The idea of a sanctuary seems pretty relevant these days! Somewhere to shelter from all that’s going on in the world sounds inviting.

Unfortunately for Carina Lin in this next episode of her story, Flight From Sanctuary, book six of the space fantasy, Star Mage Saga, her haven isn’t the safe refuge it appears to be.

Chapter One

“And, finally, the time came when our mountain home, which had been our sanctuary for generations, was no longer safe, and we had to flee, taking with us only our most precious items. Some of us brought paper books, though such things were already old and fragile by then, and others took cherished family heirlooms like jewelry, paintings, and handcrafted ornaments. A few wanted to bring animals they’d grown to love, but the Great Mage ruled this out, with no exceptions. The colony ships did not accommodate any living organisms other than humans.

“So those among us who loved their pets and working beasts created clones of them and froze the embryos, then added them to the stock of wild and domesticated animal species. We also collected and loaded seeds and spores of plants—particularly trees, for wood is essential to our way of life. Most important of all, we brought our lore and the history of our kind, written within these pages and held within the minds of the three Spirit Mages.”

Nahla paused and frowned, looking up from her screen.

“Go on,” said Ferne. He was inside a closet, checking all his things were still there, and he’d stuck out his head to speak. “I want to hear the bit about the fight at the spaceport, when they finally left Earth. That has to be coming soon.”

He and the rest of the children had decided to return to the suite on the Bathsheba they’d occupied before going into stasis. Carina hadn’t lived there, but to her it looked as though the Regians hadn’t touched the place. Even so, now that the battle with the aliens to reclaim the colony ship had been won and no other threats were looming, a few missing personal items would have been a small price to pay.

Oriana and Darius were lying on a double bed, Darius resting his head on his sister’s lap as they listened to Nahla. Parthenia was messaging someone as she sat at a dressing table. Carina sat on a sofa, working as she waited for Bryce.

Ignoring Ferne’s comment, Nahla said to Jace, “I thought there was only ever one Spirit Mage.”

The older man was sitting across a single bed, resting his back against the wall, his long legs hanging over the side.

“I’ve only ever known there to be one,” he replied, smoothing the hair of his thick, black beard. “Our old Spirit Mage, Magda, said another of her kind would appear—a child—when she entered the later stages of her life, and she was correct.” He smiled at Darius. “Aside from that, she never spoke of other Spirit Mages. What the text says is news to me, but I’m not saying your translation is wrong. I’ve learned many new things from the ancient documents. I’m impressed by your work. I’d no idea you were so good.”

Nahla blushed and lifted her interface a little in an attempt to hide her face.

Carina was deeply impressed by her sister’s efforts, too. She’d had no idea Nahla had been reading and translating the copies of the mages’ documents in the months before entering Deep Sleep. The young girl was full of surprises, like the time she’d discovered Mezban’s ember gems secreted aboard the Zenobia.

There was no doubt that Nahla was extremely smart. The level of language she was using to rewrite the old mage texts in Universal Speech far exceeded her years. Listening to her read her words out loud, it was hard to believe she was only nine years old. Perhaps that was what had made their Dark Mage brother, Castiel, want to control and torture her so much. Maybe he’d been as jealous of his sister’s intelligence as he’d been of his other siblings’ mage abilities.

Jace and Nahla continued to discuss mage history, with Oriana and Darius chipping in, but Carina could only listen with half an ear. Her own interface was occupying her attention as she tried to uncover some information that was proving surprisingly difficult to find.

Taking a break from her search, she let the screen fall into her lap. The information she wanted wasn’t very important. All that really mattered was that the Bathsheba was finally free of Regians and under the Black Dogs’ and her own command.

Retaking the ship had been surprisingly easy. The aliens had made the mistake of leaving only a few guards behind after they’d transferred all the human prisoners to their planet. As a result, they’d lost their strongest military advantage: huge numbers.

Once the Black Dogs and Mezban’s soldiers had broken through the weak Regian defense and reached the ship’s armories, the battle was quickly over. The men and women were not the undernourished, untrained, and unarmed inhabitants of poor settlements on backwater planets the aliens were accustomed to preying upon. Nor were they fresh out of stasis, unsteady and disoriented.

The troops had dispatched most of the insectoid aliens efficiently, and as soon as the mages could reach their supply of elixir, they’d finished off the remainder with Split Casts before Healing the soldiers’ wounds.

No other Regian ships were approaching, and now all they had to do was to set a course for Earth and continue on their way. They could work out the finer details of the voyage later.

Carina wondered if the living starship who had brought them here had finally flown away. The Enthrall Cast should have worn off hours ago, but the last time she’d inquired, the space-faring animal had remained hanging around the Bathsheba. She guessed the creature would leave eventually, probably to return to the Regian planet or, if she feared recapture, perhaps she would undertake the kind of long journey the aliens used her for when they raided impoverished worlds for human hosts.

Banishing her time-wasting musings from her mind, Carina lifted the interface and opened the screen again. They had to get underway soon. The Regians might decide to mount another attack.

The problem was, in order to plot a course, they had to know their current position, but the vast spacetime anomaly drifting within and beyond the Regian system was chaotically distorting the light that passed through it. The Bathsheba’s scanners were reporting fluctuating, unreliable data from the direction of the cloud, and, even worse, the ship’s computer didn’t recognize the star systems that were not obscured.

She’d been trying to get around the difficulty by using information from the navigation logs. If she knew the route the Bathsheba had followed since being taken off her original course, she could extrapolate their current coordinates. But the logs were incomplete, possibly due to something the Regians had done or failed to do when they took over the ship.

The door opened and Bryce walked in. The general conversation paused, and he announced, “Pappu’s in the brig, and I took Calvaley straight to the sick bay after releasing him from stasis.” He dropped onto the sofa next to Carina and added, as the discussion in the room resumed, “Poor guy’s in a bad way.”

She would never have described Calvaley as a ‘poor guy’, but she wasn’t surprised he was suffering ill effects from his time in Deep Sleep. She’d felt terrible for days after awakening from stasis, and Calvaley was an old man.

“How bad?” she asked. “Is he going to be okay?”

“I don’t know. The medics wouldn’t tell me anything. They told me to get the hell out of their way or I’d end up in the sick bay too.”

Carina smiled. Black Dog medics didn’t mince their words. Bryce had probably gotten the polite version of what they would have said to a fellow soldier.

But then she grew serious again. Calvaley must have done terrible things in his career, though he’d excused his actions, saying they were necessary to create a unified, civilized society. His motivations had been deluded, but honorable in his own eyes, and he’d suffered plenty at the hands of Sable Dirksen, coming close to death from starvation.

If he died soon after reviving from stasis, she might feel a twinge of pity for him.

It had been that modicum of sympathy that had prompted her to take him from Deep Sleep as soon as they’d secured the ship. The longer he stayed under, the greater the threat to his life, and she had a feeling they’d all been in stasis longer than the few years originally planned upon.

“How’s the course setting going?” Bryce asked.

“Not good. In fact,” Carina said, putting down the screen, “if Hsiao hasn’t come up with anything, I’m going to suggest we give up and just pick somewhere—anywhere—away from that screwy cloud of nonsense that’s messing with the data. Then we might get our bearings and be able to set a course.”

“Makes sense to me,” said Bryce. “Though…” a wrinkle formed between his brows “…do you know how much fuel we have?”

“Er, no.” She’d been concentrating so hard on navigation, she hadn’t even thought to check the fuel.

“My guess is, we might be low. We’re way off route, right? The Regians could have used up most of it to bring us here.”

“I hate to admit it, but that wouldn’t surprise me,” said Carina. “They probably didn’t even understand the Bathsheba’s engines or how to use the fuel efficiently. They usually travel through deep space inside living creatures, after all.”

But speculating about the aliens’ intellectual capacity wasn’t going to get her, her family, or anyone else aboard any closer to Earth. She lifted the interface again. “So, we need a settled system where we can refuel.” Though they had no idea where they were, signs of planets inhabited by humans would show on the scan data.

“Uh huh,” Bryce said, scooting closer and peering at the screen. “You should probably talk to Hsiao about it.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” But Carina had felt the events of the last few days catching up with her. She relaxed into the sofa and rested her head on its back. “In a minute.”

She held Bryce’s gaze for long seconds, and he held hers. She’d missed being around him, and she didn’t want to be separated from him ever again.

“Hey,” he said, smiling.

“Hey.” She brushed his hair away from his eyes.

At the same time, Ferne groaned. “I hope you two aren’t going to start kissing!”

“Oh, grow up and leave them alone,” said Oriana.

Suddenly, Carina realized something. She sat upright. “Earlier on, I tried to figure out how long we were in stasis, but I was looking at the Bathsheba’s old chrono, which we never really understood. I just remembered Cadwallader had one installed that marked Standard Time.”

She swiped then tapped her screen.

When she read the star date that came up, she dropped it in her lap.

“What’s wrong?” asked Bryce.

She turned to him and stared into his eyes. “We’ve been underway for seventy-three years.”

He whistled. “No wonder Calvaley looked so bad.” However, after considering for a moment, he went on, “But it’s not that important, is it? We all survived stasis, we’re just a little bit older.”

“Seventy-three years on a colony ship? Do you have any idea how far we must have traveled? How much farther we must be from Earth than we were before?”

“Well, it has to be as a seventy-three-year journey, plus the distance we still had to travel on our original course, I guess. Maybe we can cut across?”

Carina rolled her eyes. “How can you think this is no big deal?”

Bryce’s happy, teasing look suddenly faded, and he paused, troubled.

She took his hand.

The duration of their journey plus the effects of time dilation would mean Bryce’s parents were already long dead, and it was likely the same was true of his brothers and sisters. Such was the great tragedy of long-distance space travel. Embarking on an inter-sector voyage usually meant saying goodbye to loved ones forever.

“You’re thinking about your family, right?” She’d never met the people who had abandoned him while he was suffering from Ithiyan plague, later returning and paying for his treatment. Now, she never would.

He heaved a deep sigh. “It’s okay. I knew when I decided to come with you I’d probably never see them again.”

But the Regians’ hijack of the Bathsheba had turned that ‘probably’ into ‘definitely’.

She squeezed his hand tighter, and he managed a strained smile.

“The way I see it,” he said, “the longer our trip takes the more time I get to spend hanging out with you. Also, who knows what’s going to happen? When we finally reach Earth we might regret it and decide to go back, so we’ll be cooped up together even longer.”

“Hmm. I like your first thought better.”

“So do I.”

Carina’s comm announced a request from Hsiao.

“What’s up?” she asked the pilot, hoping for good news.

“Have you seen the latest scanner data?” Hsiao asked. “That time-shifting nebulosity is on the move, and it’s heading our way.”

I hope you enjoyed the first snipped of Flight From Sanctuary, which goes live on Amazon on 26th July. To read snippets from book five of the Star Mage Saga, go here.