Starship's Mage: Episode 3 (10 page)

Chrysanthemum orbit was quiet. After everything they’d seen on the surface, Damien was expecting
some
kind of resistance as they shot towards the
Blue Jay
, decelerating to make rendezvous now.

“Can
you see anything?” David asked.

“The tanker is still attached,” Damien replied.
“There’s nothing else moving that I can pick up, but the shuttle isn’t big enough for decent heat sensors, and the radar is stupidly short-ranged.”

“
We’ll see if we can fix that,” the Captain replied. He touched a command on the screen again, and then twitched in surprise as it actually turned green. “We have a connection,” he told Damien, before leaning forward.

“
Blue Jay
, come in, this is Captain Rice,” he said over the channel. “Singh, please come in. Someone tell me what’s going on over there.”

“Oh thank gods,” a female voice –
Kelly’s
voice, Damien realized in relief – answered. “Captain, it’s good to hear from you.”

“What the hell happened?
Where’s Singh?” Rice demanded.

“
They tried to board us through the shuttle bay,” LaMonte told them, her voice weary. “Singh took that suit and half a dozen of the crew with carbines to stop them – he said they were mercs of some kind, not local troops.”

“The locals
certainly had a hand,” the Captain told her grimly. “Where’s Singh?”

“
I don’t know,” the young engineer replied. “I’m in touch with engineering via the hardline, but the jamming cut off all contact with him and his team – the last I heard they were fighting in the shuttle bay, but twenty minutes ago a bunch of shuttles fucked off from the tanker. Looks like they were meeting up with someone – scanners show a jump-yacht running for the jump zone at crazy speed.”

“The jammer must be on one of the shuttles,” Jenna murmured.
“They took it with them when they ran. Why would they run?”

“
We would have been visible to decent sensors twenty minutes ago,” Damien told her.

“Kelly, can
you send us the sensor telemetry?” Rice asked. “We’re coming in through the shuttle bay, we’ll check up on Singh on our way in.”

“Okay,”
she replied. After a moment’s pause, she asked softly, “Is Damien okay?”

“
He’s the only reason any of us are,” the Captain said bluntly. “Get us that telemetry – we need to get the hell out of this star system before those gunships launch.”

Damien blanched as the
Blue Jay
’s sensor data started to come up on his screen. He hadn’t even thought of the four gunships they’d delivered. If he managed to rest and make it to the
Jay
’s simulacrum, he could take them, but if he tried in his current state, he likely wouldn’t survive to jump them out.

“
They know what you did to the ship,” David said quietly. Damien glanced over to the screen the Captain was working on. He’d pulled together a projection of the shuttles’ and the jump-yacht’s courses. “The Navy – and most people – treat two million klicks as the maximum range of an amplifier – and their course will pull them out of that range before we can get aboard. They wanted to make sure they were clear before you could take them out.”

“How would
they know that?” Damien asked.

“
I don’t know,” David admitted. “But if one set of mercenaries does, others do. That makes us a target.”

“
I don’t know about you guys, but I think we were
already
a target,” Jenna interrupted. “Let’s see if we can get out of this trap before we start worrying about the next one, okay?”

Damien nodded in agreement,
his attention suddenly consumed by the final maneuvers as the
Blue Jay
rapidly expanded in the screen ahead of them.

The
Blue Jay’
s shuttle bay was a mess. The bay the shuttle normally belonged in was filled with the burning wreckage of the end of the boarding tube, while the main length of the tube was occupying a third of the door.

Bodies, weapons, and debris floated in the zero-gravity, all coated and obscured by a faint
pink haze of loose blood. Damien swallowed down a moment of nausea as he oriented the shuttle on a spare rack and slowly locked the ship into place.

“
We’re down,” he told the Captain. “There’s almost no atmosphere outside – the main door won’t be able to close until we remove that tube.”

“
I saw,” Rice replied grimly. “There are breathers and coveralls in the shuttle. We need to get into the ship.”

“
I didn’t see Singh,” Damien said quietly. “Just his handiwork.”

David nodded
grimly and set off for the back of the shuttle. Carefully, wary of his still-fragile balance, Damien followed. Kellers had already pulled out five sets of coveralls and, wearing one himself, begun the careful process of sliding Kelzin’s unconscious body into one.

The emergency
coveralls were designed to be quick to put on, and had decent enough gloves that Damien was able to take one of the carbines and be confident he could use it. The suits weren’t designed for long term duration – they lacked plumbing connections, if nothing else – but would do to cross the bay and deal with any mercenaries left behind.

“Watch out for hostiles,”
Rice told the others. “Just because we know some of them fled doesn’t mean they didn’t leave anyone behind.”

Damien nodded,
carefully controlling his movements in the shuttle’s zero-gravity. The magic he’d normally use to provide his own personal gravity field would be too much for him in his current state, so he’d have to move through the microgravity like everyone else.

Kellers
slammed the button to open the ramp, and then scooped up Kelzin carefully. Jenna and Rice kicked off first, launching themselves into the blood-soaked bay, carbines moving in gentle patterns to track potential targets without throwing themselves off-course.

Damien followed, relying on
them to have kept the room clear as he lacked the training to track targets without sending himself spinning. He landed gently next to the emergency airlock leading forwards into the ship.

Six
men in ship’s clothes with the Hyper-Kevlar vests he and Singh had picked up were collapsed around it. The body armor was pocked with marks where they’d stopped dozens of rounds, but in the end they’d been too little. From the almost twenty bodies floating in the shuttle bay, they’d given a good account of themselves with the carbines in their hands, but the professional boarders had taken them down.

Rice
joined him, and tapped a quick code into the airlock door. It slid open, admitting them all and allowing Kellers to bring Kelzin over.

“Ready?”
Rice asked after a moment after they were all inside. Damien joined the others in bracing himself against the wall and outer door, ready to fire into the ship, and then nodded.

The
airlock filled with breathable air, and then the inner door opened into the antechamber of hell.

As many men as
had died in the shuttle bay had died in the corridor at the core of the
Jay
, and there was less space for the bodies to separate. To make it worse, these had been shot down with explosive rounds and micro-grenades. The air was filled with blood and parts of bodies. Damien choked back more nausea, and was glad he’d left his coveralls on.

“Forward,”
Rice ordered, suiting actions to words and pushing through the mess.

Cringing
against the
wet
pressure against his suit, Damien followed behind – so he was the one close enough to watch the Captain drop his rifle, grab a wall and launch forward like a rocket.

A moment later, Damien saw what
Rice had seen and followed his Captain. He landed by the shattered combat exosuit only moments after Rice, who’d already lost his breather helmet and was floating in air next to Singh’s head.

“Narveer!”
Rice snapped, reaching out to check for a pulse. Damien was about to say it was a waste, no one with
that
many holes in him was still alive, when Singh’s eyes popped open.

“Sorry
Captain,” he groaned. “I tried.”

“Tried, hell,”
Rice told him fiercely. “You drove them off Narveer – they left running. You saved the whole damn ship.”

“Ah,” Singh exhaled a sigh,
blood bubbling from his lips as he did. Damien watched in horror as the pilot struggled to breathe. Armor-piercing rounds had gone clean through the suit, and his left leg had been blown off by a grenade. None of the wounds were bleeding much – the suit had to be doing something to stop it – but he had
so many
.

“
You are
not
permitted to die,” the Captain ordered, his voice choked. “This was
my
mistake.”

“Never,” Singh coughed, more
blood interrupting his words, “give an order you know can’t be obeyed.”

An
armored hand reached up and grabbed at Damien. Wordlessly, Damien reached out and grabbed the older pilot’s hand in his own. Rice grabbed Singh’s other hand and the old Sikh warrior looked from one of them to the other.

“Stay strong boy,”
he ordered Damien. “Both of you,” he glanced at Rice, and then back down the hall at the mess he’d created holding the corridor.

“Not a bad way to go,
I gue…” he trailed off, and was gone.

Damien
gently, carefully, folded Singh’s hand back onto his chest. He looked over at Rice, the Captain was frozen, covered in other men’s blood, and holding the armored gauntlet of his friend.

“
Captain, you’ve got to get to the bridge,” he said quietly. “I need to get to the simulacrum. If we can’t save the ship, Singh died for nothing.”

Rice met
his gaze, swallowing hard and slowly releasing Singh’s hand. He looked back at Jenna and Kellers.

“Get
him and Kelzin and the others to the infirmary,” he ordered. “I need to go make sure our former passengers don’t blow us to hell.”

Kelly looked up in obvious relief as David entered the bridge, snagging his chair as he drifted by and strapping himself in.

“Thank gods
you’re here, sir,” she told him. “I have no idea what to do!”

“
You’re doing okay so far,” David replied, spotting that the
Jay
’s two anti-missile turrets had been spun up, ready to intercept any missiles launched from the running shuttles or the ship they’d run to. “Any word from the Rock?”

“Not a peep,” Kelly answered.
“It’s like they haven’t even noticed what’s going on.”

“With the jamming,
it’s possible. But it’s not likely,” David said grimly. “How are the engines?”

“Everything’s green – the boarders seemed to be heading for the bridge and the
simulacrum chamber,” she explained.

“Makes sense,” David
realized aloud. “They thought Damien was on board – they were trying to eliminate him before he could return the favor. They’d brought enough men they could deal with him – and not enough to deal with Singh.”

“
You found Singh? He’s okay?” Kelly asked quickly, only to whiten as David shook his head silently.

“
You’re the best engineer on this ship bar Kellers himself,” the Captain said gently, trying to get her to focus. “Can we burn the engines with that tanker still attached?”

“
She’s latched onto our cargo points,” LaMonte answered. “We’re a bit unbalanced, but the computer can adapt for that automatically.”

Turning
away from the only crew-member currently on his bridge, David hit a series of commands on the screen mounted on his chair, opening a ship wide channel.

“All
hands, hear this, hear this,” he said into. “Cruise acceleration in thirty seconds. Secure for acceleration. I repeat, cruise acceleration in twenty-four seconds.”

He
ran the toggle bar up on his screen, and hit a command that activated ‘automatic mass balancing.’ It had been a while since he’d flown the freighter himself, but it was a lot less complex than flying a shuttle. His full weight pressed him down into his chair, and he breathed slowly, beginning to relax.

The other
jump ship in the system was a shining beacon on his scanners as they continued to scream out-system at an ungodly acceleration. Every person aboard had to be strapped in and half-crushed, but the push had put them outside any range at which Damien could reach them with the amplifier, even if the Mage wasn’t half-dead
anyway
.

“Sir,
we’re receiving a transmission from the Rock,” Kelly, who was covering every task on the bridge that David wasn’t – thankfully! – announced.

David flipped a few controls and brought the video transmission up on
his screen. He was unsurprised to see the strangely-pupilled eyes of Major Niska, though the Augment looked oddly relaxed given that a battle had just taken place on the planet beneath him.

“
Captain Rice,” Niska greeted him cheerfully.

“Major Niska,”
Rice answered carefully, somewhat put off. “What can I do for you?”

“
I want to inform you that we’ve completed our inspections of the gunships, and we’ve found no issues related to their transport,” the Legatan officer said. “Your contract is fully fulfilled, and we have no complaints.”

David opened
his mouth, about to ask what was going on – they’d just escaped the local army and a space-borne boarding attack, and Niska was talking about the
delivery contract
? – but the Augment slightly, almost imperceptibly, shook his head.

“
We did run into some issues with the ships’ engines,” the Augment continued, “but my techs have them stripped down and assure me that it’s a manufacturing defect – they’ll have all four ships running in a few days.”

The
Blue Jay
’s Captain stared at his former passenger in shock for a moment. The gunships, which he’d been worried were going to chase his ship down, had their engines stripped down? The Augment had
disabled them
?

From the cheerful smile on Niska’s face,
he was
perfectly
aware of what he’d done, but was mugging for the inevitable Chrysanthemum interception of the communication.

“
I’ve just transmitted your funds now,” the LMID soldier continued. “I’ve included a small bonus for your patience with us and with the locals. I hope you’ve come out of this with a positive impression of the Directorate, at least.”

David ever so
slowly nodded to the camera.

“
I think I have,” he admitted. “And thank you, Major Niska. Thank you.”

He
didn’t say what he was thanking the cyborg for. From the bright grin the other man flashed him, he didn’t need to.

The bridge was silent for a moment as the channel cut out and
he met Kelly’s shocked gaze, and then Damien’s voice cut in as the Mage brought up the intercom screen from the simulacrum chamber.

“Did
he just do what I think he did?” the young man asked, his voice incredibly tired.

“
I think he did,” Rice confirmed, and glanced back at the screen. “You go get some rest Damien. We’re going to burn for the outer system as fast as we can – and as soon as you can, jump us out of here, I want to brush this planet’s dirt from my heels!”