Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) (9 page)

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.

#

“What the hell happened?” Rice demanded. The RFLAM turrets had only just started to engage – the missiles had been tens of thousands of kilometers out, nowhere near close enough to actually hit the ship.

“Three of the missiles were decoys,” Jenna said grimly. “They were augmenting their radar signatures, and we nailed all three. The fourth was an x-ray laser. It blew up at twenty thousand klicks and hit the engines.”

X-ray laser warheads were rare and expensive – so expensive that even the Martian Navy didn’t use them normally. A small atomic bomb triggered a lasing reaction in specially treated crystals, providing a deadly and precise stand-off weapon.

Rice flipped up a link to engineering. “Kellers, how bad is it?” he demanded.

“We’ve a giant hole through the main conduits for Two and Three,” the engineer snapped back. “The conduit for One got clipped – that
might
be repairable, but if we fire up Two or Three before a shipyard’s been at them, we may as well just set off a nuke back here.”

“Get me at least one engine back Kellers,” Rice ordered. He turned back to Jenna, and she answered his question before he asked it.

“It’s gained them forty minutes,” she said quietly. “Maybe as much as a full hour.”

An inexperienced Mage jumping with anything less than a six hour wait between jumps risked the same fate that Kenneth McLaughlin had suffered. Rice looked at the link to Damien, knowing that the youth would likely risk it. If they pushed it close enough, it might even work – assuming the pirate didn’t open them to air and let them suffocate. The bounty on Rice’s head would be paid as happily for a vacuum preserved corpse as for a live prisoner. He met the young Mage’s eyes and saw something there he wasn’t expecting: hope.

“Captain, I have an idea,” Damien told him.

#

He ran for the front of the ship, power flaring through the runes in his palm as he formed his own ‘down’ in the zero-gravity of the ship. A bag of tools, soldering irons and silver wire, banged against his side as he dodged around Singh, who trying to make his way backwards along the keel. The big Sikh stared at him in surprise, then flashed him a thumbs up.

“Whatever you’re doing Montgomery, good luck!” he shouted after Damien, who barely heard him as he caught a support bar and redirected his personal gravity.

With a bruising thump, Damien slammed into the underside of the ship’s radiation cap, where the sub-matrix diverted energy away if it wasn’t a jump spell. He focused his gaze on it, following the lines of energy and noting where they detoured.

With a deep breath, he pulled the soldering iron and embossing tools out. With a single slash of the iron, he severed a rune. Molten silver followed, new runes taking shape that loop the energy back into the general matrix.

One link done, he slid sideways and repeated the process. Runes were something to carve carefully, with time, precision and detailed calculations. Without time, Damien relied on his sight, on knowing how the energy would flow.

The forward matrix took him fifteen minutes to disconnect, and then he ran again, redirecting gravity to speed him towards Rib One.

He had mere hours to change the entire nature of the rune matrix, and all he could do was pray he was doing it right.

#

Damien had made it to Rib Four when the ship lurched out from beneath his feet, his spell failing to compensate for the entire kilometer-length of the vessel jerking a full meter sideways. He slammed into the wall, gouging his hands and cracking his jaw.

Carefully feeling his jaw for any major injuries, he opened a link to the bridge.

“What the hell was that?” he demanded.

“They have a laser,” Rice said shortly. “And we no longer have a forward turret. You’re out of time, Damien. Whenever that thing recharges, we lose the rear turret, and then we either jump or die.”

Damien looked at the sub-matrix for Rib Four. Most of the runes were severed, with only one rune chain still linking it. With a deep breath, he focused on the lines of energy, and slashed with the soldering iron. If he’d judged it right, he’d broken the rune without creating a dangerous feedback loop, but at this point he could only hope.

“Computer, connect me to engineering,” he ordered his PC as he charged rearwards for the simulacrum chamber.

“Kellers, it’s Montgomery,” he told the engineer, focusing his gravity spell so that he fell towards the rear of the ship.

“I’m a little busy trying to keep us from blowing the fuck up kid, this better be important,” the engineer snapped.

“You know those runes on the main heat exchanger?” Damien asked, grunting as he slammed into the ladder leading to the keel. He hadn’t slowed himself enough, but he hadn’t broken any bones.

“What? What about them?” Kellers demanded. “
Watch that hydrogen line
,” he bellowed at somebody else. “Do
not
connect that thing to the conduit yet; hold off till I
tell
you to hook it up.”

“I need you to break the rune chains connecting them to the rest of the ship’s matrix,” the Mage told him.

There was silence on the other end of the line as Damien forced his bruised, weary, legs to carry him towards the keel.

“And how the fuck am I supposed to do that?” Kellers finally demanded.

“It shouldn’t matter,” Damien told him honestly. He was pretty sure that destroying the other six matrices would render the one in engineering utterly ineffectual – but he couldn’t be certain. “Weld it, gouge, burn it – take an ax to it for all I care, but I’ll be in the simulacrum chamber in two minutes, and I need those runes disconnected when I get there.”

Another pause. “You owe me one hell of an explanation Montgomery, but I’ll see what I can do,” Kellers finally said.

“If we live, I’ll explain with diagrams,” Damien promised, and then redirected his gravity spell towards the simulacrum.

As long as he made it to the simulacrum in time, he didn’t care if he broke something anymore.

#

Leaving the door to the simulacrum chamber open had been one of his better ideas. He fell through the door, barely slowing himself at the last minute. With a deep breath and steeling himself against the result, Damien grabbed onto the simulacrum to slow himself.

The simulacrum
couldn’t
move. He barely held his grip, and one of his arms was clearly going to make him pay later, but he stopped.

He looked up at the bridge link and met Rice’s eyes.