Starship's Mage: Episode 5 (10 page)

“I’ll think about it?” Amiri offered slowly. “Once Azure is dead or rotting in a prison.”

“Either way, you have the sworn oath of a Guild Bounty Hunter that I will keep your secrets, Hand Alaura Stealey, unto death or your betrayal of our contract.”

“Good enough,” Alaura accepted. She tapped a sequence of commands on her wrist personal computer and the bookshelves on the wall slid sideways, revealing a small opening into the secret workspace built beside her office. “Come with me.”

Alaura led the Tracker into the hidden Star Mirror chamber and gestured her to the computers and modeling tank.

“There’s your modeling tank,” she told her. “This room is locked, and only I have access to it. No one will disturb you.”

Amiri looked around in surprise.

“Why do you have a full-size sensor cluster
inside
the ship?” she asked, her gaze locking on the massive array of scanners that occupied fully half of the room. “And what’s with the shiny mirror?”

“Once you have identified the
Blue Jay
’s destination, I will use this to scout ahead,” Alaura said quietly. “It’s a Star Mirror, and there are very few of them in existence. The skills require to build one are so rare they may as well as not exist, but with it, I can look across the stars to make sure we are not jumping into a trap.”

The Bounty Hunter stared at the silver-framed mirror in shock and awe.

“That’s
impossible
,” she whispered. “Bringing light from a
light year
away?”

“You live in a world of magic and starships that travel by spell; and you find
that
impossible?” Alaura asked dryly. “For that matter, you can track a jump, and many would call that impossible.”

“I have hunted Mages, Lady Hand,” Amiri told her quietly. “I made a point to know what they can do, and this isn’t even in the possibilities I’ve studied.”

“There are artifacts that can be made that are beyond what most believe possible,” Alaura agreed. “A small handful of them are available to the Hands of the Mage-King, that we can do his will.”

Julia Amiri crossed to the mirror and gently, reverently, touched the corded silver that surrounded it.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” she muttered, “who’s the
scariest
of them all…”

“That would be my boss,” Stealey told her. “Now let’s find our running Mage.”

#

Having slept for six more hours before jumping again, Damien was finally feeling something close to human when he joined the
Blue Jay
’s other senior officers in the Captain’s dining room. His own personal clock was sufficiently warped by trying to recover from his six rapid jumps that the Captain was actually serving supper.

The meal wasn’t one of David’s flights of culinary fancy, but the conversation stayed determinedly on lighter subjects until the last of the pasta had been cleared away. Then, the Captain leaned back and looked at his crew.

“I don’t know how much time we’re going to have,” he said quietly. “We’re pushing Damien as hard as we
safely
can, but that cruiser has multiple Jump Mages and has proven they can follow our jumps. They’re going to catch up to us, and we have no onboard weapons, no boxes full of missiles. We need a plan.”

There was silence around the table. Damien glanced around at his fellows, hoping Kellers, Jenna or Kelzin had a thought or an idea.

“Whatever we do, we have to end this,” Jenna said quietly. “Chasing them away again won’t save us – we physically cannot hide a starship in the Fringe, and we can’t go back into the MidWorlds.”

“We can’t run either,” Kelzin said quietly, looking at Damien with a concern that suggested that he still looked worse than he was feeling. “Damien can’t outrun a ship with multiple Mages on his own.”

“We can’t run, and we can’t hide – but we can’t fight either!” Kellers objected. “If we’d time to get
any
weapons mounted, maybe we could come up with some kind of trick to get them close enough, but the only thing we have are anti-missile turrets. Those won’t even scratch the cruiser’s hull.”

“Come on people,” David said loudly. “There has to be
something
. I refuse to accept that we are going to end up in those bastards’ hands.”

“We could blow the ship,” Jenna said quietly. “If we know we can’t run, self-destruct. I, for one,” she continued as she looked around at the others, “prefer that to being tortured to death. If this has to end, let’s end it on
our
terms.”

“No,” Damien said quietly, and everyone turned to look at him. “We’re not out of options yet.”

Everyone looked at him in silence, letting him corral his thoughts. He still had the rune pattern in his quarters. So many things could go wrong, but…

“Jenna’s right,” he finally continued. “This has to end. So let’s end it in fire –
our
fire.”

“You have a plan,” David said flatly.

“It’s risky,” Damien admitted. “It could easily kill me. But if it works…”

“If you die, we’re all dead anyway,” Jenna objected, and Damien rounded on her.

“You just admitted we’re all dead!” he snapped. “Do you think I
want
to risk blowing out my own damned nervous system?”

“I have a rune,” he explained, “that I picked up on Darkport. They took it from the arm of a Hand of the Mage-King, and it was tied to that man’s own power. I
think
I can modify it to work for me, and I think it would increase the range I can affect with the amplifier.”

David considered for a long moment before nodding.

“Do you need anything from the rest of us?” he asked.

“Faith,” Damien said quietly. “Any good luck you can spare, too. This could go very wrong.”

#

The plain sheet of portrait board seemed an oddly prosaic piece of backing for a rune whose existence was probably as secret as the possibility you could turn a jump matrix into an amplifier. Next to it on Damien’s workstation was the stretched out skin of the fallen Hand, and Damien was slowly recreating the rune in a silver-based paint.

He heard the door open behind him, and the heavy thud of a brawnier person entering the magical gravity field his workshop maintained.

“Boss,” he greeted David softly.

“How bad can it really get, Damien?” his Captain asked behind him.

The young Mage considered, studying the weak energy flow in the inactive rune in front of him. He scraped off part of a line, recreating it two centimeters over.

“I’m trying to create a tailored and controlled thaumic feedback loop,” Damien finally answered. “If I really screw up, I miss the loop and just feed the energy back into myself. That will be fatal. Painfully so, but quick and contained.”

“And the real worst case scenario?”

“I get it
almost
right and lose control of the feedback loop,” the Mage admitted. “That would… well, the
Blue Jay
wouldn’t survive. It would be even quicker though – no one would ever know something had gone wrong.”

David’s hand descended on his shoulder in a firm grip.

“You can do this, right?” the Captain asked, his voice very quiet.

“Eighty-twenty,” Damien admitted with a sigh. “I can’t promise better.”

“I trust you,” David said. “Is there anything we can do?”

“Tell Kelly where to find me?” Damien asked. “This is about done, and I’m not sure I want to be alone when I do this.”

This
was ‘cut lines in my own flesh and pour molten silver into them.’ He was pretty sure he needed moral support for that.

“She’s already waiting outside,” David told him with a chuckle. “Good luck Damien.”

#

“So how are you planning to try to kill yourself to save us all this time?” Kelly asked. The petite engineer, responsible for saving everyone aboard the ship herself at least twice Damien could think of, dropped herself into the single extra chair in the workshop.

“This,” Damien pointed to the rune he’d finally finished drawing on the board. “If I’ve done this right, this rune will increase my own magical abilities around three-fold, allowing me to reach even further with the amplifier and do more damage.”

“My lack of strength has held us back before,” he admitted. “If this works, it won’t anymore – I’ll be stronger than any Mage that doesn’t have a rune like it.”

“If this rune is so powerful, why doesn’t every Mage already have it?” Kelly asked, eyeing the silver design with concern.

“Writing in a script wouldn’t work,” Damien explained. “I had to shape it to my own power, matching it
exactly
to myself. Whoever did this one,” he gestured at the case with its preserved skin, “had to be able to see the flow of power, the same way I do.”

“So, what, you think the Hands have access to someone who sees like you?” she asked. “I’ve looked it up Damien – what you describe is
unique
.”

“Or secret,” he admitted. “So secret even system Guildmasters don’t know about it.”

“And you’re going to tattoo this into your own skin?”

“I
wish
it was a tattoo,” Damien told her grimly. “It’s closer to an inlay, much as they did on my palms. It’s a very specific mix of silver, polymers, and some other materials that I have to pour into carefully aligned cuts in my skin.” He showed the runes on his palm to her and she touched it gently, running her fingers over the hard yet flexible ridge of the rune.

“Can I help?” Kelly asked, meeting his eyes.

“I’m going to have to do it with magic,” Damien told her. “It’s… not going to be safe in here.”

“Can I help?” she repeated, smiling at him.

“It would work better if someone else transferred the pattern to my arm,” he admitted. “And then, well…” He smiled. “I wouldn’t object if you wanted to stay and hold my hand. This is going to hurt.”

Kelly moved closer to him, setting up the lights carefully as he laid his right arm out flat for her to work on. With both his arm and the diagram lit, she studied the original skin for a minute, and then picked up with brush he’d been using on the picture.

“There is a tiny amount of silver in the paint,” Damien told her. “It’s enough to allow me to judge if the rune is correct. What you’re laying is a stencil I can use as a target for the magic in a minute – the closer you can match the diagram, the better.”

“Damien, I’m an engineer. I was trained in drafting,” she reminded him. “Now, shush and let me work.”

The workshop was quiet as she slowly, delicately, and carefully duplicated the rune structure on the diagram on his arm. Only the tiniest of trickles of energy flowed through the silver solution, but Damien watched it carefully as it drew sparks from his own energy. In some ways, this was the most dangerous part for
him
.

“It’s done,” Kelly finally said, leaning back. “What now?”

“Grab the block of silver from the other workbench,” Damien asked. Once that was laid beside his arm, he closed his eyes for a long moment. “Now is the part where you just hold my hand,” he told her.

Shifting around him, Kelly settled her hand on his left, gently but firmly squeezing. Damien gave her a grateful nod, and then focused his power on the tiny ingot of silver and polymer. Power flickered into it, and it rose off the workbench and began to melt.

He spun it out in thin air, the molten metal warming the air of the room as he drew the pattern of his rune in silver and power. The liquid metal moved smoothly to the commands of his power, and then slowly descended over his arm. This was both the most dangerous part, and the most painful

The rune hovered so close the molten metal was burning the hairs on his skin. Damien took a deep breath, and squeezed Kelly’s hand back.

Then, as quickly as he could, he slashed out with his magic. Tiny lines of force flashed along the pattern of energy and silver Kelly had painted on his skin, and blood welled as he cut open his own flesh.

Before the pain could really sink in, he slammed the rune closed upon his arm.

Damien Montgomery screamed. Molten silver sank into the wounds he’d opened in his skin, cauterizing the wounds even as his magic cooled the silver, knitting skin around it. His entire arm was alive with pain, but he focused on the magic, cooling the silver, stretching skin, stitching wounds closed.

Then, suddenly, it was done. The heat in his arm flashed to impossible intensity, and then spread through his body in a tumultuous rush that took his breath away.
Power
filled him, a cascading, looping, growing sense of strength like nothing he’d ever felt before.

Breathing sharply, he controlled it. His new-found strength rippled through him, but he contained it. His entire body felt full of heat and electricity, but he damped it, brought it back down to something resembling normal – as if he would ever be normal again.