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  “This one isn’t regulation?” I finished her sentence with a smile.

  She laughed, and her deep blue eyes squeezed together. “It’ll be good to have you aboard, Nick. Have you met the other squires yet?”

  “Only the one with the weird haircut.”

  Casey laughed again. “That’s Neville.”

  “Are the other squires like him?”

  “Not at all. He’s the only dud of the group. The twins are normal and joke around a bunch.”

  At least I wouldn’t have to spend all my time on the Stalwart with the clone of Ludas Barnes.

  The starship shook a little, and I grabbed a handle on the bulkhead to steady myself. Casey grabbed a handle below me, and our bodies touched. She smiled up at me, and my heart hammered in my chest.

  “I should be getting back to my quarters,” I said when the ship settled. The initial turbulence made me think the inertia negators weren’t functioning as they ought to, and I wanted to take Casey’s advice and get myself locked down before the starship jumped.

  “There’s still some time before our ship mage makes the leap,” she said. “How about I show you around our enchantry?”

  “Olav told me to anchor myself before the ship left the docks. I’m not sure I want to rub him the wrong way.” I dropped my voice, not wanting to be overheard even though the passageway was empty. “I think he might have been drunk.”

  “Oh, he was definitely drunk.” Casey’s smile made her eyes sparkle, and I forced myself not to stare. She was still standing close to me, and her body glanced against mine. “Olav Kjeldsen is almost always drunk. Great guy, isn’t he?” I was starting to wonder whether the woman wasn’t a little tipsy herself when she let go of the handle and grabbed my arm. “Come with me. There are spare anchors in the workshop.”

  Before I could argue otherwise, she yanked me through the doorway and along a short passageway opening into a circular room.

  Casey sighed as she strolled toward a workbench running along the rear perimeter of the chamber, and I watched her legs move. “It gets a little lonely on the Stalwart, and I could do with someone to talk to.”

  I felt my face redden as I thought about ‘talking’ with this beautiful woman. The enchanter uniform hugged at her figure, and her pants had worn away in patches, revealing the pale skin of her thighs. Like the rest of the Stalwart, this woman seemed a little roguish, but that alluring quality fascinated me.

  My mouth went dry as she leaned both hands on the bench and slowly turned to face me.

  “Hardly anyone appreciates good runes,” Casey said.

  “I definitely do,” I said with a gulp as I tried to rid my mind of the image of a half-naked enchantress from my imagination.

  “You bought your gear from Level 8, didn’t you? Looks like Max’s work. I figure if you went to his place out of all the joints in the Business Spire, you appreciate decent craftsmanship.”

  I thought about telling Casey about the enchanter at The Silver Rune who recommended Max to me, but figured I’d let it slide. It wasn’t like I didn’t appreciate good runes, and I was enjoying talking with her. “Well, what do you have to show me?”

  The enchantress led me to the workbench. Drills of all sizes lay within metal boxes next to magically sealed drums filled with Dust. The equipment wasn’t anything beyond the usual, but a set of gauntlets resting on the bench took my breath away. The buckled wrists straps and gold knuckles shone brilliantly, and I didn’t need to scan the item with my prot-belt to know it was Master class.

  “Not bad, is it?” Casey said as she peered over my shoulder. “My grandfather and I have been working on it for a while. Trying to figure out what makes it tick. It’s from the Prime Era.”

  “May I?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  I held my breath as I grabbed the left gauntlet. I was a little surprised by its heaviness, and I imagined only a giant of a man would be able to use them effectively. “This has to weigh at least fifteen kilos. How would anyone ever equip it and still be able to lift his arm?”

  “Ha! It’s not like you’re a small guy.” She gave me a playful smirk as she slid her hand under the armor at my bicep and squeezed. Her eyes widened when I flexed, and her cheeks turned a bit red.

  I gave her a wink as I continued inspecting the gauntlet. I recognized some of the runes as general armor class enhancements, but others were completely foreign to me. It was a priceless item constructed of burnished gold, probably worth more than any of the armor pieces lining Duke Barnes’ throne room.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but what’s the Stalwart doing with something like this?” I figured she was repairing the gauntlets, although I couldn’t think of a reason anyone would ask an enchantress on the Stalwart to do the job.

  Casey’s smile faltered, and she snatched the armored gloves from me. Then she shoved them into one of the iron crates and punched in the code to lock it. “I shouldn’t have shown you that. Like I said, it’s a project I’ve been working on with my grandfather. Kinda personal. One of them granddaughter to grandfather bonding things, you know?”

  I nodded, but her sudden change startled me. Was this gauntlet an indication of insurrectionist activity? I’d barely known Casey for more than a half hour, but she didn’t seem like a rebel. Maybe some rich noble asked her grandfather to restore the gauntlets?

  Casey returned to her jubilant self as she pointed a remote toward the viewscreen. “Check this out.” The screen flickered before showing a wide angle of the area outside the starship. A swirling portal pulsed with violet lights.

  No matter how many times I witnessed the magical doorways, I was blown away every time. When I was a child, Mom told me about how humanity first displayed magical abilities. It was a few years after the Grendels came through the rifts. She said the gods granted us those powers so we could fight against our alien enemies. I wasn’t sure I believed in gods, but I couldn’t deny there was magic in the world.

  I was looking at it right now on the viewscreen.

  “Come anchor yourself,” Casey said, her face a shade of purple from the viewscreen’s reflection.

  I plopped myself into one of the chairs while Casey sat to my right. She gave me a wink and smirked from the corner of her mouth. I smiled back at her and tried to focus on anchoring myself correctly rather than how my stomach whirled whenever the pretty enchantress looked at me.

  During my first time on a starship, I’d asked the Academy tutor why we needed to anchor ourselves. The tutor sighed and told me the inertia negators didn’t always work. Even the scholars in the Arcane Institute didn’t know everything about portals, and sometimes strange things happened while traveling through them.

  As I secured myself to the bulkhead, I hoped today wouldn’t be one of those occasions. The portal expanded on the viewscreen as our ship closed in on it. Three men walked into the workshop from the back doorway, all wearing the silver enchanter uniform. An older man with a gray beard sat to the left of me, and the two other men took chairs on the opposite side of the room.

  The old man glared at me, and then Casey. “Who’s this?” He nodded at me. I figured he was Casey’s grandfather, since the two other enchanters were probably too young to have grandchildren.

  “The new squire,” she said.

  I almost froze beneath the man’s cold stare, and I recognized him from the docks when I’d left the Academy starship this morning. He’d seemed a hell of a lot nicer then, so I guessed that he thought I was trying to seduce his granddaughter.

  “You’re the hero, aren’t you? Thought you were assigned to the RTF Valor,” the man asked.

  “Yeah, that didn’t work out,” I said with a pained smile.

  “Well, keep your head on straight while you’re on our ship and you’ll do alright. I’m Joseph Roman. I see you’ve already met my granddaughter.” His lip curled in disdain, and then he turned to the viewscreen.

  Something buzzed in my belt pouch, and I went to take it out. As soon as I
touched smooth metal, I remembered it was the comms device. I tried to press down on it so the vibrating wouldn’t alert the others.

  Joseph gave me another cold stare, but he didn’t say anything. The comms buzzed again, and I exhaled in relief when it stopped.

  When I looked up, Casey was staring at me with her head tilted. She peered down at my pouch and frowned. “You’re missing it! Our ship mage is the best there is.”

  I found it hard to believe the Stalwart was home to the RTF’s best ship mage, but my doubts were vanquished when the vessel’s round-nosed bow penetrated the purple arcane barrier like a stick piercing a swirling lake. The viewscreen blacked out as the entire starship was sucked through the whirling rift. Every fraction of my being was torn apart, and then put back together. When I could finally think straight, the others were already out of their seats.

  I flipped the buckle and jumped up. That was a mistake. I swallowed back my stomach, and I heard Casey laugh.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll get used to jumping.” The enchantress patted me on the back as I tried to give her a reassuring smile and hide my nausea.

  I’d jumped a few times before, but this one had been different. Normally minutes passed before we arrived on the other side, but we’d arrived in seconds. Maybe Casey had been right about the ship mage. I felt terrible, but at least our ship made it through the portal without falling apart. On the plus side, I was still alive.

  “Why were you looking at your belt earlier?” Casey asked as she reached for my belt pouch.

  “Oh, it was nothing. A message from my mom before we took off,” I said as I brushed her hand aside

  “A momma’s boy? That’s cute.” She gave me a charming smile, and I laughed under my breath. The pretty enchantress seemed to have bought my answer. This secret mission wasn’t going to be easy if Polgar contacted me outside 06:00 CUT. I’d have to examine the comms device to see if there was some way of silencing it.

  “Casey!” Joseph barked, and she went over to him.

  I stood awkwardly while the enchanters talked among themselves.

  My first hour on the starship had gone by in a blur, and we’d left the docks without me even meeting the captain. I hadn’t expected to be given a royal tour, but then I also hadn’t expected to be left to my own devices without a briefing.

  I wanted to thank Casey for showing me around the workshop, but I also needed to return to my quarters before the berserker knight found out I was missing.

  The viewscreen initialized, displaying the area of space we’d landed in. Next to the portal was the rune beacon that enabled ship mages to make long-range jumps with near-perfect accuracy. It was a sphere floating in space, covered in some of the most powerful runes known to mankind. Besides a smattering of stars, there were no planets or other celestial objects visible, so I didn’t know what system we’d ended up in. This might even be the first jump of many before we arrived at our mission’s location.

  The portal was slowly shrinking, but before vanishing completely, it widened in a sudden burst. The viewscreen glittered with purple and blue hues as forty ships glided out from the rift.

  Red lights flashed from the corners of the room. A holographic display of a man’s bearded face appeared in the room’s center.

  “This is the captain,” the hologram said. “Hostile vessels have breached our portal. Man your battlestations. The Stalwart is under attack.”

  Chapter 7

  The holo in the center of the workshop displayed forty ships shaped like old-fashioned arrowheads. Their noses ended in fine points, and I guessed the spear-like blades were used for piercing the hulls of other ships. Any one of them could probably skewer the Stalwart’s hull with barely any propulsive force.

  But their shapes and noses were the only common factors. There was no unifying color scheme, and most of their hulls were comprised of diverse materials. Laser array turrets hung atop the back two points while dual plasma cannons protruded from the midsections of other vessels. All of the weapons looked like they had been retrofitted by someone with only a passing interest in which direction they should be firing.

  “Looks like pirates to me,” Joseph said to the other enchanters. “Casey, Dominic, and Brad, grab some drills and a few containers of Dust. We’re heading to Deck 3.”

  We were a Beluga transport starship. How the hell were we meant to deal with these enemies? There weren’t even supposed to be any pirates within the Triumvirate, let alone forty ships worth of them. The three kingdoms didn’t cooperate on much, but at least they’d agreed upon outlawing and evicting almost all the pirate colonies from their domains. Did the presence of this hostile fleet mean we were now outside the Triumvirate’s reach?

  The last thing I’d expected when Duke Barnes assigned me to the Stalwart for humanitarian missions was a pirate attack. My heart raced as the enemy vessels slowly moved toward us, so I tried to calm myself with the protocol I’d learned at the Academy. When unable to defend themselves, RTF ships handed over whatever the enemy desired. The crew and its ship were worth more to the kingdom than the Dust aboard.

  “Were you trained in any ship warfare?” Casey said to me as she filled her pack with drills and other tools.

  “Uhh . . . not really. I’ve done some simulations at the Academy, but nothing major. Space warfare is a specialization, and I didn’t take it.” I wanted to be on the ground fighting Grendels, not engaged in battles between starships. I was regretting not taking the extra classes now.

  “You’re coming with us to the gunneries. The Stalwart only has a minimum crew; the guys will need all the help they can get.” Casey shoved me out of the workshop, and I was too dumbfounded to do anything except allow her to move me.

  The way she was talking made me think there wouldn’t be any negotiations with the enemy. If true, this could be my last day on the Stalwart. Or worse--my last day alive.

  Maybe the crew was simply extra cautious, and I took solace in the thought.

  “I’m not sure I’ll be much help,” I said to the enchantress as we followed her grandpa and the two other enchanters through the passageway. “I don’t know much about gunner stations.”

  My Academy training focused on ground-level fighting and tactics. Ship battles tended to be the domain of artillerymen and sailors, with the odd knight who decided to specialize in space warfare. While I’d used virtual gunner stations before, I wasn’t very good at it.

  “It’s really not difficult. You have arms, don’t you?” Casey smirked out of the corner of her mouth as she pulled me along.

  The other crew members we passed were either yelling orders above the siren sounds, carrying equipment, or preparing themselves for battle by donning armor and handing out weapons. Everyone seemed like they had a job to do, and the well-oiled nature of the crew impressed me. It almost seemed like they’d been attacked before, and no one appeared the least bit scared.

  The four enchanters and I entered the elevator, and Casey hit the button for Deck 3. As soon as the doors closed, I considered what would happen if these pirates decided to board. There were a few knights among the Stalwart’s crew, but I doubted they’d be exceptional in a ship battle. First rate warriors wouldn’t have been assigned to the Stalwart, after all.

  The elevator lurched to a stop with enough force to drive my stomach into my lungs. The doors opened, and Casey yanked me out after the other three enchanters had exited. The three men entered the first room on the left, and Casey tugged me into the second doorway.

  I followed her into a chamber filled with metal terminals large enough for one person to sit inside. Five were shield stations, and the other ten were plasma quarrel terminals. The area Joseph and the other enchanters had entered probably held the ship’s heavy cannons and rune lances.

  The dome-shaped boxes burst with light as the soldiers inside them initiated the activation sequences. Beeps and electronic feedback crooned from all around the room, and I could barely hear myself think through all the
noise.

  “Casey!” Moses yelled from a shield station in the far left corner. “I need a hand with this.”

  I trailed behind her as she ran over to the knight.

  “What’s up?” Casey asked him.

  Moses was wearing full plate armor and a golden tabard. The sheer weight of the armor would have crushed an ordinary man, but he was a mountainous warrior with rippling muscles. A short spear and a gladius hung from his belt, and a tower shield rested on his back. The getup gave him the appearance of an enormous armored turtle.

  “This shield station looks like it’s about ready to overheat. I need you to patch it up fast.” The big man jerked a gauntleted thumb at his shield station. Smoke drifted from the runic generator behind the stall, and I could smell burning electricals.

  “You got it.” Casey slid behind the metal cage and started pulling out tools from her bag.

  The shield stations were two meters wide and three meters tall. Regular soldiers could use them, but they were particularly powerful when manned by shield knights like Moses. Artillerymen sat within the other shield stations, readying the ship’s forcefields in preparation for a full-on assault.

  “What’s the situation with these pirates, sir?” I asked Moses while Casey worked.

  He glanced at me as if only now noticing I’d accompanied the enchantress into the room. “They knew we were coming.”

  “How would they know?” I asked, and my voice cracked a little as a thought crossed my mind. What if the duke had somehow been responsible for the attack? I knew he suspected the crew were insurrectionists, but why would he assign me to this starship only to have pirates attack it?

  “I don’t know, Nick, but we are going to find out,” he said as he gestured for me to take one of the gunner stations.

  “What do they want?” I asked as I sat on the chair where the shield knight pointed.

  “They demanded our Arcane Dust stores,” Moses said. “Captain Cross refused.”

  Casey laughed as she slipped out from behind Moses’ station. “Gotta love the captain.”