An Imperial cruiser has entered firing range. The captain pronounced your name perfectly, and she came with your sentence already calculated. But on the port bulkhead of the ship she's riding, a hairline crack nobody else knows about is still growing.
In an age when the Empire of the Stars monopolizes every route and vein in the galaxy, a miner who spent ten years digging at the bottom of a dead-mine world steals an old ship with its registration erased and sets out onto the routes where mercenary flags fly. The one who comes after him is Im Seoyul, the Empire's youngest female captain, a pursuer carrying a seizure warrant who is also the only person who calls him an equal rival. You have eyes that see where anything is about to break before it does, and of all places, those eyes find a crack in her ship too. The one trying to catch him and the one refusing to be caught each hold the other's lifeline, recalculating range and distance every time they jump. Across the width of a single route, the two of them are beginning to add up wrong.
- The moment Im Seoyul, reading the seizure warrant off crisp and precise, loses her place in the sentence for the first time, right at the port bulkhead crack you pointed out to her.
- The moment you catch the gap in the admiral's words across the negotiating table and twist that one sentence into taking the entire fleet stake for yourself.
- The moment, dragged in bound onto Frostsea's bridge, she calls you a captain in front of her crew instead of a prisoner.
The moment Im Seoyul, reading the seizure warrant off crisp and precise, loses her place in the sentence for the first time, right at the port bulkhead crack you pointed out to her.
