The Queen's Prophecy

Chapter One

Chapter One


900 Years Later

A small red light on the dashboard started to blink in time with a high-pitched beep that grated her nerves.


Cam looked up from the book that she was reading for the second time this trip to glance out the window.  There was nothing but blackness.  She flicked the switch next to the offending red light, silencing the alarm.


Being thirteen light years away from home can really suck.  Especially when the cryo tank is on the fritz again.


Cam hated deep space.  It was cold and except for the few straggling systems out here, there wasn’t much to look at.  She much preferred to sleep her way through this boring stretch of spaceway. 


Luckily she’d had enough presence of mind to pack some of her favorite novels this trip.  Old-Earth classics, mostly romances all with happy endings, which she had read and reread a hundred times but never grown tired of. 


She had only just found her place on the page again when the same irritating alarm sounded.  This time, though, it was accompanied by a soft shudder in the hull of the ship.  Cam didn’t even have time to look out the window, much less turn off the alarm before a much stronger jolt slammed her to the floor of the cockpit knocking her head against the control panel behind her.


Dazed, she struggled to pull herself back into the seat as the ship rocked and twisted.  The dashboard was lit up with at least a dozen indicators and warnings.


Her eyes scanned the black space outside of the control cabin, but still she saw nothing.  She turned to a keyboard attached to the captain’s chair she was sitting in and furiously typed in commands to stabilize the pressure of the ship and run a diagnostic of any damage.


She silently cursed her brother, Peyton.  This was all his fault.  If it weren’t for him, she wouldn’t be out here.  She wouldn’t have had to retire from the Galactic Space Force and she wouldn’t be working for the slimeball that sent her to this Godforsaken corner of the universe.


Another shudder rippled through the length of her space cruiser, this time accompanied by multiple alarms.  She was reaching behind her for the safety straps when she felt the cruiser jerk off course.  She had managed to get her arms through the straps but hadn’t gotten a chance to secure them. 


There was no time.  She grabbed the control stick and pulled it toward her with all the might she had but it was useless.  Whatever was pulling the ship was much stronger than she was.


Cam flipped the switches and fired the thrusters to fight the unseen force.  Aside from the deafening growl of the engines, there was no change.  She was still being pulled in the wrong direction and fast.


She saw it then, and it was already too late.  A blinding white light flooded the control cabin and the cruiser shook violently as it entered the mouth of the wormhole.  Cam heard the hull screaming in protest to the pressure and the magnetic force.  She hadn’t been prepared for the hole, as it was on none of her navigation charts, so she hadn’t had time to straighten the ship on entry.  She was going through a wormhole sideways. 


As the cruiser was pulled further into the wormhole the navigation tools all blinked and scrambled until finally going black with blank screens.  The light intensified until Cam couldn’t see anything at all and closed her eyes tight to shield them.


She had no idea where she would be dumped; in fact she wasn’t even sure that the ship would stay in one piece before they reached the end.  She could still hear the creaks and squeals of titanium grinding and twisting above the teeth-rattling rumble of the engines still fighting the pull.


Cam wasn’t sure if the G-forces had caused her to lose consciousness or if the wormhole had ended that abruptly, but suddenly the shaking had stopped, the light had faded, and the only sounds she could hear were roaring engines and the array of alarms melodically sounding their warnings.


She opened her eyes.  She was still alive. 


She scanned the outside of the window, hoping to recognize the systems on the horizon, but was disappointed to find that she didn’t.  There were two systems visible, one much closer than the other, but she had never seen either of them in her previous travels.  She wasn’t really sure what galaxy she was in.  An uncharted wormhole could have sent her anywhere in the universe.


The urgent beeping grew faster and Cam quickly realized that her ship was beyond disabled.  She had lost pressure in the cargo hold and the Cryo-chamber and it would take just one more jolt to cause loss of air pressure in the control cabin, too.


She pulled at the steering wheel, forcing the crippled cruiser to turn toward the closest of the solar systems.  There wasn’t time to run an environment scan of the three planets orbiting the star, she would just have to choose one by appearance and hope that it had a hospitable environment.  The third planet looked promising she thought.  Its bodies of water were large and visibly blue and it had large, green continental land formations, similar to what Earth had once looked like.  With any luck it would have a comparable atmosphere.


As she grew closer to the planet, still trying to keep the cruiser from dismantling, she was able to make out areas of inhabitation.  There were definitely several cities dotting the coastline of the largest continent.


Cam fired what was left of her thrusters and hoped that the one engine that was still functioning would be able to guide her through the planet’s atmosphere. 


There was only a second to make a decision.  Land or water.  She hadn’t gotten a chance to dump her fuel and a single spark from a crash landing on rock would turn her cruiser into a fireball.  At this speed, a water landing would be no different than a land impact except the risk of fire would be literally extinguished.  Of course, she could still drown.


She decided to compromise.  She tugged at the wheel and the ship veered to the left, headed directly for a bay of water surrounded on three sides by one of the larger cities.  If she hit the water where it was sure to be seen by the inhabitants of this planet there might be a chance of being rescued.


Cam braced herself for the impact and whispered a quick prayer that the aliens she hoped would come to her aide were not of the human-eating variety.