Bad Luck Charlie Read online

  Bad Luck Charlie

  The Dragon Mage Book 1

  Scott Baron

  Copyright © 2019 by Scott Baron

  All rights reserved.

  Print Edition ISBN 978-1-945996-23-8

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Epilogue

  But wait, there’s more!

  Freebies

  Thank You

  Also by Scott Baron

  About the Author

  Being a fish out of water is tough,

  but that's how you evolve.

  – Kumail Nanjiani

  Chapter One

  “Starboard heat shield seven is gone!” Charlie called out as calmly as he could over the din of their ship more or less tearing apart. He was going to carry out his duties like a professional if it was the last thing he’d do, and the way things were going, it was starting to look like it might be.

  “Copy that,” Captain Reynard bellowed over the noise. “Gaspari, redirect the primary debris shield to cover as much of starboard seven as possible. Pull power from wherever you have to!”

  Rika Gaspari, his second-in-command, began frantically throwing switches, inverting the power flows, her hands a blur of activity as she carried out her orders. The ship’s rattling lessened, but did not cease.

  “Still low on power, Captain. The atmosphere has some powerful radiologic properties that are wreaking havoc with our phase shielding. I don’t know if it’s going to be enough.”

  “Then pull power from life support.”

  “Sir? Won’t we need that?” Charlie asked as he struggled to keep the engines from redlining into critical and blowing them all to hell.

  “Not if we don’t survive atmospheric entry. First things first. Right now, getting down in one piece is the highest priority,” the captain replied.

  Rika did as she was ordered. A moment later the crew felt the ever-present breeze of recirculating air that moved about them cease. It was something they were so familiar with that they didn’t even notice its presence until it was abruptly gone.

  “Done, Captain,” Gaspari announced, her close-cropped hair sticking to her damp forehead. “Twenty seconds until we clear the exosphere.”

  “Copy that. Jamal, are you suited up?” the captain asked over internal comms.

  “Affirmative, Captain,” he replied. “Prepped and standing by with backup fire suppression.”

  The chief of security and emergency services had geared up the moment things began to sway out of parameters, which was just before they were unceremoniously sucked through a massive wormhole and spat out Lord knew where. His foresight was a good thing. It was looking like things were about to get a whole lot worse.

  The ship bucked and tossed, its hull glowing bright orange as the edges of the strange world’s atmosphere pummeled it with brutal intensity. It was a rough ride in command. Captain Reynard knew the rest of his crew were being subjected to a vicious beating in their compartments. He just hoped they had strapped in. They launched with twenty-four living crew aboard, and he planned to keep it that way.

  The command module’s power flickered and dimmed.

  “Losing primary power,” Gaspari said.

  “I see it,” Charlie replied, already in motion, rushing from his seat to the door to the adjacent engineering compartment just off the bridge.

  His team in main engineering down below would keep the reactors powered up. It was his job to keep that power flowing to the controls during flight.

  Smoke greeted him as he manually opened the door with the backup access crank tucked into the wall panel.

  “We got a fire?” Reynard asked, sniffing the air.

  “Negative, Captain. Just some blown circuits and overloaded wires,” Charlie replied as he stuck his head in and surveyed the damage.

  The room was small, just row upon row of circuit racks and relays. A harness chair sat in front of a work bench, never before used. Of course, for the maiden flight of the ship, why would it have been?

  “The damage looks relatively minimal,” Charlie informed them. “Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll have it sorted.”

  “We don’t have a couple of minutes.”

  “I’m on it. Let me know when the main control power surges normalize and level out.”

  Without another word, he slid through the narrow gap he’d opened in the door and set to work. The blown circuits were the easiest to repair, and, luckily, the most vital as well. The smoldering wires nearby, while important, were not crucial to staying aloft.

  “Powering off navs and switching your panels to emergency reserve. Nobody touch anything until I say so. We’re already maxing the load,” he yelled out through the door.

  Melted circuits went flying, his nimble fingers quickly replacing them with the backups stored in neatly arranged cases mounted to the wall nearby. A mere thirty seconds after he began, he called out to the others once more.

  “Okay, we’re good. It’s powered back up. Test the system.”

  Captain Reynard feathered the controls. The ship responded as well as could be expected given the circumstances.

  “Controls are functional. Gaspari, how are secondary navs and telemetry?”

  “We’re limping, but it should be enough,” she replied.

  “Okay, we’re good. Get out of there, Charlie.”

  “Just a sec, Captain. I need to swap a few wires and reroute some of this charge so we don’t fry everything if there’s another power surge. It’ll just take me a minute.”

  “Can it wait?”

  “It can, but it shouldn’t.”

  “All right, then. But be quick. We may have to make a much more abrupt landing than
would be ideal.”

  “Believe me, the last place I want to be is stuck in here,” he replied, setting to work.

  He had just replaced the first of the failing wires when the ship bucked and slammed him into the wall, the emergency protocols sealing the re-powered door shut with him inside. He frantically clawed for the crank handle, but the turbulence was too much. Miraculously, he was thrown backwards––right into the harness chair. The back of the chair, that is.

  Gotta get strapped in, he realized with a desperate grunt as his body switched from weightless to crushing Gs as the ship lurched and dove.

  Charlie slammed into the ceiling with a rude crunch, held weightless a moment, hovering just out of reach of anything from which to push off, then was thrown to the floor, pinned by the G-force.

  The pressure relented for a moment, allowing him to breathe. Charlie ignored the pain racking his body and dragged himself into the harness chair and strapped in snugly, and not a moment too soon, as the ship flipped upside down, then plummeted in a tight spiral.

  Stuck in the memory foam chair, Charlie cried out, then fell silent as the pressure of the mounting G-force drove the blood from his head, rendering him unconscious.

  He wouldn’t remember the crash. But he would never forget the aftermath, nor the folly that had led up to it.

  Chapter Two

  It was six months prior, and Charlie Gault had already been working on billionaire Brockton Millbury’s top-secret Asbrú project for nearly five years when the call came in.

  “Chuck?” a voice asked over his portable comms unit.

  “Hey, Vickie,” he replied, smoothly merging with the vehicles around him.

  Only one person ever called him Chuck, despite the many times he made it known he did not really like the nickname, and that person was Vickie Rogers, the head of the entire R&D team spearheading the eccentric visionary’s project.

  “You sitting down, Chuck?”

  “I’m driving, Vickie, so I would certainly hope so.”

  “You could be using an auto-pilot for all I know,” she replied. “But that’s unimportant.”

  Anything not on Vickie’s agenda was deemed unimportant, and that included time off, weekends, and even vacations.

  “You sound agitated. Is everything all right?” he asked, staring out the window, pleasantly distracted by the passing scenery as his vehicle effortlessly lifted off, flowing smoothly with the few other permitted conveyances in the air.

  He was, in fact, using his auto-pilot, but he wouldn’t tell her as much.

  “It’s time,” she said, barely containing her excitement. “Tests have come back, and the Einstein-Rosen stabilizer works.”

  “We know it works, Vickie. We’ve known for over a year. The question is, can we maintain a stable enough field to allow for safe transit? That’s the tricky bit. The distance between the Earth and Mr. Millbury’s test facility orbiting Mars is no small matter. The device has to be able to sustain for all thirty-three point nine million miles.”

  “Which will be covered in a flash.”

  “In theory. None of this has been real-world tested for those power parameters.”

  “But, Chuck, the prototype skiff just made the moon jump.”

  Charlie audibly gasped. He knew it was possible, the bending of space to allow for rapid transit from one point to another, but their energy sources were simply not powerful enough to allow much more than a several thousand-mile hop. It was impressive, but it would not alter the course of human history. At least, not yet. Their work could change that, one day.

  “That wasn’t scheduled,” he said. “First space trials aren’t even slated until two years from now. It’s still in the experimental phase.”

  “I know. But Mr. Millbury himself green-lit the test.”

  “He’s a dilettante, not a scientist. He should have waited.”

  “He’s a genius, Chuck, and he’s our boss. If he wants an early test, we give him an early test.”

  Charlie sighed. He knew how this would go. Protest would be useless. It would be just like every other time the billionaire had a whim. Charlie and his team would whir into action like the residents of a kicked anthill, frantically tweaking ops parameters and pulling seventy-two-hour engineering brainstorming sessions to meet the new goals their patron had just pulled out of his ass.

  An ideal work environment, it was not.

  “Okay, so we know the unit works on short hops. Christ, I can’t believe he went and did that,” he groaned. “How much did it drain the reactor? We’ll need that data if we’re going to figure load requirements for the longer jump.”

  A brief silence hung in the air.

  “All of it,” she finally replied.

  “All? It drained the whole core? That’s impossible.”

  “Nope. Apparently, it’s very possible, as we’ve just learned. The fusion core is cold as ice.”

  Draining a battery was one thing, but actually sucking the life out of a nuclear fusion reactor was––up until today, at least––impossible. Charlie put on his best game face and stayed calm.

  Treat it like just another glitch to work through, Charlie. Don’t freak out, he silently told himself, taking a deep breath and counting to three before speaking.

  “So, once again, it seems we are faced with the power problem,” he said, managing to sound relatively calm. “Only now, our only test reactor is toast. Think he’ll spring for a new one?”

  “We have other reactors, Chuck. Bigger ones.”

  He knew what she was speaking of, he just couldn’t believe she was saying it.

  “Those are supposed to power the ship, Vickie. We’ve been working on that thing for nearly five years. You can’t just go and steal our work for Millbury’s impulses.”

  “Relax. We’re not going to strip them out of your ship, Chuck. Your pet project is safe. The Asbrú will remain intact.”

  “Good, becau––”

  “We’re going to run the next test with the ship.”

  Charlie fell silent. They couldn’t be serious, could they? Taking hundreds of billions of dollars worth of research and work and turning it into a science experiment? It was folly. Madness.

  And just the sort of thing his quirky employer would do.

  He sighed, resigned to his project’s unfortunate fate.

  “All right,” he finally said, knowing it was a fight he simply could not win. “When do I have to deliver it? I’ve got to warn you, the ship still needs a lot of work and a proper shake-out to get any bugs out of the systems.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to shake them out.”

  “I’m sorry, that sounded like you said I would be doing it.”

  “That’s right, Chuck. You’ve been promoted. You’re no longer design lead. You’re now the official specialist for engineering and flight ops. Congratulations.”

  “You know I don’t fly, Vickie. Space and me, we don’t get along.”

  “It’s a great honor to be one of the first humans to travel utilizing this tech, and you were a key designer. You should be excited, not pouting like a little baby.”

  “I don’t do space flights. That was made clear when I signed on to this project.”

  Silence hung icily over the open line.

  Finally, she spoke. “You do realize what this will do to you? To your career?”

  “I’ll have to find another job. Maybe I’ll teach, this time,” he replied.

  “You won’t, you know. You’ll be blacklisted from every major research facility, shunned from reputable universities. Is that what you want?”

  “He wouldn’t do that,” Charlie said, only half believing himself.

  “He wants this badly, Charles, so yes, he would.”

  She had called him Charles. Suddenly, he realized just how deep the shit he was standing in truly was. If forced to estimate, he’d have said roughly eyeball level. And rising.

  He had some savings, sure, but not nearly enough to become an unemployed, an
d, far worse, unemployable, man. A choice would have to be made, and his options were either bad or worse.

  When the Asbrú launched six months later for what was only supposed to be a short test flight of its main drive and reactor systems, it left Earth carrying a greatly reduced crew, but enough to run some smaller experiments in the shake-out process.

  Charlie, miserable and still a little queasy from launch, found his reluctant ass planted firmly in the engineering and ops seat within the command module. The captain’s second-in-command flashed him a look.

  “I know you don’t like space flight, but I’m glad you’re with us, Charlie.”

  “Thanks, Rika.”

  They’d worked well together in the months leading up to that day, and he felt confident he could trust not just her abilities as the Captain’s Number One, but her counsel as a friend as well. She’d helped get him over his crushing fear of flight. And now he was in her hands.

  “Okay, everybody,” the captain said over comms. “The countdown has started. Full systems test in one minute. This will just be a power test in orbit. Yang, are all of your gadgets and test samples good?”