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  The ship had a pilot, and ordinarily she let him fly the ship, but right now, going in blind, perhaps into enemy territory . . . Well, she didn't trust him to do his job as well as she could, either.

  This wasn't the Garbage Scow, but it was her ship, and as long as she was sober, she might as well fly it.

  Of course, what would have put her most at ease was to have Van Gar at the controls. No one could fly under pressure like he could. She also missed having him around to bounce things off of. Jurak was the closest thing she had to a friend on this ship, and he was mostly an ankle-biting little lackey whose job it was to kiss her ass. He was too afraid of her to give her honest feedback most of the time, and he wasn't a true salvager. He, like the rest of the crew, had never been in the trenches with the garbage.

  They didn't truly understand the ways of a salvager. They didn't think like one or act like one. Salvaging wasn't just a job, it was a way of life, an attitude, a certain way of seeing the universe and your place in it.

  These people had yet to become one with the trash.

  They didn't understand the true circle of life. You are born, you live, you make trash which must then be recycled, you die and you are recycled.

  All things are eventually recycled. It was a truth that guided every true salvager.

  And she, Drewcila Qwah, Queen of all Salvagers, had allowed herself to get too far away from her roots. Not the roots of her forgotten life as Queen of Barious, she couldn't give a shit less about that. No, what in that moment shamed her to the depth of her soul was that she had allowed herself to move too far away from her real roots. She was Drewcila Qwah, and before she was Queen, before she was owner of a major corporation, she was a Salvager. She should be captaining a real salvaging barge, not flying around in some imperial mock-up, giving orders over the computer to a bunch of greenies who wouldn't know a good score of trash if it jumped up and bit them on the ass. She should have a crew of salvaging scum from all corners of the galaxy under her command, and be traveling the galaxy in search of really interesting salvage.

  As much as she hated to admit it, even to herself, Van Gar was right. She had changed. Not because she was drinking, partying, or screwing around anymore than she had. She had always done that. But because she had forgotten to momentarily sober up and get in the trenches with the filth to find the good stuff. She had allowed herself to become soft and complacent.

  She admitted something else, something that caused her a wrenching pain in her stomach. Money really wasn't everything! Being filthy rich wasn't worth anything if it kept you from doing the things you truly loved, if it cost you one of your only true friends.

  Just then she saw an all too familiar blip on the bottom of one of her screens that immediately died out.

  "Ah, fuck!"

  "What is it, my Queen?" one of the techs who should have noticed the blip asked.

  "We've picked up a tail. One of you morons try to get me a visual."

  In front of her the picture of a star class Lockhede battle cruiser filled the screen.

  "Try to hail the ship," Drew ordered.

  "I'm sorry, my Queen . . ."

  "They're powering up their canons!" Drewcila announced.

  "How do you know that, my Queen?" Jurak asked.

  "Because I'm not a moron. Our instruments show a change in the power fluctuation coming from their ship. Shields up! Full power!" she ordered as she began an evasive move to starboard.

  "Shields at full power, my Quee . . ."

  "Knock the my queen crap off. Call me Captain. I'm the Captain of this ship, damn it!" The first blast hit them, rocking the ship."Damage report."

  "No damage to the hull."

  "Drop shields, fire rear heat seeking missiles now!"

  "My Q . . . Captain, I'm afraid we have no rear heat seeking missiles," Jurak reported, his voice taking on a panicked edge. It was hard to figure out whether his panic was due to their basically defenseless condition and the fact that they were under fire, or the fact that he had just told Drew something she didn't want to hear.

  "Well, what do we have in our butt?" Drew demanded."And whatever it is, fucking fire it now!"

  "We have a laser."

  "I said fucking fire it!" A second blast hit them as they fired the laser canon in their tail.

  "Damage report."

  "Hull breach in sector seven."

  "Seal off sector seven. God damn it! If Van Gar ever comes back I'm going to strangle him for leaving me with you idiots!" Drew could feel the ship pulling as she made yet another evasive maneuver."Fire the laser cannon again! God! Do I have to tell you morons everything? Use your fucking heads!"

  "The laser was damaged in the last hit and will not fire," the weapons chief reported.

  "Beautiful! Fucking beautiful!" Drew made yet another evasive move, and found that the ship was handling worse by the minute."What do we have in our nose?"

  "Missiles, photon blasters, laser canons . . ."

  "Good. Everyone hang on and prepare to fire everything on my command." She brought the ship about by turning nose over tail, bringing them into a collision course with the much larger ship."Fire!"

  The security officer fired their entire arsenal, which hit the enemy ship with a very gratifying display of destruction. The enemy ship lost power, and its orbit began almost immediately to degrade, aided no doubt by the blast it had just received. Drew attempted to correct course just enough—she hoped—to skim the space just above the doomed cruiser. For an eternal moment of time, it seemed to the crewmen on the command deck that Drew was somehow forcing the ship to do the impossible through sheer force of will. Unfortunately, neither the application of force nor the exertion of her will could make the ship respond any faster than it was capable of responding.

  The two ships were still too close as they closed, and there was an awful grating noise as their hulls met. Drew lost helm control, and her ship started spinning off course. The entire crew seemed to scream as one as Drew wrestled to regain control of the ship. It wasn't easy, and to make matters worse, Drew saw that dozens of bottles of beer and pounds of ice were bouncing around the flight deck, careening off instrument panels and crew.

  "Who forgot to secure the ice chest? Shit! What a ship of fools." Helm control was returning slowly, and Drew was able to regain stability. However she wasn't directing the ship towards the surface of the planet, and yet that was where it was going.

  "What is it with this fucking planet? Can't I just land? Do I always have to crash? Is a nice, reasonable landing at a spaceport too much to fucking ask for?"

  She'd only actually crashed on the planet once before, but that would have made for shitty ranting, so she chose to indulge in exaggeration.

  "We're all going to die!" Jurak screamed in panic. The rest of the crew quickly followed his example and started screaming and crying.

  "Shee . . . it! What a bunch of fucking losers! Butch it up!" Drew ordered. Then she added in a mostly inaudible mumble, looking at the readouts on the monitor in front of her."We're all going to die." She was barely able to slow their descent, and steering them towards a spaceport would most likely be catastrophic. She needed someplace big and soft.

  "We could . . . land in the Galdart Desert," Jurak suggested, struggling for control, and seeming to read her mind. No doubt he was remembering that was how she had survived her first crash onto the planet's surface.

  "No!!!" Drew turned to glare at him."I'd sooner impale myself on a mountain top."

  The further they got into the planet's atmosphere, the better the ship seemed to be handling. Unlike the doomed Lockhede battle cruiser, Drew's salvaging barge was actually built to land on planets."All right, we're closer now. Most of us would die, but a few of us would live." She mumbled as she checked her readouts and maps."Flying in blind with a damaged ship. Landing at a spaceport out of the question—could hit ships landing or taking off, or hit the station itself, as little control as I have over this tub." She was thinking out loud."Defin
itely don't want to land in Lockhede territory, and not going to land in the Galdart desert for damn sure. So, I look for a nice, long, stretch of water."

  "Lake Witcha—it's close to the Capital. If they're able to monitor our descent at all, the king could then come and save us," Jurak suggested.

  Drew postponed laughing at the prospect of having to be saved by Zarco, and made the necessary course corrections. The ship seemed to respond fairly well to everything but radical altitude adjustments. She started firing retro rockets—only three of the sixteen seemed to be functional, but still the ship seemed to slow some—and they were closer now.

  Drew checked all the monitors and calculated the data in her head. She mumbled to herself."All right. We're closer to the planet's surface, and we still have some retro rockets. If I lost complete control now, but we happened to land in the lake, half of us would die, but the other half would live." The ship shook then as they hit some turbulence, and it took all her skill to keep control of the ship and keep it on course."All right, people, listen up! Code red! Implement Operation Silly Hat."

  There was a communal gasp of horror as the entire crew suddenly realized the gravity of the situation. Then they unbuckled and ran around the ship finding their silly hats and donning them. Drewcila felt Jurak push a hat onto her head, and then watched as the crew dressed in their ridiculous hats and solemnly retook their positions, buckling in.

  They were still closer to their destination now, and besides, they were all wearing silly hats. It was mathematically improbable that they would all die in a fiery crash while wearing stupid hats.

  Drewcila switched all their power to the remaining retros and cringed as the ship shuddered, as it slowed still more. She wondered if the three remaining retros could survive firing at this intensity long enough for them to land. Short bursts wouldn't do much good at this point.

  "Still, we're landing on water, and we're only a few hundred feet from the planet's surface, so some of us might die, but most of us would live."

  Suddenly the ground and the lake were visible through the view screen. They were still going way too fast, and it didn't look nearly as close as she wished it did.

  As she continued to fire the retros at full power, one of them burned out. With the reduced braking action, their speed wasn't falling off nearly fast enough.

  The last two remaining retros sputtered, and then died.

  Still, we're close, so close now, and we are landing on water, and . . .

  "We are so screwed!"

  Zarco watched in awe as the screen in front of him showed the pride of the Lockhede fleet crashing into the sands of the Galdart desert. The Artvail would soon be nothing more than rubbish in the sand, and what crew hadn't been atomized on reentry would soon be nothing more than Hurtella food

  "Did we do that?" Zarco asked excitedly.

  "Ah . . . Well, yes, of course we did," his new head advisor, Atario said."That was our plan all along. Knock out interstellar communications and then sneak up there and destroy their battle cruiser."

  "Not to mention that it kept Drewcila off our backs for awhile."

  "Ah, yes . . . the Queen." Atario laughed nervously."Sire . . . what are you going to do about the queen if she gets here?"

  "Oh . . . she'll get here," Zarco assured him, "and when she does . . . she shall finally be a proper queen."

  "What of her big friend?" Atario asked.

  "My plan and my conviction have never faltered, Atario. When Taralin arrives, she will be brought to me. We shall reprogram her, and she will take her rightful place at my side. Together we shall utterly smite the Lockhedes and return the country to its former glory. The Chitzsky," Zarco's face twisted into an ugly mask of disgust, "is to be killed on sight, as are any who stand between us and obtaining our goal."

  "And Sire . . . if Drewcila will not relent, if she will not be 'reprogrammed?' If she is in fact one of those standing in our way?"

  "She will join us, she must. That is the plan," Zarco insisted.

  A man ran into the king's office, out of breath. He bowed deeply then straightened."Sire, reports have come in that a large space ship has crashed into Lake Witcha."

  "One of theirs or one of ours?" Atario asked impatiently.

  "One of ours," the man answered excitedly.

  "No doubt one of our ships damaged in the attack on the battle cruiser," Atario said quickly.

  "Sire," the man continued, ignoring Atario, "a man on the ground who saw the ship fall . . . They are saying the ship is of imperial class. They believe it is the Queen's own ship."

  "Dispatch troops immediately to rescue any survivors," Zarco ordered.

  "Done, sire." The man ran out as fast as he had run in.

  Zarco swung on Atario."Atario, you promised me that disrupting communications would not cause her to crash . . ."

  "Sire, she is an expert pilot with an experienced crew. Landing blind should have been no trouble for her at all. Perhaps her ship was caught up in the fire fight when our forces locked horns with the Lockhede battle cruiser . . ."

  "If you have endangered my wife to take out the Lockhedes' battle ship, I will see you drawn and quartered. How dare you engage the Lockhedes in a space fight when your queen was so close! It was irresponsible, and I'd better not find out deliberate. Don't think I don't know how the nobles feel about the queen, or how they would like to deal with her. We have made a pact, but I swear to you as your king, that if any harm comes to Taralin, either accidental or intentional, I shall see all involved die a slow and painful death, marked as traitors to the crown. Lest you forget it, she is the people's Queen, and amazingly popular among the military and the common man."

  "I assure you, sire. No plot against the Queen is being hatched. We had no idea where she might be. We can't even be sure that it is the Queen's ship, sire," Atario said quickly, wishing now that he hadn't told the lie about them shooting down the Lockhede battle cruiser, and wondering whether it was better to stick to that lie and hope that Drewcila was alive, or tell the truth and suffer the consequences.

  "For your sake, you had better pray that it's not."

  "My Queen!" Jurak yelled out as he slung a piece of debris from her body."Are you all right?"

  "Do I look all right, moron? I'm four shades of fucked up, but I'll live," Drewcila grumbled as she helped him shove another piece of ship out of her lap. She slapped his hands away and undid her own seat belt. "I hurt in places I didn't know I had."

  She checked her console and found all her screens blank. She looked around at her crew, counting heads, and found that they were all shaken but not stirred. She laughed, clapped her hands together, and screamed at the top of her lungs, "Wow! What a dick on a baby!"

  "I believe that is the queen's way of showing her joy that we have all lived through our ordeal," Jurak interpreted for the crew.

  "I am a fucking genius!" She laughed, took the silly hat—which turned out to be chartreuse with a red propeller on top—off her head, kissed it, and then stuffed it down deep into the pocket of her coveralls."Yet another Qwah theory tested and proven."

  She stood up and almost fell over. The ship was swaying to and fro, which could mean only one thing. They were floating on the surface of the lake."All right, people, as much as I'm sure you'd all like to stand around and sing my praises, I have no idea how long this sucker can float or how deep this lake is, so I suggest we get our happy little asses out of this crate before we have to find out."

  It wasn't as easy as it sounded. It took them a good thirty minutes to locate the escape hatch and figure out how to open it, and then they couldn't find the inflatable life raft. None of the crew had thought it was particularly important to go through the safety manual and run through emergency drills since Drewcila didn't seem worried about it. Apparently they had come to the conclusion that since she didn't seem at all worried about going through the manual and running them through the drills, that there must be little or no chance that this ship would meet with an accident
. After all, Drewcila Qwah was their queen, and more important than that in this particular instance, she was a much more experienced space traveler than any of them were. They'd all assumed that if it had been important, she would have done it.

  Drewcila, for her part, assumed the idiots knew how to run the ship they'd been crewed on, and it never dawned on her that she might ought to take the time to run through the safety manual or go through the drills. Van Gar had suggested it once, and she'd wound up screaming at him that he was an old lady, and that they had better things to do with their time. Then she'd easily talked him into an incredibly twisted act which included sugar and zero G.