Starship's Mage: Episode 2

by Glynn Stewart

  “Those turrets are getting expensive to replace,” Jenna observed. “That’s two sets in as many trips!”

  “I’d rather replace them than not have them,” Rice told them all grimly. “So we’ll be done the major repairs tomorrow then?” he asked, sounding surprised to Damien’s ears.

  “We’ll have dozens of tiny repairs throughout the interior of the ship,” Kellers admitted, “but the major work will be done. I’d like a couple of days to test everything too, but technically we could jump out tomorrow evening.”

  “Let’s not,” Damien said dryly. “I’d like a couple of days myself to review the entire rune matrix. With all of the repairs, there may still be issues I’d missed.”

  “I don’t expect to be leaving tomorrow,” Rice assured them both. “I do want to be able to tell Bistro how quickly we can depart if he does have a cargo for us.”

  The conversation was interrupted by their arrival at the Spindle. Damien felt a bit better about his own original awe at the sight of the interior of the cylinder when he saw Singh and Kellers both stop and stare in shock.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” Jenna told them with a chuckle. “The Captain and I came through here back before we commissioned the Blue Jay. It’s a bit of a shock to see for the first time.”

  They could only spare a few moments to look at the impressive view down the rotating cylinder with its parks and towns, though, as the cab Bistro had sent was already waiting for them. Rice gestured them forward, and the freighter officers piled in.

  The conversation in the human-driven taxi, Damien noted, was far sparser than it had been on the entirely automated transit pod. Like the others, he kept in mind that there were ears listening, and they talked little in the five minute trip before the cab delivered them to a sprawling mansion, tucked away off a side road from one of the main LengthWays and concealed by a forest that looked to have been planted when the Spindle was built.

  A uniformed butler met them as they exited the car, gently directing them into the house. Damien almost took him at face value, until Singh bumped him, directing his gaze with a jab of the chin. As the butler opened the door for them, his suit jacket opened enough to reveal a shoulder holster. Secure Bistro might be here on Spindle, but he clearly took no chances.

  #

  Bistro was waiting for them in the front hall of the mansion accompanied by another man that David didn’t recognize. The stranger was younger than Bistro, tall and slim with dark red hair and piercing green eyes. Dressed in a demure dark gray suit, he fit into the elegant furnishings of the mansion like he belonged.

  “Captain Rice, welcome to my home away from home,” Bistro greeted him, offering his hand for a firm handshake. “I’d like to introduce you to Mr. Carmichael, a business associate of mine. I am only going to be on Prime for tonight, so I decided to combine two dinners into one. This isn’t an issue, I hope?”

  Rice shook his head – he was hardly going to object to whoever the billionaire magnate chose to include in the evenings events.

  “Mr. Carmichael,” he greeted the stranger with a nod and turned to present his crew: “My first officer, Jenna Campbell,” he introduced Jenna. “Then this is my Chief Engineer, James Kellers, my First Pilot Narveer Singh, and my Ship’s Mage, Damien Montgomery.”

  “I have heard of some of your crew before,” Carmichael murmured, shaking hands with each officer in turn. “But Mr. Montgomery is new to me. I believe you had a McLaughlin aboard before?”

  “Yes,” Rice said shortly. “He is sadly no longer with us.”

  “Of course, my apologies,” the stranger murmured. “It is a pleasure to meet you all.”

  Bistro shook each officer’s hand in turn as well and gestured everyone towards a door off of the wood-paneled hall.

  “The dining room is through here,” he announced. “I believe the cook should have dinner just about ready, if everyone can take a seat.”

  David waved his crew ahead of him, and eventually ended up seated at the right hand of the head of the table, directly across from Carmichael and next to Bistro. Jenna sat to his right, with Damien opposite her next to Carmichael, the youth looking somewhat out of sorts, though David suspected he had more experience with high society dining than the other three officers put together.

  As the food arrived, Bistro slid a small black chip across the table to David, which the Captain took and pocketed with a nod.

  “Payment for a successful delivery, Captain Rice – and I hope, only the beginning of our commercial relationship,” Bistro told him quietly. “I have managed to confirm some details around that commission we spoke of, but nothing is set in stone yet. You still have some repairs to complete, you said?”

  “It will be at least two or three days before we’re even ready to begin loading cargo, let alone planning on shipping out,” David agreed. “If you’re thinking you may have a cargo for me, my ears will be open for a few days more.” More than that could put his ability to find a cargo in Corinthian at risk, something he was unwilling to do.

  “What is the cargo we’re speaking of?” he asked. “I’ve learned in the past that not asking too many questions can get me in more trouble than I’m prepared to accept.”

  From the way Carmichael nearly choked on the extremely good clam chowder the cook had served, the other man knew something of the events David was referring to. That was… unexpected.

  “It will be a load of machine parts and antimatter,” Bistro said calmly. “The only -- complications -- are that it’s shipping to Legatus, one of the UnArcana worlds, so there is always more paperwork.”

  David nodded. Of the just over a hundred known colonies, fourteen had officially banned the practice of Magic on their planetary surfaces, a decision that put them in sharp dispute with the over-arching government of the Mage-King of Mars. They sent their representatives to the Council at Mars like every other world, and jump ships still carried Mages to the worlds and Mage-commanded Martian warships guarded their worlds… but no Mage was allowed to set foot on the surface except on the King’s business. Collectively, those fourteen systems were known as the UnArcana worlds, where Mages feared to tread.

  “That makes sense,” he agreed. “As I said, it will be a few days before we can begin to load cargo, so I can wait and see if your commission comes through.”

  “It will,” Carmichael observed quietly, laying his spoon down on his empty bowl and leaning back. “The right requests have all been filed; it’s just making its way to the desk of the man who signs off on these things. Antimatter shipments are especially sensitive, as it’s so damned hard to make the stuff without magic.”

  David nodded silently as the soup plate was removed, and a plate of chicken and vegetables was placed in front of him. From the looks of it, the chicken breast had come from an actual bird, rather than a vat as most ‘meat’ aboard a space station or starship did. Neither Bistro nor Carmichael, however, acted as if this was unusual.

  “What was it you do, Mr. Carmichael?” he asked politely, wondering how this man could speak so authoritatively.

  “Ah,” the man sighed appreciatively as he swallowed a mouthful of chicken. “This is good, Bistro,” he said to the Magnate at the head of the table, then turned back to David. “I am an information broker,” he explained. “I deal in being aware of events across as many systems as possible, and providing that knowledge to men like Bistro here for a fee.” He glanced down the table, at the mostly silent faces of David’s crew, wisely focused on the food.

  “In fact, Captain, you may be able to assist me,” he continued. Laying down his fork and carefully cleaning his fingers, he removed an archaic paper card from the breast pocket of his suit. “I like to get the first-hand impressions of ship’s captains of the systems they’ve visited – the kind of details that don’t make it into the news download. There would be some compensation if you could make time for me.”

  David shrugged and took the card.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he
said noncommittally. His time for the next few days would be tied up quite tightly. On the other hand, having an information broker owing you a favor was never a bad thing.

  “Enough dreary talk of business,” Bistro interjected, somewhat boomingly and then directing his attention down the table. “Young Montgomery! I take it Corinthian is the first world you’ve visited since you left home, correct? What do you think of the Spindle?”

  #

  The dinner ran late in the night, with large quantities of very good wine. Damien awoke in his hotel room the next morning late and bleary eyed. Unfortunately for him, healing with magic required even more years of training than he already had, so he settled for a solution older than spaceflight: aspirin and a giant glass of water.

  That, combined with a shower, left him feeling almost human as he maneuvered his way through the docking cylinder of Corinthian Prime to the Blue Jay. If Kellers’s comments on their way to the dinner last night were correct, the conduit work should be done and ready for him to check around it for rune damage.

  The Blue Jay’s corridors were busier than they’d been in days. Between the access port and the main engineering spaces he ran into two teams of four of the freighter’s crew, both with panels open as they checked portions of the ship’s electrical grid for burnouts caused by the ship’s damage.

  Busiest of all, though, was the engineering space itself. The massive chamber that contained the reactors, engines and life support of the freighter was a single open space, allowing a small crew to operate on them all in anything from zero-gravity to two gravities of emergency acceleration.

  The main fusion reactor quietly hummed away in the center of the space, ringed by a catwalk aligned with the ship’s main engines. Up, down and sideways were all arbitrary when the ship wasn’t under acceleration, and all parts of the wall and much of the empty space was taken up with hardware and the catwalks for operation under acceleration.

  The arbitrary up—down axis of the engineering space was generally agreed to be that ‘up’ was towards where the RFLAM turret was mounted, and ‘down’ was towards the massive primary heat exchanger directly opposite. Currently, Kellers and a dozen crew members were pulling spools of fiber optic cable down through a hole in the ‘upper’ wall – the connectors for the new turret being installed.

  Damien was more concerned about the power conduits for Engine Two and Engine Three. They ran on either side of the heat exchanger, which meant they actually passed over some of sub-matrixes connecting the jump matrix to the aft hull of the ship. It also meant they were close to the sub-matrix that had been carved into the heat exchanger itself – the matrix that, in an unmodified jumpship, converted any non-jump spell into heat energy and dumped it into space. There was some risk that the engineers would have damaged the runes, so they needed to be checked over by a trained Mage.

  Spotting his approach, one of the crew pushed off from the cables and drifted to land close to Damien.

  “Mage Montgomery, good morning!” she greeted him cheerfully.

  “Good morning Kelly,” Damien greeted her. Kelly LaMonte was the most junior of the Blue Jay’s three actual engineers. “Did we get the conduit repairs finished up?” he asked her politely, gesturing at the conduit for Engine Three, just behind where the engineer had landed.

  “Got them finished up last night,” she confirmed. “You don’t need to worry about them though – since you weren’t around they had their own Mage check the runes.”

  Damien froze in place, locking his gaze on the junior engineer, who was maybe a year older than him.

  “She was working on the colony ship in the next bay over,” Kelly said in a rapid-fire blurt of words. “They wanted to be able to sign off completely for the insurance last night, and you were at the dinner with the rest of the officers.”

  Wordlessly, Damien maneuvered around her, dropping himself to ‘stand’ where the other Mage would have had to be to check the runes under the conduit. The scar on the heat exchanger where Kellers had cut through the rune matrix with a blowtorch was clearly visible, and served to draw attention to the smooth area around it where Damien and the Chief Engineer had burned away the matrix. Any Mage sufficiently trained to be able to check the rune matrix under the conduit would have known something was wrong as soon as the scar drew their eye.

  “It’s okay, Kelly,” he said quietly, realizing he had been silent for a long time and the redheaded engineer was wilting further by the second. “We were just hoping to get all of the review done by me.”

  “She wasn’t going to charge us,” she explained hopefully. “We… you and the Chief had been working like dogs; we wanted to ease your mind a bit.”

  Damien smiled tightly. The only way his mind would ease now would be when they left the system.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” a voice bellowed, training projecting it to fill the entire vastness of the engineering chamber. Damien and Kelley both turned to see what Kellers was shouting about, and Damien’s heart collapsed out of his chest at what he saw.

  Two black-robed and black-armored figures stood in the entrance with magnetic boots locking their feet to the hull of the ship - and providing enough stability for the two Mage Enforcers to fire the ugly black battle rifles each carried.

  “What the hell are you doing on my ship?” Kellers continued, the Chief Engineer managing to cross engineering to land in front of the Enforcers in a handful of breaths.

  “We have a warrant,” a voice said coldly, and a third figure stepped out between the two Enforcers. The third Mage also wore magnetic boots that matched his plain gray suit. From halfway across Engineering Damien couldn’t make out the symbols on the man’s medallion, but he could guess.

  “We are here to inspect this ship’s Rune Matrix, on the authority of Guildmaster Varren,” the suited Mage, almost certainly a senior Rune Scribe, continued. “You will stand aside.”

  Damien was frozen. He just stood there as the three Mages crossed engineering to him. One of the Enforcer’s subtly tracked Kellers with his eyes and rifle, but the other locked his gaze on Damien and held the Mage’s attention as they approached.

  The scribe ignored Damien and Kelly, stepping around the two Blue Jay crew members and over the conduit, his gaze on the scar and the space around it where the rune matrix should be. It felt like the entire room was holding their breath as the man stepped up to the exchanger and ran his fingers over the warm metal, down to where the rune matrix began.

  “So it’s true,” he said simply, and turned back to the Damien, who realized the Enforcers were now on either side of him.

  “Mage Damien Montgomery,” the older Mage said quietly, “you are under arrest for a Class A Violation of Mage Law.”

  Still frozen in shock, Damien did nothing as the Enforcers slapped heavy, rune-inlaid, manacles on his wrists.

  #

  David Rice had lived aboard ships and space stations for his entire adult life and after twenty years as a spacer, he could count the days he’d spent planet-side on his fingers. Along the way, he’d mastered the complex, somewhat contortionist, art of typing in zero-gravity. He worked through the documents on his screen, signing off on each of the reports on the repairs completed the previous day for the insurance company, with the occasional wince at his part of the price tag.

  He was just beginning to go through the documentation around paying off the remaining principal of the note financing the Blue Jay when the door to his office was thrown open.

  “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded as two men marched through the door on magnetic boots. Both were dressed in the dark blue on black uniform of Corinthian Security, and carried ugly-looking black carbines.

  “Sir,” the older of the two security men greeted him politely. “Please come with us – this ship is being evacuated.”

  “This is my ship,” David snapped back. “No one is evacuating me!” Even docked, the main authority aboard a starship was its captain.

  “I’m sorr
y, sir,” the officer told him. “The Ship Wright’s Guild has declared the vessel unsafe for use, we’ve been ordered to remove everyone from the vessel for their own safety.”

  “What do you mean, unsafe?” David demanded. “I am not leaving my ship.”

  “We don’t have any details, sir,” the security man told him. “I am sorry, but you will have to come with us.” The man’s carbine, David noted, carried an under-barrel stungun, which was now, ever-so-subtly, pointing at David.

  “I demand to speak to someone who can explain this,” he ordered.

  “I can do that, sir,” the officer agreed quickly, “but you’ll have to come with us.”

  His options appeared to be to either go with the officers, or get shocked into compliance. David sealed his computer, transferring the data to a chip to take with him, and floated away from his desk.

  “Take me to whoever is in charge of this,” he ordered.

  The senior officer nodded calmly, leading the way out of the office. The magnetic boots the two security men wore clanged softly against the freighter’s metal floors as they made their way down the corridors to the tube connecting to the station.

  The halls and corridors of David’s ship were empty. He had expected to run into at last one of the parties he knew were working on the electrical grid, but all he saw was an open set of paneling where one of the teams had been working.

  When they exited the ship, he found the docking tube already under guard. Four security officers, each equipped with the same black carbine/stungun combination as David’s escorts, manned a barricade blocking entrance or exit from his ship.

  He finally began to understand what the hell was going on when he saw the man in charge of the operation. Standing amidst the security guards, keeping David’s crew back with nothing more than his black-armored robe and a flat glare was the readily identifiable figure of a Guild Enforcer.

  “Sir, we found Captain Rice,” the officer who’d been doing all of the talking told the Enforcer. “He insisted on speaking with you.”