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“My Lord of Gravamir!” said an unfamiliar masculine voice from outside the ship. I turned to see that though the ramp had begun to fold itself upward to seal the craft’s fuselage, I could still see the dusty attic room outside it. Three men stood there, two of them with pistols pointed at us.
I expected my master to respond first. He did, in one way at least: when I looked over at him, my eyes round and my heart pounding, I saw that he had begun to move his fingers rapidly over the ship’s controls. The walls and floor of the ship started to hum and to vibrate slightly, as if it had begun to ready itself for a catlike spring upward.
Mistress Franla, however, spoke before the baron did. “I was due at His Grace’s an hour ago,” she said, clearly to his lordship, since though I knew one called a dukeHis Grace, I had no further idea what she could mean.
My master clearly did, though.
“They moved faster than I thought,” he grunted, still manipulating what looked to me only like randomly blinking lights. A larger red one appeared, in the center of the panel, between our two seats.
“My Lord!” the voice said again from outside the shift. “I command you…”
His lordship spoke over the order from whatever official had—it seemed clear to me—come to arrest him.
“Well,” he said, turning to me. “Press the button, my dear, if you’d like to see the stars.”
CHAPTER 27
Chalondra
My lips parted and I almost asked a stupid, time-wasting question likeIf I press the button, what will happen?In my master’s face, though, I saw the answer, and more: if I pressed the button, another sort of new life would begin, a very different one from the one I had expected when the company had woken me and led me out for auction.
“My Lord!” came the voice behind us, alongside the sound of running boots on creaking wood, until the final sealing of the hatch closed out all sound but the vibrant hum of what must be the ship’s engines.
My heart pounding, I reached out and pressed the red light.
Instantly, I felt the upward rush of the vehicle. The view out the front window became an uninterpretable blur, and even through the walls of the ship I could hear the crash that, along with the sudden appearance of the twilit sky a moment later, told me we had burst through the roof of House Gravamir.
“The roof was built to be easily ripped apart in that section,” my master confided, as we quickly soared so high above Vion City that I could see only the deepening blue of the sky out the window. “Still, the structural integrity of the palace will have been well and truly compromised. Itprobablywon’t collapse on the imperial police, but I wouldn’t guarantee it.”
My sense of my body’s relationship to its surroundings told me we couldn’t be ascending terribly fast, but to my astonishment, the blue of the sky and the wispy white of the clouds had already begun to give way to a field of pitch black, dotted with tiny, brilliant points of light. I felt a chill of recognition, of a rising, irrepressible joy, come over my whole body.
The stars. At last. I saw them, and my master was taking me there, much, much faster than I had ever dreamt he might. My eyes opened very wide, and I let out a little cry of wonder, then blushed furiously at how naive—and submissive—that cry must have sounded to my master and my mistress.
“Quicker than you thought, my dear?” the baron asked, smiling. “The engine’s gravitational dampeners mean that you’re only feeling a tiny fraction of the force of gravity as we accelerate to escape velocity.”
My lips parted, as if to ask a question, but then I started to remember details from all the stories I had read as a young girl. In the very old days, only the hardiest humans could withstand a rapid acceleration like this one, which they would make with the help of a chemical rocket. The discovery of the gravitium drive had changed that forever.
For the first time in several minutes, Mistress Franla spoke from the rear seat.
“Such irony, isn’t it,” she said, her tone musing and introspective, “that the blessing of gravitium, which let our empire rise, should prove its downfall as well?”
I turned to her, feeling a frown of confusion knit my brow. I tried to remember if any of the stories had told of this aspect of the technology that had given the stars to the human species.
“Does Chalondra know any of the true history of the war?” my master asked, obviously directing his question to Mistress Franla. I felt new heat rush into my cheeks at his lordship’s asking not me but his mistress of concubines for the information, as if as a bed girl, I couldn’t be trusted to answer accurately even about my own knowledge.
“No, My Lord,” my mistress replied. “The Company teaches the same curriculum as the free schools throughout the empire.”
I had turned to look out the window, my face still burning. I had felt so free, and so happy, just a moment ago, when I had seen the stars. His lordship and Mistress Franla had put me back into my place: a concubine who belonged in her master’s bed and nowhere else, save when she knelt before him and took his hardness in her mouth.
The memories of the day, which I had idly supposed put away forever with the pressing of the red button and our ascent to the stars, all crowded back into my mind and my body. I squirmed in my seat, and I felt the lingering soreness from my master’s hand, as well as the helpless warm need that I had so shamefully tried to assuage on the knob of his bedpost. I worked my mouth, because it had suddenly filled with saliva as the memory of my first kneeling service returned. I tasted a little of the acrid flavor of the seed his lordship had made me swallow, obedient to his brutal desires. A welter of emotions swelled in my chest, and asob rose out of it, for despite the depth of my degradation to this point, I found that I still ached, down there, for the fulfillment of my master’s most frightening promise. Fucking. Defloration.
An urgent, repeated beeping from the controls took me out of the unwelcome reverie. I looked down at the panel and saw that a yellow light had begun to flash that I didn’t think I had seen before.
“Zeta Five Orbital to unidentified craft,” a voice said, perfectly clear but with a slight echo that told me it had come over the ship’s communicator, “come in.” The tone, to my surprise, sounded cordial.
“Powers bless Hes,” my master murmured, apparently to himself. “They’ve had time to mobilize the imperial police, but not the orbital watch, it seems like.” Then he spoke to me and Mistress Franla. “Don’t say anything. I’m going to open the channel.”
He touched something on the panel in front of him.
