Starship's Mage: Episode 3 (5 page)

Where David’s appointment took him into the luxury of Interface Station’s wealthy sections, Damien and Singh’s took them into the dingy corridors of the Station’s cheaper warehousing section. When the Station had been built, a significant chunk of the outer arc had been left hollow. Standard ten-thousand cubic meter cargo containers had been brought in, welded into place, and turned into row upon row of dingy, cheap, warehousing space.

“Row
seventeen, level K, box nine is where we’ll find our man,” Singh told Damien, leading the way to a rickety-looking elevator. It clanked and chugged its way up seven layers of the cargo containers and disgorged them onto a catwalk that looked only slightly safer.

“Is this place safe?” Damien asked, following Singh along the
catwalk and looking for the haphazard mix of pre-fabricated signs and glorified graffiti that marked the various sections of the warehousing section.

“Not a chance,” Singh said
cheerfully. “That’s why we’re carrying guns.”

Something about the
cheerfully deadly Sikh pilot, however, got them through the sparse crowds and darkened catwalks without incident. They reached the box they’d been told to go to, and a youth with most of his hair shaved away, leaving a row of spikes down the center of his skull, popped the door open for them.

Two more spiked-hair youths, a man and a woman, were waiting inside with blocky but effective looking carbines.

“Leave the guns here,” the woman ordered in a hoarse voice. “Nobody sees the boss armed.”

Damien followed Singh’s lead in
unslinging the shoulder holster and leaving it on the table the ganger pointed at.

“This way,”
she instructed hoarsely, leading the pair of officers from the
Blue Jay
into the next room. There, sitting cross-legged on a table surrounded by black metal cases, waited the tiniest adult man that Damien had ever seen.

The wrinkles and lines on the face showed the man’s true age, as did
his head, out of scale with his body. The small man wore his black hair, streaked with iron gray, shoulder length – and he leveled his gaze on Damien and Singh like a gun turret.

“Narveer,”
he said flatly. “I really didn’t believe you’d have the balls to try to deal with me after the last time we parted.”

“That was duty, never personal,” Singh replied
calmly. “And this is business – not personal.”

Before Damien could react, the man was off the table and pointing an immense pistol
directly at Singh. The gun was almost comically mis-matched to the man’s size, but the barrel didn’t waver or tremble in the slightest.

“
You’re unarmed. What’s to stop me blowing you away as a down payment for that cargo?”

“Damien, roll down
your collar,” Singh instructed calmly. Damien reached up, slowly so as not to disturb the dwarf, and rolled down his collar – revealing the gold coin declaring him a Mage. “Even here, he can use magic in self-defense,” the ex-soldier reminded the smuggler.

The gun remained trained on Singh’s head for a long moment, and then
was tossed aside with a massive guffaw.

“Damn Singh,
you got me,” the dwarf announced, and turned to offer his hand to Damien. “Victor Rotha, gunrunner, smuggler, and former pilot for the Protectorate Navy. Until this lunk turned me in for the whole gunrunning thing.”

“
You got sloppy,” Singh told him sharply. “I couldn’t turn that much of a blind eye!”

“Nah, and
you gave me enough of a heads up that I could get out,” Rotha allowed, turning back to the tables with the gun cases. “So, you need guns. What are you after?”

“Sidearms, body
armor and carbines for sixty,” Singh said immediately. “Decent stuff, not any of that MidWorlds manufactured crap.”

“Ha,
you think I can get away with selling Amber or Corinthian guns in Legatus orbit?” Rotha replied, digging through the cases. He opened one and passed the box over to Singh.

“Legatus
Arms 71 Model 2445 heavy pistol,” he announced. “Fires a seven point one millimeter, high muzzle velocity, solid round. The LSDF discontinued their use earlier this year as they lack the penetration to get through the level of body armor they wanted from their side-arm. They traded up for the Model 2450, which uses a sabot penetrator round, but is less effective against unarmoured targets.”

The case held ten of the guns.
As soon as Singh took it, Rotha dived back into the pile of cases.

“
Got racks of the twenty-four-forty Hyper-Kevlars,” he said over his shoulder. “Lauren, grab me four standard cases of those, and seven more of the twenty-four-forty-fives.”

The spiky-haired woman
promptly leapt to obey, clearly more aware of how the cases were organized than her boss.

“This is what
you want,” Rotha finally announced, returning with longer black metal case. He popped it open to reveal four matte-black carbines.

“This is
just
going into service with the LSDF shipboard marines,” he continued. “Legatus Arms SC-5 battle carbine, Model 2454. Caseless rounds, electronic firing, electromagnetic round advancement. It’s a block of metal and molecular circuitry – not a single moving part. Takes two fifty round magazines of a five millimeter bullet – standard load is one frangible, one armor-piercing. Box of a hundred of ‘em just fell out of a shuttle as I was walking by, and I just couldn’t leave ‘em lying there!”

“Sounds good,” Singh replied.
“We’ll sixty each of the pistols, the armor, and the carbines.”

“
Oh ho ho!” Rotha replied, his gaze settling on an unrelated box, the height of a man. “And you’ll take this too, if you know what you need!”

The small man ran over to the casket and popped the lid, swinging
it open to reveal a man-sized suit of full body armor.

“Martian Armaments Mark
Seventeen Combat Exosuit,” he announced proudly. “The Legatans just switched over to a home-grown combat suit, so a bunch of these were being destroyed. I saved a few for better fates. Still qualified on this monster, Singh?”

Damien looked from the
Exosuit to the Pilot, and back to the Exosuit. He sighed. Whatever Captain Rice had given them as a budget had to cover it, because from Singh’s expression, they weren’t leaving without the suit.

“Is Narveer back aboard with those guns?” David asked Jenna as he re-entered the bridge.

“Not quite,”
his First Officer responded, checking her console and the radar. “He took Damien with him and they checked in about ten minutes ago – their contact is delivering them, along with the goods, in his own shuttle. Their ETA is about another twenty minutes.”

“That’ll work,” the
Captain accepted, settling into the acceleration couch next to his console as he brought up the navigation software. “Is anyone else off-ship?”

“
Kellers and his engineers are out for dinner,” Jenna replied. “I got the impression LaMonte tried to go out alone with Damien, but Singh had already grabbed him for gun-shopping. Why?”

“
We have cargo inbound that’s self-mobile,” David explained. “We need to be clear of the station and in a steady orbit in about ninety minutes. Have you heard from Kellers?”

“
I’ll check in with him. Make sure they won’t have to pour Kelly back onto the ship.”

David shook
his head with a chuckle. “Is Damien holding a grudge over her getting him arrested?” he asked. “For that matter, is our high school love fest being a problem at all?”

“Nah, the rest of the crew just thinks
they’re being idiots,” his XO replied calmly. “Which they are - Damien isn’t holding a grudge. He’s just oblivious. Self-mobile cargo?” she finished.

“
We’ll be carrying four gunships, plus skeleton crew, to the Mercedes system,” David told her. “We’ll also be taking on a security platoon of Augments. Can you get someone to check through the quarters on Ribs Three and Four to make sure they’re presentable for a hundred and ten strangers?”

“
We can double up some of the cabins and fit them in,” Jenna confirmed. “How long do we have?”

“About two hours,” David told
her. “Ricket moves quickly. And pays well,” he added. “It’ll be worth it.”

With the
Blue Jay
separated from the spinning wheel of Interface Station and floating in its new assigned high orbit, Damien floated in the middle of the simulacrum chamber in zero-gravity. The screens surrounding him showed the busy space around the ship.

The freighter
’s external ribs, usually in motion while the ship was orbiting, were frozen in place. Beyond them, five sets of engines flared as the Legatan ships approached. Damien gestured on his control panel, zooming in on the squadron.

Four
Crucifix
gunships, all in what the Captain had referred to as ‘Squid Mode’, decelerated carefully towards the freighter. In the midst, a single shuttle shaped its own, slightly different, course. The
Blue Jay
’s computer told Damien it was an assault shuttle, of a class unique to the Legatus Self Defense Force.

The
assault shuttle, probably chock full of the Augments assigned to guard the tiny but deadly squadron the
Blue Jay
had been hired to transport, hung back as the gunships slowly approached the freighter.

They
approached closer than any full size ship had ever come to the
Blue Jay
, the pinpricks of their engines cutting out as they expanded into the hulls fully visibly from Damien’s cameras and sensors. Each gunship was a hemisphere, forty meters deep and as many around, to which four twenty meter cubes were linked by sixty meter long cylinders. With the modules swept behind them, the ships were sixty meters across at their widest, and a hundred and twenty meters long.

The
ships were tiny next to the
Blue Jay
. As the first slowly slid between Rib One and Rib Two and fired small thrusters to arrest its motion and bring into the freighter’s hull, Damien realized that four gunships was nothing against the normal volume of cargo they carried. The plan was to lock a single ship in each quarter of the hull, but they could just as easily have locked all four ships nose to tail along one side of the ship, and carried sixteen of the gunships all told. Of course, the
Blue Jay
could only have carried the mass of eight of the ships.

The lower mass was a factor in some of
his jump calculations. He was starting to update the course he’d been plotting when the buzzer sounded for entry to the simulacrum chamber.

“Come in,”
he instructed.

The door slid aside,
temporarily blocking off part of the view of the outside universe as Kelly LaMonte drifted in.

“Figured
I’d find you here,” she said softly. “Do you know how to not work, Damien?”

“That shuttle,” Damien said
quietly, pointing at the small spaceship now shaping a gentle arc towards the
Blue Jay
’s shuttle bay, “carries twenty-eight men and woman who voluntarily submitted to life-altering surgery to allow them to hunt and arrest Mages like me. It’s a little sobering.”

The
engineer caught herself on the platform next to where Damien floated and settled onto it.

“
We get this job done, we get out of UnArcana space, and we never deal with these crazies again,” she told him. “Why get hung up on their issues?”

“
It’s nerve-wracking to realize that anyone hates you that much,” Damien shrugged.

Kelly
carefully laid her hand on his shoulder, balancing perfectly in zero-gravity.

“Not
your problem,” she said forcefully. “You didn’t break their laws, didn’t use magic on the station. Besides, if they cause problems on the ship, the Captain will throw them out the airlock.”

He
looked ‘up’ at her, somewhat disbelievingly.

“
He won’t stand for his officers being harassed, you’ll see,” she promised.

“Fair,”
he allowed. After a moment, he reached up to cover her hand with his own. Her skin was warm against him. They floated there in zero-gravity in silence for a long moment.

“
I was starting to wonder,” she said quietly, “if you were still mad at me for getting you arrested. James told me it was nothing of the sort.
He
said you were just young and oblivious.” Kelly took advantage of her better leverage to turn Damien around to face her. “So, Damien, let me be as obvious as I can. Want to come back to my quarters and I will
cook
you dinner?”

Even
he wasn’t that oblivious.

David was waiting in the shuttle bay with Narveer and Kellers when the Legatan shuttle came aboard. The three officers floated behind a safety shield, watching the pilot neatly slow the ship to a halt in the exact center of the bay, and then gently connect her to the deck with a tiny burst from the top-side maneuvering thrusters.

The shuttle was a thick, dark-painted wedge, designed to be
equally at home in space or in atmosphere. Each side of the wedge bore the golden cog with the lightning bolt cut out that was the symbol of Legatus’s Augment Corps. Hatches on the front likely covered weapons systems designed to clear the way for the platoon of soldiers aboard. A larger hatch, roughly halfway back the port angle of the wedge, opened shortly after the shuttle settled onto the deck.

An
eerily skinny man with iron gray hair, clad in a blue-trimmed black uniform with the Augments golden cog at his collar, exited the ship first. He saw David and his officers and kicked off from the shuttle, neatly directing himself to grab the blast shield and efficiently orient himself to face them.

“Major James Niska, commanding
Security Team Alpha-Seventeen,” he reported crisply, giving a credible zero-gravity salute.

“Welcome aboard the
Blue Jay
, Major Niska,” David greeted him. Behind the Major, more black uniformed men and women spilled out of the ship. Each carried a duffel bag and a slung rifle, and they quickly aligned themselves in neat lines behind their commander. “How was your flight?”

“
Utterly boring. It was perfect,” the Augment replied cheerfully. “All of the gunships looked to have hitched on correctly. Are their crews aboard?”

“
They are coming in through the maintenance outriggers,” David confirmed. “My First Officer is checking up on them. If you want to meet up with them, I can have my First Pilot,” he gestured carefully to Narveer, “show your men to their quarters.”

“That would be perfect,” Niska agreed, gesturing for one of
his team to approach him. “Karl, take the platoon and get them settled in. Follow Mr…?”

“Singh,” Narveer replied, shifting forward to face the platoon.
“Narveer Singh.”

“
Follow Mr. Singh,” Niska finished. “We’ll sort out the rotation and guard schedules once I’ve had a chance to sit down with Captain Rice.”

“Understood, sir,” the non-com replied
sharply before turning to the team behind them.

“This way,
Major,” David told the Augment officer, leading him into the central core of the ship. Behind them, the Legatan non-commissioned officer started snapping sharp orders to get the troops into line.

“
We’ll be putting your men and the gunship cadre up in Ribs Three and Four,” the Captain told Niska as the shuttle bay doors closed behind them. “I assume you’ll want to split your platoon between the two Ribs, to keep an eye on the crews?”

“Of course,” Niska agreed.
“We will also need unfettered access to the ship. The layout of the
Venice
class is not entirely consistent from vessel to vessel, so we will need to review all of the
Blue Jay
’s own peculiarities. I will also want to post guards on the bridge, Engineering, and, preferably, the simulacrum chamber.”

David winced at the thought of
Augments guarding the chamber where Damien worked.

“Believe
me when I say the men I would select to guard your Mage are very specifically chosen,” Niska continued, clearly catching both David’s reaction and the reason for it. “In the case of any attack on this ship, however, the simulacrum chamber is one of the three areas that will be the focus of a boarding attempt.”

“All right,” the
Captain agreed with a sigh. “But if your men cause
any
issues – especially with Montgomery – that access will start restricting itself
extremely
quickly.”

“
I will do my best to make sure we have no such issues,” Niska said calmly. “If there are, you must, of course, do what you feel is necessary.”

The conversation
was interrupted as they emerged into the cross-chamber that linked in the rear set of airlocks and maintenance outriggers. An open cross-section of the
Jay
’s keel, the room was large enough to be difficult to crowd, but with everyone floating free in zero-gravity, the gunship cadre crews were managing it.

“Major Niska,” one of the officers greeted the Augment as
he and David entered the room. “Captain Rice,” she added after a moment, nodding to the man who was merely here to transport her several dozen light years. “Group Commander Harriet
Mons.
If you have quarters ready for us, I think it’s best if we break up this incipient clusterfuck.”

“Where’s Jenna?” David asked before noticing
his First Officer tied up with several of the blue-uniformed officers.

“
She’s dealing with some of my prima-donnas who are worried about scratching their paint,” Mons replied. “Let me shut them up and we can get some order in place here.”

Moments later, Mons arrived,
forcefully, in the middle of the conversation Jenna was having with the gunship crew. David couldn’t hear the conversation, but it looked rather like she was telling them to listen to Jenna.

“All right,”
he bellowed, years of practice projecting his voice across the echoing compartment. “Everyone, look to Officer Campbell,” he pointed at Jenna. “She is responsible for getting you to your quarters. Cause her any more trouble, and your quarters will be in the smelliest latrine we can find on the ship. Am I clear?!”

The silence that answered
was only broken by Mons’ chuckling. Finally clear of the previously un-relenting set of officers, now looking thoroughly cowed by the Group Commander, Jenna promptly had the crews moving with her usual efficiency.

Five minutes later, Mons, Niska, and David were alone on the
Jay
’s bridge.

“What is
our ETA at Mercedes?” Mons asked.

“
I’ll have to confirm with my Ship’s Mage,” David admitted. “Once Jenna has your crews settled, we’ll be clearing to accelerate out-system. Mercedes is forty light years from here, one of the furthest MidWorlds, so it’ll be eleven to twelve days.”

“That’s about what
I expected,” the Group Commander accepted with a nod. “I’m impressed so far, Captain Rice. If there is anything you need me for – and especially of any of my pack of super-intelligent monkeys give your crew any trouble – feel free to contact me.”

She
turned to Niska. “Once you’ve discussed your security plans with the Captain, please meet me in my quarters, Major. We have some matters to discuss.”

Mons shook David’s
hand and left the bridge, leaving him alone with the Augment Major once more.