Authors: Glynn Stewart

Starship's Mage: Episode 3

Starship’s Mage

Episode
3

By Glynn Stewart

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This is a
work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons— living or dead— is entirely coincidental.

For a heavy cargo hauler, the shuttle was surprisingly maneuverable in deep space. Basically a metal box with a rocket pod attached to each side by a gimbal mount, it was controlled by a pair of joysticks, one on either side of the pilot’s seat.

Damien Montgomery,
Ship’s Mage of the interstellar freighter
Blue Jay
, gently pushed the left stick forward while pulling the right stick back, keeping both in the center of their side range. His thumb pulled the toggles on the side of each joystick down, reducing the amount of hydrogen being fed to the fusion rockets to slow the force of the spin to something he and the older man in the copilot’s seat could take.

“Not bad,” Narveer Singh told the youth, reaching back to scratch under the white turban
he wore even while dressed in a flight suit. “I guess you really did qualify on these birds.”

“I qualified on the
Hawk
type,” Damien admitted. “They’re a few decades older than these, but the controls are much the same.”

“What else can
you fly?” the
Blue Jay
’s senior pilot asked.

The slim young man paused, checking the screens to be sure that the shuttle was clear of
its mother freighter. Alone in deep space, they were light years from anything
else
that could pose an obstacle.

“
I qualified on light shuttles, heavy cargo shuttles, heavy personnel shuttles and sub-light spacecraft up to fifteen megatons,” he reeled off quickly. “I’m also qualified for light aircraft, but anything beyond that wasn’t necessary.”

Narveer blinked.

“You, you are a pilot!” he exclaimed. “My three boys aren’t qualified for all of the shuttles, and even I couldn’t fly the
Jay
herself.”

“
I qualified on a
Dealer
type,” Damien told him. “She was basically a
Venice
like the
Jay
without the jump matrix.”

The
First Pilot shook his head, checking the screens in front of him. “Why?”

“Every
Jump Mage trained in Sherwood had to,” Damien explained. “The theory was that, since you couldn’t make it home at all without the Jump Mage, they’d train us so that we could get the ship home on our own.”

Singh plugged a sequence of way points into the computer
as he shook his head in response. “Follow those through,” he instructed. “Gives us a bit of time away from the ship, but then we’ll have to head back. You’ll need to jump us again soon.”

Damien nodded
silently. He was the only Mage amongst the
Blue Jay
’s eighty crew members, which meant he was the only one able to cast the spell that would catapult the three million ton ship across the stars.

“Any idea where
we’re jumping?” he asked Narveer as he carefully curved the shuttle over their ship. The
Blue Jay
was built to be functional, not pretty, and looked as much as an egg-beater as anything else. Four massive curved ribs extended from her central keel, rotating to provide gravity for the crew to eat and sleep.

“The
Captain, he’ll have a plan,” Singh stated confidently. “He got you out, didn’t he?”

Two days earlier, the crew had pulled Damien from a
jail cell, saving him from being stripped of his magic. Now, the Protectorate was hunting them, which was why they were in deep space, waiting for the Captain to pick somewhere for them to hide.

David Rice, Captain of the interstellar freighter
Blue Jay
, watched his First Officer walk across the ship’s bridge towards him with far more attention to the pot of coffee she carried than the heavily built blond woman herself.

“
You, XO, are a life saver,” he told her as she poured him a cup.

Jenna glanced around the empty bridge.
“From your many and varied enemies on a ship in deep space in the middle of the night?”

Rice shrugged
his broad shoulders and grinned.

“At this point, ‘
many and varied’ is a good description of our enemies,” he reminded her. They’d made enemies of one of the Protectorate’s largest criminal syndicates years ago, and now the government of the Protectorate wanted them arrested – something to do with stealing a Mage prisoner out from under the nose of a Hand of the Mage-King of Mars.

“How are the
flying lessons going?” he asked her after a moment’s silence, nodding towards the main screen, which had one of the
Jay
’s many exterior cameras zoomed in on the shuttle Damien was flying. “I thought you were in Flight Control?”

“After about five minutes,
I looked up Damien’s flight qualifications and realized I was redundant,” Jenna told him dryly. “Why didn’t you mention that to Singh?”

“
I honestly assumed that Singh knew Jump Mage flight qualifications from the Navy,” David admitted. “Once I realized he didn’t,” the Captain shrugged. “I figured letting him run with it might loosen some of the tension around here.”

“
Telling the crew where we’re going might do that too,” Jenna told him. The Captain shrugged, and with a flick of his fingers across the screen on his chair, threw the contents onto the main screen to replace the view of Damien’s shuttle.

A three dimensional
model of the star systems that made up the Protectorate of the Mage-King of Mars filled the screen. One hundred and eleven stars were lit up in several colors, forming a rough sphere centered on the single gold star of Sol. Scattered through the colored stars were almost four times as many gray stars, indicating systems no one had colonized.

Twelve
stars were silver, showing the oldest, most industrialized and most populated systems known as the Core.

Thirty-three were green,
systems with solid industry, fleet presences and economies – the MidWorlds.

Fifty, scattered around the
edge of the sphere, were blue. These were the latest wave of colonies, systems still struggling to find their feet and desperate for any shipping they could get – the Fringe.

Lastly
, a wedge of fifteen red stars, starting at one of the silver stars which had a red band around it, cut out towards the edge of the sphere from the center. These were worlds where magic was outlawed outside the ships that delivered cargos and news – the UnArcana Worlds.

“The
Core all have RTAs except Legatus,” David said calmly, a flick of his hand causing all of the silver stars except the one banded in red to turn dull. A Runic Transceiver Array was an immense construct of runes and magic that allowed a Mage to communicate verbally with a Mage in another RTA, no matter how far away. “Corinthian
didn’t
, but as soon as they get a ship to Sherwood, every system with an RTA is going to have us on a watch list,” he concluded. “That takes these systems out.”

Over half of the green lights and a single
blue light turned dull.

“Anywhere that will have
been reached by ship from Corinthian before we get there will also be looking for us,” David continued, overlaying a new layer which turned most of the remaining MidWorlds dull in a sphere around Corinthian.

“So
we go to the Fringe,” Jenna answered, gesturing at the massive swathes of blue stars. “This ship has the fuel bunkers and food storage for the long Fringe runs – she was built for it. We both have contacts out there – so does James, I think.”

The
Captain nodded. “He does, though he’s been busy making sure there’s nothing in our data download that incriminates us.” James Kellers was the ship’s engineer, and he’d been face-down in the normally sealed portion of the ship’s computer that carried downloads of all news and financial transaction data between systems since they’d left Corinthian.

“
He can
do
that?” Jenna asked, shocked.

“Can’t get into the bank data, but
he can open up the news and law enforcement downloads and modify them – undetectably, he insists.”

The
First Officer whistled. The RTAs only allowed verbal communication. The ‘mailbox’ present on every starship carried the large-scale electronic data transfers required to keep a modern economy and integrated society functioning. Supposedly, only the Royal Post offices in each system could upload and download from them, which meant that, for example, the
Blue Jay
’s mailbox carried the most up-to-date listing of her crew’s own finances – data that local banks would use to authorize withdrawals and spending.

“Contacts or not, though,
we can’t go straight to the Fringe,” David finally concluded, touching a control that made the blue stars flash gently. “Fringe shipping is speculative – we’d have to pick up a cargo we know they’ll buy and take it in, with no contracts or guarantees. That means we need the capital to
buy
said cargo, and we don’t have it.”

Jenna looked at
him sharply, and David shrugged. “I can cover operating expenses for two years, but even if I put
all
of that in, it wouldn’t cover a tenth of a full cargo for this ship. Three million tons of
anything
is expensive.”

“So what?”
she asked.

The red-banded
silver world, on the edge of the Core, flashed on the screen.

“L
egatus,” David answered. “The first UnArcana world. No Mages, so no transceiver array. Shipping is rarer than in the rest of the Core, and the Navy leaves system security to the Legatus Self Defense Force. We get a contract there; build up our cash reserves as we head outwards. Use the cash to pick up a cargo of survey satellites and combine harvesters in the MidWorlds somewhere, then do the long sweep of the Fringe.”

“Once
we’ve done an eighteen month sweep of the Fringe, we won’t be on the top of everyone’s list,” he concluded. “We’ll be able to pop back into the MidWorlds for a new cargo, so long as we don’t draw attention to ourselves.”

“What makes
you think we’ll find work in Legatus?” Jenna demanded. “I thought most of the shipping through there was locked up by big lines willing to play their games.”

“Carmichael gave
me a name,” David admitted.

“
We
played
Carmichael and left him to face the music when a Hand arrived,” Jenna pointed out. Carmichael hadn’t got anything he’d been supposed to out of the deal he’d brokered between David and a mob boss.

“The name was in trade for warning
him about the Hand in time,” David replied. “I think the man will help us.”

His
First Officer crossed her arms and looked at him crossly.

“If
you’ve already made up your mind, why are we still chatting instead of letting the crew know?” she asked.

“Because until
I said this all aloud, I hadn’t made up my mind,” David told her. “I can still change it if you have a better idea?”

Jenna shook
her head slowly.

“Fine boss,”
she conceded. “The belly of the beast it is!”