Starship's Mage: Episode 2 Read Free Page B

people would stop shooting at his ship.

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    “Is there any part of the matrix we can let another Mage inspect?” Kellers asked as Damien crawled under the fresh welding in Rib Four.
    Damien’s ‘holiday’ had come to an abrupt end as soon as the two days of offloading were complete and the repair crews started swarming over the ship.
    “In theory, anywhere not attached to the seven matrixes I highlighted on the chart,” Damien told him. Those seven were the matrixes that prevented a jump matrix from acting as a general amplifier for all spells instead of just the jump spell.
    “In practice,” the young Ship’s Mage shrugged, eyeing the glitter of energy along the runes and checking for errors, “I would want to review all of the runes around the work anyway , so not wanting someone to see what I did to the matrix just adds to the urgency.”
    He paused, noting a set of runes where the energy didn’t flow quite right. “Pass me the inlayer?” he asked the engineer.
    With a bright white grin, the engineer passed the tool over.
    “ I’ll sell it to my guys as professional skepticism, I think,” Kellers told him. “I don’t think we want to explain to everyone on the ship just what you did.”
    Damien carefully drew the engraving tool along the line his gift showed him. A tiny laser burned a trench into the steel, and a soldering iron attachment filled the trench with silver inlay. He pulled the inlayer away and looked at the runes again. He wasn’t actually sure the runes had been damaged when the repair crew had replaced the conduits, or when they’d originally burnt out from the corona of the pirate laser that had disabled the engines. Either way, it would work now.
    “The fact that it’s not supposed to be possible helps with that,” he said dryly, shivering a little at the thought of the entire crew knowing what he’d done to the ship. The Blue Jay ’s crew of eighty-plus were good people, but spacers weren’t exactly known for their tact and discretion.
    Kellers laughed sharply.
    “ I thought ships were supposed to blow up if you jump with a damaged matrix,” he continued, his dark face grim for a moment.
    “ They usually do,” Damien admitted, shivering again, and sliding out from under the conduits. “These runes are good. They’re still working on the bow cap?”
    “ The engineering firm said they’d have the new RFLAM turret installed by the end of today, but weren’t going to be working on the plating until tomorrow,” the engineer told him. Rapid-Fire-Laser-Anti-Missile turrets were mounted on all merchant ships, their first defense against pirates with missiles.
    “Hold on one moment,” Kellers continued as Damien continued to pack up. “What do you mean; ships with a modified matrix usually blow up? How the hell did you know we wouldn’t?”
    Damien sighed and finished packing up the tools he used to maintain the ship’s runes.
    “To put it as simply as I can,” he said slowly, “the runes are like a circuit diagram – they control a flow of energy, right?”
    “ I follow so far,” Kellers agreed with a nod, his eyes dark as he held Damien’s gaze.
    “Most Mages know the runes we’ve been taught – think of them as standard circuit diagrams,” Damien continued. “Scribes are taught how to combine the runes into new matrices.” He touched the quill on his collar – he’d qualified as a base level Rune Scribe along the way to his Jump Mage certification, mostly because runes came very easily to him.
    “We have to know the runes and the language around them, because like an electrician, we can’t see the power that flows through the runes, right?”
    “Yeah, but an electrician uses a voltmeter,” Kellers objected.
    “Yep,” Damien agreed. “And we don’t have anything like that. So we don’t modify existing matrices or runes, because it’s dangerous. A damaged jump matrix could leave a ship in pieces across an entire light year.”
    “So why didn’t