Starship's Mage: Episode 2 Read Free Page A

pulling the chip containing the formal contract between himself and Captain David Rice from the pocket of his blazer.
    She grunted. “Give it here.” He passed her the chip, and she slotted it into the reader on her desk. A holographic screen shimmered into existence at a wave of her hand, displaying the information.
    “This says you signed the contract in the Sherwood system almost two weeks ago,” she observed. “You should have registered it there.”
    “ It slipped our minds while we were preparing for departure,” he told her. In truth, the Mage-Governor of Sherwood had unofficially blacklisted the Blue Jay from taking on a Jump Mage, so he and David hadn’t believed that they would have been permitted to register the contract in Sherwood.
    The woman at the desk grunted , clearly unconvinced, and hit a few more keys on her projected keyboard.
    “Well, it’s registered now. Charge to your ship?”
    “Yes,” Damien confirmed, then reeled off the local account number for the Blue Jay.
    “Done,” she said, ejecting the chip and passing it back to him. “Anything else?”
    Damien shook his head, but paused as he turned to leave.
    “Do you know why the Guildhouse here is so fortified?” he asked. Anything further from the airy, sprawling complex of bungalows in Sherwood City that served his home was hard to imagine.
    She sighed. “Corinthian Prime was built fifty years ago,” she told him. “Just before that, there was a bombing in Corinth City that killed two Mages and twelve bystanders. Two more Mages were killed in the ensuing riots, and both the Guilds and the Governor agreed that moving the Guilds somewhere more securable and out-of-the-way was a good idea.”
    The woman, a senior ranked but still mundane employee of the Guild, shrugged. “It’s only been ten years or so since it became illegal to bar Mages from a restaurant or store,” she told him, some of her earlier gruffness lost in the sad tone of her voice. “If the government didn’t think flouting the Charter laws around segregation was going to impede their effort to get the first MidWorlds Fleet Yard, I think you’d still see every second or third restaurant with a ‘No Dogs or Mages’ sign.”
    Damien winced.
    “That’s… different than I’m used to,” he admitted. “Thanks for explaining.”
    She shook her head.
    “Wish I didn’t have to,” she told him. “Step carefully, Mage Montgomery. There’s a reason your kind built themselves a fortress here.”

#
    The first day on station was a blur for David. Bistro had taken them up on the offer for twenty-four hour offloading, so he’d had to arrange hotels for everyone. He’d then touched base with his insurance, a surprisingly un-confrontational appointment where they’d taken his telemetry data and confirmed within twenty minutes that they would cover the repairs under the piracy clause.
    He settled into his hotel room, an expensive one in the docking area with magical artificial gravity that allowed him a view of the Blue Jay from the window. David watched the ships and robot arms swarm over his ship, detaching the cargo containers and slowly transporting them to the station. From there automated transfer tubes whisked them away to either destinations on the stations, or transfer shuttles to carry them to the sky-tether that would deliver them to the surface.
    Each container removed from the Blue Jay was a check mark in his mental book, and in many cases, a literal entry in the ship’s ledgers. Unless he’d missed his math, even with the repairs from the pirate attack, the revenue from this trip would allow him to make the last payment on the ten billion dollar note he’d taken out to finance acquiring the Blue Jay a decade ago. It would take time for the funds, encoded in a deep bank cipher, to make their way back to the Martian banking syndicate that had financed him, but under Protectorate Law, once he sent the money, the Blue Jay was completely his.
    Now if only