Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) Read Free Page A

started to float away when his eyeballs had exploded out of his head.
    The Blue Jay ’s only Ship’s Mage, the youngest son of the Mage-Governor of the planet they’d just arrived at, was very, very dead.
     
    #
     
    Damien woke up to bright lights and white walls, blinking as he slowly realized that he could breathe and wasn’t in pain, both facts a minor surprise after having a human-mountain hybrid try to choke him to death.
    He managed to make it about a quarter of the way into a sitting position before a nurse realized what he was doing, arriving in time to stop him from collapsing back onto the clinic bed he was occupying.
    As the brunette clad in light blue scrubs helped him upright, he glanced around a room that any citizen of a Protectorate world would recognize. The Charter defined a minimum standard of health care as a human right for governments to provide, and Olympus Mons helped meet that standard by providing funding and a standard pre-fabricated clinic-in-a-box with a certain set of diagnostic and medical tools.
    “Hold still,” the nurse ordered once she had Damien upright. This was followed by a series of scanners, pokes and prods. Apparently finished, she grunted and disappeared out of the clinic room with a sharp “Stay here.”
    Still dizzy, Damien thought that might have been the most useless instruction ever. The room slowly stopped spinning while he waited, but the nurse eventually returned with three other people.
    The last of the three newcomers was the spacer from the Gentle Rains of Summer . In front was an iron-haired gentleman in a white lab coat reading over a datapad the nurse had passed him as they entered the room. In between was a tall redheaded woman in the dark blue uniform of Sherwood System Security.
    “I am Doctor Anderson,” the man introduced himself. “This young lady is nurse Kosta – remember to thank her on your way out.
    “You are lucky to be alive, young man,” the doctor continued, setting the datapad down next to Damien’s bed. “Your trachea was damaged and several of your ribs were cracked. The dizziness will fade, though you will be very tired for a day or two – a normal side effect of the bone-mending process.”
    The doctor asked him a few questions, ran a more complex scanner the nurse hadn’t used over him, and nodded in satisfaction.
    “We’ll keep you in tonight for observation, but you’ll be free to go in the morning,” Anderson told Damien. “If there’s anything that needs to be taken care of at your home – pets to feed or a girlfriend to let know - let Kosta know and we’ll get it taken care of.”
    “Neither,” Damien told him, coughing to clear his throat after he spoke. “Thank you.”
    “Now, Kosta and I will leave you with Captain Harrison,” the doctor continued. He turned to the SSS officer. “You have fifteen minutes,” he said sternly, “and then I am kicking you out of my clinic, clear?”
    “Perfectly, Doctor. Thank you,” the Security officer said calmly.
    The doctor shuffled out, and Captain Harrison pulled two chairs up beside Damien’s bed, gesturing for the spacer to sit.
    “I kept Mr. Casey here around as I figured you’d want to thank the man who saved your life,” she said quietly. “Brian Kendall – the thug who worked you over – is known to System Security. Given the number you’d done on him, he was going to kill you. Mr. Casey’s intervention prevented that, and his witness statement is going to put him behind bars for a very long time… after the doctors finish fixing his knee. That was you, I presume?”
    Damien nodded. “I… didn’t think he would keep coming after that,” he admitted. “I was trying to calm things down.”
    “With most thugs, that’ll work,” Casey told him with a small smile. “But that Kendall… ‘e seemed a piece of work.”
    “Thank you,” Damien told the spacer. “I’m not even sure why you were there, but Captain Harrison is right – he was going to