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

  That was too much. Catarina’s face burned incandescent with rage, and she sprang at him. She pulled back her cuffed hands and swung them at his face. McGowan ducked, but not before her fists grazed his face. He lunged, snarling, and grabbed her wrists before she could make another move, then twisted them painfully. She gasped, but refused to cry out in pain. Instead, she struggled to get free. He slugged her in the gut with his spare hand, then yanked her up when she doubled over in pain.

  The marines grabbed her before she could continue her struggles and held her tight.

  “You little vixen,” McGowan said. “I could have you hung for that. Maybe I will.”

  “Hah. You gave me terms. I’m a freebooter, remember? By Albion law, I cannot be hung, only fined.”

  “Those were the terms of your surrender. But since you kept fighting”—a nasty smile crossed his face—“it seems that you’ll be treated as a pirate after all.”

  If there had been any spark in her, any long-guarded nostalgia that she might have held for the history they’d once shared, his cruelty now extinguished it. She couldn’t move against the men who were holding her, but if her eyes had been daggers, she’d have stabbed McGowan full of holes.

  “Put her on ice,” he told the marines. “We’ll figure out what to do with her later.”

  A sharp pain jabbed Catarina in her side. One of the men withdrew, holding what looked like a stun gun, but it wasn’t a jolt of electricity going through her, but an icy stab of cold.

  Her muscles turned flaccid, then seemed to melt away altogether as the marines let her slip to the floor. She tried to spit a curse, but it came out as a mumble. One of the marines, a thin, horsey-looking woman with bad teeth, grinned down at her.

  “Eh, this one is still glarin’ at us. She’s a feisty wench, ain’t she?” Her two companions laughed.

  “Where’d you know her from, anyway, Captain?” one of the others asked. “That torpedo boat woman was right, wasn’t she? You do know each other. She’s a looker, though.”

  McGowan scoffed. “She’s a pirate and a scoundrel, and the result of bad breeding. That’s all you need to know. I’ve got a stasis chamber ready. Stay with her until she’s ready, then see that she’s put away. I’ll be on the bridge if there are any questions.”

  The captain strode away, and the three marines renewed their mocking. Catarina lay on the ground, helpless to respond.

  She had been stored in stasis before, and knew that it would take thirty to forty minutes before the injection had her body prepared for the low temperature chamber. Lying helpless on the cool floor of the engineering bay, she could only turn her venomous thoughts inward as she raged against McGowan’s treachery.

  His digs had hurt because they were true. They only confirmed what Catarina had always feared, long before she’d been exposed.

  Her father, Pete Vargus, had been a notorious figure, operating out of Ladino and New Dutch worlds on the frontier with his frigate, Captain Kidd, the most feared pirate ship in the sector. You’d have to travel the hostile space lanes back toward Earth, among the lawless worlds and Scandian raiders, to find a more dangerous figure. The elder Vargus had sacked sugar galleons and Hroom treasure ships, led impromptu pirate fleets against mining bases, and even made planetside attacks on the Albion colonies of Mercia and Saxony.

  In the process, he’d grown rich and used his wealth to build an untidy, but well-fortified base deep in Hroom territory. The aliens had claimed to be too weak from all their wars against the kingdom to root out Vargus and his sort, but everyone knew that the empire benefited from piracy in Albion territory.

  Vargus kept his secrets. One was a desire to someday retire, buy a royal pardon, and build a respectable estate on Albion. This was according to Catarina’s mother. It might have happened, too, but when Catarina was a young girl, her father had suffered reversals both financial and personal. A rival helped the navy attack Vargus’s stronghold, and he lost most of his wealth as a result. Captain Kidd herself had been ambushed and nearly destroyed by a pair of navy cruisers, and what emerged from the yards of San Pablo was a shell of its former strength. Vargus’s reputation lay in tatters.

  When Catarina was seventeen, her mother, tired of living in exile on a sweltering Hroom world, fled for Albion. Elizabeth Vargus, née Van Dyke, was still a great beauty, and her idea was to hide her pirate background and find good matches both for herself and her daughter among the wealthy of Albion. To help in this scheme, she changed her last name to Richards, invented a story for herself, and helped herself to her husband’s remaining hoard of gold and silver on her way out the door, to the tune of eight hundred Albion pounds.

  Catarina was initially reluctant to play along. Her older sister Isabel was out on a mission with their father already at the age of twenty, and Father had filled Catarina’s head with dreams of glory. As soon as he rebuilt his fortune and his daughters were mature enough, he’d buy them frigates of their own, and the three would go pirating together. Catarina had been raised on his stories, had enjoyed the wealth and status of his criminal activities, and what’s more, she loved space.

  Whenever she spent too much time planetside, she began to dream of it. The bright swath of the stars, the beauty of a gas giant rolling in front of you, copper and burnt orange. The smell of an alien world filling your nostrils for the first time.

  Her mother tricked Catarina into getting onto the transport schooner, but the daughter soon figured out the truth, that they were leaving Pete Vargus behind. For good.

  Catarina slipped away the first time they reached port. Her mother tracked her to a seedy bar where spacefarers congregated, and where Catarina was trying to find someone who could send a message to her father. She’d been fending off unwanted advances from grabby sailors all evening, had brained one particularly grabby fellow with his tankard of ale, and was ready to give up when her mother found her.

  “Please trust me,” the elder Vargus said as mother and daughter picked their way through filthy alleys on their way back to the spaceport. They’d landed in the midst of winter on a New Dutch world, and the air was dank and cold. “Things will be better for us on Albion.”

  “Oh, really?” Catarina said. “And how will we make a living? We’ll be piss poor and living with your no-good brother, won’t we?”

  “I didn’t say anything about living with family.”

  “Then what? Are you gonna sell me in the street?”

  “Don’t be absurd. We’re going back to make our fortune. And believe me, I’ve got a good start already.”

  “What does that mean, that you ripped off Father? Pirates don’t like sticky fingers in their coin purses, Mama. The fingers tend to get chopped off.”

  Catarina fixed her mother with a sharp gaze, then turned back to watching the shadows for cutpurses and other unsavory sorts. Her mother had arrived bearing pistols, and both women could defend themselves, but that didn’t mean someone wouldn’t try to rob them.

  “You did, didn’t you?” Catarina said when her mother’s silence dragged on. “You stole from him. Oh, Papa will love that. He’s going to drag you back. You know that, right?”

  “Only if he finds us.”

  “I’m going to make sure he does. Just because I didn’t make contact with nobody here—”

  “Anybody, dear.”

  “Huh?”

  “With anybody. That’s the first thing I’m going to do—hire a language tutor for you, make sure you speak like a proper young lady.”

  “King’s balls,” Catarina swore. She purposefully put a pirate’s swagger in her voice to piss off her mother. “Bugger me three ways, I ain’t going to be no proper young lady. I’m gonna be a pirate queen.”

  “Catarina Vargus!”

  Grinning wickedly, in part to hide her anger at having been tricked into joining her mother’s scheme, Catarina made to stomp off.

  “Please,” her mother said, her tone softer. “Will you listen to me for a moment?”

  A p
air of men had been leaning against a wall across the alley, drinking outside a tavern where the sounds of thumping music came from speakers in the window. One of them took a long swig from his beer, set his mug in the windowsill, and crossed the street, grinning. When he spoke, a leer oozed from his voice.

  “Hello, ladies. Seems you might be lost. And the girl has a tongue on her, don’t she?”

  His grin vanished when Catarina’s mother swept back her cloak to reveal the pistols at her waist. “Keep coming, friend,” the older Vargus woman said, “and by God I will blow your brains out.”

  The man went slinking back to his companion, who guffawed. The two women glared until the men took their drinks back into the tavern.

  Catarina looked back at her mother. “I’m listening.”

  “I know your ambitions. I know what you want. And I’m telling you, you won’t get it on the frontier.”

  “A pirate queen—”

  “Oh, I know that. Your father put that nonsense into your head. What he has is nothing, not compared to what you can see back in civilization. That’s wealth and power. And respect. You’ll find those things in the kingdom, not out here.”

  “So a lady of Albion. That’s your plan? Mother, I’m a spacefarer. I don’t want to be stuck planetside. I want to be rich and free.”

  “Women serve as captains in the Royal Navy. And they are also rich and respected. You can do both. Look around you. Is this what you want? To spend your life in places like this, to be a queen of the riffraff and lowlife of the galaxy?”

  “And you’ve got another idea?” Catarina narrowed her eyes. “What, exactly?”

  “I told you, I have resources. Money, and not just what I took from your father.” There was something in her mother’s tone that made Catarina think she was not being told the whole story. “Trust me, please. We’ll go to Albion, and you’ll give it a try. If it doesn’t work, I’ll send you back to your father.”

  Catarina didn’t answer, and her mother pressed on. “Please, I lost Isabel already. You’re my last chance to make something respectable of my daughters. Erase the mistake I made.”

  Ah, so that was it. Catarina should have known. Mother had chased a handsome young scoundrel who could give her pretty things, and now she was hoping for a do-over of her life. Still, Catarina was intrigued, and there was no question Father’s fortunes weren’t what they had once been. All the talk of “pirate queen” sounded these days like wishful thinking, or at least, a dream far in the future.

  “Okay, I’ll go with you to Albion.”

  #

  Three weeks later, Catarina and her mother, cleaned up and rested in York Town with no word of pursuit by Captain Vargus, had taken the rail line to a tidy village of two-story brick houses in the countryside. There, the elder Vargus woman hired a car that drove them out to their new house. When questioned about their destination, Catarina’s mother only smiled enigmatically and urged patience. All questions would shortly be answered.

  They pulled onto a lane of brushed gravel lined by stately, two-hundred-year-old oak trees that soon opened to a magnificent view of a hand-dug lake surrounded by acres of lawn and woodland. A faux Greek temple rose on a grassy hill in the center of the lake.

  But the manor house itself pulled Catarina’s gaze. It was an imposing brick structure studded with chimneys and two vast wings that swept about to enclose an imposing three-story entryway. The driver pulled to a halt at a gatehouse fifty yards short of the house, where Elizabeth Vargus presented credentials for mother and daughter, at which point the car was allowed to approach. The driver came to a halt as two footmen waved for him to stop.

  Catarina stepped out of the car with her bag and gaped at the house. A peacock strutted across the lawn to the right of the driveway. In that direction lay a handsome collection of brick stables and gabled houses for caretakers and servants, most of which were larger than most homes she’d lived in. A man in scarlet-and-black livery led a magnificent chestnut-colored horse from the stables, where a young woman in a riding dress and feathered hat pulled on leather gloves as she prepared to mount. Two men with fowling pieces draped across their arms strolled up from the lake, followed by a handful of servants. Nobody paid the newcomers any attention.

  Catarina looked at her mother. “This is it? This is where we’re going to live? It’s a bloody palace, Mother. How . . .? What . . .? I don’t understand. This is our home?”

  Her mother laughed. “Heavens, no. This is the estate of Lord Henry McGowan, retired general and Earl of Easthaven. A man worth over two hundred thousand pounds, and the cousin of Lord Admiral Malthorne through his wife. No, you’re not living here, not in the manor house. Not yet. Our quarters are in a small cottage on the far side of the lake.”

  Catarina turned to her mother. “What do you mean, not yet?”

  “Lord McGowan’s eldest son, Reginald, is twenty-nine, heir to the earldom, and fourteenth in line to the throne of Albion. The young man’s sister is married to the Duke of Mercia, and his younger brother is a first mate of a missile frigate, and it is said that he’ll be a captain before he’s thirty. Perhaps someday admiral. The family has connections upon connections upon connections.” A significant pause that Catarina would remember later. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, first. Clean you up, teach you to be a lady, ingratiate you with the family. And then you’re going to marry the eldest son and become the wife of the future Earl of Easthaven.”

  Catarina had scoffed. “The devil I will.”

  Chapter Five

  Capp could no longer fight her irritation once she and Carvalho were back on their own ship, the twelve-man torpedo boat that had skewered Catarina Vargus’s flagship and hauled it in.

  “I didn’t expect a bleeding medal or nothing,” she said as she settled into the commander’s chair, “but would a ‘thanks,’ or ‘well done, Lieutenant,’ have been out of order?”

  “McGowan is not that sort of captain,” Carvalho said. He sat in the mate’s chair and tapped his console. “I am going to untether and take us out of here before you get us in any more trouble.”

  “Technically, that is my call, luv. I’m the commander here.”

  Carvalho made a broad gesture. “Awaiting your orders, Commander Capp.”

  “That’s more like it.” Capp cracked her knuckles. “Untether the boat and take us out of here before I get us in any more trouble.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Oh, shut up, you,” she said lightly.

  As the torpedo boat detached, HMS Peerless drifted away on the viewscreen. Gleaming in the reflected light of the gas giant to its starboard, the cruiser looked enough like their home ship, Blackbeard, that Capp felt a twinge of nostalgia.

  She’d always admired the lean, barracuda look of the navy’s torpedo boats, the way they could dart in and savage a larger ship and slip away unscathed, but inside, they were cramped, hot, and smelly. No lifts, only ladders to take you into the engine room or the crew quarters.

  “I hate change,” she said.

  “Nah, you love it. That is why you got yourself drummed out of the marines. Punched that officer in the face so you could live a life of adventure.”

  “I’m telling you, I don’t like it. I was happy under Drake. Subpilot was good enough for me.”

  “Sure,” Carvalho said, “and that is why you agreed to be first mate when Drake left and put Tolvern in charge.”

  “I had no choice, luv. What do you say? No, I don’t want to be no officer? That I like my gruel and my two pounds a week?” She grunted. “Why did Drake have to leave anyway? Wasn’t he happy as captain?”

  “What would he have said?” Carvalho asked, mimicking her tone. “No, I don’t want to be no admiral? Anyway, it wasn’t so bad under Tolvern. We still had our fun, didn’t we? Fighting the buzzards, going from one scrape to the next.”

  “But now we ain’t even got Blackbeard no more. We lost another captain, and they stuck us on this tin can. Twelve crew, barely space to turn
around. Hot bunking again with the general crew. Where’s the fun in that?”

  “Dios mío, be happy, won’t you? You are a commander now, and we still work together.”

  That cheered her. “Aye, that’s true. I’m your commander, luv. The navy put me on top.” She grinned wickedly. “Just wait until I get you alone, then you’ll see on top.”

  He didn’t take the bait. “Look, there is something bothering me. This business with Catarina Vargus and Captain McGowan.”

  “That’s settled now, luv. McGowan has her fleet, he put her on ice.”

  “What for?”

  “What do you mean, what for? She’s a pirate, and the navy’s got to clean up the sector so we’ll be ready for some more fighting.”

  “We are pirates, too, Capp. Don’t forget that.”

  “Not anymore, we ain’t,” Capp said.

  “But even Drake turned pirate when we were fighting the civil war. Sometimes, there are reasons.” Carvalho nodded. “What was this Vargus doing to us, anyway? Nothing. Not raiding commerce, not selling sugar to the Hroom or selling secrets to Apex. She was not even in Albion space when we caught her.”

  Capp scratched at the tattoos on her forearm, uncomfortable with this line of thinking. Not that Carvalho was wrong, but the kingdom was still a mess. Two wars, one after another. First, the messy civil war against Lord Malthorne and that business with the Hroom cultists that had vaporized York Town with an atomic suicide charge.

  Then, the war against the aliens. The damn buzzards; she hated them. Vicious, brutal, ruthless. Apex would have exterminated human and Hroom alike if they hadn’t been driven off to God knew where. Admiral Drake was assembling a new fleet to go find out, and no doubt Capp would be part of the expedition somehow. She was looking forward to it.

  “Maybe the admiral wants Vargus’s ships,” Capp said. “Them shipyards is turning out sloops and destroyers and war junks, but it ain’t enough if the buzzards come back. And everyone is talking about an expedition into Scandian systems. Vargus had a small fleet. Could be something.”