Starship's Mage: Episode 1 (8 page)

The
Blue Jay
accelerated for twenty-four hours, building velocity, and then coasted for another day, drawing clear of the gravity well of the planet behind them. Damien calculated and re-calculated his first jump. Rice reviewed it once more, the morning of the third day.

It
finally came down to it late that afternoon. Damien checked the sensor readouts, and they were clear enough of gravity wells for the spell to function.

“Captain, we’re ready to jump,”
he said quietly into the bridge link, and Rice nodded.

“Note for the log,”
Rice ordered. “It is seventeen forty Olympus Mons Time, and I am authorizing the jump.”

“Noted for the log,”
Jenna replied, though Damien knew the computer would be recording after the phrase ‘note for the log.’

Rice
looked through the link directly at Damien, holding his gaze. “You may jump when ready, Ship’s Mage,” he said firmly.

Damien nodded, and turned
his attention from the link screen to the simulacrum floating at the heart of the
Blue Jay
. The tiniest of kicks launched him away from the acceleration platform, leaving him floating in zero-gravity, held in place only by his hands on the silver icon of the
Blue Jay
’s essence.

With a deep breath,
he slipped the runes on his bare palms into the exact places carved for them on the simulacrum, and let his power become part of the rune matrix of the ship. The screens around him allowed him to see as the ship saw, and now he
felt
the ship.

He reached out with his mind, confirming through the simulacrum what the sensors had already told him – that the space-time here was sufficiently unbent by gravity to allow for a jump.

He touched the reservoir of power in his core, mustering energy up into his hands and through the connection into the ship. The rune matrix greedily sucked up his power, reflecting it around the ship in an ever-building net that was almost blinding to someone who saw the magic in the rune matrix.

Without conscious
thought, Damien knew the calculations were perfect, and he held them in the center of his mind.

Then,
he released his breath and his power and
moved
. He touched a blip in the probability of reality, and all of his energy fled his body in a single exhalation.

The
Blue Jay
jumped.

“How are we looking?” Rice asked Jenna as soon as the indescribable sensation of being transported trillions of kilometers through space in an instant faded.

“Checking position now,”
she replied, running a series of programs on her console before looking back up at him. “We are bang on target, dead center in jump zone one of the Sherwood-Corinthian sequence.”

Rice turned to the
monitor showing him the simulacrum chamber, taking in the utterly drained expression on his new Ship’s Mage.

“Well done Mr. Montgomery,”
he told the youth. “Shall we schedule the next jump for oh-three hundred Olympus Mons time?”

That would give the young man over nine hours to rest – nine hours it looked like the Mage desperately need
ed. He and Damien had scheduled to jump every eight hours, but after the new Ship’s Mage’s first jump, he figured they could spare the time.

“I’ll be ready,”
Damien promised; his voice soft with fatigue.

“Get some sleep, Damien,”
Rice ordered. “We’ll talk before the next jump.”

With a nod, the young Mage turned off the video link, and Rice turned to Jenna.

“Scopes clear?” he asked quietly.

“All clear so far as our sensors can read,”
she replied, equally quiet. “No one has come through here in a week at least.”

Rice
considered the screen showing the thermal signatures around them. The thermal scope was the most reliable method of detecting ships, seeing as how any vessel under power blazed like a tiny sun against the backdrop of empty space.

“Three degrees Kelvin as far as our eyes can see,”
he muttered to himself. “Why does that not make me feel better?”

“Because you’re rightfully paranoid, sir,”
Jenna replied.

“Which is why I want you to send the maintenance ‘bots out to check over both of our new turrets,”
Rice told her.

For ninety quiet minutes, Rice slowly relaxed as no sign of pirates or technical difficulties materialized. Both of the new Rapid Fire Laser Anti-Missile turrets checked out as fully functional, and he took some comfort in the fact that he’d paid to upgrade them heavily from the previous weapons. Each of these turrets was rated to take down a four missile salvo like the last one they’d faced on its own.

Ninety-one minutes
after arrived at the jump zone, all of his quiet hopes for a peaceful trip shattered as the distinctive heat and radiation flare of an incoming jump appeared on their screens.

“Jump flare!”
he barked, grabbing Jenna’s attention from her focus on the maintenance ‘bots. “Get me something Jenna,” he ordered as she pulled up the rest of the sensor suite. Heat would only tell them so much.

“Single ship, three million kilometers,”
she reported, then double checked her figures. “Damn, their Mage must have blown his numbers – I bet they were planning on coming out right on top of us.”

As if to prove
her comment, the heat signature on the new contact flared with a sudden, massive, brightness.

“Boss, if I’m reading this right, she just lit off
a fusion rocket at six gees,” Jenna said quietly, and David winced.

“Time to missile range?”
he asked steadily.

“If they’re using the same birds as last time, about an hour,”
she admitted. “If the turrets hold up, it’ll take them just over five hours to match speeds and rendezvous with us to board – that’s if we start burning now.”

Five hours.
That would make it over six hours since Damien had jumped, which meant that, if they could make it, the young Mage would be able to jump them
before
the pirate ship boarded them.

“Sound the emergency acceleration alert,”
Rice ordered, “and lets burn directly away from them. Let’s buy as much time as we can.”

A klaxon began ringing through the
ship and the bars on his screen showing the rotational speeds of the ribs rapidly shrank.

“All ribs at full stop,”
Jenna reported. “Initiating emergency burn… now.”

The four massive fusion torches at the rear of the
ship lit up, and a large man sat down on Rice’s chest as his ship began to accelerate at two full gravities.

It seemed like Damien had barely closed his eyes when the klaxon woke him up. He certainly didn’t have time to wake up or prepare at all before the rib stopped rotating and the motion of his waking up sent him drifting away from the bed beneath him.

Then the
engines engaged, and two gravities of force slammed him into the back wall of his cabin, crushing the breath from his body. He struggled against the gravity to regain some measure of breath, and then wove magic around his body to reduce the force to something he could move in.

“Captain, this is Damien,”
he said as he opened a link to the bridge. “What’s happening?”

“We’ve been ambushed,”
Rice said shortly, his breath strained. “They missed their jump, though, and we should be able to stand off the missiles until you can jump us again. How long?”

Damien focused for a moment, testing the reserve of energy buried deep inside of him.
It had recovered somewhat during his hour-long nap. The gravity spell wasn’t a major strain, and from the feel, he could handle anything that wasn’t major.

Of course
, a teleport spell was the definition of major.

“At least a few more hours,” he
admitted. “I’m still shot to hell.”

There was a long pause, during which Damien pulled on a shirt and grabbed a folded up
emergency pressure helmet.

“We’re running,” Rice
said finally. “But he’s got four gravities on us, and he’ll be in missile range in under an hour. Anything you can do?”

“I can knock down some missiles from the simulacrum chamber,”
the Mage told him. “Not sure what else…”

“Any little bit helps,”
the Captain told him.

“
Then I’ll be in the simulacrum chamber,” Damien promised.

Blue Jay
was not a small ship, and there was no direct route from Damien’s quarters in the middle of Rib Four to the simulacrum chamber at the center of the vessel. The two gravity acceleration didn’t help, though at least the ship had fold-out stairs and other tools to function with acceleration-driven gravity.

By the time Damien made
it to the chamber, struggling up a ladder to the small platform beneath the simulacrum, the pirate ship was just drawing into missile range. He opened a video link to the bridge, as well as several windows that showed him sensor data on the area and the ship.

“There he was,”
Jenna said suddenly, as a spike showed up in the sensors. “Bastard was sitting a full light-hour out of the jump zone with his drives dead – not even the Martian boys would have picked him up at that distance – but he’d have seen everyone jump in. He IDed our signature as soon as it reached him, took half an hour to be ready, and then jumped us. If their Mage hadn’t overshot, we’d have been dead or boarded before we even knew they were there.”

Damien replayed the sudden burst of energy and saw her point.
Up to that moment, now a full hour ago, there had been no sign of a ship in that bit of space. Then the jump flare appeared, marking the pirate’s disappearance.

“Missiles,”
Jenna reported calmly as four more signatures lit up on the thermal scope. “They look the same as last time – two thousand gravities acceleration, seven and a half minute flight time. I’m taking evasive maneuvers – hold on!”

The missiles
were anemic compared to the antimatter driven weapons the Protectorate Navy would use, but they were still a thousand times faster than the
Blue Jay
. Damien focused the sensor screen on them, using it to focus in and zoom on the missiles.

Through the
simulacrum, Damien could affect the space around them with his magic, but all it did was let him see as the ship saw. His power and range for his normal spells was almost the same, unlike using the jump spell.

One of the spells he
knew, however, was explicitly intended for just this situation. It was draining, but it had a range of forty or so thousand kilometers. Normally, that was utterly useless, but here and now, he could take down a missile in its last six seconds or so of flight.

“Sixty seconds to impact,”
Jenna announced. “RFLAMs engaging.”

The lasers were
invisible on the visual screens that surrounded Damien, though they lit up the sensor feeds. Their results weren’t. One missile and then another disappeared in fireballs that were clearly visible in the zoomed in screen.

A third
missile detonated, and then the last came within Damien’s reach. His power flicked out through the simulacrum’s matrix and conjured a tiny fireball, not much more than a spark.

Conjured
inside
the missile’s fuel cells, it triggered a reaction that blew the missile apart.

Even as Damien breathed a sigh of relief, something was bothering him. A niggling thought at the back of his head. The spell he’d cast hadn’t felt right. It wasn’t a spell he’d cast many times before, but most of the time he had he’d been in deep space, casting through a window or viewscreen on the side of a ship.

This wasn’t the
first time he’d cast it from the simulacrum chamber of a starship – but it was the first time he’d done so only a short while after casting the jump spell. The feel of the two spells should have been very different to his mind. The jump spell was tied into and amplified by the rune matrix throughout the starship, but the defense spell was only using the simulacrum to allow him to see what he was aiming at.

Both spells
had felt
exactly
the same when he’d cast them. His energy had fed into the matrix that ran throughout the ship, and he swore that the defense spell had started the same amplifying feedback loop that the jump spell had… and then it had simply continued on as normal, as if that loop had broken.

He ignored the pursuing ship as
he dove into the ship’s operating system, looking for something he knew had to be there.

“More missiles incoming,”
he heard Jenna’s voice report. “I think the RFLAMs have their measure now, but keep your eyes open Damien.”

The missiles were still two minutes out when
he found what he was looking for. The usage level of the main heat converter popped up on his side screen, tracking back in time… to a massive heat spike when he’d cast the spell.

He
stared at the spike in shock, understanding what the strange matrices he’d found did at last. There was no difference between a jump matrix and the spell amplifier a warship would carry – except that those seven sub-matrices would break the amplifier loop for any spell
but
the jump spell.

His
moment of realization shattered when the
Blue Jay
leapt under his feet. Five megatons of mass jumped like a startled puppy, and then he was in zero-gravity.