Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) by Glynn Stewart

ship,” Jenna told Damien as she drifted up to a handhold near another hatch. They’d started their tour of the keel of the ship at Singh’s shuttle bay at the rear end of the ship and worked their way down the central corridor of the keel in zero-gravity. “The last Ship Mage called it the ship’s ‘Sanctum.’”
    Damien followed Jenna through the hatch and saw that the central corridor dog-legged ahead, around a chamber he knew would be exactly one-hundredth the length, height, and width of the Blue Jay ’s exterior structure. Even if Jenna hadn’t warned him what he was approaching, that dogleg would have suggested he was approaching the starship’s simulacrum chamber.
    Runes coated the outside of the chamber: swirling patterns of silver inlay that Damien knew cut through the wall and were visible from the inside as well. From here, they linked into other patterns that marked carefully calculated routes out to the outer hull of the Blue Jay .
    “Your workshop is over here,” Jenna continued, gliding neatly up to a side hatch leading off the dog-legged main corridor. “Watch your step,” she warned, “Kenneth put gravity runes in the workshop, but they’ve been finicky since…” she trailed off.
    “They likely haven’t been charged recently enough,” Damien told her as he joined her by the workshop door. “Runes like that need to be renewed weekly.”
    Jenna hit the panel to open the hatch, and it slid aside to reveal what Damien judged to be a relatively standard Mage’s workshop – a Wonderland-esque cross between a research lab, a jewelry workshop, and a private office. On the far wall, a centrifugal casting unit occupied the center of a workbench, surrounded by soldering irons and etching tools.
    Another wall held a desk with three massive work screens, touch-driven interfaces that were currently combining to show a pseudo-three-dimensional view of the space around Sherwood. The opposite wall held a spectrometer, a microscope, and a set of micro-scale manipulators – for the really fine rune work.
    The floor plating was the same plain steel as the rest of the ship, but here someone – Kenneth, presumably, or possibly an even earlier Ship’s Mage – had inlaid the silver pattern of runes that provided artificial gravity equivalent to the spinning ribs. They were a common luxury for a Mage’s work room, providing a sense of ‘down’ even the Simulacrum Chamber lacked.
    Even from outside the room, however, Damien could tell that these runes were almost uncharged, spitting out tiny bursts of gravity that would make the entire room a tripping hazard.
    “Hold up a moment,” he told Jenna, and focused. He needed to touch the runes without worrying about spinning off, so he oriented himself with the floor of the workshop and slowly created a gravity field underneath himself. He drifted downwards and then settled his feet onto the floor in a comfortable half-gravity before kneeling and removing the glove on his right hand.
    As soon as the rune on his palm was within a few centimeters of the runes on the floor, both began to glow gently. Damien focused on that glow, and fed energy into the gravity runes. The glow rapidly spread out from his hand, and Jenna’s gasp behind him suggested that it was bright enough the ship’s first officer saw it.
    After about fifteen seconds, the entire room’s floor was glowing brightly to his eyes, and Damien closed his hand into a fist, cutting off the connection between his own power and the runes on the floor.
    He rose to face Jenna, standing in his own personal field of gravity as he met the gaze of the officer floating in zero-gravity beside him. “It’ll be safe to enter now,” he told her. “It doesn’t take much to maintain a room this small; it just has to be done regularly.”
    “You don’t actually need to deal with zero-gee,” she answered accusingly, reminding Damien of what he was doing.
    He released the spell, though without motion he