Stellar Fox (Castle Federation Book 2) (36 page)

Before Damien even started to run, however, the thug was moving again. With one eye closed and his face bleeding from the heat burns, the thug rose on his one good leg and grabbed Damien with both hands. He threw the slight Mage bodily into the wall, crushing the breath out of him.

Still balancing on one leg, the thug slammed one hand around Damien’s neck, crushing him against the wall, and then smashed his other fist into the Mage’s stomach.

Unable to breathe, Damien began to choke, his vision graying out and pain tearing through his body as the thug struck him again. And again.

Then one of the
other
thugs flew bodily into the leader’s back. Still the man remained on his feet, dropping Damien as he turned to see who was interrupting.

Damien barely recognized the spacer from the
Gentle Rains of Summer
before the ‘liberated’ length of black piping crashed into the leader’s head. The thug wavered for a moment, and then the piping slammed up between his legs, and the mountain of a man finally crumpled.

Damien’s consciousness crumpled with him.

#

Captain David Rice figured he was about to die.

The pirate ship had been waiting for the container ship
Blue Jay
when they emerged from their second-to-last jump en route to the Sherwood system. Compared to the freighter’s four spinning ribs wrapped around its core and containers, the hundred-meter long cylindrical ship was tiny.

Unlike the
Blue Jay
, though, the pirate ship had antimatter thrusters, a Mage who hadn’t just jumped, and fusion-rocket long-range missiles. The last were the cause of the muscular captain’s sense of incipient mortality.

He stood on the freighter’s bridge, watching the display from his ship’s cheap but functional sensor suite with one eye, and the video link to the simulacrum chamber at the center of the ship showing his Ship’s Mage’s exhausted face with the other. The sensors showed the pirate, just less than two million kilometers distant – and the missile salvo it had fired several minutes ago, accelerating towards them at over two thousand gravities.

“Four missiles,” his first officer, Jenna Campbell, reported in a strained voice. “RFLAMs engaging.”

The ship had two Rapid Fire Laser Anti-Missile systems: defensive turrets containing a dozen rapidly charging gas-chambered pulse lasers. The ship mounted one at the bow, where the four ribs and the central keel combined into the protective shield dome. The second was at the rear of the ship, where it guarded the vessel’s immense engines.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Kenneth McLaughlin told Rice through the video link, the Mage closing his eyes and reaching out. Even from the simulacrum chamber, no Mage could reach very far, and jumps were exhausting. There was no way McLaughlin would save them.

“RFLAMs each got one,” Jenna reported grimly. “Two more inbound –
shit
! One’s out of the gun’s field of fire!”

“Got it,” Kenneth said grimly. A third blinking icon on the screen disappeared as the Mage reached out and turned part of the missile into super-heated plasma.

It wasn’t enough. The immense, multi-megaton mass of the
Blue Jay
lurched as the last missile slammed into the forward RFLAM turret. Rice expected to die in that moment, only to blink as nothing more happened.

“What the hell?” he demanded.

“Either it was a dud or a straight kinetic,” Jenna told him harshly. “Not that it matters – the RFLAM is gone, as is half the bow dome. We try any major maneuvers and we’ll open up like a rusty tin can.”

“I am not dying like this,” Rice told her, engaging the maneuvering controls himself. He took it gently, trusting the XO’s assessment, but he slowly turned the ship so her main fusion rockets – and the last laser turret – faced her attacker.

“We’re being hailed,” Jenna told him. “Playing it.”

“Captain Rice,” a sardonic voice told him. “I do believe your ship may be a bit banged up! Please don’t run too hard, you might hurt yourself.”

“Shit, shit, shit,
SHIT
,” Jenna exclaimed as the hull lurched again, this time much less noticeably.

“What?!”

“Asshole painted us with an x-ray laser while we were busy listening to his transmission,” she said bitterly. “Now the
aft
RFLAM is gone.”

Jenna didn’t wait to play the second transmission; she just threw it on when it arrived.

“In the name of the Blue Star Syndicate, I order you to heave to and be boarded,” the voice ordered. “Continue running, and I will put a kinetic warhead through your bridge, and then collect your cargo and bodies from the debris field.”

Rice shared a helpless look with Jenna and McLaughlin. If the Blue Star Syndicate boarded the ship, he was dead. If they blew out the
Jay
’s bridge, he was dead.

Now Captain David Rice
knew
he was going to die, and his crew with him.

The Ship’s Mage took a deep breath and looked him in the eye.

“Not happening, sir,” he said quietly. “Ready the ship for jump.”

“You just jumped,” Rice told him. “You can’t jump for at
least
a few hours!”

Regulations said a Mage should jump every six hours. If you had a strong, brave, Mage, you could jump after three… once. They’d arrived at the final jump zone short of Sherwood barely twenty minutes before.

“I’m sorry David,” Kenneth said quietly. “I won’t let everyone on this ship die.”

The camera to the simulacrum chamber cut out, and David turned back to look at the sensor board and the pirate ship closing. Then the indescribable sensation of teleportation took hold, and the whole bridge faded out.

When it slowly faded back in, the sensors were clear. They were a day’s regular flight out of Sherwood Prime.

“Get the camera back,” he ordered Jenna. “Kenneth, answer me dammit!” he snapped.

The monitor flipped back on, and Rice swallowed hard. The simulacrum chamber was at the center of the ship. It had no gravity, only the small model that was always, somehow, at the exact direct center of the ship it was a copy of.

One of Kenneth’s hands was caught in the model. The rest of him had started to float away when his eyeballs had exploded out of his head.

The
Blue Jay
’s only Ship’s Mage, the youngest son of the Mage-Governor of the planet they’d just arrived at, was very, very dead.

#

Damien woke up to bright lights and white walls, blinking as he slowly realized that he could breathe and wasn’t in pain, both facts a minor surprise after having a human-mountain hybrid try to choke him to death.

He managed to make it about a quarter of the way into a sitting position before a nurse realized what he was doing, arriving in time to stop him from collapsing back onto the clinic bed he was occupying.

As the brunette clad in light blue scrubs helped him upright, he glanced around a room that any citizen of a Protectorate world would recognize. The Charter defined a minimum standard of health care as a human right for governments to provide, and Olympus Mons helped meet that standard by providing funding and a standard pre-fabricated clinic-in-a-box with a certain set of diagnostic and medical tools.

“Hold still,” the nurse ordered once she had Damien upright. This was followed by a series of scanners, pokes and prods. Apparently finished, she grunted and disappeared out of the clinic room with a sharp “Stay here.”

Still dizzy, Damien thought that might have been the most useless instruction ever. The room slowly stopped spinning while he waited, but the nurse eventually returned with three other people.

Behind the others was the spacer from the
Gentle Rains of Summer
. In front was an iron-haired gentleman in a white lab coat reading over a datapad the nurse had passed him as they entered the room. In between was a tall redheaded woman in the dark blue uniform of Sherwood System Security.

“I am Doctor Anderson,” the man introduced himself. “This young lady is nurse Kosta – remember to thank her on your way out.”

“You are lucky to be alive, young man,” the doctor continued, setting the datapad down next to Damien’s bed. “Your trachea was damaged and several of your ribs were cracked. The dizziness will fade, though you will be very tired for a day or two – a normal side effect of the bone-mending process.”

The doctor asked him a few questions, ran a more complex scanner the nurse hadn’t used over him, and nodded in satisfaction.

“We’ll keep you in tonight for observation, but you’ll be free to go in the morning,” Anderson told Damien. “If there’s anything that needs to be taken care of at your home – pets to feed or a girlfriend to let know - let Kosta know and we’ll get it taken care of.”

“Neither,” Damien told him, coughing to clear his throat after he spoke. “Thank you.”

“Now, Kosta and I will leave you with Captain Harrison,” the doctor continued. He turned to the SSS officer. “You have fifteen minutes,” he said sternly, “and then I am kicking you out of my clinic, clear?”

“Perfectly, Doctor. Thank you,” the Security officer said calmly.

The doctor shuffled out, and Captain Harrison pulled two chairs up beside Damien’s bed, gesturing for the spacer to sit.

“I kept Mr. Casey here around as I figured you’d want to thank the man who saved your life,” she said quietly. “Brian Kendall – the thug who worked you over – is known to System Security. Given the number you’d done on him, he was going to kill you. Mr. Casey’s intervention prevented that, and his witness statement is going to put him behind bars for a very long time… after the doctors finish fixing his knee. That was you, I presume?”

Damien nodded. “I… didn’t think he would keep coming after that,” he admitted. “I was trying to calm things down.”

“With most thugs, that’ll work,” Casey told him with a small smile. “But that Kendall… ‘e seemed a piece of work.”

“Thank you,” Damien told the spacer. “I’m not even sure why you were there, but Captain Harrison is right – he was going to kill me.”

Casey slipped a small paper envelope from his jacket onto the table by Damien. “The Cap’n wanted to give you a little something for your help with the ward,” he told him. “’e sent me after you to hand it over. I, um,” he gave a sideways glance at the Security Captain, “pinged your PC for your location… and hurried when I saw where you were.”

Harrison was studiously looking at Damien’s medical monitor, pretending she hadn’t heard the spacer confess to a minor crime. Personal Computers were keyed to a user and contained all of their personal information – accessing one without permission was considered a form of personal assault.

After a moment, the Captain turned her eyes back to Damien and tapped her own PC.

“I need you to give me a recorded witness statement,” she told him. “After that, I shouldn’t need to call you in for anything, but we’ll hold onto your contact information in case. Is that acceptable?”

Damien nodded, and Harrison pressed a button on the computer. “All right, let’s get started.”

#

It didn’t take very long for Damien to give as complete a description as he remembered of the incident. Some of his memories were clouded from being choked into unconsciousness, but at least the start of the encounter was clear.

“One last question for the record,” Harrison finally told him. “How many spells do you know that would have killed Kendall?”

Damien blinked, confused. “Sorry?”

“I’m aware of at least some of the spells taught in the self-defense portion of the Practical Thaumaturgy curriculum,” she said. “Your response was non-lethal, but you were capable of a lethal response – correct?”

Damien thought about it. He’d learned self-defense spells around various forms of energy manipulation – heat, cold, electricity. Even the straight force spell he’d used could have been more deadly if directed at, say, Kendall’s neck.

“At least five,” he finally answered quietly. “At most basic, a fire spell would have inflicted significant third degree burns if not killed him.”

“Thank you,” Harrison said, turning off her PC. “That will be sufficient for the courts I think.” She was shaking her head slightly.

“What?” he asked.

“I think you are the first Mage I’ve ever met to default to a non-lethal level of force when threatened,” she told him. “Most Mages go straight for fire or lightning – we spend a good part of the training for the System Security Mages teaching them to use a targeted level of force.”

“I thought I could scare them off,” Damien admitted. “I was wrong.”

“That wasn’t your mistake,” Harrison told him. “Your mistake was not escalating as soon as you realized you couldn’t. Training can fix that – have you ever considered joining the SSS?”

“I’m trained to be a Jump Mage,” Damien answered. “That’s what I’m going to be – as soon as I find a ship.”

The Security Captain looked like she had swallowed something sour.