McGowan sputtered. “She’s . . . she’s a bloody pirate! Not a drop of noble blood in her!”
“Of course she’s noble. She’s a duchess.”
“Only because you say so!”
“No, because His Majesty has decreed it.”
McGowan fell silent.
“Thank you, Admiral,” Catarina said.
“You may thank the king at your investiture. Meanwhile, your colony is an important bulwark against whatever surprises might be lurking in the Omega Cluster—there are more than a hundred stars in there, and there might potentially be an alien race or two waiting to break out—so the crown has decided to send you an additional five thousand colonists per year for the next ten years.”
It was a welcome pronouncement . . . so long as it didn’t come with strings.
“So long as it’s not just warm bodies,” Catarina said. “We’ve got to clear land, build farms, dig mines—I won’t take on a bunch of hungry mouths without the resources to support them.”
“Understood. High-quality colonists, food, and equipment. Whatever you need. Correction—whatever you need that’s reasonable.”
Catarina nodded, pleased, but still wary that with more crown resources came more crown control. She had no intention of being a duchess in name only, and would resist any attempts to strip her of the rights that had been promised to her.
“Ah, and another thing,” Drake added. A hint of a smile touched the corners of his mouth. “The king has apparently decided that the name New Albion is a little . . . fusty is the word he used. He asked for alternatives.”
“And?”
“With so many of your colonists being from outside traditional Albion worlds, so many Ladino and New Dutch worlds now under nominal control of the kingdom, I thought a more exotic name might indicate unity. What do you think about Segovia, Your Grace?”
#
Tolvern let herself into her husband’s quarters on Fort Alliance and moved quietly into the sitting room. There, she stood and watched James through the open bathroom door, waiting for him to notice her.
He stepped out of the shower, grabbed a towel, and threw it around his waist. His hair, usually carefully combed, was a wet mop, and he stepped up to the mirror and swiped away the steam with the palm of one hand, reaching for a comb with the other.
Tolvern cleared her throat dramatically. “Admiral, sir?”
James turned quickly, stiffening, then relaxed as he saw who it was. She grinned.
“Unauthorized entry into the admiral’s private chambers,” he said. “I’d have to check naval regulations, but that sounds like a serious offense.”
“Good thing someone gave me authorization, then, isn’t it? Or at least, I put my hand up to the pad, and the door opened right up.” She scratched her head in mock confusion. “I wonder if it would open for any naval officer, or if I’m somehow special.
“You’d better throw on some clothes,” she added, “or I’m going to forget all about why I came to talk to you.”
Tolvern fanned herself with one hand and playfully tugged at her top button, as if it were suddenly stuffy in the room, and she needed to take off her jacket.
“Oh? Tell me more?” He took a step toward her.
“Go on, get dressed. Time for play later.”
She was serious about talking, but couldn’t take her eyes off him as he hung the towel on a hook and put on a bathrobe. When he turned around, she saw the pink scar across his left shoulder where a piece of shrapnel had hit him in the Battle of Persia. Enemy fire had penetrated all the way to his bridge. It was a sobering reminder of how close he’d come to dying. How close all of them, their entire civilization, even, had been pushed to the brink.
“The news has spread through the fleet,” she said. “Or rumors, at least.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“Come on, James. You can’t organize an expedition without advance preparations, especially now that the war is over. People talk.”
“And what do they say?”
“That you’re shipping a lot of ordnance to Fort Alliance, Viborg, and Persia.”
“I need to fortify the inner frontier,” he said. “We have no idea what’s two or three systems beyond Persia other than what the Persians themselves have told us, and their information is at least ten years old. What’s out there, anyway?”
“Forty systems lie between Persia and Old Earth, according to the charts.”
“And those charts are three decades out of date,” he said. “Jump points have changed, systems that were lawless might be organized now, and vice versa. Might not even be a pathway through at all.”
“In other words, you’re planning an expedition to Earth,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“We’re more than a kingdom now, Jess, we’re an empire. If we’re honest, we’ve been an empire since we started picking off Hroom worlds in the sugar wars, and once you walk down that path, you can’t walk it back again. And look how scattered we are—Segovia, Odense, Viborg, Roskilde, Persia.” He ticked them off on his hand, one by one. “Then you’ve got the three core planets, plus sugar colonies like Hot Barsa, Ladino and New Dutch worlds like Peruano and San Pablo—all under Albion control.”
“So, what? Is the plan to keep marching toward Old Earth until we scoop them all up?”
“Heaven help us. But an empire needs stability on its frontiers. We can’t have pirate worlds, Viking raiders, or any other lawless types seeing us as a fat, rich target. And what about the other alien civilizations out there? We only know of two. Our encounter with the Hroom led to a centuries-long conflict, and Apex tried to exterminate us. But we’ve caught hints of others out there. Derelicts, the ancient base in the Fort Alliance crater. And the unknown species Olafsen reported seeing inside the harvester ship.”
“Let me cut to the chase,” Tolvern said. “Barker looked into the manifests of outgoing supply vessels. There’s a hell of a lot of cannon shot on its way to New Persia. The big stuff, the sixty-twos and sixty-fives. That means either a battle cruiser or battleship. Dreadnought is stuck in the yards for six months. Void Queen is headed in the opposite direction, toward Segovia. HMS Citadel is still under construction, and won’t put out to space until the end of the year. There’s only one ship left.”
He nodded. “HMS Blackbeard.”
“You’re sending me to the inner frontier?”
Tolvern’s voice sounded flat in her ears. She hadn’t known what to expect in the aftermath of the war—retirement, maybe, so that she could be with James without violating navy regs?—but being sent off again was the farthest thing from her mind. They’d been apart almost since the moment they got married. She didn’t want to leave the navy, but the thought of another long separation for the sake of propriety made her heart ache.
“We don’t know what’s out there,” he said, “and I won’t send the fleet across the frontier until we know. That could start a war, or provoke a new enemy into sending a fleet to cause trouble while we’re still crippled from fighting Apex.”
“So it’s a solo mission?”
“I’m giving Blackbeard the best of everything. Singaporean cloaking technology, a full complement of strikers. A hold stuffed with every kind of ordnance we can think of. Resupplies stashed at Persia if you need to come back for any reason.”
“And it has to be Blackbeard? It couldn’t be, I don’t know . . . Peerless?”
“Blackbeard is the best ship for the job,” he said. “The most powerful at hand. The most experienced crew—I’m moving Capp, Carvalho, Smythe, Barker, and Nyb Pim back across. Anyone else you need—they’re loyal to Vargus, but they’re more loyal to you. And none of them are colonists, they’re navy officers. It will be like old times, Jess. A solo mission through dangerous territory, the old crew reunited.”
“Not all the old crew though, right?” She pinched her lips together and looked away. “Not all of them.”
He turned her face toward him. “Yes, everyone.”
“What?”
“You don’t think I’m sending the lot of you out there without me, do you? You’d get yourself killed.”
“Hah!” She pushed him away, but couldn’t hold her scowl. “You led me to believe . . . and you . . . is this your way of getting past navy regs about fraternization?”
He grinned at this, but his face turned serious again. “I thought if I came right out and said it, you might balk.”
“Balk at being with you? Why?”
“Balk because of Blackbeard. She’s your ship now, and I’m asking you to step down for the duration.”
“Oh, right.” Tolvern folded her arms and stared in mock indignation. “Are you stripping me of command, Admiral?”
“Captain Tolvern, acting first mate of Blackbeard. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?”
“Better ask Lieutenant Capp, too. She’ll love being demoted.”
“I already told Capp. She wouldn’t stop cursing for ten minutes. I’m pretty sure they were curses of joy, but it’s hard to say. I’ve told all the rest of them, in fact.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell me first?”
“I wanted to make sure the others were on board. It’s an easier sell, that way. Now I’m giving you a choice, too. So, here it is. You can stay at Albion and lead the admiralty in my absence. Or, come with me to Old Earth.”
Old Earth. Two centuries had passed since Albion, then a young colony of ten or twenty million, had seen its last visit from the mother planet. Fifty years now since the last goods had slipped across the increasingly chaotic inner frontier, although even in her childhood, she remembered hearing of a man who claimed to have visited the home systems, had heard her father talk about securing a bottle of Old Earth brandy for the baron.
So when had contact truly ceased? And why had it happened? Wars? Shifting jump points? Alien invasion? There were so many possibilities, and she was itching to find out.
That she would do so with James Drake at her side . . . well, that was worth stepping down as captain for a few weeks. Months? A year or more? It didn’t matter, it was worth it.
She kissed him. “Fine, get dressed and come over. I’ve got a lot to show you—Blackbeard has changed since you last flew her—and I can’t be showing you around my ship with you dressed in that ridiculous bathrobe.”
While James was getting dressed, Tolvern opened the viewport to look across from Fort Alliance to Blackbeard. Her ship was a long, dark shadow, lights blinking to mark the edges of its hull, with the planet of Albion below, shrouded by night. Cities and smaller towns stretched across whatever landmass lay below, but much of the continent remained black, covered in forests, mountains, and other wilderness.
It was a reminder that humanity was still young out here on the fringes of the explored systems. Half a billion humans lived on Albion, with seven or eight hundred million more stretching from Singapore to Persia. At the time of the Great Migration, the population of Earth had been nearly ten billion.
What about now? Was Earth still a teeming mass of humanity, or had the home planet and its surrounding systems been devastated by war, plague, and famine? Destroyed entirely, perhaps. Maybe that explained why nothing had come through from the home systems. But somehow, she didn’t think so.
Tolvern didn’t know for sure. But soon, she would step onto the bridge of the starship HMS Blackbeard and sail into her people’s past to find out.
Old Earth awaited.
-end-
Afterword
Thank you for reading The Void Queen Trilogy. If you enjoyed the books, but haven’t read the original Starship Blackbeard series, you can buy them here. Also set in the same universe is The Sentinel trilogy, beginning with the first book, The Sentinel.
When I first introduced James Drake and his crew as they fled bad elements in the Royal Navy, I imagined something along the lines of a sci-fi TV program like Firefly or Battlestar Gallactica. The crew would run through a series of fun, largely standalone adventures in local systems while I maintained a thread of their being pursued by the navy. If you remember Captain Rutherford on Vigilant, he was going to be the main bad guy, while the figure of Lord Admiral Malthorne lurked darkly behind the scenes.
Then Rutherford turned out to be not only stiff and haughty, but honorable. Malthorne became more greedy and vengeful and dangerous than he first appeared. Finally, Drake and his crew proved tenacious in sticking around and making a fight of it.
I’m not one of those writers who say that characters just take over, that they do their own thing and I simply can’t control them, but it is tempting to make that claim here, although I suppose I could have stopped it—I certainly caught what was going on early enough. Once I realized that Drake, Tolvern, Capp, and the rest weren’t going to go quietly to the frontier, but fight to clear their names and attack treasonous elements back home, I could have returned and tweaked those characters to stop that from happening.
I didn’t do that. So instead of pulling them toward adventures on the frontier, the plot kept them in the thick of the action. Next thing I knew they were the establishment, the ones fighting off existential threats from Hroom death cults and Apex attempts to exterminate sentient life in the sector.
And it’s not always a sympathetic establishment to defend. Even some of our good guys are classist, and the civilization we’re rooting for is expanding, turning into more and more of an empire before our eyes. That might go well for a while, but empires often end up ruled by despots, and sooner or later end badly. But our characters are humans (well, most of them), and we want humans to survive and even thrive.
I can hear what some of you are thinking right now:
King’s balls, man! All we bloody well want to know is what happens next. What about Catarina Vargus and her new settlement? How about the expedition to Old Earth with Drake and Tolvern united on a souped-up version of Blackbeard? When do we get to find out about that?
If you think you’re going to get all the answers, all the books, you’ll be disappointed. The human-colonized sectors now stretch across dozens of systems, and it would take several writerly lifetimes to tell all the stories that have already occurred to me. Every time I release a new series in the Blackbeard universe, I seem to raise as many questions as I answer.
Meanwhile, I’ve written ten books in this universe in a period of two and a half years, and will be taking a short breather. If you like my writing here, let me encourage you to pick up some of my other work. The stories are different, but the storytelling is the same style.
Maybe start with the five-book Dark Citadel series, or, if you want something very different, check out the books in the Righteous series, which is where I first gained a little bit of notoriety.
And help me spread the word about the Blackbeard universe. Tell a friend, leave a review to draw attention to the books, or drop me an email. Few things inspire a writer’s enthusiasm like a growing reader base, encouraging emails from readers, and an ability to pay the bills by selling enough copies to make it worthwhile.
You can sign up for my new releases list here, and you’ll get an email when I release a new book. You’ll also get a free copy of the first book of my fantasy series, The Dark Citadel, as a welcome. This mailing list is only used for announcing new releases, and your email will never be sold or distributed.
Sun King (The Void Queen Trilogy Book 3) Page 24