Cemetery World

Tomboy daughter from a family of 7 sons, Yvette Mischeau graduates first in her class from the Space Maritime Academy earning her pick of available assignments. When an anticipated commission in the Federal Space Navy is denied, she applies for a maritime billet read that reads like a travel brochure. It promises a first mate’s billet on a ship with the capacity to carry “1500 souls”. Trusting Mischeau arrives at Port Golgotha on Planet New Elysium in the Revelations System to find her posting is not to a cruise ship as she’d supposed but to the space tug Azrael. The 1500 “souls” mentioned in the posting aren’t vacationers but corpses! Mischeau has unwittingly joined Project Lazarus and New Elysium’s funerary fleet, in the midst of disinterring the dead from the cemeteries of New Elysium and reinterring them on New Elysium’s barren second moon, Necropolis. New Elysium is a water world with a 2% surface land mass and is running out of living space. The governing religious theocracy, the Jarl, observe strict covenants governing the preservation of life and veneration of the dead. To complicate matters there is a jurisdictional dispute over New Elysium’s second moon.
More surprises follow: Azrael’s master, ageing Captain Flynt, assigns the rooky ensign to a Gaelic speaking ship’s computer MacTavish, named for the Azrael’s first master and Flynt’s grandfather. As the Azrael prepares for her next Golgotha-Necropolis run, two tardy clerics arrive: Priest (Exemplar) Eleazar Steele and his assistant, Acolyte, Ira Cross. Their mission is to sanctify the reburial of the dead but their secret mission is to refute accounts of risen dead roaming the airless moon. On arrival the clerics discover the sacred tombs have been plundered. The Azrael’s crew and passenger are taken captive by grave robbers. It gradually becomes apparent they are not the only inhabitants of this catacombed underworld. Tomb robbers and Azrael’s crew alike are soon fighting for survival against an implacable enemy they cannot hope to understand.

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