Queen of the Void (The Void Queen Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  “We don’t know for sure,” Catarina told him. “Maybe they just arrived. Maybe that’s what the other ship was doing, setting up to give warning. Could be they see us and run.”

  Da Rosa didn’t answer this.

  Catarina gripped her armrests in frustration. So many months—no, years—of work to get to this point. If she’d lost all her settlers, all her supplies, what then? Slink back to the frontier worlds and return to a life of smuggling and small-scale raiding? How humiliating would that be? Everything her enemies had said about her would be proven true.

  Burris must have been thinking the same thing. “Guess there’s always Admiral Drake. Bet he’d hire us on again.”

  “I won’t go there again. And I wouldn’t think you would, either,” she added, eyeing her tech officer. “Former navy guy like you.”

  “Drake paid us though, didn’t he? Not all of those navy blokes would have done the same. I’ll take Drake over that other one . . . what’s his name? McGowan?”

  “Who knows?” she said a little too quickly. Catarina glanced to the side to see Da Rosa watching her with raised eyebrows. He knew some of her history with McGowan, and could no doubt guess most of the rest. To Burris, she added, “They’re all the same, a bunch of stuffed shirts.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  Catarina’s fleet accelerated toward the moon, where the two schooners sat tethered to her barges. Every once in a while, one of the schooners shifted a little bit, but otherwise, they seemed unconcerned by the fleet of sixteen ships, some heavily armed, roaring toward them.

  Cheeky buggers, weren’t they? The ship in the last system must have sent a subspace warning that her fleet was on its way. She’d have expected them to flee. Schooners of that size had good acceleration, but a slower top speed than the faster ships in her fleet. And Orient Tiger alone outgunned the pair by a significant margin. They were running a hell of a risk scooping up goods until the last possible moment.

  “How much money do we have locked up in this operation?” she asked.

  “I’m not the money guy,” Da Rosa said, “but aren’t we talking hundreds of thousands of pounds?”

  “It was a rhetorical question, Da Rosa. I’m the money guy—I know exactly how much it is. My point is that it’s a lot. Better than a hundred thousand just in supplies. But you can’t just haul it out of here in a couple of schooners. It took us months to shuttle it all over here.”

  “They must be picking through it looking for the good stuff,” the first mate said. “Dumping whatever they don’t need.”

  “Or what if it’s a big operation, and they’ve got half the pirates and smugglers in the sector involved?”

  “We’ve been all over the place,” Da Rosa said. “San Pablo, Peruano, Samborondón—you name it—and haven’t heard a whisper. That would be some kind of conspiracy. Pirates talk—they don’t keep secrets.”

  “I know that,” she said peevishly. “Some idiot in our fleet blabbed, for one.” Catarina gestured at the screen, where the two schooners, now in better focus, continued their work. “They must have caught us on their scans by now. What are they doing?”

  “What are you saying, that there are other ships around?” Da Rosa asked.

  “I’m still looking,” Burris said from the tech console. “But nothing is showing up. We’re close enough, I figure only Royal Navy or Singaporeans could stay this quiet.”

  At last, the schooners began to nudge away from the barges, sluggishly, like scavenger fish that had been feeding on a pair of dead whales and were almost too engorged to move. One of the schooners was dragging some unidentified collection of gear, which made her burn with anger.

  The fools. It was too late; Catarina was going to overtake them long before they got up to full speed. They had no hope of fighting it out, not with the firepower she had at her disposal.

  “Da Rosa, hold the junks. Get their arrays fanned out. Let’s make sure we don’t stumble into a trap. The rest of the ships can follow us in. Burris, you keep looking at those schooners. I want to know what we’re talking about. Guns, armor, and the like. Pilot, maintain current course.”

  Catarina took in the side viewscreen while she waited for updated information on the enemy schooners, which were still attempting to flee the scene of the crime. It showed the gas giant, a swirling mass of rust and copper. If she knew the way pirates thought, the schooners would attempt to get around the backside of the planet, disguise their direction while they threw up cloaks, and hope to slip away, each one going in a different direction. That would never work, not with the sensors Catarina had at her disposal, and they must know it, too.

  So why had they waited so long to make a run for it? A niggle of doubt worked through her. She was missing something, but what?

  Chapter Two

  The young commander rubbed a hand over her buzzed scalp as she looked at the small viewscreen showing Catarina Vargus’s approaching fleet. The bigger frigates were already showing their guns and missile bays, which sent an excited thrill across the young woman’s skin.

  “Bloody hell, them pirates sure look mad, don’t they?”

  There was only one other person on the small bridge of the torpedo boat, a man who answered with a Ladino accent. “You would be too, wouldn’t you?”

  “Course I would be,” she answered. She dropped her arm, with its two Albion lions rampant tattooed across the skin. “Can’t say as I blame that Vargus lady. She’s been out here working all this time, botherin’ no one, and up she comes and sees us robbing her. Bet there’s some good stuff in there, too. Don’t know why McGowan wouldn’t let us look. That pompous arse, what did he think, we’d steal it for real?”

  “He thinks we are pirates ourselves.” The man shrugged. “He is not all wrong.”

  Henny Capp turned to her companion, Ronaldo Carvalho. They’d been together—in every way, even the illicit ones—ever since a navy mutiny at the start of the Albion Civil War two years ago. That included a stint as pirates. Everyone knew they were lovers, which made it funny that they’d been put together on this mission.

  “I don’t like the idea of shooting her, that’s all I’m saying,” Capp said. “She ain’t so bad, and she did us a good turn back when we was fighting Malthorne. Bet Admiral Drake wouldn’t have told us to shoot. Don’t seem right.”

  Carvalho tapped the defense grid console, giving instructions to the crew at the torpedo bays. “Right now, I am more worried about the shooting that Vargus does against us, and not about us shooting her.”

  “That’s exactly my point,” Capp said fiercely. “It’s this McGowan bloke. He don’t like her, and he don’t like us neither. He wants her ship all wrecked up, but he ain’t gonna be bothered none if we don’t come back.” The console showed control of the torpedo tubes, and she flipped the switch to open the bays. “Wish I could send Drake a message and tell him how we died.”

  Carvalho gave her a sly smile. “That would be your last act? You are going to tattle on Captain McGowan? I am sure that will make you feel better as cannons tear holes in our ship and we are sucked into space.”

  “Oh, shut up, you,” Capp said, but without any heat. “I’m in command here, not you, and I say McGowan is a piss nozzle.” She turned back to the screen.

  In spite of her worries, things were going well. The second torpedo boat, captained by one of McGowan’s bootlickers, a kid named Williston, had come around the gas giant and was accelerating toward one of the smaller moons. It was cloaked—well, sort of—but Vargus’s two Chinese ships—the Singaporean war junks—had pulled up about two million miles away, as McGowan had predicted when planning the operation.

  Also as expected, Vargus sent several of her ships toward the second torpedo boat while continuing after Capp’s vessel with Orient Tiger and four other ships. The scans identified one of them as Pussycat, a frigate that had fought by Drake’s side in the civil war. Real piece of work, that one. Capable of delivering the pain. The rest of Vargus’s ships spr
ead into a net to prevent the two torpedo boats from escaping.

  “Why do you figure she is coming after us herself?” Carvalho said.

  “It’s all this junk we’re dragging,” Capp said. “McGowan says Vargus is vindictive. That lady’ll want to take care of us ’cause we done the most damage. But how did he know? That’s what I wonder.”

  “The way I hear it, the captain knows her from back on Albion,” Carvalho said.

  “Hah, I’ll bet he does.”

  Carvalho grinned. “And she knows Admiral Drake, too. That woman—have you seen her? Who would blame them? Very beautiful.”

  Capp punched his shoulder. “Don’t you get no ideas. We’re here to take care of her, not to bring her on board so you can question her in private.”

  “If you say so.” Carvalho’s face turned suddenly serious. “There she goes!”

  Two missiles squirted out the nose of Orient Tiger. Admiral Drake had always called Vargus’s ship a frigate, but it wasn’t a pure missile platform like the missile frigates of the Royal Navy. It could only fire two missiles at a time, but it also had a battery of three powerful cannon, and could fire a single torpedo. Or it had been able to, back in the skirmishes of the civil war. One of the destroyers in McGowan’s task force had mixed it up with Orient Tiger a few months ago when he’d surprised her in the Fantalus System, and there was a chance the torpedo bay was offline from damage it had suffered.

  Capp got on the com to call engineering. “Drop the disguise. Let’s show ’em who we really are.”

  #

  Catarina watched the screen with grim satisfaction. She’d fired two missiles, and they were rapidly closing on the pirate schooner. She’d targeted the one dragging her gear, and sent other ships to finish off the other.

  Burris studied the numbers from the tech console and said six minutes to impact, but that only confirmed what her eyes could see. The schooner made a weak attempt to change course while struggling to cut loose the mass of stolen material.

  “Idiots,” she said. “You got greedy, and now it’s going to cost you.”

  “Maybe they figured you wouldn’t shoot if they were carting off our most valuable goods,” Da Rosa said.

  “Then they’re doubly idiots.”

  “Four minutes to impact,” Burris said a moment later. “The schooner is trying another maneuver, but the missiles have locked on. Nothing can save it now.”

  Assuming a few inches of tyrillium and adequate bombproofs, the missiles wouldn’t destroy the schooner, but they’d do heavy damage. With luck, the attack would render enemy guns inoperative and knock out the engine. Catarina would overtake the small ship and make a decision about whether to take prisoners or to simply blow them all to kingdom come.

  The schooner cut loose the goods. Then something broke off the shell—it looked like it was shedding armor.

  “Huh?” Burris said. “The engine signature is changing. Wait, I don’t . . .”

  Even as his voice trailed off, Catarina was studying the data that streamed across her screen. The pirate schooner had a navy engine, which wasn’t surprising in and of itself—plenty of old gear floating around the shipyards in the frontier worlds—but it was a newer model. And now she could see the profile. It no longer looked like a pirate schooner.

  “Bloody hell,” Da Rosa said. “It’s a Royal Navy torpedo boat.”

  Catarina was still processing this when the enemy’s cargo—released and drifting behind the ship—flared to life. It burst into dozens of tiny, spinning flares, each giving off their own signature that briefly simulated a small plasma engine. Not her stolen goods at all, but a sophisticated towed array of countermeasures.

  Her missiles, not nearly so sophisticated, lost track of their target and corkscrewed toward the countermeasures. The first one hit and detonated. The second followed it into a fiery death moments later. The enemy ship was nowhere near when they went off. Instead, it had turned about and was beginning a run at Orient Tiger.

  “Enemy torpedo tubes activated,” Burris said. His voice trembled, and he was breathing quickly, but his hands moved smoothly over his console. He was not panicking, which was good.

  “Give me the guns,” Catarina said. “And missiles. I need another volley, now.”

  “Hunter-II torpedoes fired,” Burris said.

  “Break off the engagement. Get us out of here!”

  Orient Tiger swung around, but slowly, as the antigrav struggled to hold the ship together against the extreme deceleration. One of her own schooners, a former pirate ship by the name of Dagger, had been following off starboard, ready to lend her guns to the attack on the enemy ship. It, too, was in range of the rapidly accelerating navy torpedoes, and made to flee the scene.

  One of the enemy torpedoes broke from the charge to pursue the schooner, and Catarina let out her breath. Dagger was doomed if it couldn’t shake the attack, but facing one torpedo instead of two gave Orient Tiger a chance. The nearest moon stood about eighty thousand miles off, and she ordered her pilot to make a break for it. Skirt the surface and maybe throw off the torpedo’s targeting. For now, it was still gaining on them.

  Catarina got on the com to give orders to her fleet. Royal Navy or no, she meant to make the two torpedo boats pay, and she had plenty of firepower to do it. First step was to get the nearest enemy ship off her tail, but she had no intention of letting the second one slip away, either.

  The situation was still developing when Burris cried a warning from the tech console. Orient Tiger was rushing up at the small gray moon, whose surface stretched above them, pitted and scarred by eons of interstellar bombardment. Only a few hundred miles from the surface now, and if Catarina could hug the planet as she whipped around in a tight orbit . . .

  She looked to see what Burris was shouting about. The pursuing torpedo devoured the smaller side viewscreen, and she barely had time to flinch before it slammed into them. The bridge shuddered, antigrav failing, and the impact threw her from her seat. Lights flashed, and warning bells screeched as she pulled herself to her feet.

  Her crew kept their nerve. The ship pulled up before it slammed into the moon and scooted back into space after skimming a few tens of miles above the surface. The moon was soon receding behind them. The torpedo boat continued its pursuit, but hadn’t yet fired another salvo.

  “Engine?” she asked.

  “Damaged and bleeding plasma,” Burris said from the tech console, “but still functional. Aft shield is completely gone,” he added, “and the deck shield is at twenty percent. Defenses are more or less totally gone at the rear of the ship.”

  From one torpedo? She muttered a curse.

  “But we’re alive.”

  Could the same be said for Dagger? Its attempts to shake the second torpedo had failed, and it was racing away in a vain attempt to outrun its pursuer. The torpedo steadily gained, and watching it overtake the schooner was like watching an execution in slow motion. Twenty seconds later it hit, and the small ship exploded. Two pieces of debris spiraled away from the explosion, but otherwise, there was little left of Dagger. Fourteen crew on board, dead.

  Catarina skimmed the data from her own near-death experience. Ten feet further back and the impact would have obliterated the engine entirely and crashed through the rear bombproof, and then they’d have been finished. It was either a great stroke of luck that she hadn’t taken a harder blow, or an intentional near miss by the pursuing ship. They might be trying to take her prisoner.

  “Bring us back around to the fleet,” she said. “We can’t take another hit, and we could use the extra firepower.”

  The torpedo boat had kept its distance as Orient Tiger nearly crashed into the moon, but now resumed the pursuit. The ship’s commander didn’t seem overly worried by the encroaching ships of Catarina’s fleet, but more concerned with keeping her separated from the pack. This raised fresh suspicions.

  “These two aren’t alone,” she said.

  “I’m running scans,” Burris said. “
Seeing nothing.”

  “Keep looking,” she said, more confident by the second. “They’re out there.”

  She kept her voice calm, but inside was cursing. What was it, a destroyer and maybe a missile frigate? Suddenly, it would be a tough fight all the way around, especially now that she’d lost one of her schooners.

  “Get us past that boat,” she said. “We’ll charge, keep our forward shields facing it until we’re past, then take our chances.”

  “Found them!” Burris said, followed by a string of oaths, some of which were quite creative. He tapped at his console. “Look, Captain.”

  A navy cruiser came uncloaked a few tens of thousands of miles away, the second most powerful warship type in Albion’s arsenal, after the admiral’s battleship. A pair of destroyers flanked it, and a missile frigate stood back a pace. Their cloaks withdrawn, the four ships now exposed cannon, missile bays, and torpedo tubes. They were on the move, and would arrive in time to reinforce the attacking torpedo boat before Orient Tiger could engage it with her guns.

  “Help me out here,” Catarina said. “Who are we looking at?”

  “It’s a Punisher-class,” Burris said. More tapping at the tech console. “Some mods, though.”

  “Please tell me we’re looking at Blackbeard.”

  If it was HMS Blackbeard, the captain might be Jess Tolvern or another of James Drake’s old crew from before he’d become admiral. She knew the men and women of Blackbeard. They’d fought together. Catarina had served as a mercenary in the early engagements of the Albion Civil War, even though she’d sat out the end of the conflict to pursue her colonization scheme.

  Burris groaned. “Negative. It’s Peerless.”

  The word sat heavily in the air. HMS Peerless. It was Edward McGowan’s ship. Her enemy. Her pursuer. The man who’d called her a pirate and said she deserved to hang.

  Edward, you villain. Won’t you leave me alone, even now?

  “More ships,” Burris said. His tone was even more grim. “Look.”

  A second pair of destroyers appeared next to the other torpedo boat, which had succeeded in peeling off several more ships from Catarina’s fleet. No, that was something she’d done herself. Two pirate schooners—she’d divided her forces voluntarily to chase them, and fallen into a trap.