Falcon carried almost seven times as much cargo as Blue Jay had, which made it harder to find cargos but cost just over ten times as much to operate.

  The solution David was seeing was to move as quickly as possible. It took Falcon less time to get from system to system and less time to get in and out of a given system as well. If he could move three or four cargos in the same time it took a ship with a single Mage to move one, then even at a significantly reduced profit per cargo, he was going to come out ahead.

  Way ahead.

  The Mage-King’s gift was a dream come true. David could see why most shipping lines wouldn’t want a ship like Falcon—finding enough cargo to keep her full and moving was going to be a nightmare, and her initial cost would be insane if you had to actually pay for her—but he could make her work.

  “Stop gloating inside your head,” Campbell told him sharply, his XO leaning in over the side of his command chair. “I bet you anything the Mage-King thinks he got the better end of this deal.”

  “Likely,” David agreed, shaking the grin he hadn’t realized he was wearing off his face. “That’s the sign of a good deal.”

  He glanced around the bridge, busier than he was used to, and lowered his voice.

  “Plus, Stealey warned me that some of the fragments of Azure’s syndicate may still come after us,” he told her. “They’re seeing us as bait, which means they’re still planning on getting value from giving us Falcon.”

  “Figured something of the sort, especially after I got shot,” his XO replied. “Anyone else filled in on that?”

  “Kellers and Skavar have guessed, I’m pretty sure,” he told her. “I have the feeling Soprano knows more than any of us have told her. Acconcio is paranoid enough that I’m not too worried.”

  The tactical officer was currently at his station, walking two of his new staff through the scanners. Every member of the gunnery crew had at least some experience with civilian-grade weapons, but Red Falcon’s weapon systems were an entirely different animal—and so were the sensors.

  “What’s that?” one of the gunners asked.

  “That’s…” Acconcio began brightly and confidently, then trailed off. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “That’s strange.”

  “What have we got, Tactical?” David interrupted.

  “I’m calling it a ghost for now,” Falcon’s third officer told him. “Focusing the passives, unless you want us to go active?”

  “Let’s not paint the neighborhood with targeting beams just yet,” the Captain replied. “Tell me what you see.”

  Acconcio was already diving into his controls, the training session reduced to “watch the expert work” for at least a few minutes.

  “Contact is between forty and sixty-five light-seconds away,” he reeled off. “Blips of thermal signature, some reflected light. If it’s a ship, they’re being very careful to not fire engines where we can see them.”

  “Someone being sneaky?”

  “Or a random rock with some hydrocarbon outgassing,” the tactical officer replied. “But…yeah, someone with a heat-absorbing hull trying to be sneaky. Sixty-forty.”

  “At that that distance, they’re not a threat, right?” David asked.

  “They could hit us if they had top-tier antimatter missiles, but I don’t think they’re planning on it,” Acconcio said. “I think we’re being watched, but I don’t think they’re picking a fight today.”

  “Then why are they watching us?” David wondered.

  “At a guess?” the ex-Navy warrant officer said softly. “Because they’re planning on picking a fight another day and want to know just where we are.”

  David nodded.

  “I never thought I’d miss having to fly without a formal flight plan,” he said dryly. “Keep our eyes open, Acconcio. If they move in our direction, I want to know before they do.”

  “Eyes on, Captain. Eyes are on.”

  Maria relieved an exhausted Shachar Costa. The Tau Ceti native Jump Mage was probably the weakest link of her little collection of Mages, but he could still make a jump every eight hours. Maria herself could push to five, and she’d be comfortable pushing Xi Wu to the Navy’s standard six for emergencies.

  The small, gaunt youth couldn’t push past eight. It wasn’t a mark against the youth, just something his boss had to keep in mind.

  “Soprano, it’s Rice.” The Captain’s voice echoed through the intercom as she began to check into the ship’s systems. “One of our new gunnery students spotted a ghost and Acconcio can’t nail it down. It looks like we’ve got a stalker. Any suggestions?”<
br />
  She considered, pulling up the data on the contact on her screens.

  “Not much we can do at that distance,” she admitted. “This isn’t a real amplifier, so there isn’t much I can do with magic outside the ship anyway. If I wake up everybody, I could cloak us, but…”

  “But they already knew we were here,” Rice agreed. “Someone dropped them our flight plan and they’re checking to see if we’re following it.”

  He sighed.

  “We’re keeping an eye on them, but other than making me nervous, they’re not doing anything. We could get a missile to them, but I imagine they’d be able to jump away or shoot it down, and I’d like to keep the Navy birds close to our chest.”

  “I suggest we leave it be, sir,” Maria told him. This was exactly what Alois had wanted her on Rice’s ship for. “If they want to jump us, we’ve a few ugly surprises for them, but picking fights is only going to get us in trouble.”

  “My thoughts as well,” Rice admitted. “How long till jump?”

  Maria poked at her internal reserves and gave her Captain a bright smile.

  “Depends on how twitchy you’re feeling,” she told him. “I was trained to the Navy standard, after all. Want to show these guys our heels?”

  “Dealing with stalkers, I’d rather punch them out, but I don’t have the grounds for it,” the Captain said. “Take us away, Mage Soprano. Engines aren’t even online.”

  “Sound the alert and give me a minute to double-check my calculations,” she promised. “Then I’ll get us the hell out of his sights.”

  “Carry on, Ship’s Mage,” Rice replied. “And thank you.”

  David stayed on the bridge after the early jump, watching the scanners. He was somehow unsurprised when Iovis Acconcio did the same. He was relatively certain the tactical officer had been scheduled to be doing something else after his training session—potentially sleeping—but instead, the man had remained behind.