Read Chapter 3 of Queen of the Iron Sands, a new free online serial novel by Scott Lynch

Fantasy author Scott Lynch has posted Chapter 3 of his unpublished novel Queen of the Iron Sands. A “free serial adventure in weekly web installments” inspired by author Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic novel A Princess of Mars (1912, 1917) and the United States Women's Airforce Service Pilots of World War II (WASP), here’s the promotional piece for Queen of the Iron Sands:

At the height of the Second World War, Violet DeVere was a WASP - a Women's Airforce Service Pilot, trusted with ferrying the most advanced warplanes in the United States arsenal. Five years after the war, she's barely making ends meet as a crop duster and part-time science fiction writer.

Kidnapped across a hundred million miles of space, Violet suddenly finds herself a prisoner in an impossible empire, an inhabited Mars shielded from earthling eyes by a scientific illusion called the Veil. Mars and its people are ground beneath the heel of the ruthless All-Sovereign, whose legions rule the skies. All resistance to his absolute despotism has been driven to the deadly red sands beyond civilization.

Outgunned and outnumbered, Violet DeVere and her few brave Martian allies make a desperate stand against the All-Sovereign … against an ageless tyrant with the power to destroy every living thing in the solar system.