Mage-Commander: Starship’s Mage Book Eleven Read online

  Mage-Commander

  Starship’s Mage Book Eleven

  Glynn Stewart

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

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  Preview: Conviction by Glynn Stewart

  Chapter 1

  Conviction by Glynn Stewart

  About the Author

  Other books by Glynn Stewart

  Mage-Commander © 2021 Glynn Stewart

  Illustration © 2021 Jeff Brown

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Published by Faolan’s Pen Publishing. Faolan's Pen Publishing logo is a trademark of Faolan's Pen Publishing Inc.

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  For all the Glynn Stewart news, announcements, and insider information, join the mailing list at GlynnStewart.com/mailing-list

  1

  Roslyn Chambers was feeling very pleased with herself.

  The slim Mage-Commander of the Royal Martian Navy lay naked on her bed, watching the tanned form of her lover as Jalil Abdulrashid dressed in his sharp black uniform. The Lieutenant Commander’s insignia the Earth-native man wore sent a twinge of something resembling worry through her, but she was still mostly basking in her post-orgasmic glow.

  As Abdulrashid glanced back at her with a smile of his own, she carefully adjusted to let the sheet fall away from her body. He chuckled throatily but shook his head and tapped at the computer strapped to his wrist.

  “The corridor is clear right now and might not be later,” he murmured. “I should go.”

  As the blue armband on his uniform declared, Lieutenant Commander Jalil Abdulrashid was Military Police. He was, in fact, Ship’s Marshal of Her Royal Majesty’s cruiser Duke of Magnificence—the senior MP aboard, which gave him full access to the warship’s surveillance systems.

  “Fair,” Roslyn sighed, the last of her glow fading. “Kiss before you go?”

  The redhead—though she still had blond tips from when she’d had time to manage an artificial hair color—was the battlecruiser’s executive officer. Which made her Abdulrashid’s arguable boss…and made them two of the three people on the ship responsible for discovering and discouraging fraternization up and down the chain of command.

  So long as no one else knew, Captain Cemal Hesenov wouldn’t find out and wouldn’t bring the hammer down. Roslyn had no illusions that Hesenov wouldn’t find out if anyone else knew.

  Abdulrashid pressed a quick kiss to her lips, his eyes dancing with amusement at her naked brazenness.

  “I’m on shift in an hour, and everyone needs to see me coming from my quarters,” he noted. “We’ll talk later. Work talk, at least.”

  “I know.” Roslyn concealed a sigh and waved him on his way. She was on duty soon as well. As one of the five trained Jump Mages on the battlecruiser, she was one of the people responsible for flinging Duke of Magnificence across the stars.

  The door silently slid shut behind her lover, and Roslyn took a moment more to enjoy the fleeting remnants of her post-sex glow. It was, if nothing else, better than the almost two years of celibacy she’d suffered as first an Admiral’s Flag Lieutenant and then as a destroyer’s tactical officer.

  She’d been posted to Duke of Magnificence for a year now, since about six months after she’d been promoted to Mage-Commander in the aftermath of the Sorprendidas Incident. She was good at her job…but most of that was by being completely and utterly diligent.

  Her wrist-comp was on the table by her bed and she grabbed it, running through her messages while she stretched. She’d been off shift for six hours and had received no less than forty-five messages. Her quick skim said fifteen of them weren’t immediately relevant to her.

  The other thirty would require her attention, though she already eyeballed five as having to be elevated to Captain Hesenov for the final decision. She’d have to send them with a recommendation, though, which meant even those required work.

  Those five and three others were going to require immediate work, before her official shift began—but after her shower.

  * * *

  Running through the critically important email, Roslyn started going through one of the mental not-quite-distraction games she used to stay focused. As each name came across her screen, she quickly checked whether that NCO or spacer had been aboard Duke of Magnificence when she’d served as the personal transport and immediate backup of Hand Damien Montgomery.

  The answer was almost universally no. It had been four years since the then–First Hand had left Duke of Magnificence to assume command of the Royal Martian Navy force at the Battle of Ardennes. He’d never returned, swept away on the currents of duty.

  Now, the Prince-Chancellor sat at the Mage-Queen’s right hand. And if being the Chancellor of the Protectorate was anything like being executive officer of a cruiser, Montgomery barely had time to see the twin daughters he was raising, let alone consider jumping back on a starship to deal with trouble personally.

  And from her twice-monthly Link conversations with the Prince-Chancellor, Roslyn figured that was an underestimate of his workload. Despite her junior rank, she’d found herself at the heart of several of Montgomery’s problems over the years, and he clearly regarded her as a protégée.

  Roslyn wasn’t entirely sure how Kiera Alexander, the Mage-Queen of Mars, regarded her—but they spoke regularly, both a remnant of Roslyn’s service as the Mage-Queen’s Voice in the Sorprendidas Incident and…something else.

  The executive officer of one of the many cruisers in Mage-Queen Kiera the First’s navy hesitated to call her Queen her friend, but it was closer to that than many other things.

  She dashed off her recommendation on the fifth of the five items that needed to go to the Captain—one of the winked-at stills on the ship had malfunctioned and the product had sent four ratings to the infirmary. The on
ly reason it hadn’t been worse was because the petty officer running it had realized the problem and personally retrieved every other drop of that batch.

  Still, the semi-written rule with the stills was that they were allowed so long as no one got hurt. That rule had been broken, so Roslyn felt they had to hold a Captain’s Mast and put the noncom through administrative punishment.

  Her recommendation, on the other hand, was for the Captain to basically apply a slap on the wrist because the woman had made sure the contaminated batch didn’t hurt anyone—and reported the whole affair herself.

  The second message wasn’t one that required immediate action but did require immediate attention. The jump schedule and charting for the next few days were already nearly set in stone, though now that RMN warships carried the Link FTL communicators invented by their once-enemies on Legatus, missions could change unexpectedly.

  Roslyn was due to jump the ship in ninety minutes and to be on the bridge in sixty. She wanted to know what the exact coordinates involved would be. She’d review everything when she actually jumped, but Duke of Magnificence was in deep space, two days out from Eridani on a course for New Berlin.

  She had barely brought up the data when her wrist-comp chimed with a priority alert. Looking down at the device in surprise, she tapped Accept and looked at the new message.

  The Captain had just called a senior officers’ meeting—in ten minutes. Without talking to the XO first.

  Roslyn was supposed to be sleeping at that moment, but that was still a bad sign. That meeting was not going to be normal.

  She suspected her review of the jump plan had just become obsolete.

  2

  Roslyn was the first person to enter the breakout conference room attached to the Captain’s office, three minutes before the meeting was supposed to start. Captain Cemal Hesenov was the only person there, staring morosely into a coffee cup that she suspected wasn’t large enough.

  “Sir,” she greeted him with a quick salute. “Is there more of that coffee?”

  Hesenov laughed.

  “It’s the Navy; of course there’s more coffee,” he noted. “Errol is bringing more, but there’s a carafe already on the table.”

  Chief Petty Officer Errol Haraldsson was Hesenov’s personal steward, responsible for keeping the Captain healthy and fed. Roslyn knew the Chief was good at his job, but no one would have guessed it to look at Cemal Hesenov.

  Duke of Magnificence’s Captain was a small man, maybe a hundred and fifty-five centimeters tall, with pale, nearly translucent skin that seemed stretched across too many bones and not enough anything else.

  As the cruiser’s executive officer, Roslyn was privy to the fact that Hesenov suffered from a rare, noncontagious but incurable disease from his home Panterra System. She wasn’t entirely sure what Grendel Syndrome entailed, as she hadn’t made it more than three paragraphs into the official report before needing to vomit.

  Managed, it just made him look like a semi-undead horror from a bad movie. Fortunately, Hesenov’s warm personality still shone through in his bright blue eyes and his generally soothing tone of voice.

  Roslyn poured herself a coffee and took a sip.

  “What’s going on, sir?”

  “Emergency call,” the Captain told her. “Condesa System. Familiar with it?”

  “Fringe World,” she noted immediately. Those were the newer colonies, almost always self-sufficient for key supplies but usually needing to import high-tech gear and other complex items. “Um. Not UnArcana, closest MidWorld is New Berlin—hence us getting the call.”

  The UnArcana Worlds technically no longer existed. Once, they’d been the worlds that had banned the use of magic on their surface. Then they’d defected and formed the Republic of Faith and Reason—and gone to war against the Protectorate.

  The peace settlement had removed the magic bans, but the Protectorate still stepped lightly around them.

  “And you know as much as I did when I got the call,” Hesenov told her. “No one on the ship is from there, I don’t think, but I’ll have you and Jun-Seo double-check that after the meeting.”

  “Of course,” she confirmed.

  Jun-Seo Geier was the ship’s logistics and administration officer, a copper-haired Corinthian native of Korean extraction.

  As if summoned by his name, Geier stepped through the door a moment later, accompanied by Mage-Lieutenant Commander Ayaan Sherbune, the cruiser’s tactical officer. Three women were a few seconds after them.

  All five of the officers were Lieutenant Commanders, though three—Sherbune, Leonia Wolter from Navigation and Phyllis Kazlow from Engineering—were Mages.

  The last into the room was the night-dark tall figure of Lieutenant Commander Nyah Giunta, the communications officer. She looked utterly drained—Giunta had been on the watch and would have received and decoded the Link message that had summoned this meeting.

  “Everyone, sit down and grab a coffee,” Hesenov ordered. “Errol should be here—ah! Everyone’s favorite person, the man with the coffee and the donuts!”

  Errol Haraldsson had just stepped through the other door with a carefully balanced tray in his hands. The delicately built blond man slid the tray onto the table with a practiced motion, grinning at his Captain in response.

  “I know you,” he said in a noticeably alto tone. “You need food, even if the rest of these fine officers do not.”

  Haraldsson distributed extra coffee and a carefully measured two sugar-coated donuts to everyone—except Hesenov, who got four donuts—and the steward stood at his shoulder, looking pointedly at the Captain until he ate one.

  Then the blond steward vanished, leaving the officers to their meeting.

  “Giunta, can you brief everyone on the message we received?” Hesenov said. “I wanted to short-stop everything before we made our next jump, as we’re actually as close to our new destination as we were going to get.”

  Roslyn had a solid handle on the astrography of the Protectorate, and Hesenov wasn’t being quite honest. They’d been closest to Condesa twenty-four hours, twelve jumps, and a dozen light-years ago. Since they couldn’t go back in time, every jump would take them farther away unless they changed course.

  “Yes, sir.” Giunta tapped a command on the table, opening a holographic interface. A few swift commands brought up the region around them and highlighted a single system in bright green.

  “The Condesa System has sent out a general call for military assistance from the RMN,” the coms officer told them all. “That was about four hours ago—we weren’t copied on that, obviously. That went to Mars.

  “High Command authorized deployment immediately. This falls under Article One of the new Constitution, and no higher authority was required.”

  Even several years later, the entire Protectorate was still getting used to the new structures laid out in the Constitution written and promulgated during Mage-Queen Kiera’s regency—with her full, public and enthusiastic support.

  But Article One was the one that the Royal Martian Navy would always go back to. It was the defining segment, the one that laid out the entire purpose of the Protectorate—and in so doing, the mission of the Royal Martian Navy.

  They were charged to protect humanity. A system in need meant RMN ships were deployed. No ifs, buts or maybes.

  “We are the closest RMN unit to the Condesa System at this moment,” Giunta continued. “Fifteen light-years. Thirty hours at standard cycles.”

  Or eighteen if Hesenov ordered minimum cycles, Roslyn knew. Even the Navy didn’t like to ask Jump Mages to teleport a ship more than once every ten to twelve hours—but the Navy trained its Mages to jump every six.

  “High Command’s logic is that we are on a standard patrol with no expected crises or particular duties,” Hesenov told his officers, wiping his fingers clean of excess sugar with a napkin. “We are to proceed to the Condesa System and see what we can do about the problem.”

  “What is the problem, sir?” S
herburne asked.

  “Pirates,” Giunta told them. “Over the last month, the Condesa System government has contracted eleven ships to make deliveries to the system and would normally have expected to see about the same in tramps and independents.

  “In a usual month, Condesa would see twenty-three to twenty-five merchant ships and one RMN destroyer,” the com officer continued, clearly reading from the report she’d been provided in the message.

  “They’ve seen eight ships, and two of those arrived in company with the destroyer Shadows of Fear.”

  And that was why they’d called for military help.

  “How many of those were the contracted ships?” Roslyn asked.

  “Only the ships that arrived with a Navy escort,” Hesenov said grimly. “So, whoever is raiding them knows their schedules. That’s a problem in itself. The good news is that whoever is harassing them clearly didn’t want to tangle with a destroyer.

  “That means Duke is significantly more threat than they’re prepared to handle.”