Starship's Mage: Episode 2

by Glynn Stewart

  “An Enforcer?” Damien asked, shocked. The Guild’s police Mages weren’t the war-trained Mages of the Royal Martian Marine Corps, but they still had a lot more combat training than he did. And any Mage who’d qualified to be an Enforcer was probably a stronger Mage than Damien too.

  “No one else in the crew can take him,” David replied grimly. “He’s between us and the ship, and if you can’t get him to step aside, all of this has been for nothing.”

  For worse than nothing, Damien realized. If they couldn’t escape, then every member of the Blue Jay’s crew was going to go down with him now.

  He was silent for the last few minutes it took them to approach the Blue Jay’s berthing dock, where they met Kellers. The black-skinned man looked uncharacteristically grim, while behind him Jenna was busy organizing and co-ordinating the growing mob of Jay crew members.

  “What do we do?” the engineer asked bluntly. “There’s a station-wide alert out to security – we were hoping the Enforcer would answer the call. Instead he sent the CSS officers and settled in here himself – he’s watching the only way in like a hawk.”

  “Do we have any gas grenades left?” David asked.

  “Won’t work,” Damien told him, cutting into the conversation. “You took the Mages at the cells by surprise – forewarned to expect trouble, that wouldn’t even work on me.” The young Mage considered the access to the dock. It was a single wide corridor leading to the hatch, big enough for small cargo and completely lacking in cover or gravity.

  “They’re only guarding the personnel lock,” Singh interjected. “I can steal a shuttle and take everyone over.”

  “That would work for twenty of us, but the rest would be arrested before we could come back for them,” Damien told the pilot, still distracted and thinking.

  “Gas grenades won’t work,” he repeated. “But do we have any flash-bangs left?”

  #

  There was no point in trying to sneak up on the Enforcer, so Damien simply came around the corner, slowly approaching the man while keeping his hands visible.

  “Damien Montgomery,” the Enforcer greeted him. The black-armored man was helmetless with short-cropped black hair that accented the face of an older officer, his face carved with the laugh lines and slight ruddiness of a man who lived happily and well.

  “Enforcer,” Damien greeted him, inclining his head slightly as he stopped, about two meters away from the man. The Enforcer had a stungun to hand, but made no move to aim it.

  “I somehow doubt you’ve returned to the scene of the crime to surrender,” the older Mage said quietly, “though it would make life easier and less painful for everyone – including you.”

  “No,” Damien admitted. “I don’t suppose I could talk you into stepping aside?”

  “Why in the stars would I do that?” the Enforcer asked, clearly surprised by the thought.

  “Either that ship is the deathtrap that the Guildmaster thinks it is, or it’s safe to jump,” the Ship’s Mage said bluntly. “Letting me and those who want to risk it aboard the ship doesn’t hurt anyone except us if we’re wrong. It might even save you time! And if the ship still works… has there really been a crime?”

  The Enforcer shook his head, finally starting to lift the stungun. “You’re crazy, you know that right?” he said conversationally. “If you jump that ship, you and everyone crazy enough to go with you dies. Some might call that evolution in action – I call it something I’m supposed to stop.”

  “What’s your name?” Damien asked, his eyes riveted on the stungun. He honestly wanted to know.

  “Mallory,” the Enforcer told him, the gun rising to point at Damien’s chest but still unfired. “James Mallory. Why?”

  “Because you’re a good man, James Mallory,” Damien told him quietly. “And I’m sorry for this.”

  He flipped the two flash-bangs that he’d been dragging along behind him up and over his head, closing his eyes and shielding his ears with magic as they went off next to his head – and barely two meters from the unprepared Enforcer.

  Mallory lurched backwards in shock, raising his hands to paw at his suddenly blind eyes. Damien dove forwards, augmenting his lunge with a little extra gravity, and grabbed the stungun from the Enforcer’s suddenly limp hands.

  The guard hadn’t even begun to recover from the grenades before the SmartDart slammed into his neck and disabled him in a spasm of electricity.

  #

  Hands of the Mage-King of Mars did not, as a rule, help jump their own ships. When Alaura had ‘borrowed’ the latest-model destroyer from the Royal Navy, they’d lent her the crew too – with a reasonable degree of grace even!

  Something about the situation in Corinthian, though, made her want to rush. Adding herself to the cycle took them from two Mages making four jumps a day to three Mages, which let the warship make six light years a day.

  She’d insisted that the last jump would be hers as well. There was a reason for that, which was glowingly clear to the handful of crew, includes both other Mages, standing in the simulacrum chamber of His Majesty’s Starship Tides of Justice. Where most Mages only had silver runes inlaid into their palms, allowing them to interface with rune matrices, Alaura had a series of runes wrapping around her left arm back to the elbow, carved into her flesh by the Mage-King himself.

  Those runes glowed with a brilliant white fire as she jumped the ship with a greater degree of accuracy, and far closer to the planet of Corinthian, than any of her crew could have managed. The Tides of Justice erupted into normal space less than half a million kilometers from Corinthian Prime.

  Traffic Control, understandably, panicked.

  “Unidentified vessel, identify yourself immediately!” a voice barked from the radio, and Alaura took personal control of the communications.

  “This is the Hand of the Mage-King Alaura Stealey,” she said flatly. “I am arriving by request of the Guildmaster to take over a Mage Law case.”

  Silence answered her, then a sigh of relief.

  “Thank the Gods you’re here,” the voice replied. “We’re having a situation – there’s been a riot and a prison breakout, no one has any idea what’s going on!”

  That was obvious.

  “Prison breakout? Who escaped?” Alaura demanded.

  “I don’t know!” the anonymous traffic controller replied.

  The Hand sighed.

  “Transmit the Dockmaster’s office’s co-ordinates to my ship,” she ordered. “Tell him to have the details of the breakout ready for me; I will be meeting with him in five minutes.”

  “You can’t possibly dock and get here in five minutes!” the bureaucrat replied.

  “Ma’am, look!” one of the sensor technicians in the simulacrum chamber exclaimed, pointing at a sudden flare of light on the screens surrounding them. The stereotypical four-keeled shape of a freighter had released itself from the station, flipped up ninety degrees to clear the station, and then brought its drives up at maximum emergency acceleration.

  “That’s a Venice class freighter,” the tech reported. “She’s making just over three gees – her crew is in one hell of a rush.”

  Alaura eyed the ship for a second, and then turned back to the video. “I am a Hand of the King,” she said bluntly. “Never tell me what I cannot do. Tell the Guildmaster to be ready.”

  Cutting the channel she glanced around the simulacrum chamber, the rune encrusted room at the heart of every ship, covered in screens and technology to allow the Mage to understand everything happening around her. On a Navy ship like the Tides of Justice, the simulacrum chamber doubled as the bridge – there was no point in doing anything else, as the ship’s main weapon was the amplifier that increased power of the Mage at its center a hundredfold.

  “Watch everything,” she ordered Harmon. “Locate every ship that’s moving, and every ship that’s not and keep me in the loop. Do not take any action without specific orders – this whole situation stinks.”

  “Understood,
Ma’am,” the Lieutenant confirmed. He didn’t even look at his people; both Alaura and he knew they’d already be on it.

  She nodded to him, and then funneled magic through the Rune of Power on her arm and stepped across half a million kilometers, to the Dockmaster’s office.

  #

  Damien hung onto the simulacrum at the heart of the Blue Jay with both hands. Even with the freighter’s jump matrix turned into an amplifier, there was little he could do against the crushing acceleration of her engines at full power.

  All around him, viewscreens showed the space around them, overlaid with icons from the ship’s sensors. Linked into the amplifier, he barely needed them, as the freighter’s sensors were his eyes and ears.

  He saw the destroyer erupt into normal space terrifyingly close to the station and couldn’t help himself from staring at it. The sharp lines of the white warship were clean, and terrifying. If things went wrong, that warship could easily shoot them down, no matter how hard they ran.

  The advantage to the punishing acceleration they were under was that only a Navy destroyer could catch them. If nothing intervened, they would reach a region of space flat enough for him to jump the ship in just over a day.

  #

  “How the hell did you get here?” the Dockmaster demanded rudely as Alaura overrode the security on his door and strode in. “This is a private…” his voice trailed off as she removed the golden chain from around her neck and dropped the tiny golden open-palmed hand symbol of her office on his desk.

  “The station is in a state of emergency,” she told him flatly. “I came here to judge a case, and I find a hornet’s nest. What happened?”

  “There was a bank robbery,” the Dockmaster replied, after swallowing hard. Hands were terrifying to anyone sane, and Alaura wasn’t exactly trying to set him at ease. “It turned into a riot, and while System Security was dealing with that, seven prisoners broke free from the Core Zero-gravity Cells.”

  “Only seven?” she asked. She would expect somewhere like Corinthian to have more prisoners in the station-side high security cells than that.

  “Just the Mage they had locked up in there and half a dozen mob hit men,” the Dockmaster confirmed. “No one’s been reported dead yet, but they’re only getting back into the Cells now.”

  “Have any ships left since then?” she demanded.

  “The Blue Jay launched without permission,” the Dockmaster replied, sounding affronted. “I was told she was locked down – why the hell didn’t they at least unfuel her?!”

  Alaura held the man’s gaze coldly. The Dockmaster of a station the size of Corinthian Prime had to know the answer to that question – she knew that un-fuelling a freighter of the Blue Jay’s size was an exercise of days, so he should. That answered one question, at least. Damien Montgomery was gone, and he’d taken his ship with him.

  “Any other ships?”

  “No,” the Dockmaster pulled up a list on his computer. “There’s a liner scheduled to launch in an hour, we’re trying to get permission to seal the docks.”

  “Why haven’t you?” she demanded, shocked.

  “The docks are the lifeblood of this system!” the Dockmaster insisted proudly, his back straight as he looked her in the eyes. He then deflated slightly. “So, only the Governor can order them sealed, and he’s tied up in meetings.”

  “Right,” Alaura said slowly. She tapped the golden hand on its chain on the man’s desk. “Seal the docks,” she told him. “My authority.”

  The Dockmaster stared at the golden icon on his desk, the symbol of authority of a woman authorized to do anything short of shoot him at a whim. Shooting him, Alaura reflected, would require her to actually hold a trial, however short, and record the evidence in favor.

  After a moment’s hesitation, however, the man quickly got to work, typing messages into his computer and talking on the com.

  Turning away from him now that he was working, Alaura’s earpiece buzzed.

  “Stealey,” she answered quickly. “What is it, Harmon?”

  “You wanted to know what was going on,” the Mage-Lieutenant told her. “Well, we just noticed something you may want to intervene in.”

  “Which is?” she asked. Normally she had more patience with Harmon – he was extremely competent, just a little fussy.

  “There are two Navy destroyers in the system other than the Tides,” he told her. “They both just vectored after the Blue Jay – a request coming from the Corinthian Guildmaster. Given that there’s an escaped Class One Fugitive aboard…”

  “They will shoot to kill,” Alaura finished for him, grimly. “Thank you, Harmon. I’ll deal with it. Prep the Tides’ Marine detachment for crowd control and search work,” she added. “It looks like we have some scum we’ll need to find on station.”

  Turning back to the Dockmaster, she smiled grimly at him.

  “Where would I find the Navy System Command Center?”

  #

  There were few things in the universe David hated more than full emergency acceleration. He was strapped into his Captain’s chair, with his crew around him, but he couldn’t focus on much more than the fact that he felt like he weighed over two hundred kilos.

  The computer was programmed for twenty-four hours of this, which was going to leave the entire crew very cranky –but alive and free. Alive was important – and free was even more so.

  “Hey boss,” Jenna announced, her voice showing almost none of the strain of the acceleration. “Got a com channel inbound for you – looks like its Carmichael.”

  “Put him on,” David told her; and a moment later the image of the red-haired information broker appeared on the screen of his captain’s chair.

  “Captain Rice,” Carmichael greeted him. “You look uncomfortable.”

  “Emergency acceleration is quite bracing,” David replied. “You should try it sometime.”

  “I like my home system,” the businessman replied. “I have no intention of pissing off enough people to need to run. I’m surprised you ran as fast as you did though,” he admitted. “Carney and I were planning on the three hours it was going to take to get the Governor to authorize the lockdown – and the fact that the liner in dock has a notoriously stubborn captain.”

  “You were right, though,” Carmichael continued. “The dock just went into lockdown, which means Carney’s men are stuck on station, instead of being snuck off until the heat dies down. I can’t help but suspect you knew something was coming.”

  “Everything I told you was true,” David replied.

  “Indeed, you are a man of your word,” the broker agreed. “Also, a man with more morals than most in our business, so I was surprised when you agreed to free six of the worst men in those cells – I doubt you didn’t look up their resumes.”

  “So tell me, Captain, what speeds up the lockdown by three hours and makes you unafraid of those released thugs?”

  David considered it for a moment, eyeing the plot of the system showing the destroyer he was quite certain had delivered the Hand to the station, and shrugged.

  “The Guildmaster was planning to burn Damien out,” he said simply, “and summoned the only Judge who could. The same kind of Judge who could order a lockdown without the Governor.”

  “You have a Hand on your station, Mr. Carmichael,” David continued, “and if you will not run, I would strongly suggest that you hide.”

  Carmichael’s face was frozen, and he was silent for a good minute.

  “You played us all,” he finally said, and his voice was admiring. “I appreciate the warning, Captain Rice, and I do believe I will follow your advice.” He paused. “I wouldn’t return to this system if I were you.”

  “I know,” Rice agreed.

  “That said, if you find yourself in Legatus, look up a man named Bryan Ricket,” the broker continued. “Tell him I sent you. He’ll find you work that stays under the radar.”

  “Thank you,” David answered. “I might just do that. Keep your head do
wn.”

  “And the same to you, Captain Rice.”

  The channel broke off, and David looked up at a choking sound from Jenna. Her face had gone pale, and she met his gaze wordlessly, throwing up a wider chart of the system.

  On it, glowing in a bright green that mocked the reality of the situation, was the pair of Martian Navy destroyers he’d noted when they arrived in the system. They would intercept the Blue Jay well short of jump range. Not that it mattered. With what they’d done, the Navy would settle for putting a missile into them.

  #

  Two uniformed Marines guarded the entrance to System Command. Armed with black battle rifles and clad in digitally camouflaged armor, they were a barrier to any random and most non-random intruders - a barrier that melted away instantly at the sight of the golden hand hung around Alaura’s neck.

  Inside, glowing wall-screens surrounded a massive holographic display that displayed the location of every ship, structure, and rock ever identified in the Corinthian system. Arrows showing vectors and paths criss-crossed the display, but three were glowing brightly as the system focused on the Blue Jay and the two destroyers chasing it down.

  “Understand me Mage-Captain,” a voice was saying into a communicator, “Damien Montgomery is a Class One Fugitive and the crew aboard the Blue Jay accomplices in his escape. We have no idea what that ship might be capable of – you are to destroy it from maximum range.”

  “Belay that,” Alaura interrupted, stepping up next to the Commodore, who was clearly taking his orders from the Guildmaster standing on the other side of him.

  “Break off the pursuit and return to the station,” she ordered.

  “Who the hell are you?” the Commodore demanded, turning to face her. “No one has the authority…”

  He trailed off as he saw the chain around her neck.

  “I have the authority,” she said bluntly, looking past the Commodore to the Guildmaster.