Read Starship's Mage: Episode 1 for Free Online

her lover, though he would never have dreamed of complaining. She ran at roughly twice his speed on a good day.
    “Everyone involved is spending a very long time as guests of System Security,” Damien told her. “Beyond that, what was the point of telling anyone?”
    Grace sighed loudly, and pushed Damien down onto the couch to hop into his lap, snuggling up against him in an extremely pleasant way.
    “Because, you adorable dolt, we actually care and worry about you when we don’t hear a peep for weeks?” she told him. “To hear about you getting beaten up from the spacers on my new ship on top of that is not my idea of a good day.”
    Damien hugged her back, not sure of what to say.
    “I’m sorry about the Gentle Rains ,” she continued after a moment, her voice quieter. “I wasn’t expecting Mom to call in favors quite that heavily. If it helps, she promised to make sure the next Captain heard about you first.”
    Arya McLaughlin was, as well as the daughter-in-law of the system governor, Head Administrator for Sherwood Prime. Her prodding ship captains about Damien couldn’t hurt him, but he felt uncomfortable at the thought of strings getting pulled on his behalf.
    Before he expressed that thought aloud, however, Grace laughed, and kissed him.
    “You, of course, have an even greater portion of pure Sherwood Scot stubbornness than any of the family,” she told him. “Which is a small, teensy, portion of why I’m spending my last night on the station here.”
    “You leave tomorrow?” Damien asked, surprised.
    “Yeah, we ship out at eleven hundred hours station time,” Grace told him. She sat up straight, remaining on his lap but creating some distance between them. “Which, given that I need to be on-ship two hours beforehand, means we only have about twelve hours. I’d better get business out of the way.”
    “What business?”
    She slid a tiny data disk out of her cleavage and dropped it on the side table.
    “That’s from Captain Michaels,” she told him. “It’s the contact info for Captain David Rice on the Blue Jay – they’re the ship that came in damaged from a pirate attack a couple of days ago. Trick is, they lost their Mage on the way in – but for whatever reason, the Sherwood Guild has blacklisted them. Rice can’t post for a new Mage.”
    “You mean…” Damien said slowly.
    “Rice asked the Captain if he knew anyone,” Grace told him. “Then the Captain asked Kyle and me if we knew you – and I said I was trying to track you down since we were leaving, and he told me to tell you to contact Rice if you still wanted a Jump job.”
    For a long moment, Damien was silent, looking at the tiny disk on the table. Finally, he looked up at Grace.
    “Thank you,” he said quietly.
    “You’re welcome. Now, I believe I mentioned spending the night?” she continued with a familiar wicked grin.

#
    Damien didn’t get a lot of sleep that night, but when he did wake up, Grace was gone. He wasn’t sure when she’d left, but by the time he woke up, it was only an hour short of when she’d said the Gentle Rains of Summer was due to leave. Running his hand down the slight indent her body had left in the cheap motel mattress, he realized he could still clean up and make it down to watch the freighter leave.
    Making sure to grab the data disk Grace had left with him, he made his way down to the same observation deck he’d watched the Blue Jay arrive from, slipping into the window table in the Angelus Gravity Lounge in time to see the last lines drop away from the big freighter.
    The Summer was one of the biggest freighters the worlds of the Protectorate built, rated for twelve million tons of cargo and massing over twenty million tons fully loaded and fuelled. This close to the even greater mass of Sherwood Prime, the immense ship moved slowly, running on secondary ion thrusters to avoid damaging the station itself.
    Her gravity ribs locked as she maneuvered out, so Damien could clearly