In the vicinity of an icy moon named Kryenna, which had been named after the goddess of ice and freezing winter, an entire mountain of granite floated in space, after an unplanned slingshot maneuver had flung it around the moon, toward Junas, the red, orange, white and brown gas giant the moon orbited. Junas had been named after the father of the gods, the god of logic and reason. He ruled over all others, save only his wife, Vanenta, the goddess of marriage and stars, who had quite different ideas about who was in charge.

  The granite mountain was rectangular in shape, though most of it was featureless, aside from a series of holes in the sides that were only barely visible, and the front, which had an open docking bay. Another huge opening appeared to be the gigantic monolith’s control center. Zombies worked to erect a replacement window supported by a series of columns of both steel and granite. There were traces of a shattered window around the corners, where large, runic symbols had been etched into the surface, possibly part of an enchantment to make the glass stronger, though it was obvious that hadn’t been enough.

  The giant mountain-ship was currently on a suicidal course to fall into the atmosphere of Junas, though it was moving so slow, that would take months.

  The original plan had been for the ship to use reverse thrust at the perigee of a transfer orbit, until its course had been circularized, but that opportunity had been missed, due to an incident in which the ship had been boarded. The intent had been to orbit Kryenna and send out a smaller tanker craft to take on water from the moon, mostly because the ship had used quite a lot of fuel chasing a smaller ship, to outmaneuver them.

  Elsbeth Natas, better known as the Dead Queen, entered the airless bridge of the granite ship, finally about to get it back under control. The undead witch mostly lacked hair, but what little she still had was slightly red in color. Her green eyes revealed an intensity of emotion rarely seen, because she was more furious than she’d even been, after the way her ship had been invaded. Her skin mostly hung lose from her bones, because she’d caught an infection that was slowly consuming her muscle mass. The affliction was little more than an inconvenience, however, because a zombie’s muscles were secondary to those of their spirit.

  Foundation Stone had been adrift and without an atmosphere for nearly a full day, but the Queen had finally discovered an interesting fact she hadn’t previously known, which likely no one else had learned: the common bone transduction spell witches used to communicate over long range worked without an atmosphere.

  The Queen had long known that an undead witch could cast spells without air, because she’d experimented with it, ages back. What seemed to be required was an attempt to speak, including lip and tongue motions in the ancient witch’s language. Whether there was air in the lungs to activate the vocal cords or not played no part.

  However, she’d always considered bone transduction to be an auditory spell, carrying the voice of the speaker to any distant magical creature that served as a receiver. The spell vibrated the receiver’s skull and formed sound only they could hear, unless someone pressed their ear to the affected receiver’s head. Newt Witches had been using the spell for thousands of years and it had trickled down to witches of every stripe, because it was so useful.

  After a day of frustration, the Queen had tried the spell, despite the fact she believed it wouldn’t work, because coordinating every witch on board Foundation Stone without speaking was a practical impossibility.

  She been surprised the spell worked and only then did she realize the spell functioned by amplifying one’s internal voice, rather than by sound. Effectively, it made the thoughts associated with speech into a magical wave that carried to the receiver.

  The bridge of Foundation Stone was a massive room that had been carved from the granite of the ship. There had originally been a wonderfully large window that gave a spectacular view of space, but Amelia Blackwell had crashed her ship through it, only to plug the hole with an atmospheric seal spell strung between the masts of Starwitch. However, as soon as she’d rescued her sisters and stolen the spell-core, they’d flown off, leaving the hole unplugged. To add insult to injury, the Blackwell sisters had even stolen the Queen’s dog, Bones.

  The new window wasn’t going to be as wonderful as the original, which had been made of one huge sheet of rune-enchanted glass. Ironically, the enchantments had made it as strong as steel, right up to the moment it had been shattered by the engines of Starwitch, after which the portions that lacked runes had become as brittle and weak as regular glass, which hadn’t really damaged the little steel star ship.

  The replacement window was getting a series of granite and steel supports that would make it far stronger than the original. If anyone was ever foolhardy enough to crash into the bridge again, their ship would surely be torn to shreds by the shrapnel.

  Staring out between the first two new columns, she shook her head, because they made the bridge feel like a cage.

  She stepped closer to her throne and the many control consoles arranged around it, grateful Amelia’s crazy entry to the ship had missed them, because she’d landed to one side.

  Sitting down, the Queen gestured for her replacement bridge crew to enter. Close to a hundred zombie soldiers in armor took position at the many consoles of controls.

  The Queen erupted into orders, her voice echoing in the heads of her men and many distant witches scattered all over the ship, We’ll save the engines for maneuvering only and I want full gravitic thrust from the granite! Begin rotating us to an angle of – she rattled off some precise numbers – then full thrust for twenty-two minutes and twelve seconds, on my mark!

  The stars outside whizzed past as Foundation Stone spun in place, while the granite of the floor rumbled, due to distant engines coming to life. After the turn was complete, the engines shut down and the rumble ended.

  The Queen waited and counted down the seconds in her mind. She’d once been a Newt Witch and member of The Order of Newts, the body of witches that ruled over the Solus system. That had been about a thousand years back. Her heritage gave her both strong magic and an exceptional talent for numbers, which was essential for the rapid sort of space travel favored by pirates.

  Mark!

  With a barely-perceptible change of force inside the ship, Foundation Stone shot forward under the power of gravity-manipulation spells. Fifty-three other witches combined their magical might to channel the massive magical power pooling in the ship’s stone structure into just as many propulsion spells, a feat that was normally coordinated by the spell-core.

  The magic pouring from the granite was remarkably inefficient, producing a stream of waste magic as eighty percent of its output, but that had always been easy to turn into an advantage. The queen focused her mind and mouthed some words in the witch’s tongue. Her spell absorbed the massive amount of waste magic and transformed it into a gravity-manipulation effect, for additional propulsion, which was what had always made Foundation Stone as maneuverable as a wasp, despite its massive size. She couldn’t have done it without the other witches, however, because the ship had to be unified in casting an identical spell for the technique to work.

  Half a day had passed and the Queen looked on a green and blue world, which had been named for the god of inspiration and madness, Wambris. It was a forsaken place that not even the Newt Witches visited, because they’d grown so disgusted with the inhabitants, they’d flown away and never returned.

  Appearing as a distant speck that glittered in the light of Solus, Ice Palace Seventy, more commonly known as Junkshop, looked wrong in just about every way. The other Ice Palaces were small mountains of ice in space, all of them cubical, but number seventy was spherical, in defiance of conventional wisdom.

  Almost no one visited Junkshop anymore, though it was presumably still manned – no, not manned, because that was the wrong word, but gnomed would have been more accurate. The floating port was still in the navigation tables of all other ports, but the Newt Witches had calculated and added additional navigational paths to the stone tablets detailing known, safe courses, to allow entirely bypassing Wambris.

  It was all because of the gnomes. No one liked them, because they were crazy and often dangerous. Each and every one of the race bore The Touch of Wambris, as it was called, the touch of inspiration that could sometimes border on madness, but as the beloved of Wambris, the gnomish race bore a double portion of his touch.

  It was often said that there was no better engineer than a sane gnome, but the trouble was, only one in a million of them was sane, and that figure was probably too generous. It wasn’t that they were malicious, but they were constantly subject to a barrage of new ideas.

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  Some gnome might set out to design a machine to make better coffee, but by the time they were done, it might have become a huge, steam-powered monstrosity with self-greasing components, that manufactured and dispensed its own cups, plus some absolutely fabulous coffee, while in the background, it liberally dumped toxic chemicals all over the floor as ‘an unwanted byproduct of the process! I’m sure I’ll figure it out in the next version!’ However, the next version never came, because the engineer had gotten inspiration for a flying machine in the night, which would supposedly work entirely by muscle power, an almost inevitable idea that had killed millions of gnomes, as if they were lemmings. The only reason there were still plenty of gnomes on Wambris was the fact gnomes reproduced almost as fast as rabbits.

  However, despite the dangers of visiting their world, the work of gnome artists was much sought-after, though it was hard to get them to focus on a commission for more than five minutes, at least without putting a crossbow to their head.

  Due to that mountain of issues, the Queen expected no retribution for what she was about to do. According to the pact between the Newt Witches and the pirates, all Ice Palaces were off-limits, but Junkshop was the one of very few Ice Palace the Newt Witches had abandoned. Technically, they still owned the place, but in practice, possession was ninety-nine percent of the law of space and you’d never keep what you weren’t willing to fight for, an argument the Queen would make if she lived long enough to be challenged on the matter.

  All soldiers: prepare for boarding action! The Queen called out, via bone transduction,

  I want ramming speed! Maximize internal gravity resilience! We’ll go through Junkshop like a hot knife through butter!

  Junkshop loomed ever closer and the Queen smiled, because she’d wanted to destroy it for centuries, though she’d never dared, for fear of the consequences. However, after the way the Blackwell sisters had embarrassed her, it was time for decisive action and a show of strength beyond anything she’d previously aspired to, lest her lieutenants decide she was weak enough to consider deposing her from the throne.

  She didn’t have much time before the rumors reached every world orbiting Junas, because the Blackwell sisters were unlikely to keep quiet about their victory. It was best to make it look like all the blood had come from the sisters, lest the coming sharks attack their Queen, en-masse. Alternatively, it was time to nail every one of her enemies to the wall with such psychotic strength, no one would ever dare cross her again, even if the Blackwell sisters survived.

  Sooner or later, The Order of Newts would get involved, but the Queen was certain she could bluster her way past them, just like she always had. After all, despite how much power they wielded as a group, they all individually feared the Queen, because she’d once been of high rank among them and knew the dark secrets they’d been hiding for thousands of years: the Order’s power was a house of cards, based on some barely-understood magic artifacts they could only just manage to duplicate, while their witch powers varied by the individual, just the same as anyone else. People thought they were divine messengers, but the Queen knew they were only human.

  As the Queen looked on the unsuspecting Ice Palace, she frowned, suddenly feeling guilty for all the lives she was about to take. In truth, she had no right to kill them. In fact, it would be better to leave them alone. Better to dock and trade for a spell-core. That would be less wasteful in terms of lives. Yeah, that was a great idea!

  The Queen was about to give the order to change plans, only to realize Marta was influencing her mind again, via the connection they currently shared. The Queen opened her mouth and tensed the muscles of her lungs, just like she would have for a scream, while her bridge crew visibly flinched, because the silent scream was audible to them! The Queen shook her head, dismissing the weak and spineless idea Marta had subtly planted.

  Looking around at her staring crew, the Queen growled, What are you fools looking at me* for? Get back to work!*

  The many zombies looked away and were suddenly very busy at their stations, even though most of them had nothing to do.

  Port Commander Tarwert was busy tinkering with a small contraption he’d managed to insert between the Ice Palace and its spell-core, without disrupting the artificial gravity field it produced, which had required an unusual level of concentration as he removed it.

  The device was a mythril tube about six inches long, covered in runes, which were beginning to glow. One side of it was a socket that had a large ruby etched with runes in it. The ruby was glowing with an inner light.

  Tarwert was rather short, at just four feet tall, with a huge nose and a set of ears that desperately tried to draw attention to themselves through sheer size, but his nose made such a spectacle of itself, most never noticed them, because his nose was large, even by gnomish standards. Like most of his kind, his hair was a snowy white shade. He wore a heavy parka, because Junkshop was literally made of ice and it was a rather chilly place.

  “It works!” He called out, with enthusiasm!

  His assistant, a gnomish woman with long, flowing, white hair, clapped her hands, “Wonderful! Now we can siphon the unused magic from the core into gemstones!”

  Tarwert nodded, “Indeed!”

  He reached out, pulled the ruby from the socket and frowned as the glow immediately faded.

  “Now we just need to find a gemstone that can hold it.” He sighed and shook his head, “I didn’t give that enough thought.”

  “But it’s still a great scientific achievement!” His loyal assistant was still enthusiastic.

  An alarm, not unlike that of a mechanical alarm clock, rang out in the control center of Junkshop, which housed the port’s spell-core. It was soon joined by a dozen others, filling the room with a painful roar of bells!

  Both gnomes covered their ears, while Tarwert demanded, “Which one is it!”

  They both looked around at the walls, where hundreds of rune-powered alarms for every purpose under the sun had been installed, each sensitive to something different. Unfortunately, half of them were flawed and went off whenever an adjacent alarm sounded, making it hard to determine which was responsible for the racket, despite the careful labels.

  Above the line of bells that went the whole way around the room, the ice of the walls had been polished to serve as scrying windows, every few feet displaying a different view outside the port.

  The center of the room was a raised dais with stairs leading down to a lower floor and the exits, which allowed every wall to serve for the purpose of scrying, giving views in every direction at once, though one still had to look around from time to time, to scan every wall for activity, which was why Tarwert had designed all of the alarms, to save himself the trouble of turning his head.

  After glancing at various alarms, his assistant concluded, “I think it’s just possible we’re being attacked by cheese, but all of the direction alarms are ringing!”

  Tarwert nodded, sighed, then did the one thing he’d been trying not to do, because he preferred to build machines that did his job for him: he looked around at all the scrying views and eventually spotted a huge mountain of granite, which was getting larger from one moment to the next, because it was rapidly approaching.

  “That’s not cheese!” He complained, totally failing to comprehend the fact that the mountain was on a collision course, on top of the fact it was much larger than Junkshop.

  Seconds later, the collision occurred and air began flowing through the halls of Junkshop, due to a hull breach! That lasted only a moment, however, because the spell-core responded by automatically casting an atmospheric seal spell around the port, which looked very much like a soap bubble!

  “They hit us!” Tarwert grumbled, “I can’t believe anyone could be such a poor pilot! Don’t they realize docking hours aren’t scheduled right now?”

  Outside, zombies hurled grappling hooks from the docking bay of the granite ship, which latched onto the ice of the Ice Palace.

  “We have docking hours?” Tarwert’s assistant asked.

  “Oh yeah, I set it up to follow a fractal principle. It’s nice and regular, just so long as you can follow the math.”

  “That’s good to know. I always thought the Docking Witch just opened the place whenever she felt like it.”

  Outside, the zombies got to work cutting ice from the port, while the freed chunks were hauled into the granite ship, presumably for fuel.

  Tarwert objected to that, “That’s not how they’re supposed to get fuel! They haven’t even paid yet!”

  “They’re very rude customers.” His assistant commented, “First they crash into us, then start taking ice without making an offer of trade? That’s what a pirate would do.”

  Finally, a few faint memories related to Tarwert’s training as a Port Commander desperately waved to get his attention.

  “Wait a moment. What does the pirate queen’s ship look like? Isn’t it a whole…mountain…of granite…oh, son of a-” Tarwert cursed as the realization of how deep the crap he was standing in struck him, “All hands: get into your pressure suits and get to battle stations!”

  His assistant rushed off to spread the word and obey her orders, while Tarwert slipped a mythril wand covered in runes for ice from a little loop on his belt. He raised it and concentrated to enact a spell to control the ice of the port.

  The result was a huge chunk of the port detaching from it, only to hurl itself with serious velocity at the granite ship! Tarwert watched via one of the scrying windows, only to feel great disappointment as the ball of ice hit the granite mountain and exploded into small fragments, without doing any damage!

  “That won’t work.” The skull of Tarwert vibrated to deliver a voice that was raspy with age and undeath, “You see, all you can do is literally throw snowballs at me, but my ship is made of one of the hardest stones around.”

  Tarwert gulped with terror and replied in the most polite voice he could manage, “Ah, yes, you’re right. May I ask what your business is with Junkshop?”

  “Don’t worry.” The Dead Queen answered, “I’m not going to kill anyone if you don’t resist and even if you do, I still need witnesses. I’m mostly here for fuel and to send a message to my lieutenants. I’d be much obliged if you would deliver it.”

  “What’s the message?”

  “Don’t screw with me, because I’m in a bad mood!” The Queen suddenly growled!

  Tarwert flinched, then quietly replied, “I’ll make sure I tell the other pirates. Anything else I can do for you?”

  “If you bring me your spell-core, I won’t kill anyone.”

  Tarwert hung his head with shame, because he knew he was going to obey, but that was the very last thing a port commander was ever supposed to do.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Tarwert started to cry, his tears freezing before they even hit the floor, “Just give my crew a little time to get into their pressure suits.”

  “You have twenty minutes. After that, my zombies board Junkshop and take it by force.”

  “Understood.” He spoke with a sigh of resignation.

  Tarwert wasn’t much of a wizard, but he immediately whispered in the witch’s tongue, using the words for ‘bone’, ‘carry’ and ‘sound’.

  When he spoke, his words vibrated the skulls of every witch and wizard in the port, “Attention, all hands: the Dead Queen has come to visit us, but she’s not going to kill us, so long as we give up the port’s spell-core. Everyone, please put on your pressure suits and prepare for the loss of atmosphere…”