Pulsar Race (Starship’s Mage #9.5) - Glynn Stewart Page 0,1

Holding his hair back, he swallowed and bowed his head slightly.

“You know I’m divorced, right?” Karl asked. “I think we talked about that.”

“Messy disaster, you got the ship and Lyle, and she got everything else?” Ivan vaguely remembered the conversation. They hadn’t been drinking that heavily, but neither of them could drink like they had when they were nineteen, either.

“Yeah,” Charpentier confirmed. “Penny wasn’t responsible for everything that went wrong after that, but she started all of it.” He sighed. “I guess I can’t blame her for getting bored sitting at home taking care of Lyle while I fucked off around the Protectorate, but I still hate her a bit for leaving Lyle.”

Lyle was, if Ivan remembered correctly, Karl’s eleven-year old son. Ivan wasn’t clear on what Lyle’s living situation was, but he doubted the boy was living on Restoya, Charpentier’s owner-operated jump-courier.

“I know what jump-courier rates look like, Karl,” the ex-Navy Mage pointed out. “I can’t imagine you’re hurting just because your wife took the bank account and the house.”

The channel was silent again and Charpentier looked like Ivan had punched him in the gut.

“I fucked up,” the courier captain finally whispered. “Divorce, midlife crisis, worry about the kid…I can give a billion excuses, but it’s all on me. I fucked it up but good and the crew quit.”

“All of them?” Ivan asked. He wasn’t sure how many people a civilian jump-courier would have aboard, but the Navy ones he was familiar with ran a crew of twenty—six of them Mages.

“All of them,” Charpentier confirmed. “Restoya is a well-built ship with good robots and computers. I can fly her on my own, but maintaining her on my own is a life-eating job and…well…without Mages, I’m fucked.”

Only a Mage could cast the spell that would jump a starship a light-year away. Karl Charpentier was not a Mage, which meant he’d hired them. If he was having problems hiring new Mages…

“You got yourself blacklisted?” Ivan asked.

“Five Mages walked out on the same day,” his old friend told him. “Doesn’t matter if I’m officially blacklisted. No Mage will jump for me.”

That was…fair enough.

“What did you do?” Ivan demanded.

“What do you think?” Charpentier replied. “I took sympathy as something more and made a pass I shouldn’t. Took no for an answer, but apparently I’d been enough of a general shithead through the divorce…” He sighed. “Look, Ivan, I don’t blame them one bit. But I’m in a hole. A deep hole.”

Charpentier swallowed hard and met Ivan’s gaze.

“I put myself here and I probably made it worse along the way,” he said grimly. “Doing my damnedest to keep Lyle in the style and schools Penny got him used to. Holding it all together, paying for it all somehow, but…

“I need your help, Ivan, or I’m going to lose Restoya,” he finally said in a rush. “I’m deep in debt, and if I don’t come up with four mil in the next thirty days, I default. I default on Restoya, I have nothing.”

“Four million,” Ivan repeated. “Martian dollars, I’m assuming.”

“Exactly.”

That was more than Ivan had made in total in twenty-five years in the Navy. How the hell had Charpentier even ended up that deep in debt?

“How much of it have you got?” Ivan asked with a sigh. He didn’t want to get involved—he’d been considering never leaving the planet again—but he and Charpentier went back a long way.

“Nothing,” Charpentier admitted. “I’m tapped out, Ivan. I’m…” He sighed. “The bank has given me almost a year of leeway; that’s why the hole is that big. I’ve borrowed from places I shouldn’t to keep things floating, but I need to make a forty percent payment on the main loan to get back into good standing, and nobody is going to lend me that. Not when my income is all over the place.”

“Even if I jump for you, you need half a dozen Mages to run at your usual speed,” Ivan told his friend gently. “We can’t make four million in a month, even if we pay nothing except docking fees and fuel.”

“I have a plan,” Charpentier told him. “Restoya is way faster and more maneuverable sublight than most people think. It shaved a few hours off each end of the critical deliveries and made me a pile of money—Penny’s got that money now, but the ship is still a racer.”

“You can’t win an intersystem race with one Mage—and even this star system doesn’t have that many sublight races,” Ivan said slowly. Xanth had more than most, both