Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) (7 page)

“I can see that,” Jenna agreed. “Is there anything you need to check in here?”

Damien took a glance around the workshop. All the equipment looked relatively standard. “Nothing that I can check quickly,” he told her. “I’ll need a few hours to get used to the gear and the setup before I do much of anything, but you said we have a few days?”

“We do,” she confirmed. “Enough of the crew is living aboard that we need to rotate the ribs during the night, so we can only load for one of Sherwood Prime’s twelve hour shifts each day. Even with all of their gear, it takes two full shifts to attach three hundred ten thousand ton containers to the keel.”

“That’ll give me time to review the gear, and go over the ship’s rune matrix,” Damien told her. He had never had a chance to inspect the rune matrix of a jump ship in detail before. He saw and identified power flows and purposes better than any other Mage he knew, but it still took time to examine as complex a spell as a jump matrix.

“Speaking of which,” Jenna gestured carefully towards the simulacrum chamber. “The rest of your Sanctum awaits you.”

Damien didn’t wait for her to catch up with him once he’d kicked off, and touched the panel next to the hatch. It slid gently open, and he slipped into the only space from which he would be able to jump the ship.

The same runes that coated the room on the outside were visible on the interior as well, continuing up onto the roof and the floor and coating the room on all sides. The inlaid silver runes stood out against the thousands of tiny optical diodes around them that projected the image of the outside of the ship. Right now, Damien saw the docking arms and the base of the hub of Sherwood Prime, but beneath him fell away the black of space, and if he looked carefully up and to the side, Sherwood itself was visible past the bulk of the space station.

In the exact center of the room, unsupported yet utterly incapable of moving from that position, was the simulacrum. Forged by magic from molten silver when the ship was built, it exactly mirrored every part of the ship’s exterior. The
Blue Jay
’s four ribs rotated around. Her forward radiation shield still showed the damage where the last repairs were being done. Damien drifted, unthinking, to the model – exactly one-thousandth the size of the ship itself, catching himself on the immobile engines. His hands on the simulacrum, he
felt
the ship, and with the screens around him, he saw what the
Blue Jay
saw.

“This place is always awe-inspiring to me,” Jenna said quietly from the edge of the room, and Damien glanced up from the impossibly perfect model of the ship to look at her. “I don’t understand
any
of how what you do works, but this room… this is the key to the stars.”

“That was the Compact,” Damien half-whispered, reveling in the power pulsing around him. “Peace between Mage and Mundane, between Mars and Earth… and in exchange, we gave you the stars.”

#

“How’s the firewood loading going?”

Captain David Rice turned around, carefully, in the bridge’s zero-gravity to face his executive officer.

“I think the company paying for a million tons of premium hardwood would be… displeased if it was used as firewood,” he observed drily. “Or were you referring to the forty-five containers of luxury furniture made from said hardwood?”

Jenna shrugged, grabbing a handhold and positioning herself to review the video screen Rice was watching. On it, the dozens of manipulator arms of a major docking station were carefully maneuvering the Protectorate’s standard ten meter by twenty meter by fifty meter; ten thousand ton rated mass; cargo containers onto the
Blue Jay
’s keel.

“Did you follow up on the secondaries?” he asked her.

“Yep,” she confirmed. “Corinthian is just major enough that people are shipping there, and just minor enough that no one has shipped out for two months.”

There were dozens of cargos to be shipped between the worlds under the protection of the Mage-King of Mars, but few of them would justify filling even a three megaton freighter like the
Blue Jay
. The usual policy was to book a standard container, fill it with your cargo, and list it as a secondary cargo on a station like Sherwood Prime. As soon as Rice had the contract to ship a hundred and forty-five containers to Corinthian, he’d had Jenna put in a notice to Prime of which world they were shipping for.

All secondary shipping contracts to Corinthian would now be loaded onto the Jay, along with a massive data upload to be transferred to the other system’s communications net. The data transfer fees alone were a hefty part of the freighter’s operating costs, but it was the primary cargo contracts that paid the bills.

“How’s our young Mage working out?”

“He seems dedicated and smart so far,” Jenna told him. “I showed him around Kenneth’s lab – he fixed the gravity in about two seconds flat. Last I saw, he was going over the runes in the simulacrum chamber with a magnifying glass.”

“He thinks they may have been damaged?” Rice asked, remembering Damien’s comment to that effect with a shiver.

“I don’t
think
so,” she replied. “From what he said, I think it’s the first chance he’s ever had to really examine a jump matrix, and he wants to make sure it all… ‘flows right’ was how he described it.”

“Good,” David let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d taken. “We’ll have all of the rest of the repairs finished by the time the primary cargo is loaded. We’ll hang out a day or so after that for any new secondaries, but then we need to get to Corinthian.”

“That wood isn’t exactly going to rot in our hull, skipper,” his executive officer pointed out.

“No,” David agreed, looking around the empty bridge carefully before continuing quietly. “But I don’t think our pirate friends are deaf and dumb either, and I’ve got an itchy feeling between my shoulder blades. The sooner we’re out of Sherwood, the happier I’ll be!”

#

The Martian Runic script defines a spell matrix in the same way that a programming language defines the 0s and 1s that allow a computer to function. With seventy-six characters and fourteen different ways of connecting them, the script is complex and difficult to read – and the
Blue Jay
’s jump matrix contained the equivalent of sixteen million lines of code.

Damien read Martian Runic fluently, but he couldn’t go over that many runes in detail with less than a month of solid reading. Unlike every other Mage he’d ever known, though, he didn’t need to. He saw the flow of energy along the patterns and read the purpose and flow of entire blocks and sub-matrices at a single glance.

On a small matrix, like the ‘warning spell’ in Captain Michaels’ office, he often read the entire structure of the spell, from its triggers to its actions, in a few seconds. Larger spells would take him some time, but it was minutes where another Mage would spend hours.

He’d never done it on a spell matrix as large as the
Blue Jay
’s jump matrix though, so when he hit the first utterly wrong sub-matrix he assumed he was misreading it.

The sub-matrix was at the core of the spell, one of the seventeen that linked into the simulacrum at the center of the ship. The other sixteen sub-matrices fed energy out from the simulacrum, but the seventeenth interfaced with the others and changed the energy flow somehow. On certain criteria, it redirected energy away from the main matrix.

Damien spent an hour reading the runes on the sub-matrix, and then took another long, hard look at the energy flows. Sub-matrix clusters came in primes and squares, so it was theoretically possible that the seventeenth sub-matrix was unnecessary, but it made no sense. Shaking his head, he made a note on the matrix diagram he’d inherited from the ship-mages before him. It was the only current notation on the file, all the previous notes were ‘sub-matrix in this location damaged by crate impact, repaired’ or similar minor fixes.

Still confused, he moved on, following the rune matrix forward towards the prow of the ship.

#

At the front of the ship, where the lengthy connecting sub-matrix expanded into the runes that covered the inside of the immense radiation shield, he found another ‘wrong’ sub-matrix. Four of the sub-matrices made sense, channeling the power of the jump spell out into space, but a fifth, again interfacing with the other four, siphoned off energy if criteria were met. The criteria didn’t make sense to Damien, the runes basically redefining the standard teleport spell that the matrix would amplify.

From the empty, echoing void beneath the radiation cap, Damien made his way into Rib One, following the chains of runes that linked together the major sub-matrices into the locked down decks. At the far extreme of the rib, the links broke apart to create seventeen sub-matrices, spread along the length of the outer rib, the extreme exterior of the ship. The central matrix, the one linking all seventeen together, was ‘wrong’ again. Like the runes in the simulacrum chamber and the radiation shield, it channeled away energy on criteria that read like a description of a jump spell.

By the time Damien had followed the rune matrices around to the central part of Rib Two, he wasn’t surprised to find almost the exact same rune matrix as he found in Rib One. He noted the slight differences on his matrix diagram. It almost looked like all three of the matrices were redirecting energy towards the same place if it met the same criteria.

In Rib Three and Rib Four, he didn’t even try to follow the linking matrices, heading directly to where he knew he would find the strange matrices. Each was basically an ‘if-then’ line of code, redirecting energy to a single point in the jump matrix if their criteria were met.

He floated in an empty maintenance space on Rib Four with his personal computer up, reviewing his notes on the sub-matrices. The six patterns had more to do with each other than with the hundreds of other sub-matrices and millions of other runes that made up the jump matrix, and they made no sense to him.

All six redirected energy away from the matrix, where the entire purpose of the runes was to multiply a spell that would transport Damien, personally, roughly ten thousand kilometers at best into a spell that would transport an entire ship a full light year.

The calculation he’d set to run finally finished, and the computer spat out an answer – all six runes were directing energy to the same place, likely a seventh and final sub-matrix. If his calculations were correct, it was in engineering.

#

Drifting into the engineering spaces in zero-gravity almost got Damien crushed as a load of containment cylinders of some kind swung through the space just inside the door. Only an instinctive jerk of magic pulled him back from a dangerous collision, and a voice bellowed across the cavernous space at the rear of the freighter.

“
Watch
what you’re doing, you dimwits! That’s the only damn entrance; let’s
try
not to kill ship’s officers, eh?”

Damien remained motionless for a long moment as a white-faced assistant engineer caught up to his wayward cargo. The man gave Damien an apologetic glance before regaining control of the floating cart from his datapad. Tiny jets flared on the cart, redirecting the cylinders – which he now noticed had a ‘Warning: Explosion Hazard’ sign on them – away from the Ship’s Mage.

A dark-skinned man, not much bigger than Damien’s own slight frame, appeared out of the depths of the engineering space, zipping across the empty space and grabbing a support loop with practiced skill, turning bright blue eyes on the Mage.

“Only one folk on a ship like this wears that gewgaw,” he said gruffly. “Welcome to Engineering, Ship’s Mage Montgomery. Chief Engineer, James Kellers.”

Damien carefully shook the engineer’s hand, keeping his feet and spare hand carefully wedged to keep him in place. Releasing the handshake, he looked around the engineering room in awe. There were no rooms, corridors or dividers in the working space at the rear of the ship. Designed to function in zero-gravity, the space around the engines was festooned with hundreds of devices and consoles that he didn’t begin to comprehend.

The room stretched to the exterior of the hull on all sides, and on the far edges of the room Damien saw the graceful looping patterns of the runes of the Jump Matrix.

“What brings you to engineering Mr. Montgomery?” Kellers asked.

“Looking in awe, right now,” Damien admitted. “I did my jump tests on a much smaller ship, and they had the life support and other equipment separate from the engines.”

Kellers nodded. “Probably ex-military,” he admitted. “The Navy likes to space important bits out through the keel, minimizes the point failure sources. Concentrating all of the important gear in one place allows three of us keep everything functioning, though.”

Damien took a deep breath, inhaling the faint scent of burnt plastic and fused hydrogen. “Is it safe for me to move around in here?” he asked. “I need to review the runes and make sure nothing was damaged when we got banged up.”

“The Ship-Wrights had a pair of Mages in here day before yesterday checking all of the runes,” Kellers told him, scratching the stubble on his chin. “But if you’re careful, you should be fine. My boys are not normally quite that dumb,” he finished loudly, glaring at the assistant who’d nearly flattened Damien.