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

length on each one, so we have no shortage of space. There’s a saying in the merchant fleet – ‘cubage is cheap, mass is expensive.’” She gestured at the doors they were passing. “We have individual cabins for one hundred and sixty people, almost twice our crew, but crew are restricted to less than one hundred kilos of personal possessions.”
    “Do we ever carry passengers?” Damien asked.
    “Sometimes,” she confirmed. “We keep Rib Four’s cabins empty for just that purpose, actually. I’d say we have passengers maybe a quarter of the time – we’re no luxury cruise liner though.”
    She palmed the scanner by one of the cabins and the door slid open. “Put your palm on the scanner,” she ordered, and Damien obeyed. After a moment, the device beeped at him.
    “It’s now keyed to you,” Jenna told him. “The captain or I can override it if we have cause, but no one else can enter your rooms.”
    Damien almost missed the plural until he stepped into the cabin. The room was bigger than the space he’d rented on Sherwood Prime, though it only contained a single, extremely lightweight, couch, an entertainment screen, and a desk.
    “Bedroom to the right, bathroom straight ahead,” Jenna told him. “You can pick up some furnishings on the station if you want, but, like I said, one hundred kilos max. The Captain and I have the same restriction – mass is expensive,” she concluded with a grin.
    “Thank you,” Damien told her, looking around the living room with a small degree of shock. “Are all the cabins like this?” he finally asked.
    “This is an officer’s cabin,” she admitted. “The crew cabins are only a single room and the workspace requires you to sit on the bed, but they still have the couch and entertainment screens. Blue Jay ’s first owners outfitted her for the long runs in the Fringe – it makes sense to keep the crew in style if you’re in the boonies for months at a time.”
    The Mage nodded, dropping his single bag – much less than a hundred kilos – on the bench, and looking around for a moment.
    “Where is the simulacrum chamber?” he finally asked, figuring getting to work was probably a good idea.
    Jenna laughed. “You’ve been on the ship less than ten minutes, and we aren’t leaving port for at least three days,” she told him. “In any case, I have to get back to the bridge for a conference call with the repair company and our insurance agent. How about you get unpacked and grab a bite to eat, and I’ll give you the grand tour at eighteen hundred hours?”
    Damien looked around the somewhat excessive cabin and at his tiny bag. Unpacking wouldn’t take him long, but he could probably order some useful items through the communications net for delivery if he had three days.
    “Call it a plan,” he agreed.

#
    Damien took about forty minutes to unpack his few belongings and lock them away in the drawers set into the wall of his bedroom next to the lightweight bedframe. The bedroom shared the front room’s lack of any major pieces of furniture, containing only the bedframe and two sets of shelves set into the wall. A handful of the drawers contained the multi-point clips that substituted for hangars when you were traveling in zero-gravity, so he placed his two dress jackets and the eight half-necked dress shirts that were formal wear for mages in them to keep them un-wrinkled.
    Fully unpacked, he found himself with over an hour before he was supposed to meet Jenna for the tour of the ship, so he pulled up a map of the ship on the screen in his sitting room and began to study it.
    His stomach allowed him long enough to locate the mess hall on Rib Four before loudly growling at him, and he realized he hadn’t eaten since before Grace had arrived at his hotel. With a grin at his own forgetfulness, he took mental note of the location of the mess and headed out into the ship’s halls.
    The half-gravity that Blue Jay maintained wasn’t much lighter than the