The Star Wizard Read online

  Contents

  Preface

  The Star Wizard

  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

  Book 5

  Author's Note

  The Trials of Io: Preview

  Preface

  Dear Reader,

  It is with pride and joy that I present to you The Star Wizard, Book 4 of the Starship Fairfax series. I can only hope you enjoy reading it half as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it; if you do, I’ll be a happy writer indeed!

  If you like what you read and you’re interested in helping me be able to make more, then I have a few favors to ask of you. Ugh, I know. Favors are the worst. You’ve already bought this book, so I can’t really ask anything more of you! But if you’re feeling generous, here are some things you can do to pat me on the back:

  Consider leaving a review. Whether on Amazon, Goodreads, or elsewhere, ratings and reviews will draw more readers to this book.

  If you’d like to read more, join my mailing list. You’ll get a monthly to bimonthly newsletter with new releases, occasional freebies, and special offers. No spam, no email sharing, none of that nonsense. You’ll also get access to a mailing-list exclusive short prequel story, “The Trials of Io,” that will give you a glimpse into Darren’s mysterious past.

  If you can find it within yourself to do either of the above, I will be immensely indebted to you, and will send you good vibes as I write more stories for your enjoyment.

  Thank you, from the depths of my being, for reading! And now, without any further ado about nothing (ha!), here we go!

  Best,

  Benjamin Douglas

  The Star Wizard

  The Star Wizard

  Book 4 of The Starship Fairfax

  The Kuiper Chronicles

  By Benjamin Douglas

  Copyright 2017 Benjamin Douglas. All rights reserved.

  The author’s permission is required for any reprinting, distribution, or recording of this content.

  All persons within are fictional and not intended to be representative of any real persons.

  Books in The Starship Fairfax Series:

  0.5 The Trials of Io (newsletter prequel)

  0.75 Totaled (another prequel story)

  1. The Lunar Gambit

  2. The Hidden Prophet

  3. The Neptune Contingency

  4. The Star Wizard

  5. The Sons of Jupiter

  Chapter 1

  “Moses, seal all bulkheads on level eight!”

  Lucas Odin, the young captain of the Fairfax, screamed at the ship’s new AI.

  “Done,” Moses calmly replied. “But you should know, Captain, a sizeable human population is currently contained there.”

  “Life support?”

  Beep. “Active. No souls have been lost.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Wait a second,” Lieutenant Caspar said. “No souls lost on level eight, you mean, right Moses?”

  Beep. “Affirmative. No Ceres souls lost on level eight, nor on the rest of the ship.”

  Lucas held his head in his hands. “Ada, your program isn’t talking sense. A moment ago he said the Ceres survivors had been shot to pieces. Now everyone is alive and well?”

  “Actually, Sir,” Moses said, “I never said the Ceres population had been eradicated; that was inference on your part. It is true that Hive attempted to kill them by destroying the bottom seven layers of the Fairfax. But Hive’s error lie in its inability to accurately determine the location of the survivors after I severed its connection to the Fairfax mainframe through Jeffrey.”

  Lucas shook his head. This was getting ridiculous. There were just too many AIs. “Alright—so where are the Ceres survivors now?”

  Beep. “Some remain in engineering, but most are now locked behind sealed bulkheads on level eight.”

  Lucas heaved a sigh of relief. They weren’t mass murderers. Not today, after all. Further, it sounded like the bulk of the people who had tried to overtake the Fairfax were now locked away, effectively on a deck-sized brig. Disaster had somehow been averted.

  Well, one disaster.

  “Mulligan,” he said into his comm. “Report.”

  Static crackled. The message that returned was garbled and broken. “Sir… almost had… kill them.”

  “Moses,” Lucas said, “what’s going on with the comm?”

  “I’m sorry about that, Sir,” he replied. “There seems to be some interference with non-essential systems. The Fairfax has entered a radiation field.”

  Lucas frowned.

  “Shouldn’t your ship have shielding for that?” Ada was squinting at him. She squinted a lot. It made him want to flinch, like he was being stared down. He had been trying his best not to let her see that lately.

  “My guess,” Caspar said, glaring at Ada sideways, “is that when your toy robots ate a bunch of holes through our belly, our shielding took some damage.”

  Ada scoffed. “They’re not my toys.”

  “You sure did let them out of the box though, didn’t you?”

  “Enough.” Lucas held a hand up. Caspar turned her glare on him, but was silent. He agreed with her points, as usual, but the way she had antagonized Ada ever since she’d come on board was starting to wear on him. He didn’t know what to do with the conflict. His stomach was roiling, and he thought absentmindedly about ordering a couple of antacid pills from the dispenser. Maybe later, he thought. Work to do now. “Randall, any damage to navigation? You getting the power you need?”

  His helmsman shook his head. “Everything looks alright from here, Sir. Ship is responding.”

  Lucas nodded and opened a comm to engineering control. Mulligan should be there anyway, but maybe it was just body comms having trouble. “Adams, report. How’s everything going down there?”

  This channel was cleaner, but there was a silence before the response. “Sir?”

  “Yes, this is the Captain. Tompkins, that you? Where’s Adams? What’s going on?”

  “Aye, Sir, this is Tompkins.” For once, the kid’s voice sounded devoid of its usual cheerfulness. “I regret to have to inform you, Sir, that Mr. Adams… he didn’t make it, Sir.”

  Lucas rose to his feet. “He didn’t make it?”

  “There’s been a firefight down here, Sir. Somehow the Ceres survivors got their hands on some weaponry. They’ve mostly been subdued now… I mean, Darren is just about done taking care of them. But, yeah. Adams didn’t make it.”

  Lucas reached down and held onto the armrests below him. The immediate loss of Adams was so prescient, it felt as though all the wind had been knocked out of him. Pull it together, Lucas. You’re the captain. He licked his lips. “Thank you for telling me, Private.” He cleared his throat. “Sitrep on the engines.”

  “Looks like all the shots have done is superficial damage, Sir. Things still seem to be running without too much trouble.”

  Lucas nodded, grimly. “Thank you. You have the engine room, Tompkins.” He closed the comm.

  Caspar cursed quietly.

  “Moses, where are the drones?” Lucas asked.

  “Hive has advanced out-system, presumably on a heading to Pluto.”

  Lucas ground his teeth. “Make best speed, Randall. Follow them.”

  “Sir?”

  “The Council has to be warned. The Colonies have to be…” He trailed off. They coul
d only hope they got there before the drones started taking out civilian targets. And that the Fairfax could do anything about it. “Lieutenant,” he said to Caspar, “you have the bridge. Ada, with me.”

  Ada frowned.

  “I need you in case we have to talk to Moses without being heard.”

  She rose and followed, seeming to understand.

  Mess after mess after mess on this tour. Now he had a gutted ship, a dead engineer—the only senior officer onboard—and a coup to finish putting down.

  “On second thought,” he muttered, punching an order into the console beside his dispenser. A couple of antacids fell out into his hand.

  ---

  Engineering was a mess.

  “Shut that down,” Lucas said, waving overhead. Lights flared and a klaxon wailed. Tompkins, who had met him at the hatch, nodded and trotted off to a security console. A few seconds later the deck grew quiet.

  “Anyone hurt?” Lucas asked. He winced. Other than Adams, he thought.

  Tompkins, to his credit, pretended not to notice. “Private Jan took one in the arm. Security got him to medical, I think.”

  “What about the other side?”

  “Oh, them.” Tompkins heaved a sigh through his nose. “Check around the corner.”

  Lucas glanced around. A blasting rifle lay on the ground, just within sight. Another peeked out on the ground from around the corner of the wall that divided the control area from the main engine room. Cautiously, he crept forward and peered around.

  More rifles and a few blasting pistols littered the deck. Lining one long wall, a row of men and women sat, most unconscious, their arms tied behind their backs. Lucas raised an eyebrow. Then he spotted the tall figure hunched over the last of the would-be mutineers to be secured.

  Darren.

  “You… you did all…?” Lucas trailed off, counting bodies. Seventeen of them sat there, heads lolling back. He didn’t even know why he was surprised anymore. Darren was obviously the most dangerous man he’d ever met when it came to hand-to-hand combat. Still, the sheer numbers boggled the mind.

  And they were all alive.

  “You didn’t kill them,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Disappointed?” Darren asked without turning. “I can change that.”

  “No, no. I’m glad you didn’t. It’s… refreshing.” Truth be told, he wasn’t sure how glad he felt that Adams’ murderers were still living and breathing on his ship. But he needed them alive to get to the bottom of what had happened. And anyway, he’d seen more than his fair share of carnage in Darren’s wake.

  “I didn’t let him.” Private Mulligan appeared from around one of the enormous pipes that dissected the space. “Kill them, I mean.” Her mouth was drawn up into a thin, tight line.

  Lucas nodded. That made sense. Some of these people had been friends of hers, once. He wondered at the battle of loyalties that must be raging inside her. Hers was the voice that had interceded on their behalf and arranged meetings between Lucas and the refugees, before all hell had broken loose and they had been forced to turn tail and run the Fairfax back to Colony space for all she was worth. Before Jeffrey’s treachery. He wondered, numbly, who had manipulated who. The AI, or the refugees? Who was responsible for the ship’s damage, the loss of the drones, the loss of Adams?

  The hatch opened and a pair of security privates entered, reporting to Mulligan. “How is he?” she asked.

  “He’ll live,” one said.

  “Keep the arm?”

  “Too soon to tell. Doc says it’s up to him, now that those things are inside him.”

  “Private,” Lucas interrupted, “you talking about Jan?”

  “Sir.”

  Lucas frowned. “There a doctor among the Ceres survivors?”

  “No, Sir,” Mulligan said. “One of the men that came with Ada. He’s got a small nanobot farm with him, so I sent Jan there straightaway. I hope I didn’t err.”

  “No, you were right.” Lucas hoped that was true. He’d been taught, like most colonists, to be suspicious of nanobots. Of course they were a useful tool, but their abuse in conjunction with the AI incidents a generation before had led to a legal ban on true AIs, and a distinct prejudice against nanobots. Still, options for medical care were few and far between on the Fairfax right now. Like many of the other senior posts, that of ship’s doctor had been vacant when the ship had flown out to Mars a few weeks before to convey Ambassador Taurius to the Peace Summit on Pluto. A simple mission; child’s play. They hadn’t needed a doctor.

  The arrogance.

  “Send him to the bridge once he’s healed,” Lucas said. “Or once he’s well enough to talk.”

  “Sir.”

  Lucas crossed back to the line of bound mutineers. A couple of them had regained consciousness. They glared straight ahead.

  “Who’s in charge here?” he asked them.

  Silence.

  “I’ll ask again. Who’s in charge of this mess?”

  “I’d say you are,” a voice grumbled. Lucas turned to face the end of the line, where an older man with baggy jowls sat scowling. “Seems more like he is, though.” His eyes darted to Darren, then back to the deck.

  Lucas frowned. He crossed to the man. “How’d this all get started?”

  The man made a sound something like a cough, something like a mirthless chuckle. “Maybe when you locked us up down there like animals. Maybe before, when you blew our home to high hell.” The man lifted his eyes. They seemed overflowing with hate, but a hollow, consuming hate, like staring into the event horizon of a black hole. “No death is good enough for you, Roman.” He spit.

  Lucas flinched. Then he looked at Darren. “Make sure their bonds are tight. I want them in the brig. Now.”

  He turned on his heel and left engineering, the man’s words rattling around in his ears.

  Roman.

  Chapter 2

  The beep of the dispenser unit brought Erick sharply out of a troubled sleep. Every five hours, without fail, it beeped. Then he was fed. And that was it. That was all that happened in his quarters, unless you counted the flushing of the toilet. He’d tried the comm in the wall a few times. No one answered. So far as he could tell, he’d just been moved from one prison cell into another. So much for the grand escape.

  It had been this way for nearly a day. Well, four dispenser cycles, as he was coming to think of them. Their tiny ship had rendezvoused with a Rome vessel not long after the destruction of the Empire prison ship. Cyclops, back in his element, wasted no time. Erick and Rylea were immediately separated, so they could rest, he was told, and in that moment he had been so tired and bewildered he hadn’t protested very strongly, he was embarrassed to admit. Now, some twenty hours later, he wondered at his naivety.

  He also wondered, more darkly, what was happening to Rylea. He cursed himself under his breath for letting them separate him from her. He was all she had now, the only person in the whole system who saw her as a human being rather than a victim at best, an experiment at worst. Or whatever it was that Cyclops saw in her. He shuddered at the thought.

  At least he had a proper bed, and a private bath and toilet. It wasn’t outfitted like a prison cell. Still, the locked door and dead comm made it hard to enjoy the amenities.

  Ten minutes later had had slurped down a bowl of pea soup and a mug of water, and was munching on toast when the hatch hissed open. Erick glanced up from the little desk-table combo to a familiar man. Tall, bald, a scarred face, a black eye-patch. Cyclops entered the room and the hatch closed behind him, locked again, no doubt.

  “Mind if I join you?” he asked.

  Erick blinked. Join me in prison? He shook his head and kicked out the other chair, which Cyclops took and sat in, sighing. The man seemed worn out, but pleased. He slumped back a bit in the chair, relaxing. Erick put down his toast.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  “Extraordinary. That girl… the things she can do. Huh, imagine the things she can do that she ca
n’t even imagine imagining yet! Now there’s a mind bender.” He picked up what was left of Erick’s toast and took a bite.

  “I mean how is she doing? Is she ok?”

  Cyclops waved off the question. “Oh, sure, sure. She’s fine. Will be fine. Just needs to rest and get her strength back.”

  Erick felt every muscle tighten. “What did you do to her?”

  “Me?” Crunch. “Ha, that’s a joke! I didn’t do anything but give her permission to be who she is. Who she’s becoming.”

  “And who is that?”

  Cyclops dropped the crust on the desk and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, sighing again. “You really never do stop asking questions, do you, Erick?”

  “I’ve a right to know. I’m her… she’s—”

  “Yes, what is she to you, anyway?” Cyclops grinned. “I’ve been wondering. What are your intentions, young man?”

  “It’s not like that. Her brother and I, we went back. Before Rome. She’s like a sister to me.”

  “Hm. And you figure now you owe her your protection, or you owe him some kinda debt?”

  “Something like that.”

  Cyclops shrugged. “That’s unfortunate. I hate complications. But I tell ya what, Erick. I don’t dislike you. Yet. You stay out of the way, and maybe I won’t kill you. But you might as well know, what Rylea’s been through… she’s nobody’s little sister anymore. She’s so, so much more.”

  “I gathered. Pretty convenient how you seem to know all about it.”

  Cyclops frowned, glaring at him for a moment. “We make it our business to know everyone’s business in the system. I thought you knew that already. I can assure you, I had nothing to do with putting her in the middle of the project. That was someone else.”

  “Empire?”

  “Maybe. Maybe you don’t need to know. Point is, I’m not your enemy. Necessarily. Now, I’m gonna walk out of here and give you a few hours to think that over. Next mealtime, instead of your dispenser going off, that hatch is going to open. When it does, you can either come down to the galley and join me and the crew to eat, or you can be a fool and try to run off to gods-know-where. One of those options ends in a fine meal. The other ends in you getting spaced. Understand?”