Bonds of Brass (The Bloodright Trilogy #1) - Emily Skrutskie Page 0,29

Archon imperials had mismanaged their sparse resources and were allowing their citizens to starve. Propaganda packaged the war as a humanitarian effort to save these territories from their leadership. But anyone with half a brain knows in the end, it was all about that metal.

I have no doubt that every single one of the ships in this blockade is less than seven years old.

I don’t like what we’re about to do. I don’t like that I’m about to do it in a Beamer. I don’t like any of this. But when it comes down to it, this is our best option—as long as they don’t catch on in time.

Another hail pops up as we approach. Gal answers again. “Fulcrum, this is the Umber heir.”

“Apologies, Your Majesty.” It’s not the system governor this time—instead, a nervous-looking communications officer appears onscreen. “Our telemetry shows you drifting nearly a mile off-course. Adjust accordingly.”

Gal flashes that irresistibly charming apologetic smile he keeps tucked away in his arsenal. “Sorry, it’s the Beamer being an asshole. Never can get these things to handle properly, am I right?”

We’re seconds away from getting busted, and he knows it. He slides his hand onto the empty spot on his side of the dash. Taps once, twice, three times, each more insistent than the last. Do it, he’s saying. Do it now, before we lose this window. Do it, or I’ll jump across the cockpit and do it for you.

I’ve committed crimes in dozens of degrees tonight. Unleashed a mob of naked, drunken cadets on the officer quarters. Broken a window. Kidnapped a prince. Stolen a military ship. Compared to all of that, speeding should rank as a minor sin.

I check our vector, whisper a prayer, and jam down the superluminal booster.

My body tenses, anticipating a sudden snap of acceleration that doesn’t come. It’s an instinct I can’t fight—something in my brain knows how fast we’re about to go and braces for it. But going superluminal defies the natural order of physics. There’s no lurch forward, no vicious, uncompromising acceleration. There’s only a sudden stillness as the thrusters go quiet, the drives fire up with a whine, and the black goes gray outside our cockpit windows.

“How long until they lock on?” Gal asks, staring intently at the instrumentation.

“We’ve got a thirty-second head start. Enough time to get on course.” Now that they’ve been given due cause, the dreadnoughts are immune to intrasystem speed limits—they’ll be on our tail as soon as the system governor gets his wits about him. Already I’m tugging at the controls to get us on our escape vector. The Beamer can move like a devil on a linear path, wondrously enough, but it’s another kind of nightmare to get it oriented.

“Ettian.”

“What?”

“We should be headed for the interior. Why are we—”

“We’d never make it all the way to the Imperial Seat with ten dreadnoughts on our tail. We can’t outrun them—we have to scrape them off somehow. So we go where they can’t follow.”

Gal pales. I almost apologize. He had no idea he was signing up for this when he got on this ship. Neither did I. But there’s only one course we can set that has a chance of peeling these cityships off our ass. We have to cross a border they’d never dare follow us over. We have to leave the Umber Empire entirely.

So I’ve set us on a course for Corinth.

CHAPTER 7

OUR THIRTY-SECOND HEAD start translates into an entire day of superluminal with the dreadnoughts safely at our rear. It’s enough to take us from the heart of the former Archon Empire to its borderworlds, and by the time we reach the fringes of the neutral zone that separates our empire from Corinth, the dreadnoughts have fallen off our tail. They know our gambit, and they’re forced to let us pull it.

To catch us, they’ll have to decelerate—and the instant they do, they’ll be detectable by Corinthian instrumentation. To do so in Corinthian space would be interpreted as an act of war on behalf of the Umber Empire. For a rogue system governor trying to steal the Umber Crown’s