Starship's Mage: Episode 1 by Glynn Stewart Read Free Book Online

and arched an eyebrow at him.
    “I brought the cart to help carry your stuff, but I see that wasn’t necessary. Light packer?” she asked.
    “I lived alone, I didn’t have or need much,” Damien admitted. “Anything specific I should make sure to have?”
    “Not really,” the heavy-set officer told him. “Food and such are included in your pay. Grab the cart, let’s get aboard.”
    Damien grabbed onto the cart and pushed it forward, keeping a hand on it as it drifted through the zero-gravity boarding dock. Not much more than a metal tray with clips for keepings objects attached to it, the cart was useful to keeping things from drifting away while moving through zero-gravity zones such as the central hub of Sherwood Prime, and the transfer tube that linked it to the keel of the Blue Jay .
    “The Blue Jay is a Venice class freighter,” Jenna told him as she kicked off into the tube. “We’re rated for three megatons of cargo – three hundred standard ten thousand cubic meter cargo containers at their max mass.”
    “To carry that, she’s almost a full kilometer long, with four rotating gravity ribs. With a crew of eighty-five, we have quite a bit of cubage to give people living space.” She paused as they entered the main lock and gestured to a storage rack on the side of the plain room. “Since you’ve just the one bag, stow the cart there.”
    Damien obeyed, carefully propping himself as he slung the bag back over his own shoulder.
    “Through here is the rear access point for the ribs,” Jenna continued, launching skillfully and catching the handle by the open door out of the loading zone. The room beyond the door held four ‘elevators’ that would spin up to match the ribs, and then slide into tubes heading out to the edge of the ship.
    “Your cabin is on Rib Three,” she told him, “the same cabin as the last Ship’s Mage.”
    “Don’t worry,” she said after a pause, “we already sent all of his stuff onto his family.”
    “What happened to him?” Damien asked, following her into one of the elevators “We were jumped by pirates,” Jenna told him grimly as she carefully oriented herself feet-first towards the outside of the ship before hitting the button to start the tiny cab rotating around the ship. “Kenneth jumped us before he should have and burnt himself out.”
    Damien wasn’t sure if the bottom fell out of his stomach due to the memory of the lectures he’d had on over-exerting his magic, with attendant pictures of the results, or the sudden acceleration induced shift in apparent gravity.
    “Are pirates common?” he asked slowly, holding onto the safety railing and determinedly ignoring his inner ear’s confusion.
    “In the Fringe and the UnArcana Worlds where the Navy is sparse, they can be,” she said quietly. “But normally a major Midworlds system like Sherwood is so safe as to be boring.”
    The sensation of gravity changed again as the elevator stopped accelerating sideways and Damien’s stomach lurched as the pod shot outwards towards the rib.
    When it finally came to an apparent halt, there was a comfortable sense of about half a gravity of centrifugal force, and Damien breathed a sigh of relief.
    “The elevators take some getting used to,” Jenna told him with a grin. “But you do get used to them.”
    She led the way out of the elevator, pointing out the stairs leading ‘down’ towards the outside of the ship. “Each rib is arranged in four decks,” she explained. “The outermost deck is storage, systems, and radiation shielding. Quarters are on the inner two decks, and working spaces on deck three. Follow me; I’ll take you to your cabin.”
    Damien’s cabin, it turned out, was on Deck One of Rib Three – the innermost deck.
    “The ribs are about two-thirds the length of the overall hull,” Jenna told him as she led him along the corridor. “Even after curvature, shielding, and the rotation motors, there’s about five hundred meters of usable