Ice Drag Queen Wedding: A Queenships Novella

By Tami Veldura

They're stranded on an icy moon with only one tent between them.
They can't stand each other.
And they're getting married in two days.

Team Hendrix: close-knit like family, the rising stars, work hard, play harder.

Hendrix is a fighter pilot for the spaceship Artio with a hand-picked team of underdogs, and this year they're making a run for the championship. But he knows politics and fashion will do more for him than flying, which is why Hendrix has been negotiating an arranged marriage with the one rival he wants to crush in the games.

Team Kane: driven, undefeated, champion favorites.

Kane loves nothing more than outflying the competition, especially that upstart Hendrix who has been chasing Kane's rise to the top. The only people standing in Kane's way are his political family, pulling strings and making deals behind his back. They're forcing him to marry the one man he can't stand, but Kane won't let a little thing like a wedding stop him from winning.

Hendrix and Kane's rivalry has always been heated, but stranded on the moon together, it just might ignite. There's only one bed and baby, it's getting cold outside!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tami Veldura
• Release date: Feb 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781941319383

Tami Veldura

Tami Veldura is an enby/aro/ace author of queer fiction. They have published short stories in anthologies Fresh Starts, Hauntings, Love Among The Thorns, Love Is Like A Box Of Chocolates, the magazine Galaxy’s Edge, and they are a contributing member of the scifi magazine Boundary Shock Quarterly. They publish new work every month, crossing every genre, but always featuring queer characters and found families.As S.T. Lynn, they write uplifting, sweet, and tropey fantasy fiction, featuring women front and center. Including fairy tales, elves, magic, and happy endings for young adults and young-at-heart.

Book preview

Ice Drag Queen Wedding

By Tami Veldura

Chapter One

Hendrix Kelly gripped the flight stick of his Kingship Shale and pressed forward. He toggled a pedal under his left foot, sending the ship spinning. Kingship Shale danced through space under his direction, dodging drones, and weaving past simulated projectiles. Hendrix grinned as he pulled the ship to the right and blasted past one of Aplite’s forty drones, too fast for the smaller machine to fire on him.

The massive HUD screen in front of him rotated the battlefield into view as Kingship Shale and its drones fought a contest match against Kingship Aplite far above the unnamed icy moon known as Neta 2, the second moon discovered orbiting the quiet gas giant planet Neta in this far reach of known space. Down below, far too small to see with the naked eye, thousands of Speir-family citizens were building a festival ground for Midwinter: an ice maze, sculpture gardens, an entire parade route with ice bleachers. In two days, Hendrix and his squad would be in that parade, celebrating their victory.

On the edges of his view, several floating arrows of various orange shades indicated Aplite’s drones—any one of which could spin and fire on Hendrix and knock his squad out of the games. But his own team of drones, stated in faint grays, kept them busy, leaving Kingship Aplite the only real threat. Well, the Kingship and any tactics its squad came up with to score that first hit.

The HUD screen continued to rotate, spinning Neta 2 out of view and bringing Queenship Artio into the background of the skirmish. Artio loomed tens of thousands of meters distant, beyond Neta 2’s minor gravitational pull, and yet her sheer size dwarfed anything else in the sky. Her crystal-metal exterior glinted in silver and white, Speir family colors, and her long, narrow shape gave every family on board a space-view window. Over a million souls called Artio home, and most of them had never left her, not even for Midwinter.

Kingship Shale was a speck in the sky beside her, a single-compartment ship designed to be a mobile command unit out in the field. Shale was ovoid in shape, with a few crystal-metal struts to support its power ring and various actuated thrusters. Internally, it could hold eight bodies with no standing room available. Each seat, semi-isolated up to the chest in case of emergency ejection, and the only thing between Hendrix's eyes and that of his crew were the light-HUDs on display.

An orange arrow swelled and became red at the edge of Hendrix’s HUD. He yanked back on the flight stick, toggling pedals with his feet to dodge a strafing run from one drone. Simulated lasers dotted across his screen, just missing Shale’s bow.

In front of him, seated in the crew U beyond the glare of his HUD, Hendrix’s second, Isobel Rose, glanced in his direction. He jerked his eyes back to the screen, chastised. He needed to keep his head in the game. Kingship Aplite was no pushover.

Shale had room for a crew of seven plus pilot, but Hendrix had narrowed his team down to five plus himself. Convincing Queenship Artio to modify her king for him had taken paperwork, letters of recommendation, and a full year of waiting for the crystal-metal interior to be re-grown. Aside from his second, he’d selected a munitions expert, an engineer, a navigator, and a statistician. Each crew member filled a specific and critical role in his team, and Hendrix had done his best to tie everyone together. They ran simulated drills aboard the Queenship until specific directions had become shorthand and shorthand had become glances and grunts. Hendrix was proud of his team and what they could accomplish together.

They even wore the new flight suits Hendrix had commissioned. Speir wasn’t as nationalist as some of the other big families, and they didn’t require branded uniforms in the cockpit. There were some fit and function requirements, but nothing formally designed. Hendrix wanted his team to feel more unified, though, and they all wore skin-tight white and silver, a stretchy, breathable fabric that slipped easily under emergency suits and sculpted to fit each of his squad mates. There were no zippers that might catch or cause burns in an emergency. No seams at all that might chafe. They each sported kingship Shale’s logo on the breast with individual roles listed below. Each of them singular, bonded together through Hendrix. Now they just had to prove they were the best. Today with Aplite, then tomorrow with Kingship Basalt.

Hendrix frowned. Basalt’s pilot was a complication he hadn’t figured out yet. One equal parts infuriating and attractive. A possible bump in the road to winning the games.

And he didn’t have time to dwell on it now. An indicator blinked wildly on screen and Hendrix pushed Shale into a dive, twisting his kingship out of range once more. His distraction had put the team on the defensive, and Aplite saw the opening. A spinning line of drones pursued Shale and Hendrix dodged through skirmishing pairs to shake the tail. His HUD spun and whirled. The first time he’d sat down to pilot in a simulation, that spinning screen had sent him immediately to a trash can. Now he knew how to let the zooming background fade from his attention and allow the highlighted information to sink into his subconscious.

The kingship itself supplied vast amounts of data to the HUD, but Hendrix saw a modified collection thanks to Tristan, his statistician. A kingship pilot couldn’t handle