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

said finally. “But he’s got four gravities on us, and he’ll be in missile range in under an hour. Anything you can do?”
    “I can knock down some missiles from the simulacrum chamber,” the Mage told him. “Not sure what else…”
    “Any little bit helps,” the Captain told him.
    “Then I’ll be in the simulacrum chamber,” Damien promised.
     
    #
     
    Blue Jay was not a small ship, and there was no direct route from Damien’s quarters in the middle of Rib Four to the simulacrum chamber at the center of the vessel. The two gravity acceleration didn’t help, though at least the ship had fold-out stairs and other tools to function with acceleration-driven gravity.
    By the time Damien made it to the chamber, struggling up a ladder to the small platform beneath the simulacrum, the pirate ship was just drawing into missile range. He opened a video link to the bridge, as well as several windows that showed him sensor data on the area and the ship.
    “There he was,” Jenna said suddenly, as a spike showed up in the sensors. “Bastard was sitting a full light-hour out of the jump zone with his drives dead – not even the Martian boys would have picked him up at that distance – but he’d have seen everyone jump in. He IDed our signature as soon as it reached him, took half an hour to be ready, and then jumped us. If their Mage hadn’t overshot, we’d have been dead or boarded before we even knew they were there.”
    Damien replayed the sudden burst of energy and saw her point. Up to that moment, now a full hour ago, there had been no sign of a ship in that bit of space. Then the jump flare appeared, marking the pirate’s disappearance.
    “Missiles,” Jenna reported calmly as four more signatures lit up on the thermal scope. “They look the same as last time – two thousand gravities acceleration, seven and a half minute flight time. I’m taking evasive maneuvers – hold on!”
    The missiles were anemic compared to the antimatter driven weapons the Protectorate Navy would use, but they were still a thousand times faster than the Blue Jay . Damien focused the sensor screen on them, using it to focus in and zoom on the missiles.
    Through the simulacrum, Damien could affect the space around them with his magic, but all it did was let him see as the ship saw. His power and range for his normal spells was almost the same, unlike using the jump spell.
    One of the spells he knew, however, was explicitly intended for just this situation. It was draining, but it had a range of forty or so thousand kilometers. Normally, that was utterly useless, but here and now, he could take down a missile in its last six seconds or so of flight.
    “Sixty seconds to impact,” Jenna announced. “RFLAMs engaging.”
    The lasers were invisible on the visual screens that surrounded Damien, though they lit up the sensor feeds. Their results weren’t. One missile and then another disappeared in fireballs that were clearly visible in the zoomed in screen.
    A third missile detonated, and then the last came within Damien’s reach. His power flicked out through the simulacrum’s matrix and conjured a tiny fireball, not much more than a spark.
    Conjured inside the missile’s fuel cells, it triggered a reaction that blew the missile apart.
     
    #
     
    Even as Damien breathed a sigh of relief, something was bothering him. A niggling thought at the back of his head. The spell he’d cast hadn’t felt right. It wasn’t a spell he’d cast many times before, but most of the time he had he’d been in deep space, casting through a window or viewscreen on the side of a ship.
    This wasn’t the first time he’d cast it from the simulacrum chamber of a starship – but it was the first time he’d done so only a short while after casting the jump spell. The feel of the two spells should have been very different to his mind. The jump spell was tied into and amplified by the rune matrix throughout the starship, but the defense spell was