Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 68525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
“Acknowledged,” the yacht replied. “Jump pattern rho seven, when the launch is in field.”
The ship had continued to turn as his lordship had conversed with his yacht. I lost sight of the orbital and the ships pursuing us.
“They can’t catch us,” my master said, “and that’s something.” He had lowered his voice to a murmur, and I could tell that he meant to do his best to distract me and Mistress Franla from the peril of the situation. “Our engine and theirs come from the same place, and that place happens to be a factory that belongs to me. And I happen to have made certain that our engine goes about five percent faster.”
My mistress spoke for the first time in what felt like several minutes. “And their weapons?” she asked, dryly.
“Weapons?” I asked. The stories, of course, had lots of fighting in them, but it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that one part of the Vionian Empire would ever turn their guns or lasers or missiles on another part. Would they really try to shoot down a nobleman’s starship?
By this point, the view in the front window had at its center an array of objects, growing larger by the moment, that I thought must be ships—much bigger ships—parked in orbit. As if in response to the question, that view suddenly shifted to the left. I felt the tiniest lurch in my stomach, and I realized the gravitational dampeners had kicked in to cushion us against the effect of a drastic change in position and momentum.
“Well,” my master said, “yes. They do have those. The ride is likely to get a little bumpy from this point on, but…”
The ship shifted again, much more violently: up and to the right, as far as the view of the ships in front of us was concerned. One ship now occupied the very center of the window, and it began to get bigger very quickly. I thought I could see something streak by us, and then I saw a flash that blotted out the vessel. I couldn’t suppress the little cry of alarm that rose to my lips, for I felt certain that my master’s yacht had just been destroyed.
When the flash disappeared, though, the ship still hovered there against the stars.
“Nope,” his lordship said, his voice almost boyish in triumph. “Not the Joy. Not that way. Fire your mass bombs at someone who cares.”
The Gravamir’s Joy got very big in the window, and then, abruptly, it fell completely away.
Had we landed atop it? I could only see the stars and a few distant ships of a similar size, I guessed, to the yacht, but very far away. Then a bell sounded, and the stars changed completely, as if they were actually just a curtain, and someone had lowered a different curtain, so fast I couldn’t even see it happen.
The bell went off again. The stars changed again.
“A little anticlimactic, I suppose,” said my master, turning to me. “But we’ve just escaped from the empire. Let’s get aboard the Joy and…” His mouth twisted up to the side in a way that suddenly made my heart ache. “Well, find some joy of our own.”
CHAPTER 28
Baron Gravamir
The Joy had concubines’ quarters, of course, since it had belonged to my grandfather—a whole deck of the vessel, in fact. To be sure, the gravitic transformer that had rendered the mass bomb completely harmless represented my own modification, as did the current grav drive. My grandfather, though, had added most of the Joy’s sumptuous decor when he had converted a decommissioned light cruiser for his personal use.
In keeping with his particular style of dominance, he had kept the concubines’ deck in almost its original, spartan state. Only the suite he had refurnished for his Mistress of Concubines featured anything like the luxury to be found throughout the rest of the Joy. After I had shown Chalondra and Franla the stunning bridge and the stately dining room, I brought them there.
We had begun what would be a day-long sub-light-velocity cruise from the gravitic node to which we had jumped, through the gorgeous blue light of the Sheliak binary system. With the help of the Joy, I had decided on a heading that would bring us to a volume of space in the shadow of a small moon of a barren planet of Sheliak’s twin suns.
There, even my enormous yacht would easily evade detection by anyone jumping to the same node. We had already moved far enough away that an observer who jumped there would have to have extraordinary luck to spot us moving briskly away at ninety-nine percent of lightspeed, and our double jump meant that they would already have had to be very fortunate—on the order of one in several billion—to have chanced on our node at all. The Zeta Five Orbital had certainly vectored our first jump, but only an observer at that node, one of an estimated seven million reachable from the Vion system—could have tracked our second.