Space Pirate Charlie: The Dragon Mage Book 2

by Scott Baron

  “What happened?”

  “Baloo,” she said, pointing to where the curious little animal had been digging.

  Jutting out of the red soil was a bright flash of white. He knew immediately what it was, if not who. A bone. One of his former crew. The pup had somehow found the remains of his dead crewmates.

  “It’s okay. It’s one of mine,” Charlie said. “We lost almost twenty people when we crashed. We buried them––I mean, the ones we found enough of. Some of them were no more than pieces. The hull tore to shreds...”

  Charlie fell silent. He had fought, he had even killed since he first arrived in this strange galaxy, but the memories of that day hit him in the gut as hard as if it were yesterday.

  “It was an honorable thing you did, seeking and burying your friends,” Bawb said, studying the burial ground intently. “But there is something odd here. I sense traces of magic. Ara, do you feel it?”

  “Of course, Geist. A killing spell was cast.” She paused, sniffing the air. “Four of them. There are more bodies under this soil.”

  The memory of the green slave ship captain brutally murdering those of his crew too injured to be of value to him flashed through Charlie’s mind. Captain Tür. The man who had made him a slave. Who had sold him off to become a gladiator. Who indirectly made him what he was today.

  “I know what happened,” Charlie said quietly. “These four were survivors along with me and Rika. When the Tslavars arrived, we were taken as slaves, but our friends were injured. They were healing, it just would have taken time, is all, but the Tslavars didn’t want to spend the power on them.”

  “So they killed them?” Leila asked, shocked. “Why not just leave them behind? There was no need to kill them.”

  “I’ve often wondered that very same thing,” he replied, then fell silent.

  “Their claim,” Bawb commented.

  “Their what?”

  “Their claim. Normally stranded are fair game, but you are not from the conglomerated systems. Nor are you from this galaxy. I suspect they killed your friends so there would be no possible witnesses to negate their claim to you and your friend. If they had not done so, though highly unlikely, the potential of a challenge to your enslavement could still have been made, should they be found.”

  “So they killed my friends to make sure they could keep us as slaves.”

  “Yes. And as this wreck site proves your extra-galactic lineage, I believe a reasonable argument against your being subject to this realm’s rules of bondage could have been made.”

  Charlie jaw flexed involuntarily. “All over some goddamn slavery,” he growled. “You know, we abolished that practice on my world hundreds of years ago. And now, here I am, deep in space and what do I find? A people just as cruel and backwards as the ones we drove from existence back home.”

  “It is an imperfect system, for certain. But one that is being challenged. Why do you think I was tasked with killing the visla, Charlie? He is one of the key players on the Council of Twenty. With Maktan out of the equation, the rebellion stands a far greater chance of success. They may not be able to free all of the systems, but with pressure applied to the right places, there is a very real possibility of them freeing at least some of them, and that is a start.”

  Charlie pondered his assassin friend’s words as they carefully re-buried his deceased crewmate while Leila tied Baloo’s lead far enough away that he wouldn’t go digging up any more bones. Once the pup was secure, she quietly laid out a meal from their perishable supplies.

  “I’ve got it,” Charlie said, sitting down and absent mindedly starting their fire.

  “Charlie?”

  “Yes, Ara?”

  “Did you notice what you just did?” she asked, an amused tone to her voice.

  “What?”

  “You cast the fire spell without even thinking about it. And you did it silently as well.”

  The others took note of her words. They hadn’t noticed when it happened, but it was true. He had started the fire without muttering the spell.

  “How did you do that, Charlie?” Bawb asked, an eyebrow arched high and curious. “Only the most powerful of vislas can cast without uttering a word.”

  He thought about it a moment.

  I don’t feel any different, he mused.

  “I can’t rightly say, Bob. It just happened,” he finally answered.

  “Interesting.”

  It was a statement the Wampeh assassin had made more and more frequently as he spent time with the unusual human. Given what he’d seen in his time accompanying the man from Earth, he had a sneaking suspicion he’d utter the word a great deal more in the future.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Light peeked through the myriad holes pockmarking the hull of the Asbrú, making the outer compartments feel almost like a disco ball with their glinting multitude. The elements had wreaked merry havoc on the metal shell, the Wastelands’ periodic windstorms battering it relentlessly. Fortunately for Charlie and his friends, the innermost reaches of the ship were left unscathed.

  That meant the reactor still functioned, and while many of the peripheral systems had failed due to environmental wear, it was looking like a bit of elbow grease and a lot of scavenged cabling might get some systems functional, if not fully online.

  “Watch your step in there,” he warned Leila as she inched her way down into the ship. “It was unstable back when we crashed here, so I can only guess how things might have broken down over time.”

  “Seems pretty solid,” she replied, testing the floor with her boot. “Maybe whatever was loose before has settled into place.”

  Bawb surveyed the interior, his sharp senses scanning for any unexpected hazards. “This place is a disaster.”

  “Duh. We crashed, Bob.”

  “You know what I mean,” the Wampeh shot back. “But I would tend to agree with Leila’s assessment. The storms alone would have shaken the most unstable sections into either collapse or a more solid configuration as they moved. I’m hoping for more of the latter.”

  “Okay, then. So long as you all know to keep your eyes open and walk carefully. And for heaven’s sake, don’t go flipping switches on anything. It’s going to take a while to track down what’s active and what isn’t, and I don’t want any unplanned discharges if we can avoid them.”

  “Discharges? I thought you said your kind did not use powers,” Bawb said, his eyes bright pinpoints as they reflected the sunlight peeking in through the holes in the hull. “I do not sense any magic here.”

  “I told you, it’s not magic. It’s tech. Reactors. Electricity.”

  “I don’t like it,” the Wampeh said, crinkling his nose with distaste. “This place, this ship. It feels wrong.”

  “Just a different type of power than you’re used to, is all. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. I felt the same about magic when I first got here, after all.”

  “Perhaps. For now, let us be hasty in retrieving the thing you described.”

  “Plasma cutter. Right. I know the tanks supplying the gasses were intact after the crash, and I saw others we could jury-rig if need be, but the big thing is going to be powering the system up. It still takes a fair amount of juice.”

  “Juice? This tech-magic from your world runs on beverages?” Leila asked.

  Charlie almost laughed aloud, but managed to refrain. This was their first exposure to actual Earth tech, and while he may have told them stories, there was simply so much to learn, and they’d only just arrived.

  “No, Leila, it’s not powered by actual juice. That’s just a slang term for power we use on my world,” he said.

  “Strange. Even with the translation spell, some of your expressions just don’t make sense.”

  “You should try talking to teenagers sometime,” he replied with a grin. “Anyway, the ship seems stable, though some sections appear to have shifted since I was last here. Let’s move deeper and see about retrieving the plasma cutter and getting these damn
ed collars off, shall we? I think if we head this way and cross over via the upper levels we can avoid the most extreme damage.”

  Charlie took the lead, guiding his friends through the dimly lit wreckage of his ship, up higher and higher until they passed the ruined command center, then aft a few compartments before preparing to descend to the jumble of metal that had held the plasma cutter when he was last there.

  As they walked, he pointed out systems and explained their functions. It was a crash course––literally––in Earth tech.

  “You say you built this vessel?” Bawb asked, eyeing an enormous jumble of wires that had been torn from the bulkhead.

  “I didn’t actually build it. I was one of the lead designers, is all. Most of the fabrication was handled by robots. The welding and all that was done in sections, then assembled into their final configuration. Men and women then came in and worked alongside the machines to install all of these miles of cables and tie in the machinery.”

  “It lacks style, and is brutish in design, no offense,” Bawb said.

  “None taken.”

  “But the sheer scope of the endeavor––I must admit, your people appear capable of great feats, even if the powers behind them are unknown to me. And the ship jumped, like Ara does? Amazing.”

  “Well, technically we were still in the experimentation stage on the whole jump thing. We call it an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, by the way. Unfortunately, something went horribly wrong, and we were sucked through a wormhole.”

  “What’s a wormhole?” Leila asked as she carefully climbed over a toppled control rack.

  “It’s like how water drains, you know? Spinning and vanishing down a pipe. Only this happens with space, and no one knows where that pipe leads.”

  “In your case, it led you to this world,” Bawb noted.

  “Correct. Or, more correct would be to say it led to this galaxy. And if we’re lucky, the systems I’m pulling may be able to tell me where exactly we are in relation to my home, and hopefully even show me a way home.”

  “Is that why you are collecting these seemingly useless things as we move through the ship?” Bawb asked.

  “Yeah. If I can get them charged, the residual trace of whatever pulled us here may still be in there. And that just might guide the way back. Of course, it’d take a helluva lot more power to send a message, and I’d be long dead before they even received it, but at least I could hopefully let someone back home eventually know what happened to me. Us. My crew.”

  He fell silent a moment, the memories flooding back as he walked the ship he had spent so many years of his life creating.

  “Okay, enough of that. We should keep moving. The plasma cutter is about a dozen compartments away, but if we cut through Cargo One we should be able to bypass a few of them.”

  He turned and headed off down a warped corridor, the metal bent and distorted from many years ago.

  Come on, don’t be blocked.

  Charlie pushed the partially open airlock door blocking his path, and, miraculously, it began to grind open.

  “Bob, gimme a hand with this, will ya?”

  The two men pushed hard, and despite years of grit making its way into the craft bit by bit, the door gave way to their efforts and slid into the wall. The compartment it exposed took the aliens’ breath away.

  “What is all of this?” Leila said, her light flashing across the equipment, then falling to rest on the massive machine in their path.

  “That, my friend, is a mech. It’s in travel mode at the moment, so you can’t really see its normal configuration, but when it’s not in here all folded up, it’s an enormous metal man used in environments too dangerous for people to go.”

  “A metal man? But how does it move? I sense no power. No Drooks,” Bawb said, running his hand along the enormous machine’s cool mass.

  “Normally it has power cells that fit in there.” Charlie pointed to the sealed compartment. “But that’s them over there, and as you can see, they’re bent to hell and won’t possibly fit. So all it has––or had, last time we checked––was just enough power to run systems tests but not function beyond that.”

  “Fascinating. And there is no way to power it now?”

  “Nope. Those were the only power cells that fit it. I could run a trickle charge from the reactor, but that wouldn’t solve the bent housing problem. So this bad boy is stuck, unfortunately.”

  He looked at the mech, thinking back to the simulations he had run with his friend so many times. Over the years, he had managed to put her fate out of his thoughts, but now, here, in this place, Rika’s memory haunted him with every turn.

  “Come on, there’s no sense lingering in here. The plasma cutter should be up this way, and if we’re lucky, it’ll still have enough of a charge on board. Once we get it to the surface, these collars should come off.”

  “Should? We came a long way for should, Charlie.”

  “I know, Leila, but I’m almost positive it’s the one thing that this galaxy’s magic won’t stand up to. But there’s only one way to know for sure, so let’s get cracking.”

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  It had taken several trips and an entire day to finally get the plasma cutter disassembled enough to fit through the damaged sections of the ship and hauled to the surface. The twists and turns inside made even Drook-powered lifting spells difficult to utilize, but eventually, the last of the components reached the first sunlight they’d seen since being installed in the craft many years prior.

  Charlie had decided to bring every possible gas they could use on the strange, magically enhanced metal bands around their necks. It had required additional trips, but was well worth the effort in his opinion. If they could find the right combination, he figured they should be able to cut through them, whatever the hell type of metal they were.

  Of course, plasma would also cut right through the person on the other side of the collar, so he took Bawb on a scavenging expedition to find the toughest scraps of heat shielding from the hull that they could fit between themselves and the collar. They then trekked through the belly of the ship and recovered a half dozen space suits, all sealed and pristine, waiting for them all those years, safe from the wear of the elements.

  “These are a form of armor?” the Geist had asked.

  “What? No, this isn’t battle stuff, Bob. These are to protect us from the extreme temperature fluctuations in space.”

  “Wouldn’t a basic environmental spell be more––”

  “Yes, Bob, it would. But we don’t have those where I’m from, remember? So us poor humans have to come up with other ways to survive in space. The good thing is, not only can we use one as a thermal buffer to keep us from burning when the heat shield under the cutter gets hot, but we can also wear them when we fly with Ara from now on. She can take us into space with no problems.”

  “But without breathing spells––”

  “They have their own closed-loop air systems, and with the CO2 scrubbers built in, we have a day or two of air in each suit. And there are extras, so we can even repurpose one for Baloo. He’s small enough to easily fit.”

  “I do not understand much of what you just said, Charlie, but I am starting to see the wonders of this craft with new eyes. It may not be aesthetically or magically pleasing, but the accomplishment is nonetheless impressive.”

  “Thanks. Now let’s get this stuff back to the camp. I’m gonna have a long night rebuilding that cutter, but if the power cells hold up, I think it just might do the trick with these bits and bobs to shield us.”

  “And none too soon, I expect. The odds of Maktan and the Council finding us increases the longer we stay still, and if they get close enough, they will be able to track us by those collars.”

  “I’ve seen that at work before,” Charlie said, recalling his recapture by Captain Tür after being kidnapped by pirates. By his friends.

  “There you are,” Ara said as Charlie and Bawb emerged from the ship. “We were beginning to wond
er if perhaps Leila should come in and search for you.”

  “All good, Ara. We were just grabbing a few other useful supplies while we were at it. These suits are all intact. That means we can safely exit the atmosphere next jump.”

  “Oh? That is excellent. It will make the process so much more efficient, not to mention requiring far less power to jump.”

  “Yeah, I knew you’d like that.”

  “And what of the collars? Will your device be able to remove them?”

  “I think so. I just need to get the plasma cutter back together, and we’ll give it a try. In the meantime, would you mind wearing this little harness of gear I rigged up?” Charlie asked, holding aloft a small addition of cargo netting to clip to the lines she already wore.

  “Of course. That seems like a paltry weight for me to carry.”

  “Oh, it’s not the weight I’m wondering about. It’s your magic.”

  “Hmm. Go on,” she said, intrigued.

  “I’ve cast an incredibly basic yaka illum spell to feed power into them, kind of like I used once before to trickle energy into one of my old devices. The thing is, I have no idea how I made it work at the time, but I was thinking, if it’s in proximity to someone of your enormous power, maybe it’ll absorb enough by osmosis to function eventually. If you agree to it, of course.”

  The Zomoki pondered a moment, looking at the strange tech-magic devices.

  “An interesting idea,” she finally said. “You have my permission.”

  “Thanks, Ara,” he said, then clipped the navs and drive arrays to her harness, hoping they might one day show him the path home.

  Charlie looked out across the horizon. The twin stars illuminating the planet were already dropping low in the sky, and as the red sun set, a small sandstorm was starting to blow across the wasteland. Charlie knew there was simply no way he’d be able to finish rebuilding the cutter before it hit.

  “We should cover our gear and move inside to shelter,” he said.

  “But I thought you said it was best to camp outside,” Leila noted as she fed her squirming pup.