Starship's Mage: Episode 4 (8 page)

“What the
fuck
?” Seule exclaimed over the comms channel.

“Those were boarding torpedoes, old
Navy issue,” David said grimly. “Someone was trying to sneak up on us – if Damien hadn’t been practicing, I think at least some would have made it through.”

Unlike his Mage, David
knew that each of those torpedoes was rated to carry eighteen soldiers, and that Damien had probably just killed almost three hundred people.

“I meant, what the
fuck
did your ship just
do
?!”

“You’re alive,
Captain Seule,” Rice told him flatly. “I suggest you stop asking questions you don’t want to know the answer to and collect your shuttles.”

The red-shirted man on the other
ship threw up his hands.

“Fine, keep your secrets
Captain – they ain’t no business of mine, you’re right,” he told Rice. “But what the hell gets someone to launch that kind of op to try and catch you?”

“Money and revenge,” Rice said grimly.
“We hurt a bounty hunter bad a few weeks back – if he could find us, he’d throw that at us.”

He didn’t need
to explain the value of the
Jay
’s amplifier. If the other man guessed what Damien had just done, he could guess why the Syndicate would want David’s ship.

Seule
sighed.

“Listen,
Captain – you need to get out of everyone’s sight it seems,” he told Rice. “Head to Darkport – you should be able to bury yourself in the mess there, maybe upgrade your ship and find some extra cargo to take wherever you’re going.”

“
Darkport is a myth,” David pointed out. Rumor mentioned a place by that name – an asteroid complex in an otherwise uninhabited system, where no authority ran. Amber was Libertarian – but Darkport was an anarchic hellhole, if it even existed.

“It exists,”
Seule told him. “More importantly for your little problem, it’s a neutral zone for bounty hunters – if they try and claim a bounty on the station, they’re banned for life. Assuming they survive to leave at all.”

“Sounds like somewhere we
could begin to recharge,” David admitted. “But since I didn’t even believe it existed, I don’t have the co-ordinates.”

“
Sending them over,” Seule told him with a grin. “Tell ‘em Seule sent you, that’ll get you a docking berth if nothing more.”

“David, the Graveyard!” Jenna suddenly
interrupted, shouting and pointing at the screen in a moment of panic.

Graveyard
Station was just over eight light seconds from where they’d rendezvoused – almost two and a half million kilometers. Emerging over the shadow of the stations massive, sensor-blocking bulk was the characteristic white flare of antimatter thrusters.

A
familiar looking jump yacht came around the alien station, the same ovoid vessel that had picked up the shuttles from the failed boarding attempt in Chrysanthemum. This time, however, the other ship clearly wasn’t planning on running. As soon as the bounty hunter ship was clear of her cover, she opened fire.

Whatever the
ship had originally been built as, she’d clearly been heavily upgraded since. No less than twelve missiles shot forward from the front of the ‘yacht,’ already carrying a significant velocity before more antimatter thrusters flickered into existence.

These weren’t the normal, dirt-cheap, fusion thruster rockets of an
ordinary pirate. The missiles blazing towards the
Blue Jay
were the missiles the Martian Navy had used during David’s own service twenty years before – and would cross the eight light-second gap in under three minutes.

“Clear the
RFLAMs,” he ordered Jenna. “Get us a course directly away from that asshole. Damien – the RFLAMs are
not
rated for military grade missiles. Can you do what you did to the boarding torps?”

Damien lifted his gaze to meet David’s through the camera, and the
Captain was shocked to see that the youth’s eyes were bloodshot and exhausted, like he’d just finished an all-night bender.

“I don’t
know,” he whispered, barely loud enough for David to hear. “I don’t think I’m strong enough.”

“Do what you can,” David told him.
“You’ve already saved us all once today.”

The young man nodded slowly, and
returned his hands to the silver miniature of the
Blue Jay
.

David
returned his own gaze to the sensors showing the space around him. Acceleration was pressing him back into his chair now, as Jenna pointed his freighter away from the pursuing bounty hunter. The
Blue Jay
’s three gravities of emergency acceleration was
nothing
compared to the pursuing missiles.

“
Entering laser range,” Jenna said grimly, her fingers dancing across her console as she opened fire. The ship’s computer superimposed the invisible laser beams on their screen, and a pair of missiles disappeared as she scored direct hits.

Then the entire region of space around the missiles dissolved into
gray static on the screen as the missiles, real military weapons, engaged their electronic counter measures and turned the
Blue Jay
’s sensor beams to hash.

“I can’t get a bead,” Jenna exclaimed.
“I can’t even estimate time to impact.”

David hit a button on his controls that took over direct control of the turrets from her, and then brought up a program he’d ‘borrowed’ from the Martian
Navy years before. The turrets started to fire again, sweeping cuts designed to try and cover as much space as possible.

He glanced at the link to Damien.
The Mage could see slightly better through the
Jay
’s sensors than they could. What the laser pattern missed, the Mage
might
be able to stop – but David wasn’t sure he’d like the price.

The static cloud of the missiles grew ever closer to the
Blue Jay
. There was a flash that might have been the lasers hitting a missile. A couple more. Even in the best case, he couldn’t stop the remaining missiles before they reached his ship.

For a long moment, David Rice
knew, once again, that he and his crew were going to die.

Then an immense explosion erupted in space where the missiles had been.
Antimatter flared and died as
dozens
of sub-munitions swept through the bounty hunters salvo. The static flashed and disappeared, revealing a single surviving missile, still running desperately towards the
Blue Jay
.

The
Luciole
swept past it, a military grade missile defense turret swatting it from space contemptuously as her
own
missile launchers spat fire back at the bounty hunter, and the image of Captain Seule appeared on Rice’s screen.

“I was starting to feel hurt that
everybody had forgot us,” he said cheerfully. “Get out of here, Captain. I aim to teach a lesson here - one that
fils a putain de lignage déloyal
won’t forget!”

“Do you have the co-ordinates Seule sent us?” David asked over the bridge link as Damien gently massaged his temples.

“I’ve got them,” he replied, slowly.
“I’ll need at least an hour to run the calculations and recover from the attack before I can jump.”

On his screens, Damien watched the running battle between the
Luciole
and the bounty hunter. Recognizing the greater immediate threat, the bounty hunter had launched a second salvo of missiles at the blockade runner – which had responded by demonstrating that it mounted four military grade battle-lasers concealed under its radiation cap.

They’d scored at least one hit, and then the
bounty hunter ship had turned and run. Blazing away at a full ten gravities – the ship
had
to have magical gravity – the bounty hunter had ducked behind Graveyard Station even as Seule had used a second multi-warhead missile to wipe away the missiles aimed at his ship.

Then Damien felt the strange, almost
indescribable to a non-Mage, sensation of a nearby jump. The hunter was gone.

Resting
his head in his hands against the
Blue Jay
’s own acceleration, he checked that his computer was running the new jump details for the first jump of their course to Darkport. A glance at the co-ordinates themselves revealed why Seule had suggested they head to the outlaw port. Darkport was in a system less than ten light years from Excelsior.

Th
at system was supposedly completely uninhabited. It had no habitable worlds, and lacked the extra appeal of multiple exposed planetary cores that had brought a dedicated mining operation to Excelsior. It held just a single gas giant, a sparse asteroid belt, and a couple of heat-seared rock balls orbiting a bloated and radiation-spewing giant red star.

Seule’s
ship was quickly lost in the debris field of the Lagrange point as the
Blue Jay
flew outwards, towards the spaces clear of debris that Damien could jump from. He needed the time to recover from defending the ship against the first attack more than anything else.

He wondered how many people he’d just killed.
He knew nothing about boarding torpedoes, and he knew that looking them up right now was probably a bad idea. His defense had cut so close that he suspected if he
hadn’t
been spending his time studying the more advanced Enforcer combat spells he wouldn’t have been able to stop them all.

If someone had been judging what a Mage with Damien’s formal training and an
amplifier could do, and based their attack plan on that… they’d planned exceedingly well. He would have failed, and his friends would have been captured or killed.

The spell had taken a lot
out of him though. Not as much as a jump – he would be ready to jump before the calculations were complete – but more than any defense spell he’d known before. He couldn’t repeat that kind of attack.

Sighing
, Damien starting reviewing the complete parts of his jump calculation. Stopping the boarding torpedoes had proven one thing to him – he wasn’t strong enough. An Enforcer or a Navy Mage would have been able to do what he did and then carry on and take out the missiles too. A Navy Mage might be better trained for it, but a lot of it was also sheer power.

If they ever had to face a true warship, with a
functioning amplifier and trained Navy Mages, there was nothing Damien would be able to do to save the
Blue Jay
.

Deep space jump layovers were the safest place Damien knew of. Exhausted and battered from defending the ship and jumping, he passed out almost as soon as he made it back to his quarters. He barely registered Kelly joining him several hours later, waking up barely enough to shift over for the engineer to join him.

They were both
violently awoken by a sudden burst of emergency acceleration that threw them from the bed as the clanging acceleration alarm began to ring throughout the ship.

Damien, half-naked, stumbled to his intercom and triggered it.

“What’s happening?” he demanded.

“The
hunter is
here
,” Jenna told him. “Get to the Simulacrum Chamber –
fuck he just launched missiles
.”

Damien was already moving by the time the
XO had stopped swearing. He didn’t even bother with a shirt, directing his personal field of gravity to sling him out of his quarters and along the corridor of Rib Four. Whatever damage Seule’s
Luciole
had done to the bounty hunter’s ship clearly hadn’t been enough.

In the back of his mind, he was counting seconds as he charged
through the ship. Everyone else aboard was crushed to the side by the three gravities of acceleration, but he burned magic recklessly to pull himself through the ship.

With thirty seconds to spare, he saw the
Simulacrum Chamber at the end of the hallway. Breathing deeply, he kicked off and added his magic
to
the three gravities of acceleration the
Blue Jay
was pulling. A flick of power popped the door open before he hit it, and then he was in the Chamber, heading for the Simulacrum and the platform under it for when the ship was under acceleration.

He missed the
Simulacrum.

His right leg hit the
platform and
snapped
, the heart-wrenching noise echoing through the oval chamber at the heart of the ship as the pain slammed into him.

Damien didn’t check to see where the missiles were.
He didn’t look to see how close he’d cut it. He
somehow
drove the pain down, and slapped his bare palms onto the silver Simulacrum.

He looked up to see the missiles screaming towards him, in final
acquisition, and
jumped
.