Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) by Glynn Stewart Page B
Authors: Glynn Stewart
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secondaries?” he asked her.
“Yep,” she confirmed. “Corinthian is just major enough that people are shipping there, and just minor enough that no one has shipped out for two months.”
There were dozens of cargos to be shipped between the worlds under the protection of the Mage-King of Mars, but few of them would justify filling even a three megaton freighter like the Blue Jay . The usual policy was to book a standard container, fill it with your cargo, and list it as a secondary cargo on a station like Sherwood Prime. As soon as Rice had the contract to ship a hundred and forty-five containers to Corinthian, he’d had Jenna put in a notice to Prime of which world they were shipping for.
All secondary shipping contracts to Corinthian would now be loaded onto the Jay, along with a massive data upload to be transferred to the other system’s communications net. The data transfer fees alone were a hefty part of the freighter’s operating costs, but it was the primary cargo contracts that paid the bills.
“How’s our young Mage working out?”
“He seems dedicated and smart so far,” Jenna told him. “I showed him around Kenneth’s lab – he fixed the gravity in about two seconds flat. Last I saw, he was going over the runes in the simulacrum chamber with a magnifying glass.”
“He thinks they may have been damaged?” Rice asked, remembering Damien’s comment to that effect with a shiver.
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “From what he said, I think it’s the first chance he’s ever had to really examine a jump matrix, and he wants to make sure it all… ‘flows right’ was how he described it.”
“Good,” David let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d taken. “We’ll have all of the rest of the repairs finished by the time the primary cargo is loaded. We’ll hang out a day or so after that for any new secondaries, but then we need to get to Corinthian.”
“That wood isn’t exactly going to rot in our hull, skipper,” his executive officer pointed out.
“No,” David agreed, looking around the empty bridge carefully before continuing quietly. “But I don’t think our pirate friends are deaf and dumb either, and I’ve got an itchy feeling between my shoulder blades. The sooner we’re out of Sherwood, the happier I’ll be!”
#
The Martian Runic script defines a spell matrix in the same way that a programming language defines the 0s and 1s that allow a computer to function. With seventy-six characters and fourteen different ways of connecting them, the script is complex and difficult to read – and the Blue Jay ’s jump matrix contained the equivalent of sixteen million lines of code.
Damien read Martian Runic fluently, but he couldn’t go over that many runes in detail with less than a month of solid reading. Unlike every other Mage he’d ever known, though, he didn’t need to. He saw the flow of energy along the patterns and read the purpose and flow of entire blocks and sub-matrices at a single glance.
On a small matrix, like the ‘warning spell’ in Captain Michaels’ office, he often read the entire structure of the spell, from its triggers to its actions, in a few seconds. Larger spells would take him some time, but it was minutes where another Mage would spend hours.
He’d never done it on a spell matrix as large as the Blue Jay ’s jump matrix though, so when he hit the first utterly wrong sub-matrix he assumed he was misreading it.
The sub-matrix was at the core of the spell, one of the seventeen that linked into the simulacrum at the center of the ship. The other sixteen sub-matrices fed energy out from the simulacrum, but the seventeenth interfaced with the others and changed the energy flow somehow. On certain criteria, it redirected energy away from the main matrix.
Damien spent an hour reading the runes on the sub-matrix, and then took another long, hard look at the energy flows. Sub-matrix clusters came in primes and squares, so it
“Yep,” she confirmed. “Corinthian is just major enough that people are shipping there, and just minor enough that no one has shipped out for two months.”
There were dozens of cargos to be shipped between the worlds under the protection of the Mage-King of Mars, but few of them would justify filling even a three megaton freighter like the Blue Jay . The usual policy was to book a standard container, fill it with your cargo, and list it as a secondary cargo on a station like Sherwood Prime. As soon as Rice had the contract to ship a hundred and forty-five containers to Corinthian, he’d had Jenna put in a notice to Prime of which world they were shipping for.
All secondary shipping contracts to Corinthian would now be loaded onto the Jay, along with a massive data upload to be transferred to the other system’s communications net. The data transfer fees alone were a hefty part of the freighter’s operating costs, but it was the primary cargo contracts that paid the bills.
“How’s our young Mage working out?”
“He seems dedicated and smart so far,” Jenna told him. “I showed him around Kenneth’s lab – he fixed the gravity in about two seconds flat. Last I saw, he was going over the runes in the simulacrum chamber with a magnifying glass.”
“He thinks they may have been damaged?” Rice asked, remembering Damien’s comment to that effect with a shiver.
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “From what he said, I think it’s the first chance he’s ever had to really examine a jump matrix, and he wants to make sure it all… ‘flows right’ was how he described it.”
“Good,” David let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d taken. “We’ll have all of the rest of the repairs finished by the time the primary cargo is loaded. We’ll hang out a day or so after that for any new secondaries, but then we need to get to Corinthian.”
“That wood isn’t exactly going to rot in our hull, skipper,” his executive officer pointed out.
“No,” David agreed, looking around the empty bridge carefully before continuing quietly. “But I don’t think our pirate friends are deaf and dumb either, and I’ve got an itchy feeling between my shoulder blades. The sooner we’re out of Sherwood, the happier I’ll be!”
#
The Martian Runic script defines a spell matrix in the same way that a programming language defines the 0s and 1s that allow a computer to function. With seventy-six characters and fourteen different ways of connecting them, the script is complex and difficult to read – and the Blue Jay ’s jump matrix contained the equivalent of sixteen million lines of code.
Damien read Martian Runic fluently, but he couldn’t go over that many runes in detail with less than a month of solid reading. Unlike every other Mage he’d ever known, though, he didn’t need to. He saw the flow of energy along the patterns and read the purpose and flow of entire blocks and sub-matrices at a single glance.
On a small matrix, like the ‘warning spell’ in Captain Michaels’ office, he often read the entire structure of the spell, from its triggers to its actions, in a few seconds. Larger spells would take him some time, but it was minutes where another Mage would spend hours.
He’d never done it on a spell matrix as large as the Blue Jay ’s jump matrix though, so when he hit the first utterly wrong sub-matrix he assumed he was misreading it.
The sub-matrix was at the core of the spell, one of the seventeen that linked into the simulacrum at the center of the ship. The other sixteen sub-matrices fed energy out from the simulacrum, but the seventeenth interfaced with the others and changed the energy flow somehow. On certain criteria, it redirected energy away from the main matrix.
Damien spent an hour reading the runes on the sub-matrix, and then took another long, hard look at the energy flows. Sub-matrix clusters came in primes and squares, so it
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