Sun King (The Void Queen Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  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

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Sun King

  by Michael Wallace

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  The Void Queen Trilogy

  Book #1 – Queen of the Void

  Book #2 – Star Wolf

  Book #3 – Sun King

  copyright 2017 by Michael Wallace

  Cover art by Lorenz Hideyoshi Ruwwe

  Chapter One

  Captain Jess Tolvern studied the body lying on the operating table in front of her. The man’s belly lay open, and many of his internal organs had been removed, leaving a gruesome empty cavity.

  Tolvern forced down the bile that clawed up from her belly. A memory bubbled to the surface. She was back in Blackbeard’s loading bay, with Apex drones breaking in, tearing open and devouring her crew and marines.

  But this man had not been ripped open by beaks and claws, but by a scalpel. And he was still very much alive.

  In fact, he was trying to peer around the curtain that the surgeon had draped above his chest to keep the patient from seeing what had been done to him. Internal organs—kidneys, liver, stomach, intestines—sat in clear plastic containers filled with bubbling nutrients, and were connected to leads wired to a complex piece of medical equipment.

  Another piece of equipment sat on the opposite side of the operating table, where the patient’s blood flowed through clear tubing and into a gray, rectangular box that contained all of the devices performing the man’s regular bodily functions while his natural organs remained outside of his body.

  “How are you feeling, Stratsky?” Tolvern asked.

  “Hollow.”

  “It doesn’t hurt?”

  Stratsky gave a non-nonchalant shrug that brought scolding from the nurse who’d been checking the numbers on the organ-maintaining device. The nurse actually wagged her finger as she ordered him not to move.

  “It don’t feel great, no. But I’ve had worse.”

  “You’ve had worse?” Tolvern raised an eyebrow. “Worse than having all your guts pulled out?”

  “I once took a bullet up the bunghole that came out again through my left nut. Where my left nut used to be, I mean.”

  “You’re right, that’s worse.”

  Science Officer Brockett had been consulting with the surgeon, and now bent over the wing commander of Blackbeard’s striker force, currently eviscerated on the operating table, waiting to be restuffed and stitched up.

  “We had to get into his brain to root out the parasite,” Brockett said with a glance at Tolvern, “so it was no trouble temporarily short-circuiting his pain centers. He shouldn’t feel anything other than a strange empty sensation in his midsection.”

  “Think you could keep me that way, mate?” Stratsky said.

  “You will eventually need your body organs,” Brockett said.

  Stratsky snorted. “That no-pain thing, I mean. Could come in handy, you know. Six hours shoved into the cockpit of a falcon, for one. You never felt muscle cramps until you’ve done that. Then there are the fistfights in the mess. That scar on my leg—that didn’t feel good neither. Never healed properly.”

  “I suppose we could permanently short-circuit your pain centers,” Brockett said, “but you’d also lose the capacity to feel the effects of alcohol.”

  “That don’t sound so good.”

  “And he can say goodbye to sexual arousal,” the surgeon put in.

  “Good point,” Brockett said.

  “Huh? Forever?”

  “Forever,” Brockett said.

  Stratsky’s language grew a good deal more colorful, until he seemed to remember the captain standing over the operating table with the science officer. He felt silent.

  “Brockett tells me you’ll be down for thirty-two hours after the surgery,” Tolvern said. “Fully unconscious while your body heals.”

  “Long as you get me back in my falcon by the end of the week.”

  The nurse, the science officer, and the surgeon all laughed at this. Brockett had told Tolvern that Stratsky would need two weeks to recuperate. Probably longer.

  “Never mind your recovery time,” Tolvern said. “I need information before they put you under. We need to know how they got to you.”

  Stratsky frowned. “Don’t know. Never seen a buzzard before.”

  “Exactly right. I thought at first that you picked it up at Singapore. We had a lot of contact with Apex in hand-to-hand combat. Ships boarded, sailors rescued, that sort of thing. But I had Manx pull up your record. You were still in striker training in Albion when we freed Singapore. Never saw combat with Apex until we came out to the frontier, and then it’s been ship-on-ship action.”

  “That’s right. I’ve fought their ships, but never seen one in person.”

  “So how did they get to you?”

  “I told the science guy everything I know. Felt this whispering in my head, you know? Scratching or something. Remembered what they told us, the signs to look for, and came right down here to let them have a look at my brain.”

  Tolvern studied his face, unsure what level of suspicion was appropriate. “You’re pretty mellow. Most of us would be in a sweaty panic if we had an alien parasite in our head.”

  “Yeah, there was a moment or two,” Stratsky said after a slight hesitation. “But Brockett says he dug it all out, and I figure with what they did to that Hroom general—he was all the way gone, yeah?—that I’d be all right.”

  “That’s accurate enough,” Brockett said. “We caught it early. My confidence level is ninety-nine percent.”

  “That’s not a hundred,” Tolvern pointed out.

  “Can’t worry about that, Captain,” Stratsky said. “Figure on any given day of this damn war I’ve got some decent chance of dying. One percent ain’t bad.”

  These falcon pilots had nerves, you had to give them that. One had to be gutsy to launch a direct assault on an Apex harvester ship from a single-man fighter, knowing that one shot would kill you, that if you got caught in the enemy’s paralyzing beam, they’d sweep you in and eat you alive.

  “Anyway, it don’t really matter how I got it, so long as we caught it in time, right?”

  Now the pilot was just being naive. Or willfully blind. Tolvern pulled out her hand computer and studied his flights of the past two months, all those since the last major battle. Since then, they’d been holding position in the Nebuchadnezzar System with the battered remnants of the fleet. Keeping the enemy holed up in their cul-de-sac system while awaiting reinforcements.

  “The tech officers and your fellow pilots went over every mission and battle, and there’s never a time when you came into direct contact with the enemy,” she told him. “What’s more, you’ve been recorded on multiple instrument sets during every moment of those battles. Your eve
ry move recorded and scrutinized.”

  “That’s not always the case, though,” Stratsky said. “We fall out of sight of the fleet on some of our patrols.”

  “Right, and that’s where the focus is. Specifically, eleven extended missions in Nebuchadnezzar where your range exceeded eight million miles from the launch platform.”

  “I was never out there on my own, though. Always had mates with me on patrol.”

  The nurse wheeled up a cart containing surgical instruments. The surgeon and the science officer retreated to the corner to scrub up, and a second nurse entered the operating room to help them with gowns and masks.

  The pilot glanced at the activity, and a flicker of uncertainty and worry passed over his face. The reality of having those helpful life-preserving machines disconnected and his old organs stuffed back up inside him like he was a Christmas goose seemed to be getting to him.

  “Hey, Doc, what’s that little saw thing for?”

  “Look at me, Stratsky,” Tolvern said. “They’ll do their work without you. I need you paying attention.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “In seven of these missions you were always within a few thousand miles of one of your wing mates, usually multiple companions. We’ve scanned the others’ brains, and found nothing, and none of them remember anything funny.”

  “Neither do I,” he said. “Don’t you think I’d remember?”

  Time was running out, and the captain was growing impatient with his interrupting, so she kept talking over his objection.

  “Two other times, you were out of contact with the other strikers for fifteen, twenty minutes, at most. No time for the enemy to haul you in, crack your canopy, and spit their brain-control stuff in your mouth. Which leaves two missions where you were both a good distance from the fleet and out of contact with your fellow pilots for an extended period of time. Do you remember?”

  “Sure, I remember. First time we were out in the belt, scanning old mining colonies to make sure nobody was hunkered down there, waiting for a rescue. I was out of contact for a few hours.

  “Second time wasn’t so long. I went dark when I was skimming the ring on that gas giant—what’s the name of that planet?—and I had a funny instrument malfunction.” He knotted his brow. “You figure that was it? Has to be, right?”

  That was what Tolvern had initially focused on, but she’d studied the incident at greater length and was no longer satisfied.

  “Except less than a day later the whole fleet showed up,” she reminded him. “We had our war junks with their wings spread, listening hard, and twenty-six warships running in formations around the planet. If there was an enemy there, how did it stay hidden?”

  Tolvern held up her hand to stop his objection. The others were scrubbed and in gowns, ready to operate, with one of the nurses standing by to adjust Stratsky’s IV and pump drugs into his vein to knock him out.

  “How long did you say you were out of contact with the striker wing when your instruments went down?”

  “An hour. Maybe hour and a half on my own, tops.”

  She thumbed the report on her hand computer. “I’m reading Crispin’s mission report. He has you out of contact for nearly three hours. You were off in your falcon doing God knows what.”

  “Crispin? I wouldn’t trust that bloke. He can’t remember his own bunk number. Probably forgot to make his report and wrote up a bunch of rubbish the next morning after he’d been drinking all night.”

  “This is a direct reading of his instruments, Stratsky, not Crispin’s say-so. Two hours and fifty-seven minutes where his falcon couldn’t detect yours.”

  “That can’t be right. I cut through the ice rings and dipped into the outer atmosphere to take a sample. I remember there was a bit of turbulence—I came in above a storm and there was an electrical . . .” A frown crossed his face, and he stared up at the ceiling.

  “What is it?” Tolvern pressed. “Did something happen?”

  “No, I’m just trying to remember. I took over on manual while I reset the computer because of the electrical storm, but then . . . I can’t remember bringing the computer back up. Then I was talking to Crispin, and he was bugging out because he thought I’d gone down. Couldn’t figure out why he was so worked up when it hadn’t been that long. Only by then I was outside the ring.”

  “Looks like we have our answer,” Tolvern said grimly. She nodded at the others. “Take him under.”

  #

  Twenty minutes later, Tolvern stood on the bridge, admiring her fleet on the viewscreen.

  A pair of Punisher-class cruisers lurked above her on the Z-axis, while two corvettes hovered off starboard. A trio of Singaporean war junks formed a triangle around Blackbeard, their ears turned out to search for enemies in the system.

  Six torpedo boats swept in from port, guarded by a pair of destroyers and a corvette as they continued in wide orbit around the jump point from the Persia System into Nebuchadnezzar. They were the first line of defense if an Apex fleet popped through, and would do as much damage as possible before the enemy could recover from the jump.

  Tolvern’s other ships maintained a looser formation to Blackbeard’s rear: two missile frigates, six more destroyers, another cruiser, and several of Mose Dryz’s sloops of war; the Hroom general himself was back at the Viborg base repairing damaged ships, and would be shipping out with either McGowan or Vargus, so far as she understood it.

  The fleet contained thirty-one warships in all, anchored by Blackbeard herself, an Ironside-class battle cruiser with a ten-falcon striker wing, twenty-two guns in the main battery, and seven in the secondary battery, along with powerful torpedo and missile capability.

  Tolvern was confident that a fleet of this size and power could handle a force of Scandian star wolves, destroy a pirate base in Ladino territory, or maul a fleet of Hroom sloops. Unfortunately, she was not facing these lesser enemies.

  Instead, there was at least one Apex harvester ship on the other side of that jump, along with numerous hunter-killer packs. They’d made several attempts to break out, but so far had not made an all-out push. Perhaps the aliens were content to remain in the system building strength as they massacred the population of Persia and stripped the planet of its mineral wealth.

  “Clyde,” Tolvern said to her pilot. “How long would it take a corvette to make a round trip to the second gas giant in the system?”

  “I’ll run the numbers through the nav computer, sir.”

  “I need an estimate, not an exact itinerary. What have you got off the top of your head?”

  The young man plunged his fingers into his curly hair and peered at her through a pair of round eyeglasses. He muttered numbers.

  “Maybe twenty-something hours there and twenty-something back, assuming you count in deceleration on the other end and reacceleration. Shorter if you slingshot around, of course, instead of slowing.”

  “The ship would need to decelerate. To be safe, let’s count a day there inspecting. So, three days, total?”

  “Sounds about right, sir.”

  Tolvern glanced at her first mate. Manx had looked up from his own console when she asked Clyde the question, and was studying her with a questioning expression.

  “I hate to lose a corvette, Captain,” Manx said.

  “Three corvettes,” she corrected. “If there’s an enemy lance or spear hiding down out there by the gas giant, a single corvette can’t run it down, not with the way the smaller Apex ships can pull those short-range jumps.”

  “And you really think there’s an enemy out there?” he asked.

  “It makes sense. After what happened at the Singaporean battle station, the enemy learned that a gas giant with rings is a good place to hide. Must have been lurking there all this time. When Stratsky came by, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. They thought they’d slip a mole into our ranks.”

  Manx let out a low whistle. “A falcon pilot could have blown up the whole ship. He’d go into the hangar and set
off munitions, and that would be it. We’re lucky we caught it.”

  “You can thank the science guys for that,” Oglethorpe said from the tech console.

  Brockett especially. He’d been the one to identify the mind-burning chemicals in the first place and come up with a test for infection, and he’d cured several infected Hroom and humans so far. Hopefully, all of them.

  “We can’t risk sending a transmission,” Tolvern told Manx. “Not if the enemies are in the system listening. So we’ll have to send away pods to the corvettes and let their captains know what is going on. Clyde, get started on a course while we ready the pods.”

  “Are you sure about this?” Manx asked. “What if hunter-killers jump in here from Persia while they’re gone? We need those corvettes to pin the enemy and make him fight. There’s nobody else fast enough out of the blocks to stop them if they make a run for it.”

  “The enemy has pushed through that jump point every fourth or fifth week for months now. Not exactly clockwork, but fairly predictable. We’re three weeks since the last battle, which gives us at least another week.”

  “Unless they know somehow that we sent a third of our fleet back to Viborg after the last fight,” he said. “Or if they’ve got a reserve force of hunter-killer packs they’ve been saving for a big surprise breakout attempt. Captain, with all due respect, if their movements were so predictable, we wouldn’t need to stay camped at the jump point.”

  “I’m not an idiot, Manx,” Tolvern said.

  “Sorry, sir. Of course you aren’t.”

  She took a breath. “No, I’m sorry. You’re right to question. Here’s the problem, Lieutenant. The only advantage we have right now is that the Apex base is in a cul-de-sac system. There’s one exit from Persia, and we’ve got it stopped up. We have to hold them in there until Drake and Vargus and the rest of them return.”

  “Only now you’re worried that they’ve already escaped? Is that it, sir?”

  “It’s probably nothing. Probably just a lone spear or lance that we thought gutted in the last battle that has been hiding at the gas giant ever since. But what if it has a princess on it? If she escapes, runs off to some quiet sector to rebuild, it will start all over again.”