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

the backdrop of empty space.
    “Three degrees Kelvin as far as our eyes can see,” he muttered to himself. “Why does that not make me feel better?”
    “Because you’re rightfully paranoid, sir,” Jenna replied.
    “Which is why I want you to send the maintenance ‘bots out to check over both of our new turrets,” Rice told her.
     
    #
     
    For ninety quiet minutes, Rice slowly relaxed as no sign of pirates or technical difficulties materialized. Both of the new Rapid Fire Laser Anti-Missile turrets checked out as fully functional, and he took some comfort in the fact that he’d paid to upgrade them heavily from the previous weapons. Each of these turrets was rated to take down a four missile salvo like the last one they’d faced on its own.
    Ninety-one minutes after arrived at the jump zone, all of his quiet hopes for a peaceful trip shattered as the distinctive heat and radiation flare of an incoming jump appeared on their screens.
    “Jump flare!” he barked, grabbing Jenna’s attention from her focus on the maintenance ‘bots. “Get me something Jenna,” he ordered as she pulled up the rest of the sensor suite. Heat would only tell them so much.
    “Single ship, three million kilometers,” she reported, then double checked her figures. “Damn, their Mage must have blown his numbers – I bet they were planning on coming out right on top of us.”
    As if to prove her comment, the heat signature on the new contact flared with a sudden, massive, brightness.
    “Boss, if I’m reading this right, she just lit off a fusion rocket at six gees,” Jenna said quietly, and David winced.
    “Time to missile range?” he asked steadily.
    “If they’re using the same birds as last time, about an hour,” she admitted. “If the turrets hold up, it’ll take them just over five hours to match speeds and rendezvous with us to board – that’s if we start burning now.”
    Five hours. That would make it over six hours since Damien had jumped, which meant that, if they could make it, the young Mage would be able to jump them before the pirate ship boarded them.
    “Sound the emergency acceleration alert,” Rice ordered, “and lets burn directly away from them. Let’s buy as much time as we can.”
    A klaxon began ringing through the ship and the bars on his screen showing the rotational speeds of the ribs rapidly shrank.
    “All ribs at full stop,” Jenna reported. “Initiating emergency burn… now.”
    The four massive fusion torches at the rear of the ship lit up, and a large man sat down on Rice’s chest as his ship began to accelerate at two full gravities.
     
    #
     
    It seemed like Damien had barely closed his eyes when the klaxon woke him up. He certainly didn’t have time to wake up or prepare at all before the rib stopped rotating and the motion of his waking up sent him drifting away from the bed beneath him.
    Then the engines engaged, and two gravities of force slammed him into the back wall of his cabin, crushing the breath from his body. He struggled against the gravity to regain some measure of breath, and then wove magic around his body to reduce the force to something he could move in.
    “Captain, this is Damien,” he said as he opened a link to the bridge. “What’s happening?”
    “We’ve been ambushed,” Rice said shortly, his breath strained. “They missed their jump, though, and we should be able to stand off the missiles until you can jump us again. How long?”
    Damien focused for a moment, testing the reserve of energy buried deep inside of him. It had recovered somewhat during his hour-long nap. The gravity spell wasn’t a major strain, and from the feel, he could handle anything that wasn’t major.
    Of course, a teleport spell was the definition of major.
    “At least a few more hours,” he admitted. “I’m still shot to hell.”
    There was a long pause, during which Damien pulled on a shirt and grabbed a folded up emergency pressure helmet.
    “We’re running,” Rice