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)
“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. It probably won’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 a sob 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.