Starship's Mage: Episode 5 Read Online Free PDF

the rad cap to install lasers,” Jenna agreed dryly. “You sure about this, boss?”
    “Any work here comes with the implicit warning that if they screw us too badly, we can always reveal Darkport to the authorities,” David reminded them all. “It’s true both ways, and everybody knows it. We’ll keep an eye on them, and we don’t let them anywhere near Damien’s simulacrum chamber, but I think we can trust them to do the work cleanly.”
    “I’m still moving the cargo myself,” the Pilot told him, and David laughed.
    “Fine,” he agreed. “We’ll have a new pod arriving this evening too – we’re getting a container of Tempest XI smart missiles. Four hundred of them.”
    “And just what are we doing with fusion-drive kinetic impacters, boss?” Jenna asked.
    “We’re receiving four ten-bird external racks in the morning,” David explained with a grin. “Mount them on the Ribs; we can fire anything from a single missile to all forty of them. No bounty hunter’s modified yacht is going to take forty missiles, even kinetic impacters, and keep coming.”
    “What about targeting?” Jenna asked. “We don’t have military-grade sensors, or a missile telemetry suite.”
    “Hence the Tempests,” David told her. “They’re fire and forget weapons – we feed them a target at launch and they fly the rest of the way on their own. We’ll need to upgrade and integrate some software,” he admitted, and then gestured at the pile of chips again. “Software for both the lasers and the Tempests is in the pile.”
    “LaMonte is our best programmer,” Kellers told him. “I’ll loose her on it – sorry Damien!”
    “I can live with my girlfriend programming the guns that will help keep us alive,” the young Mage replied dryly. “That’s a lot of things for everybody else. What do you need me to do?”
    “Keep an eye on everything ,” David told him. “With your link into the ship, you’re the most likely one to catch if the installers do something we don’t want. Plus, if any of the hunters decides to ignore the bounty ban – or the Falcones themselves decide we’re worth coming after us – you’re still our first line of defense.”
    “I’m looking forward to us having guns,” Damien replied. “A defense other than me sounds great.”
    David shook his head at the Mage.
    “We’ll have our missiles aboard within the hour, and our installers are arriving at nine Olympus Standard tomorrow morning,” he told his officers. “That’s fourteen hours from now – and we need to be ready. Let’s get to it!”
     
    #
     
    Damien was awoken late that night when Kelly finally slipped into the quarters they’d quietly started sharing. It wasn’t a large enough ship that anyone didn’t know they were in a relationship, and his quarters as the Ship’s Mage and Second Officer were noticeably larger than those assigned to the most junior of three Assistant Engineers.
    The petite engineer tried not to wake him, but with all of the concerns the senior officers had over Darkport, the young Mage was wound tightly and sleeping lightly. When he heard a noise, he flicked the lights on with a gesture and a touch of power, to catch his girlfriend halfway through undressing in the dark.
    “What the?!” she exclaimed, but then turned a green-eyed glare on her boyfriend. “Some warning before you do that would be nice,” she told him. “I was hoping to let you sleep.”
    Damien smiled at her as he sat up.
    “I don’t think I’ll sleep decently until we’re out of this place,” he told her. “There’s too much that can go wrong, and the people here scare me.”
    “Me too,” she admitted, settling onto the bed next to him. “I got all of the software for the missiles and lasers installed. It’s not some hacked together job to run stolen hardware – the programs they gave me were the Navy programs for these guns.”
    “I didn’t think the Tempests were Navy missiles?” Damien asked. To his