Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Queen of the Void
by Michael Wallace
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The Void Queen Trilogy
Book #1 – Queen of the Void
Book #2 – Star Wolf
Book #3 – coming early 2017
copyright 2016 by Michael Wallace
Cover art by Lorenz Hideyoshi Ruwwe
Chapter One
Catarina Vargus approached the star at eight percent the speed of light. Any sane commander would have given an urgent order to pull up, to either decelerate or to change course. Orient Tiger’s tyrillium armor could absorb the heat of the corona without melting into slag, and the equipment would probably survive a few warm minutes, but the humans inside didn’t resist heat so well. Screw up, and the sixty-seven pirates, smugglers, and fortune seekers in her crew would cook like crabs dropped in boiling water. It was bound to get toasty even if they did it right.
Catarina turned to her tech officer, who was crouched over his console a few feet away, his eyes flickering back and forth while his fingers danced across the keypad.
“Burris, what have we got?” she asked. “Any more readings on the potential hostiles?”
“Negative. Nearest I can tell it was a ghost signal.”
“Don’t give me that ghost signal nonsense,” Catarina said. “Keep looking. If someone’s out there, I want to know who. And I want to know where.”
“I’ll look, but I don’t see much point. I’m telling you, it was a sensor malfunction.”
Burris was a former Royal Navy officer, drummed out of the service for reckless behavior. It had made him a good smuggler before Catarina hired him on. But she could use a little more seriousness at the moment from him and the rest of her crew.
The sensors had briefly shown an unknown ship about an hour ago, and that had slapped away Catarina’s own complacency. Who the devil was out here? Could it be Hroom? She wasn’t so far from the edge of their collapsing empire.
Or maybe Singaporean refugees. Their home world had been wrecked by an alien invasion, but there were still a good number of their ships wandering the frontier, including the pair of war junks in her own fleet.
Refugees, she could use. Hroom, not so much. Pirates, even less. Catarina had been ducking in and out of Ladino and New Dutch ports for the past two years, and someone might think she was onto a big score. They’d be right, of course, just not in the way they thought.
Or it might be the Royal Navy.
That was Catarina’s real worry. The Kingdom of Albion had driven off the alien threat, and its destroyers and torpedo boats were everywhere, cleaning up the lawlessness as they mobilized for another war.
Whoever it was, Catarina had worked too long and taken too many risks to be caught out now. She’d spent every pound and shilling on this expedition. If she failed, she had nothing.
I won’t fail. That is not an option.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she told Burris. “Something triggered the sensors, and I want to know what.”
He straightened from his console and rubbed his neck. “Might have been a solar flare, some radioactive burst from the star. Tripped something in the arrays or . . . well, who knows? Whatever it was, it’s gone now. You could order the fleet to halt.”
“You mean to have a closer look?” she asked.
“Might take a couple of hours, but sure, that’s the idea.”
“Only four minutes left to abort,” Gomez said from his console. The pilot was a slender Ladino with a thin, worried face, a goatee, and a balding head that made him look like a monk. “I can pull the fleet out of the jump trajectory, but it’s got to be quick.”
Burris nodded. “We veer from the star, come to, and let one of the war junks spread her wings. Do a thorough sounding of the whole system.”
Catarina looked at her console, at the string of ships getting ready to follow her into the star. There, inside the upper atmosphere, sat a hidden jump point that would take them into the Omega Cluster.
How about it? Abort the jump, do a thorough scan. If there were naval vessels or pirates lurking out by the gas giants or in the asteroid belt, she needed to know. All it would take to wreck her plans was the wrong person watching her slip through.
Say she found someone. Then what? Would she slip away, pretend she was up to nothing, that her fleet of sixteen ships and the two barges were idly exploring this uninhabitable, out-of-the-way quarter of the sector? And if the so-called ghost signal turned out to be from Captain McGowan or Admiral Drake? What was she going to do, attack them? She was barely slipping under the navy’s radar as it was. The last thing she needed was a task force hunting her.
“Two minutes to abort,” Gomez said. “That’s all, Captain. After that, we either go through, or we burn up in a final blaze of glory. Of course, we might die anyway, if those boys in engineering are wrong about the warp point engine.”
“When you put it like that, what’s a ghost image compared to a failed jump?” Catarina nodded. “Take us through.”
#
There was something disorienting about having your ship, all of your equipment, and your very body torn apart to the atomic level and reassembled five light years away. It was a small miracle of the universe that you generally woke up stunned, head throbbing, and disoriented for a few minutes, but otherwise unharmed.
Or, puking up your breakfast, as it happened in this case. Catarina managed to grab her barf bag before it all came out. She came up annoyed, head clearing, and snapped at the four others on the bridge to get moving, even as she unfastened her top buttons to let in air. The bridge was sweltering from the jump, and the weak climate control on her battered old frigate struggled to cool it back down.
Orient Tiger drifted away from the jump point under auxiliary power. The engine room fired up the plasma, and they picked up speed. A pair of schooners came through the jump next, followed by the two war junks. The Singaporean crew recovered more quickly than the schooners’, and spread their sensor arrays to scan the system.
The second ship of her fleet came through, the ironically named Pussycat. Another frigate like Orient Tiger, Pussycat looked like an armored warthog. It was the ugliest ship in the fleet and not particularly maneuverable. Thick armor and bristling weaponry compensated. This was followed by a Hroom sloop of war. The crew of the sloop was a mixture of the tall, pink-skinned aliens and humans—mostly Ladino, but also a few Albionish and New Dutch.
Catarina didn’t wait for all of the ships to arrive before she had Orient Tiger join the war junks in scanning the Vargus System for enemies. Yes, the Vargus System. It was vanity to name it after herself, but what of it? Nobody was going to argue, not out here. She was lord of this system, of this entire sector. The only one who knew how to get in and the only
one strong enough to colonize it.
Her fleet had emerged into a classic Earth-like solar system of the kind that people had sought out ever since the Great Migration five hundred years earlier, when humanity first took to the stars. The Vargus System had a G-type main sequence star, five rocky inner worlds, and six gas giants, with a mineral-rich asteroid belt separating the inner worlds from the outer. The third planet had acidic oceans and a few hardy bacteria and single-cell plants living beneath a thick, crushing atmosphere.
The fourth planet, however, was something else entirely. Ninety-eight percent standard gravity, four large continents rich with natural plant and animal life. Climate zones that ranged from jungle to desert, to vast grasslands and millions of square miles of temperate forests. Rich in minerals, the correct oxygen levels. Everything a world needed but intelligent life, and Catarina Vargus’s colonist fleet would correct that deficiency.
The jump point into the Vargus System was out near the largest of the gas giants, and Catarina currently sat too far out for a good scan of her new home world, but she had video from an earlier visit, and now pulled it up on the little console next to the captain’s chair. There it was, turning lazily, a cool blue-and-green sphere, wreathed in clouds. It was a jewel without price, the kind of planet that the Kingdom of Albion would have paid dearly to control, to settle.
“And it’s all mine,” Catarina said.
“All ours you mean,” a voice said behind her. It was Enrique Da Rosa, her first mate, now coming onto the bridge. He’d been down in the engine room, working with engineering to keep the damaged jump point engine from blowing up as they went through.
Da Rosa was an older man, balding up top, with a gradually thickening middle. He’d captained several ships himself throughout the years, and at one point was an ally of Catarina’s father, then an enemy, and later an ally again. If not for the vagaries of fate, she might be serving under him instead of vice versa. He was both capable and experienced.
Catarina changed her screen to show the ships of her fleet. “Mine, Da Rosa. The realm of Queen Catarina the First.” She grinned. “But every queen needs her nobles. Would you rather be a baron or an earl? Maybe I should thaw your wife out of stasis and ask her. I’m sure she has an opinion.”
Da Rosa scowled and tried to give a little harrumph, though the effect was weakened by the look of satisfaction he was struggling to hide. “She’d have several opinions, in fact. Depending on mood and time of day.”
The others on the bridge were talking in excited voices as the last of the ships came through, and Orient Tiger received word that no pursuit had been spotted.
“For now, I’ll settle for first mate,” Da Rosa continued. “At least until I’m off this bucket of screws and bolts and have my feet on solid earth.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “Go ahead, relax a little. We’re through, we got the equipment and supplies on hand, and fourteen thousand settlers are waiting on ice, ready to start this thing. There’s no Albion king to hassle us, no Royal Navy. None of those pirate idiots followed us through. Even the damn alien birds won’t find us in here.”
“We’ll see.” Da Rosa settled into his seat. “Apex is still lurking around somewhere. They must be. If not, those pompous bastards in the navy wouldn’t be so agitated. You know they’d rather retire to their smoking rooms with their pipes and snifters of brandy to discuss past glories.”
“I’m not so sure,” Catarina said. She thought about a pair of navy officers she knew personally. “Some of them have war in their blood.”
“Burris, show me the barges,” Da Rosa said. “Let’s make sure the goods are still in orbit where we left them.”
“Relax,” Burris said. He tapped his console, and one of the larger moons of the nearest gas giant came into view.
Catarina leaned forward. “Where are they? Around the back side?”
“Looks that way,” Burris said. “Give it a minute and they’ll swing around.”
“Any number of things could have gone wrong,” Da Rosa said, his tone gloomy. “Never liked leaving those colonists in stasis so long, not unattended. And are we sure we had them in stable orbit? And another thing that’s bugging me . . .”
That was Da Rosa’s style, so Catarina let him run through his worries while she waited for the barges to orbit around the moon and come into view. Whatever the state of her supplies and her colonists-in-waiting, she was satisfied she hadn’t been followed through, so she sent orders to the fleet to match her course toward the moon. There, they would pick up the goods and make their way toward Segovia, their new home world.
“I am aware that the mood is jubilant,” Da Rosa added. “But this is serious business.”
“I’m not deluding myself,” Catarina said. “Although, sure, I might have made the whole venture sound a little more . . . well, fun than it will be. I know what’s ahead of us.”
“A long slog,” Da Rosa said.
“Right. Several years until it’s all running smoothly. But it’s not like we’ll be down there chopping wood with stone axes, starting fires with flint and steel, and chasing off predators with sharpened sticks.”
“I know the sales pitch, Captain. How many times did I help you make it? But if it were so easy to settle a planet by dropping down automated factories, Albion wouldn’t have needed their Hroom slaves. And they wouldn’t need convicts working the helium-3 mines right in the heart of the Albion System.”
“Albion is run by idiots. We are not.” She was growing irritated. “That’s enough gloom for now, Da Rosa. And enough sunshine from me. We have work to do. Soon as the barges pull around the moon, send a signal and thaw the engineers. They can run their diagnostics while they’re waiting for us to arrive in . . . Pilot?” She glanced at Gomez. “How long to arrive?”
“Six hours and twenty minutes,” Gomez said.
“Right,” Catarina said. “That will save us some time, get us to Segovia faster.”
“Here we go,” Burris said. “The barges are right where we expected them. You see, we—” He stopped abruptly.
Catarina stared at the big viewscreen, her mouth clamped shut and her lips pressed together in dismay. She’d left two massive barges in a lazy orbit around the largest moon of the gas giant. They’d been shuttled through in pieces, then reassembled on the other side of the jump point. The sensors of the entire fleet were trained on the moon, and she was seeing a composite image that, with the inclusion of the Singaporean scans, gave her as clear a view as anything the Royal Navy would have enjoyed.
Nothing was wrong with the barges themselves. They were in the right position, fully assembled. But tethered to each barge was a small ship. They were not hers.
Da Rosa broke the silence with a curse. Others exploded into agitated chatter.
“Shut up, the lot of you,” Catarina said. “Burris, get me a better image.”
“We’re 9.5 million miles out,” he said. “That’s the best I can do.”
Yes, at that range it would be hard to pick out details, even with every sensor in her fleet locked in on the moon. But there was plenty that she could see. The two ships were roughly the size of her smaller schooners, and wouldn’t carry much armor or weaponry. Little question what they were.
“Bloody pirates,” Da Rosa said.
Inside, she was all in turmoil, but she kept her tone light. “Us or them?”
Her first mate looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “You’re awfully calm. Don’t tell me you’re not pissed off.”
“I’m furious,” she said. “A year of absolute silence. Our crew has taken oaths, people have been threatened with death if they talk. We’ve put every single untrustworthy person in stasis—”
“And a lot of the trustworthy ones, as well,” he said. “Believe me, when I find the rat who blabbed, I’m going to personally throttle him. Then stab him, then throw him out the airlock.”
“Maybe nobody talked,” Burris said. The tech officer leaned back in his chair, hands behind
his head, a thoughtful expression on his face as he studied the screen. “Maybe we’ve found our ghost.”
Ah, yes. The ghost. That brief image in the last system as they’d approached the jump point. What had it shown? A ship of some kind, lurking near the star. Alarmed, she’d ordered sensors to bring it into focus, but whatever it was had either been cloaked or nonexistent.
“I think you’re right,” she said at last. “There was someone there after all. That someone was working with this someone.”
“We should have pulled up and let the war junks have a closer look,” Da Rosa said.
“Say we’d looked, and say we’d found the ship. Would that have made any difference? What would we have done, stuck around, trying to act casual so the ship wouldn’t know what we were up to?”
“We’d have blasted ’em from the sky, of course,” Da Rosa said. The first mate’s tone was nearly a growl. “Then come through and blasted these guys, too.”
“Wouldn’t have changed a thing. Wouldn’t have stopped these looters in time. Who knows how much damage they’ve done?” A sick feeling settled into Catarina’s gut as she thought through the ramifications. “If it were me, the first thing I’d have done is vent the settlers to space, make sure they didn’t wake up at the wrong time and cause trouble.”
The others looked at her. “That’s cold,” Da Rosa said. His face turned pale. His wife and two of his adult sons were on the barges. “You’d do that?”
“Hell, no. But I wouldn’t be messing with some other fellow’s operation, either. That’s not my style. Well, unless we’re talking Albion. Even then, I wouldn’t kill fourteen thousand sleeping men and women. But yeah, I think that’s what they’ve done. Got to be sure their operations don’t trigger some automatic wake-up procedure. Probably forty or fifty pirates total on those two schooners. They couldn’t take the risk.”
“Hold course?” Gomez asked.
“You’d better believe it,” she told the pilot. “We’re going to thrash these idiots, whoever they are. Then try to pick up the pieces.”
“If there are any to pick up,” Da Rosa said. His voice had gone flat.
Queen of the Void (The Void Queen Trilogy Book 1) Page 1
