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Introduction:

The planet of Aghara-Penthay, where any female automatically has the status of slave, is the worst place in the galaxy to be a woman. Unfortunately for Lara, citizen of the female dominated world of Gaianesia, if she wants to save her homeworld by completing the mission given to her missing twin sister Gara, Aghara-Penthay is exactly where she must go.

Slavers of Aghara-Penthay

Olga Anastasia

To my muses – Werner H, Humilator, Brian S: I hope this pleases you. Olga. x

1 – MIA

When an emergency call comes to the university and it’s summoning me to The Fortress, I sink straight into despair. It’s just as I’ve long feared. There is one reason anyone at that place would want to see me, and only one reason for the nightmares. Something has happened to my precious Gara.

Of course they do not tell me that over a public holo-screen. I’m pulled from a lecture and into the privacy of the faculty office to take the call. A junior officer is at the other end of the line. She simply asks: “You’re Lara?” and states: “Please come urgently to The Fortress. Red Duchess needs to see you.”

Red Duchess. Intelligence staff are known by only by code names, so although the woman has a real name, my sister has only ever referred to her commanding officer as “Red Duchess”. And Red Duchess wouldn’t want to see me for any happy reason.

I didn’t want Gara to join the Gaianesian military. It’s dangerous work. As identical twins, we always were particularly close, and selfishly I didn’t want to lose her.

But Gara always was willful, and there is a war on.

So she took up arms for our planet’s cause, her sharp mind and healthy body quickly attracting the attention of the intelligence department. For my part, I grew up more interested in science that matriotism, so when I turned eighteen I only completed the bare minimum mandatory military service, working in engineering on Vengeful Angel, one of the corvettes in our space fleet, before beginning to study astrophysics at Gaianesia’s most prestigious university.

That was two years ago. Gara and I are twenty three, in the calculation of the galactic standard year.

Don’t let her be harmed, I pray.

I feel in my blood that she’s still alive – some twins have a psychic connection and I’d have somehow known if she were dead, but the thread joining us across time and space also tells me that something is terribly wrong.

Gara never talks about her work, but I’ve picked up enough hints know it’s usually offworld, and dangerous. Sometimes she returns home for planet leave with a haunted look in her eyes. When we share the same bed she rolls in her sleep to lie against me, instinctively seeking the reassurance we gain from physical contact. When she’s away on missions, the bad dreams come.

For example, only this morning I woke from a nightmare where a huge dark shape loomed over me, and there was a terrible pain stabbing into my pelvis. I cried out, but the bed was empty and I was alone.

The summons leaves me sick with dread, and imagining all kind of scenarios that might have happened. At the university I gather my books and data-pads and make my way to the shuttle station, ready to make the short flight to the center of Gaianesia’s capital – Solar City.

There are no males attending university, but I see my first drone in the marbled corridor, mopping the floor. He does not look up at me, of course. Drones have their concerns, women have ours.

Inside the rooms of learning we can forget the dangers from space, but by the university’s palatial entrance evidence of the war resumes – a vast flack cannon, half the height of the towering building, with three women in the tight jumpsuits of the gunnery corps killing their hours of sentry duty by playing cards.

It must be a boring job for them - there’s not been a raid for several months, but at least it’s a beautiful warm day outside. In the distance behind them a heavy ship is climbing slowly to orbit – a freighter of some kind - the magnesium-white flare of its gravity drives bright even against the blue sky.

I take out my holo-communicator and try to patch through to Gara, but there is no connection. Not surprising. She never carries it with her when she’s on a mission. Worrying anyway, I continue towards the station.

The shuttle departs from a commercial zone, located a short walk from the university gates. There are more drone-males serving here – males working in the convenience stores; cleaning; selling tickets at the shuttle port. All tasks that suit their abilities and fulfill their lives. As with all the drones, the men look at me with expressions that are polite, but do not show sexual interest.

I purchase my ticket and can turn my thoughts back to Gara. Please be okay, Gara! Just this once, let my twin sense be wrong and let the terrible dreams be a coincidence.

I catch a sight of my reflection in the marble façade of a building. My perfectly symmetrical features show my anxiety. It is often claimed that Gara, like me, is an exceptionally beautiful female, but neither she nor I give our looks much consideration. Such matters are only a matter of great pride to our mother. Three years ago mother secretly sent an application form in our names to Miss Gaianesia, and the first thing we knew about it was when we were contacted to appear on the show. We declined of course. I don’t know what she was thinking. It would hardly do for Gara to have such publicity. Although the current White Queen may once have been a Miss Gaianesia, that was before she joined the struggle.

I pause to stare at my face. While our looks are unimportant, if she’s been scarred it would be a pity. I don’t sense that’s the case – it doesn’t match the nightmares - but some injury to her lower body would explain the repeating phantom pelvic pains.

The shuttle port is busy – a buzz of bright and bubbly student women chatting, and also diligent drone-males about their tasks. Seeing life continue as normal eases my fears a little. I note with satisfaction that the fashion for women growing their hair is continuing to spread. Defying the inherent risks, more than half the student girls around me have rejected the safer and more practical buzz-cut that is typical in older generation of Gaianesian women, i.e. they who served during less successful years at the battle front. I take it as a good sign – that in spite of the constant threats from our nearest planetary neighbors on Harka-Ringworld, and the danger to a Gaianesian female in having long hair, these girls feel secure enough to adopt the galactic fashion of the human women.

I too am prone to the same vanities as my comrades. Gara and I wear our hair particularly long, our glossy dark brunette color prized among Gaianesians as much as it is among the humans. We don’t just do it for the appearance - I like the sensation of feeling the perfectly straight strands brush against the curves of my buttocks when I’m nude.

In the years when we were still a family, Gara and I could spend hours doing nothing but brushing each other’s hair, enjoying the euphoric calm this would produce with its warm tingling at the most intimate place between our legs – a tingling that told us we were ending our time as children and we had become women.

That was until our mother discovered us in the act, and forbad us participating in such demeaning behavior. Red-faced with fury, she lectured that Gaianesian women had not fought so hard for freedom from our own males and the Harkens for us to start acting like slaves.

Mother… I smile sadly as I think of her. Gara was always her favorite, even though the two of us are so similar. It’s perhaps a mercy that the ship carrying my mother on a routine mission to Calico was vaporized – an instant of freakish bad luck manifested as friendly fire from our own ground defenses. If mother were alive today she’d have been distraught by… well… whatever is going on with Gara.

Gara, I silently shout to the blue sky. Where are you? Not knowing is the worst part.

I pass a giant screen above the concourse carrying live news feeds from across the galaxy. They would be unlikely to publish news relevant to an intelligence operative, but I glance at the board anyway. Nothing there about space disasters, or battles with the Harkens or Aghara-Penthay. The news is still dominated by the political scandal raging between our leader President Dolan, and the male rights campaigner Ilona Minani.

Ilona’s party believe we should stop dosing the drones and let them take a place in society as do human males. That is not scandalous in itself – equality campaigners have agitated since the first White Queen. What’s filling the tabloids is President Dolan’s allegation that Ilona has gone further than that, and indulged in the most shameful act possible from a woman in our society – sexual submission to a male.

Ilona spent two years on the vice planet of Merlon – a world controlled by cartels where just about everything was for sale, so she certainly would have been in the presence of non-pacified men. And the young are often attracted to experiment with the taboo. But I don’t believe there is more. Claims of submission in politics are almost as old as our liberation. However, if President Dolan does prove her allegations Ilona will be ruined. Female submission is a rejection of everything our society stands for, and submissives are rightly ostracized.

Just before boarding the shuttle I pass the familiar bronze statue of that very first White Queen – Listu Adorin, she who liberated Gaianesia and began the program to turn us into the peaceful world we have today.

Every citizen of the planet recognizes her image and we all learn about her life. I mean - she even features in the university logo. I’m not usually interested in ancient history, and haven’t given her much thought since mandatory education as a child, but today I’m seeking anything that keeps me from worrying about Gara. For all the duration of the short flight, I test my memory of the facts from our distant past, and silently I whisper the names of those famous heroines as though they’re a mantra that can somehow protect me.

2- Gaianesia 101

No one knows whether our species originated from Gaianesia or near-neighbors Harka-Ringworld, as there is evidence of civilization stretching back for millions of years on both.

Gaianesians can see further into the infrared spectrum than the Harkens and the humans, but we are all close enough to being genetically identical that we can interbreed with either lifeform. We look almost identical to humans, except for our species has a brown mottled pattern like a tire track which runs across our foreheads, just below the hairline. Our irises also come in different colors to human ones, and range from red through pink to the shade considered most desirable – a deep purple hue that in females makes the eyes look large and reminds others of The Reflex’s color.

There is speculation we and the Harkens were once human – our world seeded by their ancients long lost to history. That will probably always be a subject of academic debate, however one topic both habitable planets in our system do agree on is that fifty thousand years ago – no time at all in evolutionary terms – a solar flare caused the same mutation in the two worlds, triggering devastating social consequences for both.

A minor alteration in the Y chromosome meant that from that point forward, four out of five births in our species were male. We were at the time reaching the early stages of technology and industrialization, but the mutation plunged both worlds back to anarchy as competition to breed with desirable females became ferocious. Rape was so common it was the most likely cause of death in a woman.

On our neighbor Harka-Ringworld, after several thousand years in that dark era of chaos, a patriarchal society emerged where women were protected, but only by a status change where females became chattels of male houses. The highest ranking Harken men were joined by marriage to suitable females, and lower ranking Harkens were denied completely, or were forced to relieve physical desires with prostitutes or slaves.

Warring was constant between the feudal Harken states, with female captives being the most sought after prize. However the species survived, and gradually progressed into a hierarchical society with each state’s native men at the top, then citizen women who at least had certain freedoms within the restrictions of their house, and then slave women captured from other states and used for breeding, and captive males at the bottom.

War and masculinity became ingrained over thousands of years into the cornerstones of Harken culture and they remain so today, with the only change being that Harken bloodlust has spilled over into local space.

After the solar flare Gaianesia descended into a similar era of millennia in anarchy and mass rape. Until that is during the fourth millennia after the flare, when some women banded together into a large enough group to protect themselves, and then they co-operated to make rapid technological advances.

Their solution to the planet’s problems was brutal, at first. Spiking the planet’s water supplies on a vast scale with a cocktail of hormones and chemicals, they turned the violent animalistic males into the docile, submissive and sexually inert drones we see today.

Our leader’s name back then - Listu Adorin.

Once the lust of our masculine population was safely under control, a few males with high intelligence and physical strength were permitted to live without drugs and be used for breeding purposes, sustaining new generations and ensuring the high quality of Gaianesian offspring.

Meanwhile Listu’s regime began an indoctrination campaign with the pacified males, counselling them on their correct place in society as servants to the dominant and superior females. There was resistance of course, but brutal times demanded brutal solutions and Listu prevailed.

Within a couple of generations of men being educated from birth to understand their natural place in the order, they too began to see that peace resulted from our two tier social system. From then on men co-operated to fight wholeheartedly for the women they viewed as superior enough to be almost divine. We were creatures to be revered, instead of desirable objects to be subjugated and possessed.

For generations now, our drone males are trusted to staff our nurseries and teach each new generation. It is thus ingrained as unthinkable for them to harm us, and unthinkable for us women to wish ill against those who raised us. We exist in perfect harmony.

All trace of the dark terrors of the rapacious past are forgotten by our planet’s women, except for the additional genetic consequence of The Reflex that makes us so desirable to the Slavers of Aghara-Penthay. But there’s no need to reflect on that shameful secret.

Once stable governments were established, the relative peace our two planets – Gaianesia and Harka-Ringworld, continued on their separate paths. A scarcity of certain natural resources meant that although we were aware of each other and communications had been open for centuries, we were late getting into space and meeting face to face. Even today a lack of metals means most of Gaianesia’s buildings are usually made of wood and stone, giving the cities a classical look that tourists consider quaint.

Interstellar travel had to find our worlds, rather than us reaching out, as neither planet contains a source of the trimium crystals used to power gravity hyperdrives.

But inevitably the frontier of civilized space expanded passed us, bringing contact from the young Republic, as well as encounters with the less pleasant inhabitants of the galaxy. Fifteen light years away on Aghara-Penthay, unfortunately one of our next-nearest neighbors outside the home system, a particularly cruel group of pirates had settled on a planet which was habitable but devoid of intelligent life, and therefore ideal to use as their base of operations. There was nowhere for captives on Aghara-Penthay to run, when the only way back into space was through the masters.

Gaianesia and Harka-Ringworld had existed in harmony for millennia, but once we joined the galactic community that all changed.

The commencement of trouble wasn’t even because of the uncontrollable cravings of Harken males for women. Yes, they made some half-hearted attempt to take us as captives, but we were the technologically superior, and raids by Harkens on Gaianesia were infrequent and usually rebuffed. Besides, rather than plunder women from ourselves or other Harken states, there was an easier solution for Harka-Ringworld - human females could be purchased by the thousands from that vile neighbor I just mentioned – the slave trader’s world of Aghara-Penthay.

No, slavery wasn’t the issue. For us, the weak and sexually-fixated wills of Harken males is actually a good thing. We appreciate that while our controlled and selective breeding makes Gaianesian women strong, with tall, toned bodies resembling the finest female athletes in the galaxy, the Harkens dilute their gene pool with human pussy. If human women are too frail to keep out of slave chains it’s their outlook.

The problems began with exploration of the third planet in our system – rocky Calico with its toxic atmosphere of methane and carbon dioxide. Sitting on an orbit almost exactly halfway between ours and the elliptical path of Harka-Ringworld was one of the largest sources of trimium crystals in the galaxy. As soon as the minerals were discovered both worlds made immediate territorial claims on Calico, and despite there being more than enough bounty for both, the dispute quickly became violent.

And violent it has continued, for six centuries now – a barely moving battle front concealed beneath Calico’s stormy surface, which divides the world approximately in half. War is waged unendingly through underground tunnels, with armies departing from vast underground cities built to equip the mines. We are fighting to kill our enemy, whereas the Harkens once more trying to capture as many of our women alive as possible, where they can be returned to Harka-Ringworld to serve as breeders in one of the houses.

That’s what I fear most for Gara. A prisoner on Calico, or undercover on Harka-Ringworld itself. Enduring a non-drone man’s lustful hands on her body, and The Reflex, and then Gara pregnant with a Harken child. Gaianesians say that death is better than captivity, but faced with that possibility when it’s my own sister, I can’t accept that so easily. Is death worse than being debased to the level of a slave, too shamed to live down her submission if she did make it home? She would be ostracized, but she’d be alive.

I still don’t have an answer when after disembarking the shuttle, I half-run across the broad plazas towards The Fortress. Please, please, don’t let it be either of those. Let her be wounded, in her pelvis to explain my nightmares, but nothing that can’t be fixed by a bacta tank to bring my Gara home safe and intact. If there are gods, please hear me.

3 – Duchess

The vast concrete complex of The Fortress is the center of Gaianesia’s defense and intelligence operations, so security at the entrance is tight.

Although any Gaianesian woman can be trusted, and we can all be recognized by the distinctive markings on the skin of our heads and shoulders that make us distinguishable from human females, unfortunately many of the Harkens look just like we do. Female Harken agents have been known to try and infiltrate the building – traitors to their own sex who believe in the Harken ideology of masculine supremacy.

Of course males are not permitted within The Fortress. Not even to complete the menial jobs.

At the closely guarded control gates I ask for Red Duchess, and present the palm of my hand for yet another DNA verification of my identity. There is a painful reminder of why I’m here when the scanner incorrectly recognizes me as Gara, and I have to explain myself to the guards.

Once inside, the narrow corridors feel claustrophobic – the same sense one gets being underground with a vast weight of rock above. The walls are thick enough to withstand the most powerful of blaster weapons.

A junior recruit – probably a girl on her mandatory service lucky enough to avoid the battle front, escorts me through the bustling building.

The door of Red Duchess’ office is ajar. I’m about to walk in when I hear the sound of an argument is raging inside. I automatically pause, waiting for a polite moment to interrupt. My escort, similarly uncertain what to do, also hesitates, and we can’t avoid hearing the conversation as follows:

“It goes against everything we stand for, to deliberately send someone there,” Red Duchess is telling someone. “You know what they do with Gaianesian women.”

My escort looks anxiously at me. As a conscript she’ll get in the most trouble for eavesdropping on state secrets.

Red Duchess is just inside that room. I’ve only met my sister’s commander once, at a social occasion to celebrate a breeding, but Red Duchess comes from a rural region in the far north of Gaianesia and I recognize her distinctive accent. She was a naturally imposing leader, as are all those who reach Duchess rank, and I found her a little intimidating. But the other woman inside the office interrupts impatiently as though lecturing a subordinate.

“What other choice do we have? We desperately need those plans and we have two incredible strokes of luck with Gara having a genetically identical twin, and Riyena still being on the Hub.”

I’m too surprised at the sound of the other speaker’s voice even to react at first to hearing my sister’s name. For the speaker is no other than the woman who runs the whole military operations on our planet – White Queen. The current White Queen enjoys the status of a celebrity on Gaianesia, for when she first took over the battle on Calico she won more territory in two years than her predecessor did in the last two decades. Things have deteriorated rapidly there over the past six months though, with ominously high losses of women to the Harkens. All the same she’s still a legendary commander – possibly as great as Listu Adorin.

And White Queen is in that office discussing my sister? I didn’t even know she was back on Gaianesia. What could Red Duchess, or Gara, have been doing that was so important that White Queen is personally involved?

Red Duchess is not awestruck like I am by the living legend.

“I don’t care,” she retorts rudely. “I’d rather lose a thousand lives to the Harkens than deliberately send one of our people where Gara’s gone.”

“You’d rather lose a thousand, but I think we should offer Lara that choice, don’t you?”

Did I just hear that? White Queen just said “Lara”. Why would the great White Queen know my name?

“I disagree,” barks Red Duchess. “Lara shouldn’t choose. She doesn’t have enough experience to understand what she’d be volunteering for. Look at her file. Just look! She’s had nothing but basic fleet training. It doesn’t look like during her service she ever left the corvette and set foot on another world. I’m not sure she’s even been to the trading enclave. Does she have the first idea what non-Gaianesian males are capable of? Especially around a female that looks like she does.”

Of course I do, well, in theory anyway. But that logic is forgotten as I’m gifted the opportunity to replace worry with anger. They’ve started talking about me as though as I’m a child, and I won’t stand for it. I have the same willful spirit as Gara, and hearing them be so condescending spurs me to action.

I knock firmly on the doorframe, boldness that makes my escort go wide-eyed with horror. Leaving her to flee down the corridor, I walk into the large, elegantly furnished room, and confidently greet the two women inside.

Red Duchess is familiar to me - a short, slender woman whose motherly appearance belies her tough manner. Even though she’s only her early forties her skin has bronzed from years of sun to a texture like a walnut. Her markings are beginning to fade. Things are safe enough for women here on Gaianesia, but she still chooses to wear her hair short – a tribute to our ancestors or a sign of readiness for battle. Red Duchess’ expression is strong but there’s kindness there also. Here is someone who cares for her people.

The other woman looks colder, ruthless. White Queen is in her sixties, or perhaps even seventies. She was considered to be the most beautiful woman on Gaianesia in her youth, and her face is still striking. However the markings around her head show greater age, having faded from the chocolate brown color that advertises a Gaianesian woman as young and fertile, to the pale ivory of a female well past her childbearing years. Her hair turned silver many years ago, but she wears it as long as I have mine.

Both are dressed in the ankle-length, loose fitting robes that conceal the figure - typical of fashions in older Gaianesian women. Notable on White Queen is the bandage she always has wrapped around her right wrist – a proud but disfiguring scar rumored to have been a wound suffered undercover on Harka-Ringworld itself.

The women have stopped talking to inspecting me as I inspect them. I’m spoiling for an argument to discharge more of the fear and emotion I’m feeling about my sister, but Red Duchess has an expression of sympathy that reminds me of my mother, and seeing this makes me crumble.

“Please,” I say in an anguished voice. “Just tell me, where is Gara?”

The two women look at each other as though trying to decide if I can handle bad news.

“Please,” I say again, and Red Duchess finally speaks. Only with a question, though.

“Did Gara tell you much about her work?”

“No. Only that she was keeping us safe from the Harkens.”

Red Duchess nods.

“Then what I am about to tell you is most secret, and I hope we can rely on your utmost discretion.” Red Duchess states firmly.

“Oh, just tell her,” White Queen interrupts angrily with a dismissive wave of her hand. “This is Gara’s sister. Of course she’s not going to blab to our enemies.”

“Let me do it my way,” Red Duchess snaps. “I’m getting there.”

Both sigh almost simultaneously, and frown at each other. I’d always assumed military intelligence would work in harmony towards united goals, but these women don’t seem to like each other.

Once Red Duchess convinced White Queen isn’t going to interrupt she begins.

“Gara was handler for our most important agent on Harka-Ringworld. Her name is Riyena Erkeegan, and unusually for a Harken female she’s a high ranking member of their military. Riyena disagrees with some of the restrictions of Harken society. Specifically - she’s a lesbian.”

My eyes widen. A Harken lesbian? Well that explains why she’d betray her homeworld. The Harken perception is that relations between two women are seen as a waste of precious female breeding flesh, and thus are strictly forbidden on Harka-Ringworld.

“One of our moles on Harka-Ringworld first passed on the rumor that Riyena Erkeegan might be a lesbian. So we tested it, arranging that your sister (who you must admit, like you, is an exceptional beauty), would cross her path at the weapons exhibition on Mordlin Four and pose as an equipment buyer.”

I wave the compliment to my looks aside dismissively. It does not matter.

“Gara seduced her, in the usual manner of these things. We arranged for the women to come across each other a second time, and a third. Unusually for a Harken female Riyena travelled frequently offworld. The two women became intimate. Riyena fell in love with Gara, and became convinced that Gara loved her back. As the relationship became established Riyena wanted the two of them to be able to live together openly, so she began to ask about claiming sanctuary on Gaianesia. At the appropriate moment Gara revealed that she was, in fact an intelligence agent.”

It sounds like the stuff of spy thrillers. But my sister – the lover to a Harken female? Surely she felt no true affection? However, if that was the case, then it means Gara give away her intimacies for material gain instead of love.

“The relationship could have fallen apart at that point, but the couple were too close for Riyena to be deterred. Quite the opposite happened. When she learned the truth, what she offered in exchange for protection was beyond our wildest dreams. Riyena said she could access an almost complete download of the Harken military operations on Calico and give them to us, simply in exchange for a new home on Gaianesia. We’re talking technical drawings of equipment, maps, military personnel files, strategy documents… Everything. Most precious of all – designs for the new Harken stun weapon that’s recently started wreaking havoc up there on Calico. It’s being kept secret by the press, and you must not reveal this either Lara, but in a matter of weeks we’ve lost a third of our territory, and stunned Gaianesian soldiers are all taken captive. It’s a catastrophe.”

The thought makes me cold. How many women, taken into the Harken breeding program? It doesn’t bear thinking about. And might be Gara one of them? Is that where Gara is?

I must concentrate on something else or lose my mind. And even with my limited knowledge of covert operations I latch onto something - a problem in what Red Duchess is saying.

“But even if she could download the plans, how could this… Riyena… ever be allowed to leave Harken space carrying the information?”

Red Duchess nods approvingly, as though I passed a test.

“You’re quite right, Lara. Of course Harka-Ringworld and Calico are highly militarized and on permanent lockdown, so Riyena couldn’t just fly out carrying a data file unless it was hidden, copied onto a chip and implanted into her flesh.”

That still seems unlikely to succeed.

“But the Harkens scan for implants, just like we do…” I continue.

Red Duchess nods again.

“Yes, Harken security do scan departing citizens for implants. Riyena herself proposed the solution – something that seemed cleverly simple at the time – that her chip would configured to remain entirely inert and therefore invisible, unless it was triggered by the presence of your sister’s DNA. A physical touch between the two women would be all that was needed, but without that the chip would simply seem redundant, obsolete. Only in a safe situation when they were together could the upload take place to a device in Gara’s custody. If anything went wrong, both women could deny everything, avoid body contact and no-one’s cover would be blown.”

“I suppose Riyena mainly saw her plan as a way to guarantee your sister’s continued participation, but it had tactical merit. Everything was agreed and set in motion. The first part of the operation went entirely according to plan and Riyena left Harken territory.”

“Of course with the war raging, there is little contact between our worlds. Riyena could not simply take a shuttle directly from Harka-Ringworld to Gaianesia. The shortest civilian connection between is from Harka to travel to the deep space trading outpost of Escarod, and from there back to Gaianesia. And so it went. Riyena caught a commercial shuttle to Escarod, under the pretext to her superiors of a few days leave, made the rendezvous there with Gara, and the two women caught a ride on an inconsequential merchant vessel carrying metals bound for Gaianesia – the Irulin Darkstar. Just when success seemed certain the worst happened. I’m sorry to tell you Lara, but that freighter never arrived here.”

I feel as though something inside me is preparing to explode. Here it comes.

“Dead?” I ask in a high, panicked voice. “Some kind of accident?”

No. She can’t be dead. Terribly injured, her pelvis ruined? The dreams…

“Worse.” Red Duchess says bluntly. “The freighter was attacked by pirates and captured.”

“Not pirates…” I plead. I don’t want to hear more now, but she presses on inexorably.

“Raiders from Aghara-Penthay.”

When I hear the name of our dreaded neighbor it’s as though someone has cut my legs from under me. My vision blurs and the world becomes unreal. With my head spinning it’s difficult to stay on my feet. A woman’s hand goes to my elbow, supporting me.

“Gara taken by men from the rapists’ planet?” I moan. “Gods no…”

Tears have already started trickling down my cheeks. I can’t keep my voice steady as, unsure which answer I want to hear, I ask my next question.

“Are they alive?”

“We’re only certain that Riyena survived. But your sister is exactly the kind of female the Slavers most prize. If they could have done, they would have taken her.”

“My Gara? Captured for a sex slave? She’d never allow it!”

I’m not sure which is worse. The possibility that Gara might be dead, or the chance that rather than fight to the end she might let herself be debased and degraded, a plaything to those monsters. Human women are weak, but not Gara. She’d know her career, her life, her chance of breeding would be over if she were made slave.

But then how do I explain the dreams? The stabbing pain… Could that have been? A man…? Not wounded… Oh Gods, no! Don’t let me imagine her like that. No! I must say something, anything. Grasping for a question I blurt out:

“Riyena. How do you know they have Riyena? How do you know they have any of them? Maybe they all perished.”

Silently Red Duchess hands me a data pad. Through the blur of my free-flowing tears I look down at the screen to see it shows an advertisement.

The woman in the image I do not recognize. She’s a youthful brunette with the pale skin and mottling typical of our two species. On the side of her face, overwriting the creamy silk of pale skin and brown mottling is a swirling mark like a tattoo. I know enough of Aghara-Penthay to recognize it – the slave mark that the Slavers permanently tattoo on all their captive women, as a sign of quality.

She’s pretty, although in my biased view not as attractive as Gara. The woman’s breasts are small, and her hips are not so wide in proportion to her waist. Her vulva is entirely hairless. Its pale pink lips are fat and rounded, almost submerging the vertical slit.

She’s less strongly built than the females on our world. A Harken woman.

This female is stark naked, which is does not shock me. Gaianesian women are comfortable being nude in front of each other. What makes me gasp is her pose, to see a woman with the markings of our species on her knees and holding her thighs open, as though she needs to humbly plead for sexual attention. A sex traitor! A whore!

That’s why my first reaction to the picture is, “And this submissive thing thought my sister was good enough for her?”

“Don’t judge her too harshly,” Red Duchess says firmly. “The Slavers of Aghara-Penthay implant a microchip into the brainstem of captive women. It disrupts the signals relating to willpower, meaning an implanted female is compelled to follow orders, as long as the order is given by a man. They only had to ask her to pose that way and she would have obeyed.”

I’ve heard that before, but my beliefs are too ingrained to accept that some part of her nature must have already been inclined to submission. Otherwise how could a woman look so unashamed, displaying her sex like that?

I’m looking at a female debasing herself to please men… Possession of this image could get someone into trouble on Gaianesia. I would throw the revolting filth away in disgust, were I not obliged to pay attention to the writing, which is the common galactic script.

“Riyena, 25, from Harka-Ringworld,” I say aloud. “Fifty credits for a session, slave also for permanent sale by auction galactic date 10:13:4452. Enquires to the Palace of Roses, Mezzanine Level, Aghara-Penthay Orbital Trading Station.”

A footnote adds, “Bring your own slave. See her abused as the plaything of this woman hater.”

“Woman hater?” I ask. “I thought you said Riyena was a lesbian. Gara would never be intimate with a misogynist.”

“The brain implants can do more than force women to obey” White Queen explains. “They can change the woman’s personality, sexuality, anything they want. With lesbian females they often enjoy turning them sadistic towards their own sex, a trick they also like to do with women from female dominated societies such as ours.”

What kind of animal would want to do that – alter a woman’s very identity? I feel faint with horror. And I’m more disgusted these women think my sister would tolerate such treatment.

“You actually believe they did this to Gara as well?” I say, outraged. “Surely not! She’d take her own life rather than do anything the Slavers wanted.”

“We don’t know,” says Red Duchess in a placatory tone. “We don’t know about anyone else on that ship. There were twenty on board, mostly humans, and Riyena is the only one about whom we have any information. I’m sure your sister will have resisted to the last during the pirate attack, and she may no longer be alive. But it’s possible she was stunned and taken alive, and is being processed somewhere on the surface of Aghara-Penthay. It’s also possible she’s already been sold and is somewhere else. There’s even a chance she’s on the trading station orbiting the planet. The Slavers like to market women with a backstory, a connection, so they would see a value in keeping Gara close to Riyena.”

Red Duchess pauses, giving me that breaking-bad-news face again.

“All we can do is tell you your sister is Missing in Action at the moment.”

But I can see from the other woman’s condescending expression that White Queen clearly believes Gara was weak enough to let herself be captured.

“If your sister was selected for auction, they’d advertise it on the usual galactic slave trading networks and we’re monitoring those channels,” White Queen says bluntly, “but Gara might have been retained without auction, or sold privately, or any number of fates where which case we wouldn’t find out about it. The best chance to find about her fate, and about the plans, is to send someone to the Slavers’ orbital station to ask Riyena in person.”

I laugh scathingly at the impossibility of doing that. There’s an obvious problem with a Gaianesian going to that den of scum. On Slaver territory, women do not have the same rights as men. Any female around Aghara-Penthay is automatically a slave in the eyes of their laws. And slaves must have owners. Unpacified male owners.

Unescorted females are captured instantly and taken to the planet’s surface for processing by the Slavers. Not even male offworlders can reach the planet itself - outsiders can only visit the orbital Hub. The only people allowed down to the arid surface are male pirates working in the four Slaver factions, and their female property.

As for the Hub where Riyena is being held, it is one of the most popular tourist destinations for male visitors, flooded as it is with cheaply available sex. Females occasionally visit as well, but still have to comply with their laws. Women on the Hub need a male owner. Visiting slaves who are not the property of Aghara-Penthay are still obliged to be identified against their owners, this being done by bracelets locked on the wrist or ankle which carry registration information.

But this is all aside. Even if a Gaianesian woman would submit to the deep degradation of accepting a male as her owner, she couldn’t visit the Hub. There’s yet another problem. Aghara-Penthay hates Gaianesia almost as much as they do the Sadami women. A Gaianesian female, detected via a DNA scan during her registration for the slave bracelet, would be instantly seized and become the property of Aghara-Penthay.

“You have a male agent willing to travel to the trading station?” I ask Red Duchess. “A human?”

“We have allies,” White Queen answers for her evasively, “and no doubt it wouldn’t take much persuasion for an unpacified human male to travel on one of the tourist shuttles on our behalf and make an appointment at the Palace of Roses. But that would only get us news about your sister. A male agent wouldn’t be able to activate Riyena’s chip and upload the plans we desperately need to survive the Harken war. Only Gara can do that, or at least someone who the implant believes is Gara.”

Before I can consider what she’s just said Red Duchess interrupts, speaking critically to White Queen.

“I must restate for Lara’s sake that I’m entirely against this idea. By everything Gaianesia stands for, what you’re suggesting is wrong.”

“What idea?” I ask, but there’s no need for them to answer for White Duchess’s “someone who the implant believes is Gara” just caught up with me and I finally understand the implications of why I’ve been summoned to the Fortress.

I’ve felt faint since learning Gara might be on Aghara-Penthay, and now the horror of it all, the terror of what I’m being asked to do becomes too much, and this time consciousness does desert me.

4 – Mission

“See? She’s not as strong as her sister,” Red Queen is protesting from somewhere close by.

“She’s tough enough,” disagrees White Queen. “It’s in her genes, remember. We’ll cheat the DNA scanner with a skin graft so the Slavers don’t detect her species, and we’ll mask her markings. She’ll be on and off the Hub in a matter of hours. After that, apart from the trauma of the experience and being stuck with the damned bracelet, there will be no permanent effect. ”

Reality comes crashing back in on me. White Queen’s plan is that I, I, should go to the Hub orbiting Aghara-Penthay. I wish I could lose consciousness again. I wish I could rewind and forget all this. But I’m here, this is real, and Gara might have been taken by the Slavers.

Reluctantly I open my eyes. I’m lying on a low couch I’d seen at the side of Red Duchess’ office. The two women are sat close by, posed as demurely as statues. but having resumed the earlier argument.

“If she agrees,” Red Duchess is countering. “And Gaianesian beliefs are too ingrained in her to do that. She’s a model citizen.”

Rather than adding to my earlier eavesdropping, I push myself up from the couch, propping my torso with one arm. Once they see I’m awake, I go straight to the attack.

“Aghara-Penthay. You didn’t just bring me here to give me bad news. You want me to go to Aghara-Penthay for you, don’t you?” It is White Queen of whom I ask this, and I do so accusingly.

Before she can answer I expand on what that would mean. “You want me to shame myself. You want me to bow down and follow the orders of those men, as though I’m as weak willed as a human female. Not even the women locked in the prison for submissives would debase themselves enough to enter that place, but you expect me to go?”

I’m angry, and this seems to amuse Red Duchess.

“I told you that’s what she’d say,” she informs White Queen with a wry smile.

White Queen frowns wearily and rubs her brow.

“In intelligence sometimes we have to set aside personal dignity for the good of Gaianesia.”

“The good of Gaianesia?” I almost spit. “At least you have the decency to admit that’s what this is about. Only Gaianesia. You don’t care about rescuing Gara. You just want me to go to Aghara-Penthay to recover those plans.”

She closes her eyes in acknowledgement.

“We’re losing, Lara,” she says. “Losing worse than you know from the media. And it’s not just about territory on Calico. Their new blaster technology might weaken the defense grid and there might be raids here on Gaianesia, soon. I respect your sister, but we can’t give up just because one brave woman is lost. So yes, those plans are more important than any one of us.”

“Our culture is founded on the natural dominance of females,” I restate, as though she needs reminding. “We shun those who submit to men. And you’re asking me to willingly walk into slavery? What happens when I come home, if word gets out I went there?”

“Again, the circumstances are extraordinary enough to ask you to take the risk,” White Queen says. “But I still wouldn’t send you if I thought you might be going into permanent captivity. You would simply mimic the tourist groups of human traitor women, who travel to Aghara-Penthay to temporarily experience debasing themselves. For a suitable fee your male escort” (I notice at that point how she slyly avoids the words “master” or “owner) “would take you to the brothel where Riyena is enslaved. You’d touch the girl, uploading the information to a receiver we’d implant into your own skin. You could ask where your sister is. In under an hour you’d be back on his ship, and you could remain in your cabin for the rest of the voyage.”

She looks at me earnestly.

“We ask you to endure one hour of humiliation that you’ll be able to put behind you, Lara, in exchange for answers about your sister and saving your homeworld.”

“But it’s not ever going to be entirely behind me, is it?” I accuse. “You’re conveniently forgetting that the wrist bracelets of visiting slaves can’t ever be removed. There’s a toxin injector inside the bracelet that detects tampering. What will I say when my friends and family see me wearing one of those things?”

“The situation isn’t perfect,” White Queen sighs. “But it’s our only chance to recover the plans.”

“Not perfect?” I splutter. “I’ll have to put myself in the power of a non-passive male. Walk with someone who’s controlled by his cock, while I’m wearing next to nothing, right into Aghara-Penthay, and then ask if he’ll be kind enough to take me to be in the power of a sadistic lesbian and hope he leaves me alone. Even supposing he co-operates what happens when Riyena sees me? She’ll think I’m Gara, and she’s bound to raise the alarm.”

Red Duchess nods emphatic agreement with me, but again White Queen has an answer.

“You can make sure your escort is instructed to ask for a private audience in a soundproof room,” she says smoothly. “They’re common in the brothels that specialize in sadomasochism and torture.”

(I shudder at the mention of sadomasochism and torture)

“Listen to me Lara, you can easily have your man command her not to shout or make a fuss. Her slave implant will compel her to obey him.”

I have objection after objection.

“I can’t go there,” I insist. “They enslave Gaianesian women on sight. They’ll see the marks of our species. And the DNA scan will reveal it.”

“Simple invisible skin patches around your wrists will fool the scanners in the bracelet, Lara. And we can give you an injection that will fade your markings for a couple of days. You’ll look just like a human woman.”

“But what about Gara?” I demand. “Even if I find out where she is, this mission isn’t going to save her.”

“We can’t guarantee anything there,” White Queen says, “But sometimes Gaianesian women come up for sale in the auctions. If this happens with your sister, as a reward for your cooperation a male agent will be instructed to buy her.”

My breath catches in my throat. An inviolate law on Gaianesia is that we never pay ransoms for captured women. Many of our people hold the view that a woman weak enough to fall doesn’t deserve anything else. But it’s mainly because once we gave in to one ransom, the demands would never stop.

“You’d give money to the Slavers of Aghara-Penthay?” I say in shock. “For Gara?”

The scandal of Ilona Minani being a submissive would be nothing compared to the outrage if word leaked out that the government paid even a credit to Aghara-Penthay. Just suggesting the idea could ruin White Queen’s career.

“To save your sister, yes,” White Queen says bluntly. “But you have to help us first.”

I clench my fists indecisively. Gara… If only you were here to advise me. What am I supposed to do?

“I won’t let you talk her into this…” Red Duchess cuts in taking advantage of my hesitation. “It’s all very well for you to send her there to suffer these indignities for you, but the two of you don’t know the first thing about real men.”

“And you do?” White Queen looks amused.

“Even private slaves find the Hub an ordeal. Men know they can act with impunity on Slaver territory. Lara’s going to be molested from the moment she sets foot on that station until the moment she leaves. She’ll be lucky if she’s not raped by her owner. What happens if he decides to keep her, or sell her to them? It happens sometimes, even with the more reputable tourist escorts.”

I take offense to that.

“I’m strong. No one is raping me.”

But my reply only seems to fuel Red Duchess’ patronizing attitude.

“See? Proof she doesn’t know what she’s getting into. Lara, you’re exceptionally beautiful to human eyes, which means to the men of Aghara-Penthay you’re Grade-A slave material. Understand me, Lara, that valuable as you are as a citizen of Gaianesia, to the scum on Aghara-Penthay you might be worth more. Over fifty thousand credits as a sex slave.”

I look down at myself. Yes, I’m tall; I’m slim with a narrow waist and wide hips; I’m athletic and toned like most Gaianesian women; and from my mother I inherited the exceptionally large breasts that unpacified males are supposed to desire. But really – it’s nothing but a body. Fifty thousand credits just for this? That’s more than I earn in five years.

While I look disbelieving Red Duchess rounds on White Queen.

“I won’t have it,” she insists. “You can’t sit here safe on Gaianesia and send Lara as a sacrifice to do something you wouldn’t do yourself.”

No-one likes accusations of cowardice and color rises in White Queen’s face and I think for a moment she’s going to explode.

“I’m not sending her to do something I wouldn’t do myself.”

“Ha!” snaps Red Duchess. “Easy for you to say.”

“Is that how little you think of me? Right…” White Queen snaps, and haughtily she reaches down to the cream bandage around her right wrist. Wordlessly she pulls back the elastic band of fabric, exposing the pale wrinkled skin of an elderly woman underneath.

I’ve heard many of the stories of White Queen’s valor for Gaianesia. She was badly injured on Calico at the battle of Abraxas Wells and still walks with a limp.

Her bandage is rumored to cover up scarring from an undercover operation on Harka-Ringworld itself. But the skin of her forearm and hand are entirely unharmed.

Instead, tightly encircling the bone of her arm, just above the joint of her wrist where most citizens might wear a watch, is a slave bracelet of Aghara-Penthay.

5 - Decision

Red Duchess gasps at the same time as I do. So she didn’t know either.

“A slave bracelet…” she says in absolute shock. “That didn’t come from Harka-Ringworld. You went to the Hub, all those years ago.”

Twice White Queen has put her reputation in our hands. Saying she’d pay the Slavers to buy Gara, and now this. A braceleted female can’t be White Queen. It doesn’t matter if she earned it in the service of our planet. She would have behaved like a submissive while they locked it on her, and if a woman is capable of submitting once she always will be.

We’ve seen what we needed to see, and White Queen is already testily pulling the bandage back over her forearm to conceal the proof of shame.

Red Duchess is almost as astounded as I am.

“Why could you have possibly needed to go there?” she asks.

White Queen frowns as though she has a bad taste in her mouth.

“The protection on Aghara-Penthay is designed to keep large enemy warships away, and trap slaves in. But the security is less rigorous in preventing individuals infiltrating and reach the surface. Someone had the idea that if we could get a team of heavily armed agents in one-by-one via the Hub, they could steal a shuttle and make a stand for women, by disrupting the Rape Run. Of course, it would be a one-way trip, and they’d have had to kill themselves before being captured and turned into sex slaves themselves. But for once, the men would have been defeated by the women.”

“It needed someone who knew the mission concept to recon the Trading Hub. I volunteered, even though I knew I’d end up wearing the bracelet as a consequence.”

We’re looking at her open-mouthed, and White Queen looks uncomfortable for the first time I’ve seen. Maybe that’s why she keeps talking.

“Gaianesian women were taken on sight by the Slavers even back then, but as I’ve already proposed for your journey, our skull markings can be hidden and the sensor in the registration bracelet only scans the DNA of the skin it touches. They’re easy to trick with a graft. It’s lucky I could pass as human, because the Slavers desperately wanted me for the Rape Run even then. If they knew this bracelet corresponded to me,” (and she holds up her wrist again), “they’d use it to track me down, and bounty hunters would be waiting as soon as I left the safety of Gaianesia.”

The Rape Run. She’s able to mention it so casually, the universe’s cruelest and most-watched sport. Ten of the galaxy’s most desirable women are captured and left in an arena on Aghara-Penthay’s surface known as The Zone. Then the five, now four, faction leaders of the Slaver clans the “Hunters” set out to find the women. And when they do find one, and in front of the galactic viewing audience they rape her and rape her and rape her.

The women Runners know this is their likely fate but they do their best to compete anyway, for the last one uncaught is the winner and becomes the rarest thing on Aghara-Penthay – a female who leaves the Slavers free and relatively unharmed.

And this is White Queen’s fate, if they ever catch her.

Red Duchess is also dwelling on the brutal event some think of as entertainment.

“Forgive my rudeness, White Queen, but I thought they only took young women for the Rape Run.”

“I was nearly captured five years ago, in spite of my advancing years. The Slavers have rejuvenation technology using the bacta. They could rebuild my body to an age they consider most desirable. The Hunters have their own personal bounty hunters, you know, as well as using the freelancers, and they dispatched one of those.”

“Salarin, the most sadistic of the Slaver faction leaders, has a bounty hunter working for him called Egregious Klink. He captures well protected, high value women, either as slaves captured to order, or for participation in the Rape Run. I was in a battle on Calico and the whole situation turned out to be a sting to try and take me.”

“Their plan could have worked, if it wasn’t for women’s natural courage. We fought our way out of an encirclement. Injured my leg badly, though.”

Red Duchess doesn’t seem to have considered that the Slavers are capable of regressing age, but I’m not too surprised. In last year’s Rape Run they entirely changed someone’s gender, turning the overthrown fifth faction leader Leshan into the beautiful slave woman, Leesha. If they could build someone a fully functional female body, regressing cellular age shouldn’t be any challenge for them.

Here on Gaianesia we consider it infinitely preferable to be female, but things didn’t improve for Leshan when he switched gender. Women do sometimes kill each other in the Rape Run, and in a dramatic three way showdown with Leesha, a Republic space fleet Colonel called Melena de Santo and a sharp-witted bounty hunter named Ja-Alixxe, Melena de Santo almost vaporized Leesha after finding out her real identity.

Then, in the best conclusion to the Rape Run for years for the galaxy’s women, Melena and Ja-Alixxe made fools of the Slavers, escaping The Zone in a stolen ship and disappearing without trace.

So great was the disgrace that it triggered wrangling between the Hunter factions over how to best make an example of the escapees, with the cruel dominant Cronorgan and the womanizing Lotho-Etsarra advocating the two Runners should be raped to death if recaptured, and the giant alien Jackran-ad-aktar and the sadistic Salarin advocating keeping the women alive to endure the worst humiliations the Slavers could conceive.

But that’s the politics of Aghara-Penthay. Here on Gaianesia White Queen has had enough of the debate.

“So, Lara,” she says. “You know the situation, and the risks, and I’ve trusted you with a secret that will end my military career if it’s revealed. I ask of you nothing I haven’t done myself. For your sister and for your home planet – will you go to the trading station at Aghara-Penthay?”

“What was it like there?” I ask quietly, and add, “Please… the truth.”

A shadow seems to pass over White Queen’s face.

“I’ve never been somewhere so vile, so horrific. I was there with an escort, but still those men… Never mind. They treated me like a piece of meat. But knowing how it was, I must still ask on behalf of your planet… Will you go?”

It is the power of this woman’s conviction as much as the need to know about Gara that makes my decision. I feel a surge of patriotic fervor, and certainty that my planet’s way of life is the right one. Snapping to attention I give her the Gaianesian salute.

“When do I leave?”

6 – Preparations

Riyena’s auction date is only ten standard republic days ahead, so we have to move rapidly if I’m to be escorted to the Hub before it is too late. So over the next few days I witness the proud might of the Gaianesian military machine in action when under the greatest secrecy, different ministries and departments are bought into the plan.

First, there is the matter of getting me to Aghara-Penthay.

Most of the women who betray our sex, by deliberately seeking to go to the Hub and temporarily debasing themselves - the so-called “Tourist Slaves”, depart from a starbase orbiting the cartel controlled planet of Merlon. This choice is a matter of pragmatism. There is no direct contact between law-abiding Republic worlds and rapacious Aghara-Penthay. Merlon is the most convenient planet outside Republic space, yet still being on the main hyperspatial travel routes.

A den of vice almost as low as Aghara-Penthay, Merlon Starbase makes much of its profits by being the departure point for those en-route to its foul neighbor. Shiploads of men take off, many per day, to seek the pleasures of cheap slave flesh forced to serve every conceivable taste. The less well-to-do female travelers join these flights, hence the ferries accruing the nickname “Tramp Shuttles”, and are allocated an owner from amongst the crew or sometimes the passengers – whoever finds the woman most to his liking. Women with only the means for these trips are frequently abused from the moment of departure – raped and abused by their owner and their fellow passengers – and it is common for the more valuable or attractive females to find themselves sold to the Slavers, rather than enjoying the return trip home they’d expected.

The more affluent female masochistic, or woman simply ghoulish enough to want to visit Aghara-Penthay, hires the services of one of Merlon’s licensed escorts. These business’s livelihood relies on their reputation with female tourists, so offer a greater chance of a safe return home. Escorts also offer a more bespoke experience – want to visit a particular location? The escort will take the woman there.

Licensed escorts advertise a no-rape guarantee from the host (unless the woman wants that experience too) but she puts herself just as completely in his power as any slave girl does her owner, and when she happens to be desirable – betrayals still happen.

There is an agent friendly to Gaianesia who works as one of these escorts. His name is Acheron Doe. Despite being a Gaianesian, I will submit to being owned by this male. I will submit to a male named Acheron Doe. He has been briefed on that small bit of our plan that he needs to know and is capable of understanding, and compensated handsomely for ensuring I remain unharmed. With his ship chartered by my Government solely for my service, I should be on the Hub enduring wearing nothing but the blue wrap of a private slave for under two hours.

Acheron Doe… I find myself distracted by repeating his name over and over, imagining what he might look like.

But back on topic: once I’m there, I have to avoid being recognized as a Gaianesian – a situation where failure would earn me permanent enslavement. The biotech department of the intelligence team prepare a serum I’ll inject in my face just before leaving home. It will temporarily fade my beautiful brown markings, so I appear to be no more than a particularly athletic human woman.

The serum only lasts forty eight hours, but Acheron Doe will leave with me as soon as I reach Merlon, and in his fast ship the journey to Aghara-Penthay lasts only a few hours. We should have plenty of time, as long as nothing goes wrong.

More challenging is fooling the DNA scan that will be made of me, registering me in their eyes as a slave for life when the shameful identification bracelet is locked forever on to one of my limbs. For this we follow the same procedure as was done with White Queen. A human female visitor to the foreign trading enclave in Solar City was recently, unknown to her, swabbed. Our Biotech team merge invisible skin grafts from her cells onto my forearms and ankles, to cover any eventuality for placement of the bracelet. These too are temporary, but sufficient for the duration of my visit.

In the whole of the real woman’s life, she’s unlikely to ever discover she’s registered as a slave on Aghara-Penthay unless she betrays our sex and tries to visit herself. I have no sympathy for her, in that case.

Finally there’s the matter of preparing me to extracting the data we desperately need. The technical department configure a chip for implantation into my forearm. Just as with Riyena’s and Gara’s chip it will remain inert except when I am in physical contact with the correct female.

As soon as I even touch Riyena, brushing her with a fingertip is enough, the essential files will copy.

Everything falls into place.

A Gaianesian ship, Vengeful Goddess, is laid on to deliver me to Merlon Starbase. Given the importance of success, White Queen is to make a rare departure from our system and go with us on the warship, commanding the operation personally. Her attention to me and to every detail of my wellbeing makes me very proud.

Gaianesian warships attract attention wherever we stop, so Vengeful Goddess will dock at Merlon only for minutes, while I disembark. It will then remain in communications blackout, but will tail Acheron Doe’s vessel as close to the Slavers’ world as is safe, and will be ready to intervene should something go wrong.

Acheron has been instructed that during the flight he must make an appointment at the Palace of Roses, asking for a soundproof room. Although Riyena is advertised as configured to inflict sadistic punishments on other slaves, he will request that she be the one restrained and immobile for our entertainment. Thus I will be safe when she inevitably recognizes me as related to Gara, and calls for help.

My planet is doing everything it can to support me, but the humiliation I’ll endure is nonetheless all personal. Before we arrive I will have to undress completely and put on nothing but the demeaning slave wrap. Acheron, a male, will inevitably see me in this clothing. It can’t be avoided. I can’t conceal myself from the crowds on the trading station either. If I act too shy or proud it will attract suspicion. I must pretend to be naturally submissive, showing my bare legs and my figure as though my owner has ordered me to present myself attractively.

At customs, as a new visiting slave I will be braceleted, have my fake DNA scanned, and I’ll be registered. I will never be able to remove the bracelet. I will have irrevocably become the property of a man named Acheron Doe and will lose all my own rights, at least under Aghara-Penthay law. And if someone spots it once I’m back on Gaianesia, I risk being outcast.

Once on the Hub we will have to walk through the concourse to the House of Roses. That’s the part that I’m dreading most, as it’s when I’m most likely to be sexually assaulted.

In the brothel the plan is I touch the girl, her chip will believe me to be Gara, and the upload will begin. I will ask about my sister’s fate. I’m not sure which answer I want and it doesn’t matter - as a female on Aghara-Penthay I can’t do anything to save her. But I will know.

In minutes I will be leaving.

There will be a second walk of shame across the station.

And the ordeal will be over. Back to Merlon, under the secret guardianship of Vengeful Goddess, then transfer to the warship itself. After it’s all over my only reminder will be an absent beloved sister, and a bandage like White Queen’s, hiding the shameful secret that I was once a slave.

With the prospect of what’s ahead filling my every waking thought, I do not need more emphasis on the horror of the Slavers’ planet. But during a briefing in The Fortress it comes anyway. A woman bursts into the room, her jumpsuit bearing the insignia of a junior officer. Out of breath and looking upset, at the last moment she remembers her rank and salutes.

“White Queen!” she gasps in a quavering voice. “There’s a broadcast from Aghara-Penthay… The heroine of last year’s Rape-Run, the bounty hunter Ja-Alixxe, has been caught.”

7 - Ja-Alixxe

Women rush to the viewing screens, even White Queen forgetting her dignity for a moment as she pushes her way to a monitor.

At one time the Gaianesian government tried to censor these viewscreen transmissions from Aghara-Penthay, judging them bad for morale and encouraging women into submissive behavior, but it quickly was proven to be pointless when any woman with a basic understanding of technology was able to defeat the blocking signal and receive the feeds. Furthermore censorship gave the impression our leaders had something to fear from the Slavers, blessing their broadcasts with the same mystique as anything taboo.

So even though it is disgusting and against all the principles of our society, Slaver transmissions remain unblocked. The full uninterrupted coverage of the Rape Run is available here. I’m sure many women watch it in secret, staying glued to their screens in sick fascination to see what might be their fate, should our planet’s defenses ever fall.

Certainly we’re all familiar with the voice of the sleazy compere Wagner, who interviews the Runners and provides the voice-over commentary.

“I’m sure you’ve not forgotten the beautiful Ja-Alixxe?” he is saying over a montage of scenes from the Rape Run of her standing proudly, or stealthily hiding, or moving gracefully dressed in the tight costume of that year’s contest.

“And you’ll remember how disappointed we were when she left without giving us the chance to see her get fucked.”

This comment is delivered over archive images of Ja-Alixxe powering the stolen ship out of a cave hidden just beyond The Zone. The expression on her face, tattooed with the slave-mark, is a picture of resolve.

“But where is she now? All that rebellion, and look where she’s ended right back after all…”

And the broadcast cuts to a gradual sweep of the camera, showing the large mezzanine concourse of Aghara-Penthay’s trading station. Seeing it makes my stomach knot with fear.

“I don’t think Lara should be watching this,” says Red Duchess, but I say “No!” and elbow her aside.

I can’t imagine a more depraved den of vice and debauchery than what is the one on screen – the place I’m destined to go. Out on to the broad mezzanine spill the open fronts of bar after bar, brothel after brothel. Men are taking their base pleasures everywhere I look, most of them loud, and many of them drunk.

Satisfying those pleasures are the women. The luckiest merely serve food or drink, but even those have to dodge or submit to the grasping hands. Some are made to dance. Others, perhaps lacking specific skills, merely stand to advertise their immediate availability for sex.

Every single female I see is of the age and body shape we are taught men consider desirable. The majority of women wear the single garment of a slave of Aghara-Penthay – a scarlet silken wrap like a towel, barely large enough to reach from the breast to the pelvis, which is configured to leave the girl open on one side. The wrap fastens with a bow under the left arm, so it may be untied and removed easily even when the wearer is restrained.

Those less fortunate are naked – including the women being publically violated in plain view of the crowds, and the unattractive ones - those forced to display more in order to lure customers to their bodies.

I only glimpse a few in that panorama who are wearing the garment destined for me – the blue wrap of a private slave, i.e. not owned by Aghara-Penthay. The blue wrap is much sought after by the local slaves. It means the woman will leave. It means she can hope.

The undergarments common to most free females across the galaxy – bras and panties of some design, are not permitted to women anywhere on Slaver territory. Captives must be open and accessible at all times, the owner easily slipping a hand inside the wrap, or pulling it aside to bare her.

It’s hard to believe this place is real – and only a short distance away across the galaxy is somewhere that life is so different. Crowds of mostly humanity, but also some other species. The males relaxing and enjoying themselves. The females suffering.

And through this milling throng walks the former bounty hunter, Ja-Alixxe.

She has already been stripped. In the first glimpse the galaxy has had of her since her escape, we begin viewing her from the back. Her body is beautifully toned, almost as fit as a Gaianesian woman, making the rounded curves of her buttocks exquisite. The camera pans round the side, showing breasts that are surprisingly full for someone with so little body fat. She has large dark nipples. There is no hair to hide the contours of her exposed sex. The Slavers usually give females a treatment that prevents it re-growing, and not even Rape Runners are spared.

Ja-Alixxe walks without resisting, but they have restrained her anyway. A device like a belt is around her hourglass waist, with a fixed wrist bracelet either side over the hip. It traps Ja-Alixxe’s hands close to her most vulnerable places, but leaving her unable to protect them, either in the front or the back.

She looks straight ahead out her dark eyes. Her hair flows loosely about her face. Really, she’s exceptionally beautiful.

Ja-Alixxe seems free to move her legs for now, but there are ropes about each ankle, trailing away to somewhere off camera. I don’t understand their purpose if they’re not being used to restrain her.

“Another successful hunt for Egregious Klink,” says Wagner. “The bouncy hunter captured by the bounty hunter.”

Egregious Klink… That was the name White Duchess mentioned. He finds women for the sadist Salarin. He tried to catch White Queen.

“Mind how you go there, bouncy hunter,” Wagner quips, repeating the pun he seems to think clever, and on cue from somewhere off camera the ropes round Ja-Alixxe’s ankles are jerked behind her with such force her feet leave the floor. Unable to use her hands to break the descent she sprawls flat on her face.

Immediately a man runs up, dressed in the overalls of the merchant fleet. He is a scruffy fellow, sweaty with a face sprouting with several days’ unshaved stubble.

“Bounty hunter…” he slurs drunkenly, not to Ja-Alixxe but to someone else off camera. “I’ll give you a thousand credits if you let me fuck her in the ass. She was the best girl by far in her year. I’ve jerked off hundreds of times thinking about raping this bitch.”

He waves a bundle of hundred credit notes. We don’t hear Klink’s response to this offer but I can guess the answer by the cheer from the crowd who begin gathering for a better view, and by the way the man starts pulling down the zipper at the front of his overalls.

“Is she a virgin?” drunk asks the same person off-screen, and I hear Egregious Klink’s malicious voice for the first time.

“Not anymore.”

Understanding what’s about to happen to her Ja-Alixxe has drawn up one knee and rolls her torso to the side, attempting to get up, as though despite her lying in the epicenter of male dominance standing upright would somehow help her evade what’s coming. It makes it more heartbreaking that even on the brink of public shaming her face hasn’t lost the same resolute courage I always saw in her.

“Is her implant working?” the stale man asks. He has his penis out now – it’s a foul thing, a pink fat semi-erect worm an inch thick with an eyeless purple head and only a slit for a mouth.

“Yes,” Egregious Klink states simply.

“Then lie flat on your belly and don’t move, slave!” the man spits down at her. “Until you feel my cock penetrate you, that is… Then I want you to resist me with all your strength.”

And immediately Ja-Alixxe resumes the prostrate position, with her stomach and her breasts pressed to the mezzanine floor. Her legs are together, extended straight behind her. She lies still as though she’s been paralyzed. An implant’s control is that powerful? Not the least resistance? Such barbarity…

The scruffy man sits down on the back of Ja-Alixxe’s knees, straddling her. He strokes a finger down her spine almost reverentially, an expression of awe on his face. Then he leans right down to her, where her buttocks meet the fulcrum of her legs, and he inhales her intimate scent.

“Oh, this is one fine looking woman,” he gloats to the watchers. “And her pussy smells as fresh as a teenage virgin’s.”

Straightening he looms over her, propping his body on one arm, his now rigid penis held in the other.

All through this Ja-Alixxe remains completely passive, staring straight ahead. She doesn’t react when he strokes his organ up and down the cleft between her cheeks, probing for the star of her anus.

It’s only when he penetrates her, sinking the rest of his bodyweight down onto her back as he pierces her bowels, that she responds.

First Ja-Alixxe screams, an animal howl of fury and anguish. Then she starts struggling. I see her legs twisting and bending, trying to get enough purchase with her knees on the floor to lift the man off her. At the same time her upper body moves from side to side, as though she’s trying to escape by wriggling forwards like a snake.

With her hands locked to her sides it’s hopeless though. He’s a heavy man and his body weight pins her down. A fit woman would struggle to throw him off, even without restraints.

Again and again we watch his hips rock back and forth, back and forth, as he thrusts his dick into her. It looks acutely painful for his victim, and Ja-Alixxe frequently shrieks during her rape.

As ordered she fights to the end though, writhing underneath him even after he makes one long last straining thrust deep into her backside and his victory is complete. While he empties his seed, her suffering forces a long moan that matches his groan of pleasure.

Fat man slices out of her and begins to climb off. We’re treated to a close-up of his rampant cock which is coated with a slime of semen, excrement and blood – evidence of the violence of his assault.

No longer obliged to move, the bounty hunter goes limp except for her heaving ribcage. She rests her forehead briefly on the floor, allowing herself only a moment to succumb to the defeat, before lifting her chin to look at the baying crowd.

The man in the boiler suit has had his pleasure, but it seems anally raping her in public was not enough to dissipate his hatred of her, or perhaps women in general.

“Stay down, bitch!” he yells down at her, and without warning he smacks his open hand down on the back of her head, making her face slam hard against the concourse floor. There is a spray of blood and when Ja-Alixxe yet again lifts her dazed head, her nose looks broken and her lip seems split.

(“Gods,” the woman next to me says, appalled)

“Sorry about the damage,” the man in overalls says to Ja-Alixxe’s off-screen captor. He is back on his feet now, zipping up his overalls.

“Nothing a bit of bacta won’t fix,” I hear Klink answer nonchalantly.

His lack of concern seems to inspire others to step up.

“Stay there but open your legs, Ja-Alixxe,” a pimpled young skinny man, barely adult, says. He’s ugly and immature, and in any other universe she wouldn’t look twice at him, but compelled by a slave implant she obeys him immediately, spreading her ankles wide so her body shape forms an inverted “Y”.

“Keep still,” he says, and then I see this pathetic youth run up behind her and kick Ja-Alixxe as hard as he can at the defenseless apex offered between her open thighs. He has heavy work boots on and the contact is enough to lurch her torso forwards, but Ja-Alixxe barely groans.

“Ha-ha, I got her right in the cunt!” he roars, laughing so hard what he’s done he collapses to the floor and rolls round in a ball.

As though his actions trigger an avalanche the crowd close on her, and while Ja-Alixxe lies helplessly on the floor she receives the beating of a lifetime. It’s too horrific to watch and like many of the women around me I have to turn away from the screen. No one shows her mercy. It’s not even sexual, just an unleashing of hate. Some of the men have slave girls with them, and forced by their implants the slaves are ordered to participate as well. I’m glad that the many bodies block my view of how badly she’s mauled.

“That will teach her to defy the proud men of the galaxy,” Wagner resumes approvingly. “If we were the weak ones, that would have been enough and we’d have let her die from that whooping, but a swift death would be far too good for Ja-Alixxe…”

Gods no, is there’s more?

And still on the public display of the concourse Ja-Alixxe is revealed now bent over a four-footed piece of furniture resembling a gymnastic pommel. The former Rape Runner is as naked as she was in the earlier scene. Her arms and legs, hanging vertically down, are shackled to the corners of the pedestal. Its short narrow cushioned surface is too small for her, so her pelvis protrudes from the back end, and a breast dangles either side of the central pad, hanging down like udders.

She’s been belted down onto the device at her waist. We view her from behind first, which shows us that her position leaves her genitals and anus presented obscenely and immobile.

Then the camera moves round to show us her front. I’m bracing in anticipation of bruises and dried blood, but as promised by Egregious Klink the bacta has done its work and she appears as though the earlier incident never happened.

A sign hangs from her neck.

“Free Fuck. Help yourself, while she lasts.”

And the galaxy does help itself. With time-lapse footage accelerated to high speed we see man after man relieve himself into her, a fraction of a second for each one. I soon lose count.

“Look behind her,” whispers Red Duchess in quiet horror.

I notice for the first time the sign at the front of the emporium in the background. “Palace of Roses”, it says in the standard galactic script, and there is a logo of a red flower, its thorn-bearing stem encircled by chains.

My stomach knots with fear, and I feel a cold sweat break out on my skin. That’s where I’m going.

My view of the establishment is restricted by Ja-Alixxe’s body and the men raping her, but I can see near-naked girls lounging out front dressed only in the red slave-wraps of Aghara-Penthay. None of them look like the Harken woman.

“Ja-Alixxe had her share of dicks,” Wagner says, interrupting my dreadful reverie. “But there’s still room in the tank, look.”

The montage finishes with a view is of Ja-Alixxe’s face. Her hair has become crusted with some foul substance, and she has dried matter stuck to her cheek and on her forehead. She looks physically exhausted, but her eyes are still alert and she seems remarkably calm. Death is perhaps welcome when the alternative is sexual slavery.

“How much more sperm can that girl hold before the end? Come to the hub on Aghara-Penthay to find out,” Wagner concludes, and the broadcast suddenly cuts to a black screen.

Women look at each other in slack-jawed horror.

“How can they be cruel?” I say, voicing what everyone must be thinking. “Is every male who’s not pacified like that? The dirty one in the overalls - why would he want to stick his thing in her ass?”

White Queen is looking at me shrewdly.

“How much do you know about unpacified males, Lara?” she asks suddenly. “And I don’t mean what we teach you in class. Practical experience. Have you ever been in the presence of one?”

I feel myself beginning to blush like a schoolgirl.

“Of course I’ve seen an unpacified male… On shore leave when I was a fleet engineer… At Rostora 6.”

“But that was in a group with other Gaianesian women, yes? You all went to a bar, or something?”

“Yes,” I say, “that’s exactly right.”

“Then come on dear,” she says, taking hold of my upper arm. “Come to my office. It’s time someone gave you the talk.”

8 - Admissions

“I don’t need a talk,” I say, slightly piqued, when we’re alone in the privacy of an office. “I’m not ignorant, you know.”

I remember most everything from the sex-education classes women receive on Gaianesia. Gara and I were eleven years old, at least in the Republic standard reckoning.

By then I’d had my first bleeding, and the full breasts that make my gender so utterly undeniable today had already begun starting to swell and they’d become tender. As always Gara had transitioned with me, becoming a woman two days after I did. We were fertile.

The mechanics of how I might become pregnant I also already knew – insemination of selected sperm being the method practiced on Gaianesia, or for most of the galaxy, ejaculation by an unpacified male inserting his penis into the vagina.

We Gaianesians are an enlightened culture, and schoolgirls laughed with horror that lesser women might want to endure physical contact with a male, when it was to us so obviously a disgusting and unclean process.

Our teacher Dolorae was fighting a losing battle as she tried to explain the facts of life for so much of the galaxy.

“We females are able to look upon someone’s body and find them desirable, so much so that there may come times you may wish to become physically intimate with another woman,” Dolorae said. “Some of you may be feeling this urges already, and there is nothing shameful in them. It is normal. I discuss them today because you need to understand the differing magnitude of sex drive between the genders. For us women, while our feelings may seem intense, particularly early into your maturity, for adult females sexual contact is something we can live without.”

“It is important if you are ever to mix with offworlders that you girls understand that this is not the case with the brains of unpacified males.”

“The hormones in a male’s bloodstream give him a desperate hunger to mate. It is a hunger so intense he cannot control it. Male orgasm relieves them of this hunger for short periods, but for the rest of the time whenever they see a desirable female, all they can think about is wanting to mate with her, and how they might remove any obstacles in their way from doing so. They will betray their friends, their morals, their principals, everything… just to satisfy their need to mate.”

Dolorae looked at a sea of skeptical young faces and tried a different approach.

“You don’t believe me? Think of the stim addicts begging on the streets. Their civility is erased by craving for the drug. It’s like that with unpacified males, and sex.”

This seemed more plausible.

“But in that case, it’s terrible for them!” said Onoona Arora in a shocked voice, putting her hand to her mouth. “How do they even function in daily life?”

“It is difficult for them, yes, and they struggle, Onoona,” agreed Dolorae. “That’s why they are to be pitied, because they can’t focus on a normal life because of the urges they feel without the pacification, and it makes them stupid. Studies show that males on Gaianesia are happier, more intelligent and live longer lives than their counterparts in the rest of the galaxy. The program begun by Listu Adorin was for their benefit as well as ours.”

Next to me Gara had raised her hand.

“In that case why don’t planets in the rest of the galaxy implement the programs?”

I still remember the guarded expression that flickered across Dolorae’s face before she answered my sister.

“The other worlds aren’t as enlightened as ours. They consider pacification an act of repression. That’s why Gaianesia isn’t allowed to join the Republic – no worlds where there is gender segregation are permitted membership, even though we act in our males’ best interest.”

Once she was sure we’d accepted this she continued:

“Another issue is that once unpacified men develop to maturity, the sensation they receive from touching their penis is said to be extremely pleasurable. They don’t wish to give that up enjoyment. Finally there is the issue that as well as males and females taking physical satisfaction from intimacy with each other, some societies prefer to favor one companion and devote ourselves to them.”

That concept was, as it were, alien to me and I frowned. There was nothing beneficial from being attached to just one individual Gaianesian, neither physical nor emotional, so why should anybody restrict themselves? Gaianesians are not prudish. True, our women are not intimate with males and reproduce is by artificial insemination from the breeding stocks, but that is because the concept is unpleasant, not because it is forbidden or we are inhibited. The only thing prohibited then and now is using The Reflex, but like any taboo, by our teens we’d all experimented with a trusted accomplice.

We consider ourselves to be a sexually liberated society. Gaianesian women are raised to form loose groups of other women they care for, taking mutual comfort and sexual fulfillment from these friends. We dress relatively conservatively in public, but in private we’re frequently naked in the company of our all-female groups, using our tongues and hands on each other, playing with sex toys or practicing mutual masturbation.

Before the day of Dolorae’s memorable sex talk I’d already experimented with Onoona, the two of us playing with each other’s bodies. Since then I’ve usually had several lovers on the go, but I reached my peak during my military service being intimate with all six of my fleet bunk-mates at once.

With women to satisfy my emotional and physical needs, why would I lay with an unpacified male? There’s no reason. And that’s what I tell White Queen.

“But don’t you have any curiosity about feeling a real cock inside you?” White Queen says rather brusquely. “In your pussy? The taste in your mouth? In your ass, even?”

I frown at her.

“I believe in the Gaianesian principles towards…” I bluster indignantly, but White Queen interrupts, waving her hand as though getting rid of a fly.

“I’m sure you’re a model citizen, Lara. But all women occasionally feel certain curiosities. And what you risk enduring on Aghara-Penthay would be more bearable if you at least have a token interest in experiencing those curiosities which relate to experimenting with the opposite sex. So, asking you not as White Queen, or as your gender politics mentor, but as a private conversation between two women, just tell the truth. Do you want to feel a cock inside you?”

I’ve had a dildo in there, but a man… Of course I’ve thought about it. Dreamed, sometimes. I guess it would be warmer – body temperature. It must be softer than the rubber-coated piece of vibrating plastic I used – for how could flesh filled with blood actually be “hard”? Does a penis have a smell? And his big hands? How would they feel?

“I suppose just once it might be fun to find out.” I’m willing to concede.

“And more submissive urges…” she continues immediately. “Have you experimented with The Reflex?”

Now she’s going too far.

“Of course not!” I say, my face flaring, but I remember being sixteen, the bedroom of a school friend, myself utterly inert lying back on her bed with my body turned to liquid desire.

“Hmm,” White Queen says, her disbelieving stare making my embarrassment worse. “You don’t have to be coy with me. Whatever the politicians say about the official stance, our Intelligence operations do need some agents with those tastes. It makes it easier for them to function offworld in environments where men are dominant, if they find some enjoyment in their work.”

“I hope you’re not suggesting Gara was one of those!”

“Hmm,” she says noncommittally.

“She was not!” I insist again. “And you’re hardly in a position to make insinuations about submission when you have that thing on your wrist.”

That strikes home and White Queen angrily picks up a datapad, her expression hard. I recognize my image on the screen – the headshot taken for my service in the space fleet.

“Then let’s move on. You’re twenty three,” she says, closing that discussion coldly. “So you’ve had your first insemination but didn’t carry the child?”

“It was a male.”

There is no need for explanation. An unfortunate outcome of only one in five births on Gaianesia being female is that to sustain a level of population each woman needs to bear at least five children during her lifetime to maintain our numbers of women. We have no use for so many surplus males, though.

Insemination takes place by artificial injection of sperm extracted from one of the ideal men, genetically selected as breeders for their physical prowess and high intelligence. These very few unpacified males are kept locked away in the Breeding Tower, to protect us in case they lose their minds at the sight of our perfection. Each breeder male will inseminate thousands of women in his lifetime. But he will never be permitted to see any of our faces, and we will never have to see his.

Should the female wish to bear a male child the baby will be handed over to one of the drone nurseries to be raised. Young females are also reared by drones, but there remains some family contact.

My own line stubbornly keeps to the one-birth-in-five being female, but when the girls do come we seem genetically disposed to produce twins. My mother was one of twins, and so was grandmother, and great grandmother. Our genes are thus highly prized on Gaianesia for their potential for increasing the female population. It was difficult for Gara to get permission to take a career of dangerous military work when she’s so valuable for her expected fertility.

Gaianesian females are usually expected to go through their first insemination at the age of twenty one and then again at a minimum of three years, but it is possible to delay the first time for reasons such as career progression or military service.

“You seem quite sexually open minded,” White Queen says, skimming rapidly through pages of text in my file. I frown. How has she formed that opinion? What can be in there?

“And yet, Lara, you seem to be hiding the curiosity in your nature from me behind a shield of the politically approved answers you think I want to hear. It’s as though you secretly want official sanction to seek out a man. Hmm.”

I shake my head while she closes the file, as though reaching a conclusion.

“Well, whatever your opinions, it would certainly be helpful for the character you’re trying to portray if you gain some experience with offworlders. You’ll arouse suspicion on Aghara-Penthay if a girl that’s too virginal choses to visit the Hub. So I’m allocating an agent to take you to the bars in the offworld enclave...”

“You want me to go to Subtown?” I protest, interrupting, and then remember White Queen might not know its street slang name, “Subardin?”

“I want you to go to Subardin, Lara. And while I can’t order you, I recommend your engaging in intimacies with one of the males there. Better you’ve been through it rather than being taken completely by surprise.”

I feel obliged to be indignant.

“Being open minded doesn’t mean I’m the kind of girl who visits that place.”

“If you can’t survive an evening in the enclave, Lara, you’re not going to cope with the Slavers.”

I frown at her, but secretly agree she has a point. A complete novice is unlikely to have the sexual confidence to take a tourist trip to Aghara-Penthay. Plus there is the tiny itch I can’t scratch of wondering what it feels like to have a male, an unpacified male, inside me. And here is the chance to experiment, and without fear of reprimand from the state.

But I see a problem. I’m due to leave for Aghara-Penthay in only days and it takes me time to decide on a sexual partner. What if males are similarly cautious?

“I can go to Subardin, but that doesn’t mean I’ll find a male willing to have sex with me,” I say uncertainly.

Up to this point I’ve had the impression White Duchess doesn’t like me very much, but her coolness cracks into a knowing smile at my concern.

“If you think that it’s going to be a problem when you look the way you do Lara, well that just proves why you need to go.”

9 – Experience

Special Agent Hoola Rathanka is a pretty brunette in her late twenties. She has full pouting lips that give a deceptively sulky expression, but actually her personality turns out to be as bubbly as the curls of her long hair. I take an instant liking to her, and within five minutes of her arrival at my modest student apartment I’m already placing enough trust in her to let her riffle through my wardrobe and choose my outfit.

Hoola herself is sporting a knee-length tight black dress, backless and low cut at the bodice.

We are taught in sex education that unpacified men fixate on the female chest, and Hoola’s outfit has been chosen for that reason - to reveal she’s one of the few women of our age with a larger rack than I possess.

Hoola is six inches shorter than I am, making her proportions seem more rounded than mine, but the toned muscles of her limbs revealed by that dress are athletic and slim, like the finest Gaianesian women.

I find her attractive.

Skirts and dresses which reveal so much leg are not common in Gaianesia, except for amongst the younger women who like to mirror the popular fashions of the unenlightened galaxy. I myself usually favor functional jumpsuits that cover the full body, although I do own a few more revealing garments kept for private parties amongst friends.

Hoola takes out the most daring set I possess – a white skirt that only covers part-way down my thighs, and a strapless top like a tube that clings tightly around my breasts. I object immediately – no way to showing this in public – especially not to Subardin, but she insists. Do I want to attract a man or not? As though my intentions couldn’t be more obvious, once I’ve blushingly given in on the outfit she selects me some high-heeled sandals – something also only worn by Gaianesians when they’re trying to emulate the human females.

I’m bustled out the door before I can think better of this whole idea, and feeling disgracefully exposed I leave my apartment with her, the two of us dressed in whorish fashions. While it’s not the first time I’ve worn this combination I’ve never felt ashamed of it before. Tonight it feels like the fellow students we pass in the corridor can read where I’m headed, and I have to fight down my glowing face.

The team at The Fortress are paying for a taxi shuttle to take us on the thirty minute flight out of Solar City, and into the offworlders’ enclave three hundred miles away in Subardin, so luckily we’re spared the humiliation of speaking the destination out loud on public transport. While our citizens are entirely free, and as I’ve said already there are no prohibitions on Gaianesian women fraternizing with the residents of Subardin, everybody knows that normal Gaianesian women only go there for one reason, and precisely the one that’s our purpose tonight - to experiment with unpacified male sexual partners.

It was decided long ago that our society could not risk offworld males running loose around Solar City, so a suitable location for a trading outpost was identified a short distance away. There, in the enclave, the water is not medicated, so males may safely visit to trade without losing any of their urges. During the day the commercial activity between ourselves and the offworlders is conducted. At night attention turns from credits to pleasure, entertaining our visitors with restaurants, holosuites, sporting facilities and bars.

The place had only been functioning as a trading enclave for a few years before the settlement of Subardin began to grow up around it.

We are not barbaric in Gaianesia, so the rulers of our planet had long sought a way to permit women who do not follow our social values to live out their lives, while protecting the rest of the population from pollution with deviant ideas. With the spontaneous birth of Subardin the problem unexpectedly solved itself. Women who sought longer term partnerships with unpacified males, and also those with a taste for sex outside the state-approved insemination programs, began to relocate by choice to the enclave.

The numbers of women in self-exile were soon boosted by those under official punishment. Women found guilty of crimes such as sexual submission were banished to Subardin and not permitted to return to respectable society. Eventually there were so many of these sluts and submissives – one in five-hundred of the planet’s half billion population confined to live among the scattering of launch pads and merchant warehouses - that Subardin became one of Gaianesia’s largest cities and acquired its slang name – “Subtown”.

Today a fortified wall forms a ring around the enclave of Subardin, giving it a ghetto-like atmosphere. Offworlders are permitted to roam within the barriers at will and a few even live there permanently in relationships with Gaianesian females, but they only step outside Subtown under close escort.

Flying on approach for my first visit, I look down curiously at the sprawling apartment blocks below. Inside the walls it’s crowded with buildings, and as we fly over I look down and see that the landing pads peppering the enclave are hosting ships bearing emblems from across the galaxy. I can even make out figures moving, but I don’t get close enough to make out the features any aliens or and of the exiled-ones.

That only begins when we disembark.

On the ground I study each face eagerly. At first everyone I see is female. I’d expected the women who live here to appear weaker than I am, physical inferiority explaining their psychological failings, but most of these seem to be perfectly healthy specimens. I’m a little shocked by the brazenness of these women who are clearly fallen. The presence of someone like me should shame them with their disgrace, but a woman with purple markings nods a greeting to me as though nothing is wrong.

I stare after her back until Hoola tugs my bare upper arm. Remembering my purpose I step after my escort, wobbling on my high heels, but once again I have to stop gawping like some yokel when I see the sex store. Hanging from a hook on view to any passer-by are the first pair of binding restraints I’ve seen in real life. They’re made of a fine material, almost delicate. It’s hard to believe someone couldn’t break them with a flex of a bicep. What’s more disturbing to me is their proportions – the diameter of the wristbands. These are too small for a male wrist, even an unpacified male. These binders are made for women.

Hoola is trying to keep me moving.

“Did you see what they were selling?” I say outraged. “That place should be shut down.”

“We’re nearly there,” is all she replies. “Not far.”

The bar Hoola has chosen is a spacious open-fronted structure with tables and chairs spilling out onto the street, not unlike the entrance to my destination – the Palace of Roses. Music blares out from inside and the lights glare bright with neon.

“This is a typical place to meet men,” Hoola says, and then she pauses as we step under the awnings. “Once we have company it will be less easy to talk freely to each other, and I’m sure it won’t be long before they close in on us. So a last reminder - do what you need to with them except for one thing: whatever happens don’t agree to spend the night on their ship. It’s dangerous.”

I nod even though she doesn’t need to give me the safety talk. Stories are rife of Gaianesian women who venture alone onto the offworlder’s ships, and then have their Reflex used to aid an opportunistic kidnapping. Some return disgraced after a few weeks. The less fortunate are lost forever, perhaps sold on to the Slavers of Aghara-Penthay.

In Subtown a woman needs to take care of her own protection, at least sexually speaking, as the view of the authorities is that any female who ventures there is “asking for it”, and proving crimes such as rape is almost impossible.

But Hoola and I know the risks, and we’re watching out for each other. So although I’m feeling nervous uncertainty like any first-timer, I step boldly forward.

Inside the bar it is busy, and unlike most Gaianesian venues, males outnumber females by about two to one among the clientele. Of course I see no Gaianesian men among the customers. The majority present from both sexes are human, although there’s a smattering of other species including a reptilian creature and giant blue skinned thing who looks as though he could break me with his hands.

I recall that on other worlds it is more often men attracted into space and women the home, so I am not surprised that these alien ship crews are heavily biased towards the masculine. What makes me stop in my tracks is the way these male visitors stop to look at me.

When we were little girls, Gara and I had a pet, a cute, furry species of mammal called a skrint. Intelligent, playful creatures, they originated as wild predators until Gaianesians began to domesticate them thousands of years ago. Nowadays there’s almost no trace of their hunting past in them, until the moment you put down their bowl of meat. Then you’d better not get in the way. Gara once tried to snatch away the food of our pet, no more than childish teasing, but the normally docile animal gave her such a vicious bite on the arm that Gara was left with a scar, and we had to convince our mother considered not to put the skrint to sleep.

I relate this memory because it’s the only way I can describe the way the men in the bar look at me… exactly the way the skrint would look at its meal. Of course I’ve heard often about masculine sex drive, and that this urge is the way most of the universe reproduces, but experiencing the reality for the first time, I feel a swell of sympathy for these creatures hypnotized by their longing. Gods, what we’re taught is exactly right. This is how they are – males - slave to their desperate compulsion to mate with me. For some of them it’s so overwhelming their jaws hang open as though they’re about to drool.

Almost every last man has his eyes on me, scanning up and down the curves of my body. The poor things are probably too drugged to realize what they’re doing, but I can’t feel sympathy when they’re making me so self-conscious. Stop staring, guys! They’re just my breasts, just my hips. I’ve never given my organs much thought before, but these male eyes are locking on my chest as though my tits define me.

It wouldn’t be so bad if this treatment was shared evenly among the females, but adding to my discomfort is the fact that far more men are focusing on me than any of the other females present. Yes, I have often been told I’m exceptionally beautiful, and Gara and I both inherited our mother’s long legs and full protruding front. But Hoola is next to me, and even better endowed than I am. So what is it about me in particular that seems to cast a spell on these men?

I follow Hoola forward, instinct keeping me close to her. Although the men all continue to watch, no one approaches us while we buy drinks. According to my briefing the men were expected to instigate the courting. Perhaps the information was incorrect.

The bar is meant for a place for social meeting and interaction, but the groups seem to be keeping largely to themselves – ship crews each spreading to fill one of the circular tables. There’s nowhere to sit with them unless strangers make a place for us.

The other Gaianesian women here are drinking separately, standing in small gaggles, although I can hear them giggling loudly and the more brazen are glancing towards the humans with open speculation. Perhaps we should ask our own species about courtship behavior.

A woman crossing the floor jostles me, a human female in the brown overalls of a ship crew. I look after her and instead of apologizing she scowls at me before making her way to her busy table. I begin to think our plan will not be successful and the males will only watch, and not request to mate with me.

“What now?” I ask Hoola anxiously, having to talk loudly over the music.

“We wait for someone to make a move,” she shouts back.

“But no one wants to talk to us,” I worry.

“I’m sure it won’t be long. We’ve only been here a couple of minutes.”

She has more confidence than I do about our attractiveness as sexual partners, but it turns out she’s right, for she’s barely finished this exchange when the first contender – a giant blue alien, looms over us.

“Are you ladies looking for something unusual?” he asks. “His voice is raspy, as though he has laryngitis. “My penis is eighteen inches long and three inches thick.”

Given we have no other takers I’m already pondering whether my vagina could tolerate penetration by something of that girth, but Hoola says firmly “I don’t think so”. And the blue alien seems to expect this rejection, for he is already moving away towards a circle of Gaianesian women who seem half hysterical with laughter that he’s chosen them to approach.

Uncertainly I watch after him, hoping Hoola hasn’t just blown our only chance. But I’ve been worrying for no reason.

“What about those guys?” I ask her, when I see two men in dark green flight overalls are clearly beckoning me.

She turns to look. One of them is a lean fellow in his thirties. He’s human, with an olive skin and jet black hair that suggests ancestry from a world with a warm climate. He’s handsome, but has perhaps overly so. He’s taken too much care with his appearance – the stubble on his face is trimmed to neat razor lines and his elaborately styled hair suggest narcissistic self-obsession.

Olive skin’s companion seems only partially human, a giant muscular black skinned male nearly seven feet tall with eyes formed of vertical reflective slits, more like those of a night-hunting mammal. This one watches me with the same intense stare of the other predators.

Either would make a suitable sexual partner for our requirements, and Hoola agrees.

“They’re satisfactory specimens, for males,” she says approvingly. “Why not?”

The men are sitting on chairs around a circular table, the surface of which is already covered with empty glasses. There are only two free chairs – one in a small gap between the two men and the other at the giant’s side. I would have preferred the more open of the two, but Hoola makes for it quickly, leaving me only the place between them. It’s tight, and once I’m in position their broad shoulders and upper arms press against me.

“Well hello, beautiful,” the smaller, groomed one says to me as soon as I’m sat down. “Aren’t you something special?”

I’m irritated they’re ignoring my friend yet again so I make a point of gesturing to her as I primly introduce, “I’m Lara, and this is Hoola.”

“Lara,” croons the groomed one, with barely a glance at my companion. “A beautiful name for a beautiful woman. My name is Gork Iren. I’m the flight officer, second in command on the merchant freighter Pride of Torconi. My friend here,” (and he indicates the dark giant) “is engineering officer Ker Armando.”

“Pleased to meet you.” I say primly.

“Hey guys,” greets Hoola with a wave from the fringes.

“Can we buy you two beautiful ladies a drink?” the olive-skinned Gork asks me. He has to lean in close to be heard over the music, and his breath smells strange – not unpleasant, just different.

“Why would you want to do that?” I reply.

I genuinely don’t understand. Gaianesian women don’t buy alcohol for each other. And the drones socialize by themselves, doing whatever drones do when they’re not working.

“You’re our guests,” Gork explains with an amused smile. “When someone is as beautiful as you are, you don’t need credits.”

Really? For something that took me no effort and is purely down to my genetics, we get given gifts? I look to Hoola for a cue, and she seems to be expecting this offer, so I agree.

Gork gets up and makes for the bar. In the interval we try to hold a conversation with the giant alien, who’s much quieter than his friend. I’ve already discovered Hoola can disarm anyone though, and before long she’s found out that Pride of Torconi has shipped technical equipment to Gaianesia. It has a crew of fifteen – thirteen male and two female. Gork, Ker and the two women are off duty this evening, but he says the two women don’t like coming to the bars in the enclave and have stayed on board.

“Why not?” I ask.

“They think this place is a meat market,” he states firmly.

I shake my head. It seems unlikely that a bar that’s good enough for Gaianesian women might be deemed unsuitable by offworld females. It’s more likely their women feel inferior in our presence. But the men wouldn’t understand that.

Gork returns with four tumblers of a bright blue liquid. He carefully selects the two he places in front of Hoola and I.

“Delsich Fire Spirit” he informs us. “Be careful. It’s strong.”

I’ve never heard of it before and we both sip cautiously. It does taste very alcoholic, but no worse than some of the distilled liquors I’m familiar with from Gaianesia. The drink produces a very fiery burn at the back of my throat though.

“Best to knock it back in one go before the taste builds up, like this,” Gork tells us, demonstrating with his tumbler. I’m willing to be led by their cultural knowledge, and copy him.

Alcohol hits me like a wall, but has the benefit of quickly rendering me relaxed and uninhibited. Conversation begins to flow more freely. The two men turn out to be very interested in us, and we’ve had little contact with offworlders so we’re as curious about them.

I feel courageous enough to ask the men what it’s like being powerless under the control of their sex drives, but they claim they wouldn’t want it any other way. Tragic. Deluded creatures, but not seemingly violently ones, and I judge it’s safe to risk physical contact. I stroke Ker’s hair sympathetically, telling him he’s so lost that they don’t even understand how much happier he could be.

Gork fetches another round of fire spirit, and then another. Always Gork, and although we offer, we don’t ever pay for anything. Returning to the table he’s always careful distributing the tumblers – “this one is yours, Lara.”

Gradually the conversation becomes intimate. I find myself answering questions about whether I’ve been with an unpacified man before (answer – of course not). Have I been with other women? Of course. Do we enjoy penetrating each other with dildos and artificial aids? Yes – we do. Do many Gaianesian women experiment with restraint or submission? No, only those deviants who deserve exile here. And is that why I’ve come to Subardin? No! Certainly not.

By now I’m saying much more than I’d intended at the start of the night, but given the purpose of our mission, it’s not a bad thing that I’m drunk enough to not feel embarrassment. If the men don’t initiate a sexual encounter soon I’ll have to take charge, so it’s easiest to keep the conversation on physical pleasure.

The fire spirit doesn’t just effect my throat, but gives me an intense warm glow through my body. Heat particularly pools at my most intimate place, and at one point when I re-cross my bare legs in my short skirt I realize I’ve become aroused and my nipples are tingling. When did that happen? I’m not just aroused. I’m so wet between my legs even the blue alien could penetrate me.

Perhaps sensing my growing receptiveness, our chosen males start putting their hands on me. The giant meaty hand of the dark man is one the pale bare skin of one of my exposed thighs, and his smaller but still masculine companion runs his fingers along my other leg. The points of contact send stronger electric jolts to the receptive center of my sex, making me want to squirm.

Further round the table. Ker’s other hand has worked its way right between Hoola’s legs. She seems to be much more intoxicated than I am, so much that she is barely staying upright in her chair.

I’m not sure what she and Ker have been talking about until she declares, loudly and abruptly enough for the nearby tables to hear, “We’re here on a mission so Lara can have sex with a man.”

It’s lucky she slurs her words so badly she’s difficult to understand but a few faces nearby smile all the same. Initially I’m embarrassed by her outburst, but then I remember what other reason brings Gaianesian women to Subardin? It’s not as if I’ll ever see any of these women again anyway, and besides, I am getting so turned on.

“Secret mission,” repeats Hoola. “Shhh. Very secret mission.”

The smaller, groomed man, Gork, touches my breast. He cups the underside of my heavy flesh and tests the weight as though he’s choosing a large piece of fruit. Then he glides his hand over the rounded surface, smooth except where my erect nipple protrudes visibly against the thin fabric of my top. I watch all this take place with mild bemusement. I like having partners play with my breasts and I don’t mind, although I’d have preferred he asked my permission first. What’s different with my first man is the way he squeezes more roughly than is ideal – something I’m sure he wouldn’t do if he knew how it feels for a woman.

“Really Lara, you have the most magnificent pair of boobs I’ve ever touched,” he tells me, and I shrug acceptance at the compliment.

I’m about to explain its no more than genes, but without warning Hoola slumps forward as though she’s fallen asleep, and just in time before her head whacks the table she sits back upright with a jerk.

“I think we’d better get the ladies out of here before we attract attention,” Ker speaks across me to Gork.

The men get up, and we also try to rise. Suddenly Hoola can barely stand, and Ker has to support her by pinning her elbows against her using his strong arms. I’m in a better state than she is, but I wobble precariously on my high heels and I’m grateful when Gork’s arm goes possessively around my back. He half-carries me from the bar, out into the cool starry night.

“Perhaps you’d like us to take you to our ship and give you a tour?” Gork asks as we’re maneuvered further from the noise of the bar into the narrow twisting street.

A tour would be good, but I’m not so drunk as to have forgotten my mission, though. I’ve come here for a reason, a reason that makes my personal craving for penetration even more urgent. I only want to see their ship if the men maintain interest in me. In only a slight slur I confidently state, “I’ll only see the ship if you’re willing to have sex with me there.”

I’m not sure why the two men find this so funny, but they both laugh out loud.

“I think we’ll be okay with that,” Gork reassures me.

With that settled I look around. There aren’t many people around on the street now. It’s not dark though, with Gaianesia’s green-tinted moon large enough to provide illumination even on cloudy nights. The span of stars across the Dorichi galaxy looks beautiful, but looking up at them makes me dizzy and I see an afterimage when I move my head.

My ankle gives way and I stagger again, but Gork’s arm keeps me on my feet. Walking shouldn’t be this hard. I must be wasted. Night air usually helps clear my head but this time the alcohol seems to affect me even more strongly outside. I comment on this.

“The fire spirit…” I murmur, my voice sounding slurred and drowsy. “It tasted strong, but I shouldn’t be this intoxicated.”

“That will be the drugs I added when I was at the bar,” is Gork’s casual answer. “I put a powerful aphrodisiac in yours, which both makes you compliant and also makes you very horny. And for your friend – she got something to help her sleep so she won’t disturb us while the three of us have fun.”

“Well that’s not very nice of you,” Hoola slurs in a childish, petulant voice. “What if I want sex too? At the very least you should have asked permission.”

I agree. I’m a bit annoyed as well, and I swipe weakly at Gork, batting him with my limp hand. But having gone through this much already when experiencing a man is what I’d wanted anyway, it would be harming myself to have to start over. Besides, they’re kind-of doing me a favor when my current level of chemically induced arousal leaves me in a much better state than not being turned on. And oh, am I turned on. Between my legs I’m aching to be touched. The craving need of my body dominates me so much that I can think of little else. With so much of my attention on my erogenous zones the world keeps turning unreal and disconnected from me, and I find myself dipping in and out of awareness.

At one point Gork is conversing with Ker, saying, “It’s just like I told you. Don’t worry about the female dominance thing here on Gaianesia. I’ve never been anywhere else in the galaxy it’s so easy to get laid… at least laid for free. All these curious neglected females naively trust in their own superiority, and they don’t think for a moment they might be exploited. Plus the genetic control of their breeding means they’re all gorgeous. Mind you, Lara here is exceptional even by the standards of this world. I couldn’t believe our luck when a creature like her walked into the bar.”

I frown petulantly. I’m not the only beautiful woman here. They mustn’t keep forgetting Hoola. I try to protest but only manage a moan that sounds sensual even to my ears, the vibration of my vocal chords triggers a tremor between my legs and for a while I’m lost again in my own body.

Next thing I know is the moment when I notice I’m walking oddly, in short restricted steps.

“Wait, something’s wrong,” I say to Gork, and we stop.

Looking down I see what the problem is – my panties have ended up just above my knees, so they’re stretching when I move my long legs. I’m not sure how they got there, because the simple white thong was tight on me, and couldn’t have possibly come down on its own.

“Oh!” I say, confused.

I hear other voices, people laughing and joking. The crew of another ship are coming towards us, relaxing offworlders on their way home from another bar no doubt. The crew in uniforms are all human – four men and one women. They have three Gaianesian girls with them. Each guy has his arm around one of the women. All eight in their party choose me to stare at. The men have curiosity in their expressions and the same look of hunger I seem to provoke. The women see me – a Gaianesian with her thong around her knees – and their faces show contempt, so I leer at them. What’s their problem? It could happen to anybody.

I decide it would be easier with no panties than walking like this, so I abandon them on the dusty street. I’m very wet between my legs and the sensation of air freely moving under my high skirt is pleasant.

Time progresses in jerky moments. Jump to us in the hanger looking up at the Pride of Torconi’s hull. Like most freighters it’s a boxy thing, built to maximize space, but there is pride in the men’s voices. I make appreciative noises. Hoola is having to be carried in Ker’s vast arms, and seems to be asleep.

A crew member stands watch at the ship’s gangplank.

“Who are these?” the guard asks the men with a knowing grin.

“Locals…” replies Gork.

The guard says he can’t let us on board without the captain’s say so, but there is an exchange of credits and assisted by our escorts we’re inside the vessel.

“Don’t let anyone catch you with them or we’re all in trouble,” the guard warns.

“We’ll have them in a taxi shuttle before morning,” Gork reassures him. “This isn’t going to take long. We only want to nail the hot one.”

I don’t remember if we ever did get shown around, but next thing I’m aware of is being in a large, opulently furnished cabin with a huge satin bed, a sunken bath nearly the size of a small swimming pool, and leather covered sofas.

Hoola is dumped face first onto one of these, limp as a sack, and on impact she remains so still she must already be out for the count. Without even checking she’s okay the men begin to undress me.

I’m perfectly capable of removing my own clothes, but they want to do it for me, and although I’m wildly aroused I’m not so wasted as to enjoy the way these two strip me. There’s a forceful insistence to their actions – one of the men always kissing me and holding my arms to prevent me interfering, while the other tugs at my clothing.

But my sedated willpower reminds me yet again the reason I’m here is to feel a male cock making love to me, which necessarily requires enough exposure of my body to enable penetration, so I remain consensual throughout. Nonetheless, what little of the sensible Lara remains warns me that if I was to change my mind, the atmosphere would turn ugly and I’m not sure they’d accept “no” for an answer. In a sense, I’m in danger.

Ker turns my head to kiss me firmly on the lips as my skirt comes down and I’m left naked below the waist. This new experience of the sandpaper rubbing against my mouth is erotic for its novelty. Gaianesian pacified males do not develop facial hair and all my previous sexual partners have been women, so I’ve never felt rough skin like this against mine before.

At one point Ker pulls me too him, and I feel the most important thing for the first time. Like a solid rod between his legs. So that’s it – a real male erection. The ultimate expression of men’s uncontrollable desire to mate, and the source of so much conflict and suffering across the galaxy.

“Oh,” I say.

I know the theory – a male penis fills with blood and becomes rigid - but at my first experience of the actual organ I find it much firmer than I’d expected. Up to this moment I’ve believed that if I suffer an attempted rape when I go to Aghara-Penthay, someone wouldn’t be able to penetrate me against my will with something as insignificant as a prick. We’re taught that a woman has to be mentally weak to succumb to rape. But no. Overpower me and a male could force one of those things inside me with no problems, and I’d be defeated just like so many women through history have succumbed to the violation of their bodies. I’m glad my drug addled brain and the attention of my escorts means I’m unable to contemplate the significance of this discovery.

My top is tight, and I have to raise my arms to help Ker pull it over my head. The under-layer is built into it and comes away with the same movement, suddenly spilling my breasts free. Males do not have tits of course, and that means female chests such as mine are fascinating to them. Gork doesn’t even wait until I’m completely undressed before groping me, squeezing me roughly and pulling at my nipples so hard the handling becomes uncomfortable.

“Oh, look at these hooters,” he says to Ker, lifting their weight out in his hands to show his friend. “Have you ever seen anything so fine?”

At this point my drugged haze clears enough to become aware that I am nude, but the men are still clothed. Granted Gork is already tugging down the zipper of his flight suit, and I gather he intends to at least partially strip as well. But the unease I’d begun to feel earlier intensifies if I consider that I, who as a proud Gaianesian should be the dominant one, am put in a subservient state of being the only one in the cabin naked.

It’s a relief to let the dream state claims me once more, so I let it claim me and next thing I know I’m stood passionately kissing Ker, the larger of the two me. I am tall compared to human women, but even so the height difference between us is so great his colossal erection presses against my abdomen.

I remain wetter than I’ve been in my life, and any time my various concerns threatens to crystalize into coherent resistance the drug dispels them like scattering startled birds. All the same I have enough self-awareness left to know I should be humiliated by what Ker demands next:

“If you want me to fuck you, let me smell your pussy.”

“What?”

“I think there’s nothing sexier than the scent of female. So please… get on your hands and knees on the bed, and from behind let me press my nose into your pussy and breathe in the smell.”

My face flares with embarrassed indignation. No, I really don’t like the sound of him smelling my pussy. But inexperience makes me uncertain whether this request is perfectly normal in heterosexual encounters, and unable to come up with an objection I find myself giving in, on all-fours with my bare rump thrust out behind me and feeling very exposed as I sense him approach my genitals. Then the hard ridge of his nose is pressing against my clitoris, and there’s the sense of air flowing over my vulva as he inhales the fragrance of my wetness.

Although it’s shameful being naked in a position like a beast waiting to be mounted, the sensation of Ker’s nose making gentle movements against my aroused trigger is intensely pleasurable. The part of me that wishes to flee once more evaporates and when Ker breaks contact to pull down the zipper of his suit I groan with longing.

“That’s the greatest smell in the universe,” Ker murmurs to Gork.

Meanwhile Gork has stripped himself. His body is wiry and lean, the muscles and sinews as defined as though he’s a medical school teaching model. The black hair sprouting on his body is strange to me – the pacification measures mean our own males never develop such growth, and I reach out to him to run my fingers through the thick rug on his chest.

He is very aroused. His penis protrudes horizontally from his body, sprouting from another nest of the midnight black hair. Gork is circumcised, and the head of him with its vertical slit is a darker color than the rest of the organ. The shaft is not perfectly round like a rolling pin, but ridged and deeply contoured with veins.

It’s intriguing to me and I can’t imagine what it must feel like to possess one. Curious overriding my other concerns, I wrap my hand round it, but after only an instant where I feel the warm firmness he gasps and draws back out of reach as though I’ve stung him.

“I’m sorry,” I say, embarrassed, not sure what I’ve done wrong.

“No, it was nice. It’s just if you keep hold, you’ll make me climax before I’m inside you,” he explains.

“Oh,” I blush. I didn’t know that.

Now the dark giant, Ker, has also extracted his cock. There is no further removal of clothing – he merely frees his organ. Ker’s penis, like the rest of him, is vast. Larger than any dildo I’ve ever had inside me. I’m thankful I’m so well lubricated in preparation, but even so it’s going to be a stretch.

I can see straight away he’s non-human, for there’s something additional on his penis – short spur-like ridges running down the length, as though someone decorated it with a series of thick lines. Ker follows the line of my gaze and understands my questioning.

“In males of my species the penis is barbed,” he says. “The barbs usually remain flat against the shaft, but reflexively extend during mating. So do not try to suddenly withdraw once I’ve penetrated you, or it will tear your inside. If you want me to stop fucking you, must warn me first, and I’ll take it out.”

He could tear me inside? Gods… I’ve never heard of this before and I become properly afraid. I shrink back from him as an adrenaline rush momentarily clears the clouds of the drug for a moment. I feel I have enough willpower to leave now, but Ker gently insists, “It won’t hurt. Not unless you fight. Just lie on your side on the bed,” and next thing I know there I am with him facing me, also lying on his side only inches away. His cock has already found its way to the apex of my legs, the hard tip pressing against my wet vulva. With the virgin’s anxiety before her first time I look up shyly, and he sees my fear and kisses me reassuringly on the lips with that scratchy mouth.

Behind me Gork also mounts the bed, so I’m sandwiched between the two men. Over my increasing heartrate I try to remind myself that all is going to plan. Ker will take me, just as I wanted a man to, then his friend will follow, and I’ll have the knowledge of two males to steady my resolve before I face Aghara-Penthay.

Women enjoy long periods of foreplay with their partners. But all I find happening on my first time with an unpacified male is that after briefly caressing my nipples (which sends a warm rush of stimulation through me), Ker lifts my thigh to expose my sex so he can press the head of himself against my nether lips. Then with a firm thrust from his pelvis he spears deep inside my body. I cry out loudly as I’m penetrated. Gods, this man is huge. I feel distended with him – he’s far larger than any artificial lovemaking aids I’ve used. It’s overwhelming. If I weren’t stretched enough there is even more pressure against my inner walls as the barbs press into the delicate tissue of my vagina. The knowledge I’m at genuine risk of harm from these additions adds an element of fear I’ve never felt before during a sexual experience, but it also feels so good it’s mind-blowing.

Ker begins to draw gradually backwards and he fucks me with steady rhythmic thrusts of his pelvis. His huge girth means the stimulation is at the upper range of my tolerance, and I understand why women moan whorishly in pornographic movies. I’m emitting the same noises myself each time he rams forward, burying himself so deep into me that his balls press against my apex.

During the brief instances when I can think coherently, I try to analyze whether what’s happening to me is pleasurable. If I can confirm a taste for men, I have less to fear encountering males on my short visit to the Slaver’s world. But although I’m undeniably aroused by Gork and Ker’s touching, by the aphrodisiac and by my own natural desire, and yes, although I’m wet and receptive, I’m still not sure heterosexual intercourse is for me. So far my mission to Subardin isn’t helping me anticipate being on a whole hub full of randy males.

Back in the present I’ve been expecting Gork to wait his turn with me, so I’m surprised when while Ker is still fucking me Gork closes in to press his nude body against my bare back. Sandwiched between the two men I feel him steer the stiff rod of his cock into the cleft between my buttocks. I tense completely from instinct to repel him, but he slides easily between my cheeks as though he’s oiled himself.

With one hand he shifts his cock along me, probing, and I feel an intense rush of fear as I realize what he intends to do.

Hold on, I didn’t agree to this! I certainly hadn’t set out this evening intending to let someone penetrate my ass as well as my pussy. Okay, once in a secret shameful moment with a girlfriend anal sex was discussed, and I even let her put a dildo in there to see what it felt like. But I found nothing but discomfort. It’s not for me.

I stiffen, automatically trying to push myself away the cock already inside me, but that only presses my back more firmly against Gork. “No!” I say.

Ker sees that I’m beginning to resist, so he tries to stroke my head soothingly before I injure my insides on his barbs. But while head-stroking might be comforting to a human woman, it’s certainly the wrong way for a male to calm a Gaianesian female.

“Don’t touch my hair,” I snap in a far more frightened voice.

He moves his hand from me immediately. By then the threat of The Reflex has distracted me for long enough that his friend is already penetrating into my backside. I’m not wet at my rear, and despite the oil coating him there’s a sharp piercing pain as he breaks though the ring of muscle, and I cry out. The initial flaring discomfort recedes immediately though, and once he’s deep enough inside me I find I can bear it as the two men screw me at the same time – one withdrawing as the other one thrusts forwards, in a steady rhythm.

Having two of them take me at the same time seems to double the stimulation from my pelvis, and for a while I lose any will to resist and much awareness of myself, not even knowing if I’m speaking, crying out or silent. Hands seem like they’re all over me, with my breasts their favorite place to grope. The mauling my tits receive is vigorous - on the verge of being too rough, but the squeezing tugging on my nipples is pleasurable all the same.

By the time I regain any self-possession the ordeal is almost over, and it’s too late for me to object. It is Gork who climaxes first. He emits an animal moan of lust and pulls me hard against him so my buttocks squash against his pelvis. His cock is buried to its deepest in my bowel, and I cry out again as he stiffens and holds me tightly in place. This seems to push Ker over the edge. He rams himself forward as well, and I feel the barbs extend as he grips to shoot his seed as far into me as he can.

And that’s it. I’ve had sex with men, vaginally and anally. With it over all three of us wait limp for a few moments. I wasn’t aware of exerting myself but I discover I’m panting as though I’ve run a race and I seem to be covered in sweat. The two men also seem to be exhausted. Both of their cocks are still inside me, but I feel no sign of the organs beginning to shrink.

“Gods, that was the fuck of a lifetime,” gasps Gork, addressing his friend rather than me.

“Mmm,” agrees Ker with a satisfied bass chuckle.

The giant smiles down to me and leans in to kiss my forehead tenderly when his friend abruptly withdraws from my backside. Strangely it’s more painful than when he entered me, and I shriek loudly enough to disturb Hoola into giving a sleepy groan.

Ker withdraws then, carefully. I actually feel his barbs retract so he doesn’t damage the delicate flesh inside my vagina. Even so the friction against my walls stimulates me so intensely that I moan as whorishly as a human. When he’s gone, leaving a trickle of sticky fluid between my thighs and a sensation of emptiness, I feel as though I’m still stretched open.

I’m the only one who didn’t climax during intercourse, so I’m still intensely aroused. The aphrodisiac has not yet worn off, and trying to reassert my authority in this encounter I remind myself there’s no shame in a proud Gaianesian woman empowered with understanding of her own body.

That’s why the first thing I do when they’re no longer within me is to roll onto my front, reach my hand between my legs and I masturbate. My rump, up in the air to allow my hand access to my genitals, makes rhythmic circular movements which probably look obscene to the two men. Touching my pussy feels different to me – the mix of Gork’s fluids with my own juices making them viscous and tackier than normal.

“Gods, look at her go,” I hear Gork say from behind me in a tone almost like awe. Yes, I think with satisfaction. Look at me. Admire my feminine strength.

The responses of my body are more familiar now, despite the aphrodisiac drugs and alcohol. Ignoring the insignificant males I bring myself to orgasm rapidly and it’s an explosive one, where I’m unable to keep down my cries of pleasure.

The adrenaline rush during sex must have been keeping me alert, for almost as soon as I’ve climaxed all sense of presence leaves me yet again, and I’m uncertain whether events are real or dream. I see an image of Hoola nude on the bed beside me, lying on her back screwing Gork with almost desperate passion. I also have a phantom memory of lying face down on the bed lifting my ass up in the air while Ker’s hand explores the naked curves of my rump, and hearing the two men converse in low voices. Ker says to Gork, “Do you know how many credits this one would be worth if we could get her to the market?” and Gork replies, “No, she’s been nice to us, and besides, we don’t finishing loading the ship for two days. There will be a search for them by morning if they really are government operatives. We’d never make it off-world.”

I’m no more certain that the memory of that is any more truthful than the one of the two men pulling me back into my clothes, and then carrying my limp form between them out to a waiting taxi shuttle. But the last part at least must have happened that way, for even though I have no sure recollection of dressing myself or of leaving the Pride of Torconi I did leave Subardin somehow. My mission to gain male experience successfully is completed, but at the cost of me feeling nothing like the victor.

10 – Gone

I have the mother of all headaches, and I groan. The sunlight, shining through a slotted blind, pierces my skull like a splinter. I groan again.

My surroundings are unfamiliar, but the architecture is reassuringly Gaianesian and I quickly work-out this must be Hoola’s apartment. Her naked body is entwined with me under the crisp white sheets.

Hoola stirs when I groan, and she emits a sound that suggests she’s suffering even more than I am. Then she pushes herself upright, the sheet sliding away to reveal her nudity. The special agent climbs gingerly out of bed; shuffles uncertainly towards the bathroom and I hear her vomit copiously.

I shift position on the mattress, discovering new sensations which had been masked by the intensity of the headache. My breasts ache from being groped too long and too firmly. My anus and pussy feel as sore as if I have internal friction burns.

Gradually the memories come. The bar; Gork; Ker; my drugged awareness; being naked on their ship; my discomfort about what was happening to me; but Gork penetrating my pussy and Ker my backside anyway; and then uncertain fragments until Hoola’s apartment.

“I have painkillers,” Hoola tells me reemerging from the bathroom. I try to smile gratefully, but even that hurts.

First things first - dealing with the headache is more important that dealing emotionally with last night. But when I sit up I’m overcome with dizziness. Hoola has to lend me an arm before I’m stable enough to keep on my feet.

For a society where males are pacified and feel no sexual desire for women, Gaianesia is surprisingly prudish about nudity in public places. But in private, among female friends, it’s a different matter. So I’m not surprised when Hoola walks away through a doorway without bothering to dress. Around those I trust, I too find it relaxing to be unclothed, and it’s not uncommon I arrive at a friend’s home and immediately strip.

But this morning, for some reason I’m feeling unusually self-conscious, and in need of the protection of having my body covered. So I borrow a robe of a rich silken material, and tie it around myself before following Hoola through to her apartment’s small kitchenette. There she hands out pills and brews the java that will also restore my spiritual balance.

Our medical science is a source of great pride on Gaianesia, and it takes these new drugs only five minutes to make us both feel miraculously back to normal. During this time we sit in silence on the cream sofa, reflecting on the night before.

My period is due and I can feel the first twinges of cramp, and I try to convince myself that’s the reason I’m feeling irritable. But I know that’s a lie, and the true source of my frustration is the two men and what they did to me.

“They didn’t have to drug us,” I complain when I eventually feel up to talking. “We were going to have sex with them anyway.”

Hoola looks at me with a wise expression.

“Is that why you’re looking so moody? You’re pissed that they tricked us so easily?”

I frown at being read transparent.

“Hold on to that emotion. It might help you, in a way Lara. Whatever happens to you on Aghara-Penthay you’re going to feel exploited afterwards, and this lesser experience will toughen you for what’s ahead.”

“It’s not the sex. I want to know why they had to drug us. Because their male urges made them that selfish? They were so desperate for us not to change our minds that they didn’t care if they made us unwell? And are all unpacified men like that, or where those two particularly bad?”

I know that in principle I have a body which is desirable to the unpacified. My face is considered exceptional even by other women, my legs are long, and my breasts are ripe and full. But it’s just a body when all said and done. I can’t understand why a male would make someone sick, just to make certain he could relieve his urges.

“It’s not just about sex drive. There’s a power thing to factor in,” Hoola answers. “Males are compelled to conquer. They liked that the drugs gave them some power over us.”

Images flash through my head. Walking through the dark street and realizing my panties were around my knees. Did I really do that? My growing discomfort with being with them, but then finding myself lying naked on the bed anyway. The barbs from Ker’s penis scraping inside me. The smaller man penetrating my anus. And every single time I tried to resist my willpower dissolving.

“They should be reported,” I state, clutching the robe to me.

Hoola shakes her head.

“No one would listen. We went freely to Subardin. We drank the drinks they bought us. The authorities will say we were asking for it. They’d be more likely to sanction us than the men. The guys would only have to claim we behaved submissively, and we could get in real trouble. Anyhow, you were on a mission to get laid. It’s not like they did anything you didn’t want, did they?”

She looks at me shrewdly.

“What did they do while I was out of it, Lara? I don’t remember much until waking up with the smaller guy screwing me, and that was just before we left.”

(A memory of Gork’s iron hard penis moving between my buttocks, and me saying “No!” but then him painfully entering me anyway.)

“All they did was make love to me,” I lie, “the bigger one first and then his friend. Then I passed out.”

But my face is flaring with the shameful recollections, and it feels like it must be obvious I’m hiding something. I’m too embarrassed to tell Hoola that Gork was able to take me in the ass though. Gaianesian women are supposed to be strong, and she might think I have submissive tendencies if I admit that all it took was a pill slipped into my drink, and I gave them everything they wanted.

Hoola looks at me shrewdly, but when she speaks her tone is gentle.

“It’s okay. Most of the galaxy isn’t like Gaianesia, Lara. Men are usually the predators and women the prey. You’re now aware of the truth that away from here you’re vulnerable, and being more wary will stand you in good stead on the Slavers’ Hub. So don’t beat yourself up about whether the men bested you last night. It doesn’t matter.”

But it matters to me. I’m supposed to be the strong one, the aggressor. There is another flashback of the two flight crew penetrating me, and when it’s gone I can still feel where their hands were on my body and feel the soreness in my anus. And it wasn’t just Gork and Ker. So many men in the bar looking at me with the same hungry eyes.

I shake my head trying to dispel the thoughts. My new knowledge is not helping me prepare to visit Aghara-Penthay. The dread I was feeling at the prospect of that place is tipping towards terror.

“I’m gonna use your shower,” I say with a weary sigh. “I feel unclean.”

“Help yourself,” Hoola says in a kindly voice. “I’ll watch the news on the video screen.”

I get the shower running, but I haven’t even stepped into the stream of steaming water before Hoola runs into the bathroom after me. The tender expression she wore only a moment earlier now looks on the brink of tears.

“You’d need to see this broadcast, Lara,” she says in a voice breaking with emotion. “There’s news from Aghara-Penthay. Ja-Alixxe is dead.”

I stop the water and the bathroom falls silent. Ja-Alixxe was condemned to be raped until death, so she must have only had hours left and it’s not as though her actions in the Rape Run deserved the sympathy of other women. I shouldn’t be shocked, or sad. But I hurry back through to the main room anyway.

I’m expecting a news ticker headline of “raped until dead”, but the text I see is something staggeringly different.

“Suicide bombing on Aghara-Penthay Trading Station claims the life of condemned former Rape-Runner, Ja-Alixxe.”

“What?” I gasp.

A regular news service would just relate what happened rather than have the bad taste to show it, but Hoola has tuned into the uncensored broadcast channel by the Slavers of Aghara-Penthay. They have no such scruples.

In the first images Ja-Alixxe is alive, still on her front as she’d been before with her limbs strapped to the legs of the same horse and her pelvis thrust out behind her. Only this video footage of her is poor quality – someone’s home movie acquired by the Slavers rather than an official broadcast.

“I can’t believe you’re fucking the Ja-Alixxe, Dojo,” says a male voice in high excitement from behind the camera. I can’t either, for the ugly man who is “fucking her” is so fat it’s surprising he’s able to penetrate his victim. No free woman would consent to mating with that beast. This is a rape. He’s stripped to the waist and sweat pours into the crevices between his rolls of flesh and he has an animal grimace of arousal.

I shouldn’t feel too much sympathy for the man’s victim. We are taught that a woman must have some inherent weakness before she can be raped. But after last night I’m not so sure of my long-held beliefs, and it doesn’t feel so impossible that even someone like me could end up in her situation.

Ja-Alixxe has become filthy, and looks even more ruined than at the end of the earlier rape montage. Her strength has gone, so when the man behind the camera commands, “resist him, slavegirl!”, even aided by the compulsion of an implant she barely manages to raise her head.

I hear a wet slap each second in time with her rapist’s pelvis pounding against hers. Oh merciful gods, how many times must she have been taken over the days she’s been there?

Yet another male victory is progressing inexorably when something unexpected happens.

“What the fuck?” the man filming says, and our view pans up to give a view not of Ja-Alixxe, but of what’s behind the rutting couple. Again I see the sign for the House of Roses – the destination where Riyena waits for me. But there’s barely time to take in the brothel because of the stark naked girl running at full speed towards the bounty hunter.

“Look out!” a guard warns, but no one avoids her. People simply stop in incomprehension to watch.

The woman is a female of the Sadami species, distinctive because of her blue tinted skin, and the heavy fronds of flesh that surround her face and flow down to her waist, as though they’re thick trunks of hair.

Her face is marked with the slave symbol of Aghara-Penthay, and that makes her a very rare captive indeed, for Sadami females are hardly ever held alive. Their digestive systems rely on bacteria producing a highly explosive gas, and the Sadami long ago evolved a mechanism to self-ignite the gas, turning themselves into living bombs.

A highly religious and conservative culture, Sadami oppose any circumstances of a woman revealing her bodies, except to a marriage partner. It is a terrible sin. Whether she does it willingly or not, a woman exposed to a male-who-is-not-her-husband is shunned forever by their society.

So the woman in this footage is disgraced, unless she finds forgiveness through the one way a shamed Sadami woman can redeem herself. Exploding to fulfil the aims of the holy war earns any Sadami, male or female, an instant place in their heavenly paradise.

Such conservative views mean Sadami culture opposes everything to do with the worldly pleasures of Aghara-Penthay, and the Slavers’ Hub was a target for suicide attacks until Sadami ships were forbidden from docking.

Nowadays their species are prohibited travel to Aghara-Penthay, unless the Sadami citizen is first given a slave implant. Slave implants prevent the carrier taking their own life, or harming any male. There is no escape from slavery on Aghara-Penthay once you have an implant in your brain stem, not even using the ultimate solution.

The Sadami willingness for sacrifice and ability to self-detonate makes it rare that their females are ever captured, however a rare few are stunned or drugged before they know what’s happening, and wake to find themselves rendered harmless.

That’s what must have happened to this woman, for she has been slave-marked and is stark naked. Poor creature – her life will have been hell. Captive Sadami women are highly valuable, prized even more highly than Gaianesians by collectors of flesh if they’re considered beautiful. I’ve never seen one nude before. And this woman would be pretty, were it not for the look of dreadful anguish on her face.

But what’s she doing? I don’t have to wait long for an explanation.

“Faulty implant!” bellows the guard. “Somebody shoot her.”

Even though I’m only watching a screen I recoil in horror. About one in fifty slave implantations are supposed to be unsuccessful or to function only partially. The Slavers of Aghara-Penthay are the best in the galaxy at using the technology and have made recent improvements, but it’s still not completely reliable. This Sadami woman’s implant is not working. The prohibition on killing is not there. She can detonate.

I raise my hand to my mouth to stop myself crying out as I understand what is about to happen. The Sadami woman reaches Ja-Alixxe, who looks up in time to see the blue-skinned female gently touch her cheek.

“Rest with honor, sister,” the living bomb says to the bounty hunter. Instantaneously the screen fills with a white flare, and there is a roar of sound.

The Slaver broadcast cuts abruptly and the screen returns to the regular galactic news – an extremely dull article about the supply of alloys used for spaceship manufacture. Hoola and I are left staring numbly at the screen.

It should be a mercy. Instead of Ja-Alixxe’s ordeal going on perhaps for days more, it was over in an instant. And instead of her death by gang rape proving male dominance, she became a martyr to women’s resistance. But I’m shocked by the violence of her demise anyway, and I mourn the bounty hunter.

“Such cruelty, in the galaxy,” I eventually say. “There was never any warmth for her in her entire life. Even her own sex showed kindness only through destruction.”

“It is men, and not women, who cause this barbarity,” Hoola states with patriotic certainty. “It just goes to prove that our cause is true.”

Ja-Alixxe is the one who is gone, but it is I who suddenly crave comfort.

“Make love to me,” I abruptly plead to Hoola. “After last night’s experience I really need to feel the touch of a woman.”

Hoola looks surprised only for a moment before she smiles with the flare of igniting sexual desire.

“Of course, Lara. Let’s go back to the bedroom.”

It was only after they were done with me that the men last night showed interest in my friend - special agent Hoola, but I consider this bubbly brunette extremely attractive. For the next few hours I am able to chase away the memories of what has happened, and also the fear of what is to come.

11 - Ready

We have to wait for the time of my monthly cycle to pass before I can leave. The shame of wearing nothing but the slave wrap will be bad enough without the added indignity of doing it with blood seeping down my thighs.

It is not a pleasant delay. My close affinity with Gara means instinct repeats that she is alive but suffering somewhere, and I worry the nightmares where I merge the hands of the men on Pride of Torconi with assailants unknown might be my strange psychic twin-sense.

We make good use of the three days though, preparing me physically for my mission.

The primary concern has to be concealing my species. As the women of our planet automatically become Slaver property if we’re caught inside Aghara-Penthay territory, it is essential to conceal the signs of my birth.

First, skin grafts, bearing the DNA of an unknown human female donor are applied as easily as a paint over my wrists and ankles. These will fool the one-time DNA scan, performed by tech in the Slaver bracelet during the process of my registration on their database.

The chip that will transfer the data from Harken Riyena’s hidden files is implanted into the back of my knee. It will remain there forever, inert and invisible until our contact activates it. The tech who applies the implanter gun tells me it barely broke my skin.

With only hours left before departure the remaining steps to disguise my species are made - a series of painful injections in an arc around my forehead. These pigments implanted into my tissue make the characteristic patterned markings of a Gaianesian female invisible. A dye is also dripped into my eyes, which alters my irises from the deep purple shade I’m so proud of to a modest, but human, hazel color.

The patterning only covers a small percentage of my body, but when I first look at my altered face in the mirror it’s as though a wide-eyed brunette stranger is looking back. I’d never realized they were so much a part of my sense of self. I’m still me, and yet without those identifiers I seem less than the strong Gaianesian female I was just minutes earlier.

I’m very glad the injections and dye will only disguise me for forty eight hours and I’ll soon once more be my natural self.

This short duration has its downsides, however. My appearance is a ticking bomb, and I must be careful not to be delayed on the Aghara-Penthay trading hub. Linger long enough to reveal my species, and they’ll never let me escape.

I’m not the only one to sense I’ve been diminished in some way by the apparent change in species. Once I appear as human to the women working in the technical missions division, they talk more amongst themselves, and their dialogue with me is almost patronizing.

Here on Gaianesia human women are not permitted outside the Subardin enclave unescorted, so Red Duchess’s team have to make a pretense of accompanying me, to avoid other Gaianesians believing I’m an illegal. Luckily I’m assigned Hoola as my companion, and as the hours count down towards launch she is better able to calm my mounting nerves.

I have an embarrassing meeting with a medical officer. Gaianesian women can fall pregnant at almost any time in our cycles, and the successful outcome of my Subardin visit means I have to blushingly seek contraception. Furthermore, although I have no intention of having sexual contact with anyone on Aghara-Penthay, it’s better to be protected against all eventualities. For example, all kinds of alien forms visit the Hub, and Gaianesian women are genetically compatible for cross-breeding with males of one species called the Garnasti – aliens whose sperm can be transferred by merely touching the skin.

The pill they give me will keep me safe for only two days – the same time as my markings will be concealed. Its hormones make me feel nauseous.

Unfortunately for me, coming from a world where reproduction is endorsed only through careful selection, it will go forever on my medical records that I’ve consulted a medic about sexual encounters outside the official programs. Not even those serving in the secret defense organizations are above this law. By receiving treatment, I’ve taken the first steps in the eyes of Gaianesian society in being labelled as an aberrant female, one accepting and maybe even approving of strong, unpacified males.

If only I could explain that the truth is the opposite. My trip to Subardin quenched any curiosity about men. I never want to be near an erect penis again after my night on the Pride of Torconi. With what free time I have remaining, I make love to Hoola with a desperate intensity, burying my face in her pussy and wishing I could be surrounded now and forever only by the female.

I can admit I am dreading the prospect of the Slavers’ Hub and the things that might happen to me if something goes wrong. This must be endured though, for Gara’s sake. I must find out what’s happened to her, and if there’s a chance Riyena has the information, it’s worth risking my own safety.

So when time runs out for me to depart, I summon all my courage and conquer my mounting nerves. I don a regulation grey flight suit that will be my last clothing before the silken wrap of a slave girl. Then I let myself be escorted to the shuttle, feeling more like a condemned prisoner than a hero of my planet.

I look around the familiar architecture and scenery of my homeworld trying to reassure myself all will be well. In only a day I will be back here with no lasting damage but the bracelet and bad memories. But when Red Duchess embraces me on the shuttle launch pad, she does it in the way of parting from someone she doesn’t expect to meet again.

12 – Merlon

The Vengeful Goddess, a heavy battle cruiser of the Gaianesian space fleet, is armed to the teeth, and feels so solid that it give a false sense of safety to my next few hours. White Queen also conveys a reassuring certainty, behaving calmly and purposefully as she issues her commands.

In the privacy of a cabin allocated to the great leader, I’m given a final briefing intended firstly to fill me with matriotic zeal, and secondly to remind me that while White Queen has sympathy for Gara’s plight, the most important part of my mission is to touch Riyena and upload those data files.

The Harken woman is almost certain to recognize me as Gara’s twin in spite of the missing markings, so White Queen unnecessarily reemphasizes the importance of ensuring that Acheron arranges privacy for our meeting. Also stating the obvious, she warns me to avoid any kind of flirting or fraternization with any of the unpacified males, which might place me at greater risk than I’m already taking simply by being beautiful.

Recalling the night with the visiting ship crew, I quickly confirm I want the least contact possible with men, and could happily avoid them for the rest of my days. After the experience on the Pride of Torconi I’ve even become apprehensive that I might meet unpacified males on my way through Merlon starbase to Acheron’s offices, so I’m relieved when White Queen informs me that messages have been exchanged with Acheron and he’ll be sending a female assistant, Kikizi, to safely escort me from the Vengeful Goddess.

Everything possible has been done to reduce the risk to me, but my legs still go weak when the booming clang of us docking at the Merlon starbase reverberates through the ship. Nerves and the contraceptive have upset my digestive system, and I have to void one final attack of diarrhea before I’m ready to disembark.

Acheron knows of the limited time we have before my markings return, so our human agents are watchful and it is only ten minutes after we dock when Kikizi boards the ship.

His assistant is attractive, for a human. An athletically built, tall blonde female with piercing brown eyes. I notice a number of the crew have overcome our natural contempt for a weaker species and look at her with undisguised interest. There’s plenty to draw the eye. Kikizi has dressed more provocatively than our unflattering jumpsuits and is wearing a knee-length dress which flaunts her breasts and her hips, integrated with tech that makes the fabric gradually shift through a rainbow of bright colors.

My attention is on something other than her undeniable beauty, though. Her garment is sleeveless and all I can look at is how on her wrist, openly worn without any attempt to disguise it, is locked the bracelet of a private slave. She’s been to the Hub, and isn’t ashamed! A few of my shipmates also notice it and gasp. I look to her face, trying to read submission, trauma, or any sign of what happened to her, but the bracelet is all. She’s just a normal, healthy, vivacious, woman.

Perhaps her familiarity with the Aghara-Penthay trading station has dulled Kikizi’s fears of the place, for she drifts through our ship carelessly and seems amused by my being given such a heavy military escort, as though she thinks we’re all taking this much too seriously. The only change in her blasé attitude occurs when she meets White Queen. Our leader is greeted by Kikizi with great formality, and after they’ve shaken hands Kikizi lingers before letting go.

Acheron’s assistant has brought a small case with her. It’s battered, (Gaianesia can’t be paying its offworld-agents much) and a cloud of dust is released when she opens it. Inside is an old fashioned tape measure. Kikizi continues to demonstrate her lack of concern by informing me she needs this tape to take the measurements for my slave wrap. And she says this loudly, whilst on the bridge in front of a cohort of the crew.

My comrades know of our objective – ferrying a female to Merlon Starbase and disguising her as a human makes it easy to guess. But I sense everyone intently watching my reaction when Kikizi so casually raises this topic. Am I submissive, everyone must be thinking? Does a part of me secretly want to wear that thing? Is that why I was chosen?

White Queen saves my red face glowing brighter when she intervenes in a matronly tone, and order us to her cabin. Back in privacy I strip down to my underwear and submit to Kikizi pressing the tape tightly against my bust, waist, and hips, and then recording the details.

“You have a nice figure,” she comments while I gratefully re-dress in my flight suit. “If you were actually seeking to please men, you’d have plenty of takers. You’d make a prize slave.”

She said I’d make a prize slave… Kikizi means it as a compliment, but the idea makes me feel faint. Red Duchess said that Gara (and therefore me as her identical twin) was the kind of female the Slavers prize. And Gork might have said something about my value in credits as well, although I’m unsure that memory is real. Gods, surely everyone can see I’m more than just some object with a value?

Kikizi is watching me with a wry smile as though she’s reading my mind.

“I don’t think Lara wants to hear more about her desirability,” she observes. “So let’s just get things moving. I’ll beam your details across so there’s a wrap made and ready for you for when you need it. Then I’ll take you to Acheron. And he’ll escort you to Aghara-Penthay.”

We return to the bridge where White Queen wishes me good luck with a tone of gravest formality. She tells me Gaianesia is proud, as though she’s dispatching me to my death. Behind her Kikizi politely suppresses a giggle. The hug I receive from Hoola is the opposite of White Queen’s farewell. When the two of us finally break apart I see our embrace has interested the human woman. I believe that among their females the percentage of lesbians is in low single figures, so such free displays of affection must be unusual.

“Let’s go,” I tell Kikizi, keeping my voice firm. I’ll show her another trait of Gaianesian women – our courage.

I walk, although my heart is racing as though I’ve been running for hours. The ship’s docking bay is my last moment on the safe territory of my homeworld, and then stepping between the two female guards I find myself under the laws Merlon Starbase, where men are unpacified and I’m an unwilling subject of their desire.

Merlon’s docking levels are more diverse than in our trading enclave – I count six different species in the first few minutes, but most are human, reflecting their dominance across the galaxy.

It’s morning Merlon local time, observing the standard Republic day as do many stations in space. It’s not the time for unpacified males to be courting, and in my plain dark grey jumpsuit my body shouldn’t attract attention. But that doesn’t deter the first group we encounter in close proximity.

The passage where we meet the four men is narrow, and it will be a squeeze to get by each other. Kikizi automatically steps to the side, giving way to them. But Gaianesian males are deferential to woman, and being raised in that enlightened society I lack the instinctive avoidance of masculine interest. Next thing we know we’re in a face-off and the four of them are blocking my way.

Sternly I meet the gaze of the largest one of them, but he doesn’t seem to be cowed the way he should be. Quite the opposite. He greets me with an enthusiastic, “Well take a look at you, honey!” and then leers at me suggestively.

This man would probably be judged handsome if I were a human female, and to humanity’s natural whores his disrespect might be welcome. Young and well-muscled, the man’s hair is blond and he has a couple of day’s growth of stubble on his face.

I might look human, but I am Gaianesian and my name is not “honey”.

“Excuse me,” I say with prim coldness, but he does not move.

“You’re a cut above the rest, aren’t you?” blondie’s friend, an overweight shorter male with lank, dark hair says to me. “You know it, too. Pity you’re not going to Aghara-Penthay. You’re meant for a slave wrap, if ever a woman was.”

“You’re being rude,” I say firmly, and this time I push my way between the middle two men. Thankfully they step apart, and I’m beyond them.

From behind me I hear Kikizi using different tactics and greeting them in a low seductive voice. “Hi boys…” Abruptly I decide I don’t like her. Human slut - pleasing men to get what she wants.

Red-faced and angry I stride ahead, forcing her to have to hurry if she wants to catch up with me.

“Gods damn, I hate unpacified males,” I snap to her when she’s back alongside. I sense she’s finding amusement at my expense. She thinks she’s better than me, as though I’m the bumpkin ignorant in social skills. Whore! I wasn’t the one forced to encourage these testosterone-driven animals.

Digging my nails into my palms as I march away, I suppress my temper. It doesn’t matter how Kikizi and I feel about each other. She’s not likely to be going to Aghara-Penthay on Acheron’s ship, so hopefully I only have a short time in her company.

Those guys are the ones worrying me. “Going to Aghara-Penthay too,” they said. So I shouldn’t have made a stand, and I regret my actions as soon as there’s time to consider the risk we might cross paths again. The last thing I want is those lecherous beasts seeing the woman who put them in their place reduced to wearing nothing more than a rectangle of silk. But I must take heart. An encounter is unlikely – the open areas on the trading station will be crowded with hundreds of people, the place is vast, and I can warn Acheron to protect me.

As long as nothing goes wrong.

Back in the present, Kikizi and I reach an area which seems seedier than the earlier levels of the Merlon Starbase. Garish neon signs depict the outlines of women. It is the sector where the tramp shuttles depart, taking groups to Aghara-Penthay. There are far more unpacified males gathered in this area. As females Kikizi and I are heavily outnumbered by the raucous crowds - men of all ages and species. Although I do see a few women around, we are the only two who seem to be unescorted. The others are example of the traitors to our sex - laughing in nervous excitement as though they enjoy having male protectors, rather than feeling rightfully ashamed.

Lewd and offensive comments are shouted at us. These suggestions disgust me, but I’ve learned my lesson and copy Kikizi this time, choosing to avoid engaging with the catcallers. I will not help Gaianesia by attracting attention, so now I’m careful not to make eye contact with anyone, even though I’m sure that “Hey, you, the hot one with the nice hooters” is aimed at me.

The offices of male scum who make money escorting women to Aghara-Penthay are to be found along the same retail strip as the tramp ships. Their signs are almost as vulgar as those of the shuttles.

Shortly after a shuttle advertising “Free slave fuck with the price of your ticket – Lower Flower Garden – Aghara-Penthay” Kikizi comes to a stop. This store-front sign in the galactic script says, “Acheron Doe: Licensed escort to Aghara-Penthay. Safe return guaranteed or your money back.”

This man has secretly served Gaianesia for a long time, and is trusted by my planet, but I’m about to deliver myself entirely into his power. I can’t help feeling some nerves as I follow Kikizi inside to meet the man destined to temporarily become my “owner”. Within the shabby interior, she locks the door and switches the signs to “closed” before leading the way to the back office. Ours is a private charter, and my mission will be sensitive and humiliating enough without more witnesses. We do not want to be disturbed.

13 - Acheron

Acheron Doe is not what I’m expecting. Here is a man who does nothing more physical than escort women to-and-from the trading station at Aghara-Penthay, but he has a battle-hardened expression that reminds me more of a soldier. A large disfiguring scar on his left cheek is almost certainly a blaster wound. He’s a big man as well. Not quite the size of the alien Ker, but with six inches height over me and a lot more bulk – all of it muscle development.

“Lara, at last,” he greets me in a deep gravelly voice, and with a hormone-driven glance up and down my figure he can’t help adding, “Gods, but you’re a beauty.”

I frown at him, and to make even clearer that our interaction will be purely a business matter, I extend my hand to shake like a man.

“Perfect,” smiles Acheron, and he encloses my slim in his giant paw. “Please then Lara, take a seat.”

I sit demurely on one of the office’s tattered chairs. Kikizi, whose brazen confidence crossing the starbase in her Technicolor dress was verging on the sluttish, shows the first sign of uncertainty before she too rests.

“Let’s get this over with as quickly as possible,” I say a little coldly. “We’ll leave as soon as you’re ready.”

“Ah, well, there’s a problem with that, unfortunately,” says Acheron with a regretful shake of his giant head. “My ship took some damage – a one in a million collision with space debris. By the time I heard an update from the repair dock you were already on the starbase – out of action for seven days. We’ll have to call it off.”

With all the planning and my expectations for the mission shattered in a heartbeat, I stare dumbfounded.

“We can’t wait,” I then bluster. “My markings will return in less than two days. And Riyena is auctioned in four. If we don’t go now we’ll never have another chance. You must buy another ship.”

Acheron snorts derisively at my suggestion, so I scowl at him. I’d been expecting our agent to be someone docile, like a pacified male, but it seems testosterone turns even an ally into a muscle-brained dolt.

“I don’t just have those kind of credits lying around Lara. And I doubt your warship is carrying them either. It doesn’t matter anyway. Even if we could access the funds, Merlon isn’t the center of the galaxy – it’s not like suitable ships come up for sale here every day. Our only choice is to abort.”

“No,” I insist. “A way must be found. I need to be on the trading station at Aghara-Penthay within twenty four hours, whatever the price.”

He looks at me speculatively then.

“Well… if you’re set on it there is one option…”

“Tell me!” I order abruptly. “What are we waiting for?”

“The reason I didn’t suggest it before is because… well… it’s beneath a Gaianesian. As a reputable escort I only ever take women on my own ship, but I could escort you onto a tramp shuttle, like the ones used by the less affluent females. But you deserve better, Lara. Women are treated badly on the shuttles. The only females who travel that way are submissives, so women have to put on the wrap and be braceleted before they’re allowed on, and they’re slaves from the moment they step on board. On a shuttle you couldn’t relax like on a private ship. You’d have to pretend you were like them for the whole voyage. More importantly - most of the passengers on those shuttles are male, and while I can protect you physically from sexual assault by them, I can’t stop anyone talking to you, and those that do won’t respect you.”

At first I shake my head, horrified at the idea that rather than appear in the shameful clothing for no longer than a short walk across the crowded hub, I might have to endure a much longer shuttle journey, every moment of it exposed in the company of unpacified men on their way to get laid. Men who would think I dressed like a slave because I liked it. Me, a Gaianesian, playing the role of a submissive.

“There’s got to be another way!” I insist.

“I’ve got nothing more,” says Acheron, holding his paw-like hands open apologetically. “You could try another of the escorts, and he would fly you there on his own ship, but they’re not all reputable, especially round a valuable piece of woman-flesh like you. What’s more you’d have a difficult job explaining to your new escort why you wanted to interview Riyena alone.”

“I am not a ‘piece of woman-flesh’” I can’t help interrupt.

Kikizi comes to my rescue, and I warm to her slightly.

“Why not Patch a holo-call through to the Gaianesian ship?” she suggests. “See what White Queen thinks.”

At last one of the humans has a good idea, and in only moments we have our leader’s image glowing on the desktop with an ethereal blue light. I explain my predicament in a voice close to breaking.

“It has to be your decision, Lara,” White Queen replies, although I can tell from her tone she wants me to go. “If you want to abort we’ll support that – it’s your body at risk after all. But this is your only chance to find out about your sister, and also recover the plans we desperately need. And while you’ll have to go through the ordeal itself alone, if you do chose to use one of the tramp shuttles, you can at least do it remembering we’ll follow as close as we can in Vengeful Goddess, and intervene if we think you need rescue.”

How could I give up when so much depends on me? My home planet have pledged an entire ship to support me. They’d risk a diplomatic incident tackling a neutral shuttle, they’d engage the Slavers even. Lara and Gaianesia are relying on me. White Queen has heroically been to the trading station before, and she carries the slave bracelet as a mark of honor rather than shame.

I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I don’t make the attempt.

“Let’s get this over with then,” I say to Acheron in the most determined voice I can muster. “I have plans when I get home. I’m gonna get drunker than I’ve ever been before!”

14 – Tramp

I left Gaianesia expecting to travel to Aghara-Penthay aboard Acheron’s ship, retaining some dignity, but I’m facing a much longer period of living hell. The sexual discrimination begins before I’m even on my tramp shuttle, for the degradingly named Bountiful Sluts has separate boarding intended to demean its females. Men can walk on and off the ship at will. Women set foot on its decks automatic slaves, so we have to go through a segregated processing channel where we’re first registered with owners, then braceleted, and forced to strip down to nothing but the silken wrap that’s female uniform.

Accompanied by Acheron, I am registered and locked into the identity band of a private slave. I try to tell myself this process means nothing. White Queen has one. Kikizi has one. Thousands, if not millions of women through the galaxy have them. But their bracelets are not secured to me.

As the escorted women who use tramp shuttles intend to return to their normal lives, for some existences where a slave bracelet may attract unwanted attention, tramp sluts are extended the small courtesy of being allowed to choose whether to have the band locked around the wrist or the ankle.

After consideration I elect for an ankle bracelet. While I will be obliged to hide it for the rest of my life by wearing boots, or perhaps clothing that does not reveal below my shins, there will be less risk of accidentally baring an ankle than there would be from a loose sleeve slipping to reveal a slave band on my wrist. I won’t have to live out my days wearing long sleeves, or a noticeable bandage like White Queen’s.

My nerves aren’t up to dwelling too long on the bracelet’s implications, so when I’m handed the vile thing that will be mine, I only allow myself to look at it for a moment, thinking of all the shame and humiliation that goes with these devices, before bending quickly downwards and pulling up the leg of my flightsuit to expose my shin. Before I can change my mind I’ve already closed it around my left ankle. There. Done. The click of the locking mechanism is barely audible, and yet I will never forget the sound.

This braceleting ceremony takes place in a small office away from the female boarding airlock. Thankfully Acheron, myself, and the staff member from the Bountiful Sluts are the only witnesses to the second Gaianesian in our planet’s entire history who willingly lets herself be marked as a slave.

The instant the lock seals around my limb, a control panel nearby bleeps to life and its screen displaying the results of my DNA scan. Rosila Volati it says, Human, homeworld Ilushin One. I’m able to feel a moment of relief at Rosila’s expense that the deception worked. The graft makes them think I’m a human. Let’s hope that Rosila Volati, whoever she is, never has to go near Aghara-Penthay. If she does she’ll be very confused to discover she’s already been registered, and her owner is a stranger named Acheron Doe.

Although he doesn’t have to debase himself, the male companion still has formalities to complete. Acheron, sitting silently at a terminal, places his palm on a scanner to register his own details. Data scrolls up a screen too rapidly to read and then with a discreet chime a light turns green.

So that’s that.

I have not yet left Merlon Starbase, a free planet. And yet in the eyes of Aghara-Penthay, I am already legally a slave. From now on I am the property of Acheron Doe, who may, according to Slaver law, do with me as he wishes. He may kill me, use me, trade me, all without consulting my opinion, as though I’m no more than an object. We will always be connected. If I were really his slave, and I attempted to escape, he could use the band to track me, sending bounty hunters anywhere in the galaxy.

I can’t take the bracelet off and escape my link with Rosila Volati, Ilushin One, not ever. There is a booby trap that will activate if it senses tampering and it will poison me – injecting a powerful nerve agent that brings death in under a minute.

The only mitigation to my now official downfall comes from knowing that it is not my DNA now on file against my details in the Slaver databases, but the same faceless Rosila Volati, whose genes were probably sampled without her ever being aware. But it won’t matter whose DNA is on there when I return to Gaianesia with the thing still locked to me. If any of my fellow women see the bracelet, they will judge me. Lara, the submissive. But I’ve made my choice. This is for Gara.

“Rosila, go to the female preparation area and put your wrap on.” Acheron delivers this instruction calmly, although I jump guiltily at the unfamiliar name. “I’ll meet you on the ship.”

As an afterthought he adds in a low voice, inaudible to the staff technician, “Remember to address me as ‘Master’ once you’re on board. People will notice if I let you get it wrong, and I don’t want to have to punish you.”

My laugh is louder and more nervous than I intended. Punish me? Did he actually say “punish me”? I’m not sure if he was joking.

It is time for us to part, me following the female symbols and Acheron the male. I watch him saunter away, and am reassured by his self-assurance. This is a routine trip, after all. Women do this all the time. It’s going to be okay.

The female changing area is rudimentary, with only tall lockers and crude wooden benches interrupting the cream tiles which pattern the floor, walls and ceiling.

Around my ankle is the bracelet. Its newness is distracting.

I’m surprised to find the changing room already occupied. An athletic dark-skinned human woman is half-way through unfastening her functional top to bare her pleasingly ripe breasts. She sees me and her sensual pouting face smiles warmly.

My immediate reaction to the sight of her is repulsion. Here stands one of those females who betray our sex. This woman willingly seeks to debase herself before men. And then I remember I’m in no position to judge. I too am debasing myself.

My tumbling thoughts quickly realize her presence is a good thing. It’s better for me that there will be other women on the shuttle. I do not to have to go through this humiliation alone. So hoping she didn’t see my initial disgust, I give the woman a genuine smile in return.

“Dealla,” she then introduces herself, and blushingly adds, “Submissive. Of course. Or why would I be here? Stop blabbering, Dealla… I’m from Boroonas Four in the Jorian cluster.”

“Rosila,” I lie, and blushing more than her using the word in relation to myself I too say “Submissive.” Deciding I might as well stick with the DNA scan completely I add, “Ilushin One.”

“Right in the middle of the Republic!” Dealla says, sounding impressed. She’d already stripped off her clothing before I walked in, and as she speaks now she slides her plain panties down over her knees before stepping out of them, leaving herself entirely naked. I see her pussy has been waxed – a preparation only made by whores who wish to make themselves more pleasing to men, and have to fight another wave of repugnance.

From her locker Dealla takes the small rectangle of blue silken material that will be her only covering during the voyage. The sight of it makes my stomach give a barrel roll of fear. That’s one of them – a slave wrap. All we can wear in public. When she unfurls it and holds it against her it looks so small. The wrap barely covers from her breasts down to her sex.

My own small bundle of cloth I’m clutching easily in one hand. Gods, I can’t put that on! What am I to do?

I had my other hand half-way to the zipper of my jumpsuit, high up near my neckline, but I drop it again as I watch Dealla fasten the wrap under her arm. I’ve seen women in wrap on the Slaver broadcasts of course, but here in reality… All there is are bare, soft limbs, deep brown flesh, and the gaping opening at her side flashing the secrets within.

“I’m not sure I can carry on,” I say to Dealla in a breaking voice. “I can’t walk onto that ship wearing only this and have everyone look at me…”

Dealla halts, and looks at me with genuine incomprehension.

“But that’s the best part…” she says. “Don’t you want to feel truly beautiful? I never feel so sexy, so feminine, as when I’m revealingly dressed in the garments of a slave. Nothing matters, but that I am desirable.”

How can I tell her that feeling beautiful in the eyes of men is the last thing I want? That I’m not submissive at all? That Rosila is nothing but a persona? That the idea of debasing myself as though I’m a slave is repulsive to me?

“Nerves, I guess,” I say feebly.

There is no more time to evade the stark choice. I must walk back out to Merlon and tell them I’m too cowardly to endure a few hours humiliation to save my planet and my sister. Or let a few insignificant strangers who I care nothing for and I’ll never meet again, see me showing a bit of leg.

There’s only one answer really. Using every last bit of my courage I force my hand to pull down the zip, exposing the tight fitting white vest underneath that flaunts the shape of my breasts.

“It’s natural to be a little apprehensive,” Dealla says understandingly. “We do make a total surrender of power to our escorts, after all. We give them a lot of trust… Have you thought about what happens if they decide to sell us, or we’re given for sex to a guy we don’t like? But in exchange comes the sensual experience of a lifetime.”

Of course I’ve thought about it. And she thinks it’s a sensual experience? How can anyone find that erotic? But when I’m pretending to be like her and I need a friend I can’t pick an argument. Quietly I step out my flightsuit, down now to only my vest and panties.

Dealla has begun walking along the banks of lockers. Some of them have striped tape across their doors, and a notice in fine print, as though to indicate they’re broken. She walks along brushing these with her fingers.

“So many of them…” she says speculatively to me. “I knew it happened, but didn’t think there would be so many.”

“What’s the big deal?” I ask. “This place feels so run down I would have expected half the facilities to be faulty.”

“These are the women who didn’t come back,” she says. “Betrayed, or they chose to hand themselves over to the Slavers. The locker will be labelled for a while, and then their possessions will be given away or sold.”

Horrified, I move closer to read one of the signs.

“Name: Elleriea Dellasavo

Homeworld: Acostin Station

Travelled to Aghara-Penthay: 18:18:4451

Fate if known: Sold to Slavers by escort”

The next one says: “Sold to Slavers by escort”. And another “Sold to Slavers by escort”. But then “Fate Unknown”.

Acheron is a Gaianesian agent, so I can be sure I’m safe from being sold or raped. Imagine what terror these woman must felt at the moment they discovered they’d betrayed, and instead of some brief sordid sex vacation a lifetime in slavery was ahead of them. Gaianesian culture would teach us they were weak for going there, and deserved their fate. But masquerading as one of them, it’s impossible not to feel some sympathy.

Dealla calls, “Here’s a volunteer” and crossing to join her I read, “Fate if known: Requested permanent ownership transfer to Slavers”

This puzzles me enough to ask, “Why would a woman want to do that?”

Dealla shrugs.

“Some people hate their normal lives. But after implantation there is nothing to think of but pleasing men. Slaves have a purity of purpose. And there are many women who enjoy their submission. You and me, for example...”

I’m frowning and about to object, but just in time I remember. All a disguise, all a disguise. I “enjoy my submission” too. I continue to undress.

“You’re really exceptionally beautiful Rosila,” I hear Dealla say with something like awe in her voice, and looking up I realize she’s stopped to watch me. “I mean look at your breasts… There’s women would kill to have those.”

She gives this verdict just after I’ve just struggled to pull the tight vest over my head, spilling my boobs free. Dealla’s assessment makes me blush, and I try to try to keep my bare arm across my stiffening nipples without it looking as though I’m feeling bashful.

“You’re brave,” she says. (If only she knew how much). “The ones like you, who are A-grade beauties, are at more risk. Do you know how many credits you’d be worth if your escort sold you?”

This isn’t what I need to hear just now. Dealla is still staring at me though, like she’s mesmerized. I wish she wouldn’t. I shouldn’t have to feel embarrassment in front of another female, but my face grows redder when I have to push down my clinging panties with her watching the whole time. Argh, this is unbearable. And being naked makes it worse. All I want to run from this place and never look back.

Desperately I crave to be re-covered, but there’s no relief ahead when for the next few hours the wrap will be my only clothing.

Standing nude in the room I hold up the rectangle of dark blue silken cloth, just as Dealla did a few minutes ago, and feeling sick with shame I study it. It looks so desperately small. But in a few moments I’m supposed to emerge on view to the crew and passengers of the ship dressed only in this. How am I supposed to bear it?

Once more I must remind myself there is nothing else to be done unless I wish to abort. And I’ll never live with myself if I let everyone down, so there’s only one real option. There’s only been one option since the day they told me where Gara had gone. So I move the wrap around me and with trembling fingers secure the string bow under my left arm – the only fastener to keep the garment in place.

Then, fighting the panic as the loose silk brushes bare skin, I fold my true clothing neatly and seal it in the locker. “Dressed” for Aghara-Penthay, there is enough time to permit the rising despair a few moments to claim me.

Please no, how did I get myself into this?

At first I believe Kikizi must have made a mistake with the measurements, for the wrap rides so high on my thighs that even inhaling deeply would risk lifting it to expose my sex. Forget any chance of leaning forward, not if I don’t want it lifting to flash my backside and simultaneously hang forward to reveal my crotch. But when I look at Dealla I see her garment has the same proportions as mine. There’s been no mistake.

The slave wrap is deliberately sized so it doesn’t completely surround the wearer’s torso – the exposed stripe at the left side of the body serves not only to show a desirable hip and the side of the breast, but also to confirm that the slave is without underwear. In my case there is a gap of almost six inches between the two edges of the wrap I’m unable to close.

On Gaianesia my chest development was a thing of pride, but on the Hub it’s going to be a curse, for my large breasts mean the fabric hangs further away from my body than on a flatter girl. Although I know logically that the silk is protecting my front from being visible, the air moving in the gap to my uncovered groin makes it feel as though I’m nude down below. Behind me it’s not much better, with the natural arch of my spine leaving a space from my shoulder blades all the way to where fabric brushes against my buttocks.

Even the material selection has been carefully considered to physically and psychologically demean its wearer - me. It’s strong but incredibly thin and lightweight, adding to the illusion of being naked. And although one might expect a silken material should be luxuriantly smooth, the wrap turns out to be slightly abrasive against the skin. I’ve only had it on a brief time before I discover than unless I keep my upper torso very still, the wrap is going to rub my breasts and keep my nipples permanently erect, with the shape of my buds being easily discernable through the thin clinging cloth.

Please no, I repeat.

I clutch my hand against my sex through the thin layer, needing the comfort of feeling a covering touching me. All the while Dealla watches me, her eyes bright with excitement and her faced flushed.

“Erotic, isn’t it, feeling so vulnerable?” she asks.

No it’s not. Gods, it’s not. If only there was another woman here I could talk – one who would understand what I’m feeling – a Gaianesian. I’ve never felt so alone. My unhappiness must show, for Dealla approaches me and squeezes my hands in hers.

“You look stunning,” she soothes. “Don’t worry. Walk on board with me if you like. I promise you’ll have an unforgettable time.”

At this I finally manage a wry smile. That last part is certainly true. As much as I’d like to forget this mission as soon as it’s over I don’t think I’ll ever get over the shame.

We’re interrupted by the public address system announcing the imminent departure of Bountiful Sluts for the Aghara-Penthay Trading Hub.

“Time to go or we’ll miss it,” Dealla says. “Come with me.”

So I do go, letting myself be led by a human submissive. I am a Gaianesian. We are genetically engineered to be physically and intellectually superior to other species, and with our women as rightful rulers Gaianesians like me are the supreme examples of femininity in the galaxy. And yet with my dignity left behind in that locker, the proud Lara is pathetically grateful to a submissive human woman – a sex traitor – for keeping me company as we walk down the ramp labelled “female boarding”.

15 – Voyage

The journey to Aghara-Penthay only takes a few hours, so in terms of facilities the tramp shuttle Bountiful Sluts needs little more than to be a bar with a hyperdrive.

The almost exclusively male passengers are relaxed in anticipation of getting laid, so a party atmosphere prevails. With masculine inhibitions lowered by intoxication, a chorus of catcalls greet Dealla and I as we pad barefoot, pale girl and dark girl, through the docking hatch and into the crowded lounge area. Facing the onslaught of this raucous rabble it takes every bit of courage not to turn and run back to the changing area as men bombard me with observations about my beauty; how nice my legs are; about the size of my breasts; and about what an experience sex with me would be like.

Everyone seems to be looking at the two of us, even the few additional women who mingle amongst the crowd dressed in the dark blue wraps of private slaves. In front of them I feel more exposed and self-conscious than I’ve ever done in my life, and I move instinctively closer to Dealla. She actually seems to be reveling in the eyes on her, and she stands taller under the inspection, whereas I’m needing the sense of fabric covering me so much that I’m clutching my hand to my crotch like a child who wants the bathroom.

I’m as close as I’ve ever been to giving up, and running for the changing room, when I feel a vibration through the deck as the ship’s engines engage. Crap, we undocked. We’re already on our way. My stomach knots with horror. Nothing for it now than to seek out the protection of Acheron, and hope he keeps everyone away from me. Anxiously I scan staring faces for my escort, but it’s so busy I can’t see him through the crowds.

An announcement in an authoritarian male voice booms over the public address system.

“The Bountiful Sluts has now left Merlon territorial space. From this point Aghara-Penthay law applies. All females are now slaves and the property of their registered owners. Please do not permit your slaves to sit on the furniture such as chairs and couches, unless it is in service of a male.”

I scoff at this. Are they for real? I’m not supposed to sit, unless it’s on a guy’s lap or on the floor? Gods, I hate the Slavers.

“I need to seek out my Master,” Dealla says, touching my arm to get my attention. “I could be punished if I don’t serve him.”

I hide my disapproval. Punished eh? Let anyone try to punish me and I’ll break his ass.

Dealla gives my hand a reassuring squeeze, before walking away from me with a deliberately sensual sashay. I’m not the only one to notice the blatantly wanton behavior she’s adopting. An elderly man holding a bottle of liquor grabs at her wrap as she passes, and before she can dance away he manages to pull the fabric enough to flash her bare buttocks. He laughs crudely, and I’m shocked that she laughs too. Dealla’s actions remind me of the way Kikizi responded to the men in Merlon, taunting them with a wiggle of her hips as though this is all some kind of harmless raunchy game.

I do nothing to encourage attention, but moving through the crowd searching for my escort, I’m beset with similar assaults anyway. Emotions freewheel between fury and humiliation while this takes place, and I’m astounded that such lewd behavior is tolerated anywhere in a galaxy meant to be civilized.

The worst treatment comes from a heavyset man with a beard. By the time I realize he even exists, he already has a firm grip on my precious blue silk. My only options then are to move towards the fierce tugging on the fabric or to flee from his grasping hand, surrendering my only item of clothing in the process. He has the wrap pulled so far to my side I can feel it flashing the cleft of my rump, and the bow under my arm is cutting into the soft flesh of my breast. Facing the risk of being denuded entirely I’m forced to yield and step into the space between his spread knees.

“Get away from me!” I say angrily to the bearded man, loudly enough that it should shame him to the people nearby. But he doesn’t get away.

“I just want a little feel, sweet-boobs,” he replies, and sure enough while still straining my wrap he reaches for me. Next thing the proud Gaianesian is fighting off the groping with one of my hands, while the other battles to save my clothing.

“She’s mine,” a male voice interrupts, and for the first time in my life I’m grateful for the type of macho aggression that oozes from the looming presence of Acheron.

The bearded man releases his hold on me immediately, and I skip barefoot as fast as I can to a place out of his range, and safely into the orbit of my “owner”. My wrap has become disordered, and red-faced I adjust it, swiveling it round me to its correct place.

“I was just messing, man,” the bearded-one says to Acheron, opening his hands in apology. Neither of them look at me. My only role in this face-down between rivals is as the prize.

“Don’t touch what’s not yours,” Acheron snarls coldly. The scar on his face makes him look even more intimidating.

Bearded one backs down and turns away, muttering something under his breath.

I turn to my escort, hoping he’s about to kick bearded-guy’s ass. But Acheron is already moving away and I’m a bit disappointed to see the conflict is over. There is to be no defense of my honor. Worse - bearded one is unashamed enough to look back at me with renewed speculation.

I hurry off.

“Did you see that? That man just sexually assaulted me!” I protest to Acheron once I’ve caught up. “He called me ‘sweet boobs’. He should be reported!”

The escort is an agent of Gaianesia and I’m expecting him to share my outrage. But Acheron turns on me, and in a harsh whisper, as though I’m the one who did something wrong, snaps, “Didn’t you listen to what I told you? I was watching all of that. You walked right next to him. This isn’t your home planet, Rosila… You have to take responsibility for not inviting trouble. It’s going to be difficult enough for me protecting you when you look like a wet dream, without you parading right in front of every pair of roaming hands.”

“You think that was my fault?” I demand, outraged. “How dare you?”

A pacified male would be cowed by this. Acheron Doe is a different animal altogether.

“I’ll remind you,” he continues in a harsh whisper, “that you’re pretending to be here because you want to experience submission. You’re going to give us away unless you behave like it. An escorted female would usually be punished for talking to her owner the way you’re talking to me right now. Don’t push me any further. I’m taking a risk bringing you on a shuttle. We’re both in danger if the Slavers discover I’ve smuggled a Gaianesian onto the Hub.”

And I stop in my tracks. Unfair as this is on me, he’s right. A passing group of men are already looking curious as they sense the obvious tension between us. I must swallow my pride quickly and behave as though I accept male dominance, acting like the unwanted attention is an erotic fantasy.

How does a submissive look? I think about the slaves I’ve seen on the view-screens and then lower my eyes, dropping the challenging stare I’ve been using for all the men around me.

“I know this is particularly difficult for people from your world,” Acheron says more gently when he sees the effort I’m making, “but remember why you’re here and don’t forget to address me as ‘Master’”

Another man passes close by, returning to his table. Keeping my gaze down at Acheron’s chest in a way that I hope seems deferential, I shelve my principles and force myself to reply, “Yes, Master.” There. I’ve said it, to a male, for the first time in my life.

I feel faint with the wrongness of what I’ve just done. I’ve committed an offense that on Gaianesia could risk my being banished to Subardin. It is a disgrace for any woman to flaunt such a deeply held taboo. Each sex traitor weakens women’s rights across the galaxy, but I betrayed the rest of womanhood anyway, just to find news of my sister.

But humbling myself that once is nowhere near enough to get me through a voyage on a tramp shuttle. Acheron relaxes back into a large black vinyl couch, and as I automatically move to take my place at his side I’m reminded that women aren’t allowed on the furniture.

“Unless you’re planning to sit in my lap,” he says with an amused smile, “which I suspect you’re not, you have to stand or kneel on the floor.”

No, I’m certainly not intending to sit in his lap. But I don’t want to grovel on the floor like some humble servant either, and it’s unbearable to remain on my feet. While I’m standing my wrap flaps about me, making me feel as open as if I actually am naked below the waist. Oh, this is even worse than I imagined. Indecisive, I clutch my arm around my middle, and try to close the gap at my exposed side.

“No way!” a loud male voice interrupts from nearby. “That honey we met on Merlon is over there in a slave wrap!”

I’ve automatically looked across, too late to avoid meeting the delighted gaze of the blond haired young man who blocked my way at the starbase. My heart sinks, and I wish the floor would swallow me up. Please no, not them. Of everybody, why do those guys have to see me like this?

“How did you trick her into a wrap?” he says with awe to Acheron. “I’d never have pegged her as a submissive. And just look at those legs…”

Again I pull futilely at the lower hem of my clothing as though it might somehow stretch enough to cover my cream limbs, while Acheron leans back with a lazy shrug, playing the role of sleazy escort better than I’m acting willing female.

“Does your slave have fantasies of a gang bang?” one of blondie’s group asks Acheron, as though I can’t answer for myself. “We’ll pay fifty credits for a session with her, if that’s why she’s here.”

For the second time it is a male who must step in and save me.

“Her name is Rosila, and she’s not here for a gang bang. When we get to the Hub she already has an appointment,” Acheron answers calmly.

“Rosila…” blond man says, tasting my false name. “If you change your mind about hanging round with this grunt Rosila, there’s always a place for you as a warmer for my cock.”

“You should trade her to the Slavers.” This suggestion provided by the man with the lank dark hair. “She’d make a top class sex slave, and she has that snooty look about her that deserves to be taught a lesson.”

Trade me to the Slavers? And what snooty look? My face flares scarlet with fury. Gods, I hate men. I hide my bunch fists behind my back and manage to keep my temper in check, looking away as though I’m as submissive as these other sluts.

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Acheron says to the men, civilly yet managing to convey a note of dismissal in his voice.

I have to grudgingly admit he’s able to fake an alpha-male persona, using it to exert authority over other men. I thought I too had this ability, but it seems to have deserted me from the moment I set foot on Merlon, and with each light year further from Gaianesia and each piece of clothing removed I command less respect.

“Who were they?” Acheron asks once they’re out of earshot.

“Losers,” I answer, trying to sound dignified. “They hassled Kikizi and I on our way to your office. I put them in their place. It’s just unfortunate they had to see me reduced to this state.”

That’s still not the end of my humiliations. Two more men proposition Acheron – offering credits in exchange for sexual use of me. I wonder if it’s because I’m one of the few women still standing that makes me a focus for unwanted attention, so I swallow my pride and briefly try sitting on my escort’s giant muscular thighs. But Gaianesian agent or not he is an unpacified male, and the physical contact between us means he can’t help the erection that forms to presses against me. Not his fault – he’s male, weak, but all the same I decide I’d rather stand than offer Acheron Doe the least stimulation.

I’m sick with misery long before we reach the trading hub. But I’d been expecting nothing less from the realm of the unpacified beasts, and it will be worth enduring every second if I can find news of Gara, plus download the plans which will save my home. I keep reminding myself objectively things are proceeding well, and the mission is on plan. And I’m not even as alone as I feel - Vengeful Goddess will be somewhere close behind us in the cold expanse of space. Only in the secret places of my heart do I need to admit this is the worst experience of my life.

16 – Hub

Of the millions of women to set foot on the trading station orbiting Aghara-Penthay, only a few lucky ones do so wearing the blue wraps that identify them as privately owned slaves. Why is the blue wrap so coveted? Because unless they’re being brought here in order to be betrayed or traded, private slaves will leave with their owners. Private slaves can have hope.

All the others - the vast majority of women - are the property of Aghara-Penthay, and to belong to the Slavers is to be doomed. I don’t need reminding of this as I pad barefoot onto the Hub clutching my own blue wrap close to me, but reminders are everywhere. Moments after arrival we pass a line of naked weeping females, chained together ankle to ankle, Slaver captives on their way for marking and the control chip implantation which will irrevocably turn them into the servants of men.

Whether blue, red, or nude, all of us are slaves, though. I’m truly on the territory of Aghara-Penthay now, I’m female, and in the twisted misogynistic logic of the place anyone female is automatically property. So by their inhuman laws I belong to Acheron Doe, his legal ownership proven by the data on the bracelet locked round my ankle. Thank the Gods I’m his, and not one of those belonging to the planet.

The processing and training of Slaver-owned women takes place down on the surface of the oxide red desert world below. I catch glimpses of the planet through the many viewing windows, which give the mezzanine level of the trading station an airy, open feel. Offworld males are only permitted down to the surface under exceptional circumstances, so the Hub serves as the meeting point with the rest of the galaxy.

I have been thoroughly briefed on its layout. The more businesslike facilities on its upper level include auction halls where women are displayed then sold to the highest bidders, and meeting rooms where special negotiations take place, such as agreeing the capture and training of a slave to order. Freelance hunters or unscrupulous escorts often sell women to the Slavers, and those deals are also concluded on the upper level.

Below us is the docking ring level where the Slavers’ heavily-armored warships moor, where supply ships land and where the visiting tramp shuttles arrive.

The mezzanine on the middle floor is dedicated to serving the pleasures of visiting males, whether they be nutritional, narcotic or sexual. Brightly lit bars and brothels are everywhere. Blasting music hurts my ears. Females flit about – almost all with their faces marked; some permitted the red wraps of those owned by Aghara-Penthay, a few in blue, but many forced to remain naked. After a gymnastics competition I once showered with dozens of the other competitors, but I’ve never seen as many naked women as surround me today.

Every fetish and preference is catered for. All races and species may be hired for an hour’s pleasure, and I see many examples of the diverse galactic tastes. There are old women and women engineered to seem perpetually young. For a price, there are women who may be restrained and tortured. There are fertile women, for those whose urge is to impregnate. Women who act wantonly, as though they welcome the sexual encounter, and those compelled to resist. Women who provide non-sexual services such as massages, and women who move on all fours in suits which make them seem like animals. For the homosexual visitor there is a brothel which sells the much rarer males slaves – control-chip implanted and with their bodies free from hair just like with most of their female counterparts. Some form of nanotech seems to keep the male’s organs permanently erect, for each of the four slaves standing nude at the front of the house has his cock rampant, readily protruding at ninety degrees from his body.

Although women are the main commodity on Aghara-Penthay, the sheer number of tourists means that men still outnumber us on the mezzanine. However, although I’d been dreading landing here, in actuality I receive less harassment than on the Bountiful Sluts. While guys stare just as much and continue to mentally undress me, with so many Aghara-Penthay females available for hire not many lecherous males make the effort of interacting with a woman marked by her blue wrap as clearly private.

I see no sign of Dealla, the woman from the changing room. I’d wanted to wish her farewell. I do recognize a plump woman who spent the voyage nude though. She is now in a blue wrap and making off towards a brothel named “Orgasm in Restraint” in the arms of two men. I’m not sure which of them is her owner.

Acheron and I are able to find enough space in the crowds to converse without being overheard, and I’m grateful for a brief chance to drop the “Master” and my fake subservience.

“Thank the Gods that voyage is over,” I say sincerely.

“You did well, Lara. And we made it safely through the security controls. Not long and you’ll have your answers.”

It does feel like the worst of the ordeal is over for now, and I allow myself to agree. I did do well.

“Let’s pray my sister is dead and not down on the surface.”

That sounds cold, but I said it because although Gara’s demise would be a tragedy, I’ve seen enough to know it would be kinder than her being captive on this hellhole.

No woman should have to endure this.

I hold my precious wrap tightly about me yet again but fail to close the opening where it gapes at my left side. Sometimes a waft of air moves the hem away from my pelvis and I feel even more exposed. Even the panels of the floor add to the sense of vulnerability, feeling hard against my bare feet.

“Soon,” Acheron says with macho confidence. “Not much further.”

I look away so he can’t see me frown. It’s easy for him to sound brave. He risks male slavery if we’re caught, but he’s not just walked into a place where he already is a slave. He’s not handed over to another human being the rights to sell him, or torture him, or rape him. He’s not just sat in someone’s lap and had their boner pressing against his ass. He’s not just appeared in a wrap in front of those beasts from Merlon. He’s not been blamed for having to fight off the bearded one.

But my minor vexations with Acheron are forgotten when I see our destination. So many light years of travel and miseries endured but I’m here. In front of the place where she is, Riyena, the only living being with the truth on Gara’s fate and a data chip vital to the future of Gaianesia. The brothel looks plush compared to some of the establishments we’ve passed. It says much about the nature of unpacified males that there must be riches to be had from torture and sadism.

The scene is overlaid strangely with my memories from the video. Although there is no sign of the human bomb who obliterated Ja-Alixxe just a short distance away from where I stand, and everything has been cleanly repaired, the milling crowds seem no different. And the women stand out front just the same, as motionless as statues, cut flowers advertising their availability.

I have reached the Palace of Roses.

17 - Roses

A redhead woman carrying a data pad, face-marked and dressed in the scarlet wrap of a slave of Aghara-Penthay, approaches us. She seems to be the hostess for the place, and keeping her head humbly lowered she bids Acheron welcome to the Palace of Roses.

Even over my adrenaline fueled heartrate I can feel pity for this creature – the first implanted female I’ve met close up. The wrap they’ve given her is not even long enough to cover the poor woman’s sex, and when I look down I can plainly see the lips of her pussy. Yet she seems to feel no shame about it.

“I’m have an appointment - my slave is to play with Riyena, the Harken slut,” Acheron says to her and he forces a realistically cold grin. He’s a better actor than I’d have expected. “We have a room with complete privacy booked.”

I nod my approval. I’m glad he emphasized that. We don’t want to risk Riyena calling out if she recognizes me.

Our hostess checks her pad, and just for a moment I could believe there’s something odd, like an expression of shock. But a moment later that glimpse of something underneath has already gone and I convince myself I must have been mistaken, for she continues saying, “Yes, Master. The arrangements are exactly as you say.”

“Have the Harken female delivered to my room for the entertainment,” Acheron orders, ignoring our danger to convey a perfectly-acted confidence. “And perhaps if some of your girls could take my slave there as well? I’ll settle the payment here and be along in a moment.”

“Of course, Master,” the receptionist agrees diffidently.

Immediately I am indignant enough to risk nudging him with my elbow. This wasn’t the plan. There are advantages of me having time alone with Riyena to discover confidential information, but we agreed Acheron needs to be there too, in case he has to compel her against raising the alarm.

“You’re meant to…” I’m saying, but he looks angrily at me and interrupts, “Silence, slave!”

I grow crosser at him, mainly because he called me “slave”, and I glare openly at the man playing the part of my owner. Stupid beast of an unpacified male. He’s allowed to stay in character in front of the hostess, which will help avoid creating any suspicion I’m a Gaianesian. But he’s breaking from plan by leaving me alone with the Harken even for a second, and we’ll have words about this after the mission. What’s worse is than now he’s told me not to argue, I’m as good as gagged by the need to play the submissive role.

“Of course, Master,” I eventually force myself to say, but letting a hint of sarcasm creep into my voice to show him I’m pissed, and alleviate the frustration I feel at having to once more that shameful word.

He smiles at the girl and abruptly I understand why he’s acting so recklessly. Gods damn him, I bet he’s trying to impress the hostess. I hate unpacified males! But this is a minor hitch, and we are still progressing with the mission. Perhaps less than an hour, and I’ll already be back on the Bountiful Sluts. And as soon as we undock any humility can go out the window.

Back in the present, the hostess gives an urgent call and a gaggle of red-wrapped girls spills out of the club. Each one would be considered pretty by human standards, average by Gaianesian. She instructs this mob in a whispered consultation.

“Come with us,” the nearest of these, a brunette with warm eyes requests of me. Patronizingly she adds, “Try not to be afraid.”

The uncertainty introduced because of Acheron’s slip has made me angry, and I look more scathingly at her than I mean to, when she’s only trying to be kind to me. As if I’d be afraid! But on with the plan. Another girl takes hold of my wrist in a slim female hand, and I let myself be tugged gently but firmly forward. I shoot a reproachful glance back at Acheron, but he’s so busy talking to the hostess he doesn’t even look.

Outnumbered, I’m propelled within the place that’s been my target and the sum of my fears – the House of Roses. Immediately inside is a richly-furnished salon where women serve drinks and are available for selection by the clients. There are more men than women in here. A couple of the females are in the red wrap of Aghara-Penthay slaves, but most of them are naked. People of both sexes look at me speculatively as I move through the crowd – a blue wrap making me distinctive.

From the back of the room we pass through to a hallway. Some of the doors to the bedrooms off this corridor are closed, but one open door gives me a disturbing view of a nude woman strapped facing an “X” shaped piece of furniture. Her back and buttocks, exposed to the room, are covered in a series of angry red stripes. I gasp – someone whipped that girl! What beast could do such a thing? I hope one day Gaianesia blasts this place into oblivion.

Under the guidance of my entourage I descend a floor, and then a second, and after so much planning and humiliation, at last I reach the appointment with destiny that’s taken so much sacrifice to achieve.

The room where I’m taken turns out to be two rooms. A plain dressing and storage room leads to the bedchamber itself - luxuriously furnished, floored with a thick pile carpet and all silks, dark woods and soft lighting. Luxury or not, it’s still a cross between a bordello and a torture chamber though. The heavy bed that fills most of the room has sets of shackles in its corners – leather straps fixed to heavy-looking chains, and their keys hanging from a hook above the bedhead.

After the Mezzanine’s hard alloy floors, the thick carpet in here feels delightful under my bare feet and the cushioned walls, covered with a pale pink satin material, also looking soft. However in the back of my mind I know the comfort is an illusion - all this padding is probably to prevent screams escaping.

This place of horrors, this torture chamber, sums up everything I detest about the Slavers, and I clench my fists at it. The hormones in unpacified men turn them into such sadists that they can consider what happens in rooms like this to be entertainment. Look, there’s even a couple of plush padded chairs been left here, angled for sitters to watch the scene on the bed.

My elation at finally being here is suppressed by my escalating fear, for I can see Acheron’s minor divergence from the plan means our problems are beginning to snowball. The girl was supposed be waiting secure and helpless in those restraints, but it’s just me and my escorts. Where is Riyena? This is really bad news. While my Gaianesian markings are covered suitably to fool the men, Riyena will instantly recognize me as an identical copy of Gara, and what’s more she probably knows my sister has a twin. Anxiously I look back into the corridor to see if the Harken is approaching. What happens if Riyena runs straight back out the door, and raises the alarm before she can be trapped in this room where no-one will hear her calls?

If only Riyena was already in position and restraint, as was meant to be, it would be a trivial matter to guarantee her silence. Look, there’s the means to do it. Already waiting on a low table is an elaborate gag, a contraption that looks like a harness for controlling a farm animal but with a red ball at the mouthpiece.

“Gods dammit,” I say frustratedly to the other slaves, “I thought the Harken girl was supposed to be here first.”

But the tension I’m feeling robs me of my usual natural authority, and the brunette gives me that same patronizing smile. Easy for her - she doesn’t know what’s at stake. She doesn’t know what I know. Riyena could walk in any moment, run straight for help, and Acheron and I would both be doomed. Idiot of a man!

Nervously I rub my hands together and discover my skin is going clammy with fear.

I turn again to the door. Perhaps we can all surprise Riyena if she walks in. But that’s also very risky. Gods, I’m in real danger. It’s no good, I have to abort, albeit temporarily.

Drawing myself to my full height I address the other women. “I do not wish to remain here until the Harken girl is present and restrained. Please escort me back to my master.”

I deliver this ultimatum while moving to leave, but the brunette girl with the warm eyes steps into my path, shaking her head.

“Our orders were to bring you here,” she says to me with equal authority. “Lie on the mattress, on your back.”

And with that, one of her entourage actually has the audacity to give me a gentle push, as though I might be too stupid to understand.

Suppressing the urge to lash out the one who pushed me, I frown at them all, not hiding my anger this time.

“The Harken woman, Riyena,” I explain imperiously, “She’s the one supposed to be restrained and ready for us. She was supposed to be in the room first. My master will punish you if his wishes are not fulfilled.”

I shouldn’t have said that. It’s beneath me to threaten them. I didn’t want to frighten these poor implanted slaves with the possibility of retribution from a man, but my danger is getting real and I had no other choice.

But still Brunette smiles sympathetically, as though I’m the one who’s deluded.

“Our instructions are to prepare the first female to arrive, and that’s you.” she says gently but firmly. Then she repeats, “Try not to be afraid. Lie on the bed, and we’ll restrain you.”

Her soft words stun me like I’ve been doused with ice water.

“Restrain me?” I splutter, looking at the leather bracelets horrified. “No one is restraining me!”

My heart is racing now. She expects to chain me up? Me? Not a chance. It’s not just the indignity that’s completely unacceptable. If Riyena recognized me while I was bound, I’d be lost.

“Everything that will happen here she can heal with the cunt paste, and you’ll sustain no permanent harm,” states the brunette.

In spite of my rapidly deteriorating situation I take a pause at her words and look down at the table. That’s cunt paste? That jar of cream is the magical bacta that can heal anything? This poor Harken female, implanted to feel sadistic urges, tortures women and then heals them with the paste, and the Slavers let her do that as though it’s acceptable behavior? These Slavers are an abomination! Well no one is doing that to me. I have to regain control before these mindless bitches try to get me on that bed.

“There’s been a stupid mistake because of poorly worded instructions,” I say to the brunette in my strongest tone, letting all the authority of a woman of Gaianesia show in my voice. “The wrong female arrived first. Go back to Acher… my Master, or send one of your girls, but you must check the instructions. I’m not lying on that bed or even staying here, until the room is properly prepared.”

Brunette’s expression hardens.

“Please, miss,” she says, patiently but with a trace of steel. “We’re going to prepare you. The group of us can force you down, but it will be more pleasant for you if you co-operate.”

I actually growl with exasperation. What a ridiculous farce I’m in. SNAFU – that’s the military term. Situation normal – all fucked up. The whole mission is endangered, and there’s a chance I’ll actually have to go through the indignity of waiting on that bed wearing those bracelets, all because Acheron got distracted by a pretty smile. And where is he? It can’t take that long to pay a tab. Hang on, what if he’s been discovered?

That’s an unbearable thought! No, I can’t consider that or I’ll go mad. I’m so frustrated I could explode, but swelling faster in me is the fear of a cornered animal. I’ve never been restrained in my entire life, and I’m going to feel very vulnerable when I’m down there on my back. Now that’s looking more and more likely. These slaves, mistaken or not, are going to follow their implants and their orders, and they’ll attack me if I don’t comply.

Assuming nothing has gone wrong, it will be only seconds before Acheron arrives and corrects the mistake, but I’m beginning to see I might actually have to let these women shackle me down before he gets here. While I’m locked down my fate will be on a knife edge – in real danger of permanent enslavement. If Riyena walks in I’m done for. This is a disaster! I never would have agreed to the mission if I thought I might be restrained.

But I’m here, and I can’t rewind the clock. The four women are beginning to close on me like hunting predators. I don’t want to fight them – it’s not their fault and it would be undignified for me, plus although I’m strong, I’m not strong enough to win outnumbered by this many.

“Gods damn you!” I curse at the last moment before the first one touches me, and then with blood pounding from pressure I climb up onto the bed, speeding up when I discover that leaning over to mount the mattress makes the wrap ride up at my rear. Once on the firm surface I quickly roll over and push the thin silk back in place over my pelvis. I feel sick and I realize I’m shaking. I’m not even secured yet and I’m already shaking.

Stay strong, Gaianesian, I tell myself. It’s still going to be okay. Lying back I try to calm myself by concentrating on the glowing lights of the ceiling above be.

“Wrist into here, please,” says the brunette, lifting one of the leather shackles into my eye-line.

“Really, there’s no need,” I protest, but she cuts me off repeating, “Wrist into here, please.”

I look once more anxious look at the open doorway but there’s still no sign of help. Crap, crap, crap!

With no other choice I extend my arm, and she encircles my thin bone with the bracelet, buckling it tightly closed. The leather is soft and it isn’t uncomfortable, but it grips me very closely and it’s probably impossible to slip it off, even over my slim hand.

She has to lean right over me to secure my other wrist, the one which is on the far side of the bed. While she does so her breasts briefly press against mine through the twin layers of our wraps.

“At least tell me your name,” I order her, needing to reduce my rapidly mounting nerves by establishing some kind of superiority over this woman who now has me helpless.

“Nastya,” she answers simply, and then, “my name is Nastya.”

While Nastya confirms my wrists are tightly held, one of the other women begins pulling out my ankle. I resist instinctively for a moment, until she pulls harder and I must accept she’ll succeed whether I fight her or not. As a healthy Gaianesian, I’m muscular and my limb is probably heavy, so even though I don’t like the sensation of spreading my thighs, to help a fellow female I open my legs for them and move my feet to the corner of the bed.

There is the same sensation of the warm leather wrapping around my ankles, and then surrounding me in its tight hold.

“Good girl,” Nastya tells me, as though she’s praising a child.

Bound for the first time in my life, I experimentally test the strength of my restraints, hearing a clang when I try to pull my hands back in to protect my body. I’d expected I’d be much tougher than such thin metal, but there is no give whatsoever in the alloy attaching the leather to the bed. It’s certainly not going to snap with my efforts. So I twist and turn my wrists instead, trying to reach back to the buckles with my fingers, and there also I quickly confirm that even touching them would require an impossible act of contortion.

I’m sure there must be some simple way out of this captivity, but it’s evading me for the moment. Meanwhile my heart has accelerated to race with barely controlled panic. If Riyena walks in here before Acheron, we’re lost, and that should be my main concern, and yet the feeling of being tied up and helpless on my back is somehow currently worse than the far greater danger from the Harken woman.

Unable even to release my wrists, my ankle restraints feel as far away as another world. A cool draught on my sex informs me that with my wrap being so short, anyone between my legs would be gifted an uninhibited view of my genitals. It’s impossible in this position for me not to feel totally vulnerable when I can’t even reach my hands in to protect my own body.

Where the hell is Acheron? It’s probably going to amuse him when he walks in and sees the haughty Gaianesian woman to be lying here spread-eagled and chained up, unable to do anything but look up at the soft ceiling lights, but it’s acutely humiliating to be that woman. If he’s waiting deliberately I’m gonna absolutely kill him for this.

Nastya leaves my view of the ceiling for a moment, and there is the sound of something heavy scraping on the table. I look in time to see her loom back over me, holding the thing that looks like the animal harness. Argh! The dumb implanted bitch thinks she’s going to get me in that thing, but this time enough is enough.

“No way,” I say, shaking my head angrily. “Absolutely no way.”

“Open your mouth,” she asks, already moving the disgusting bridle towards my face. “Please… it will hurt you if we have to force your jaws apart.”

“This is an outrage!” I’m shouting now. “Acher… my owner will have you punished for this.”

I’ve had enough of this. He can’t be far away, and the chamber’s doors are still open, so throwing caution to the wind I abandon my use of “Master” and risk shouting his name as loud as I can: “Acheron! Acheron!”

But Nastya is undaunted by my calls for help, or my threat to have her punished. For a second time I’m the one who has to give way, and when she takes my jaw in her hand and starts squeezing painfully, I’m forced to yield and open my mouth to permit Nastya to squeeze the ball between my teeth.

My last chance pathetic cry of “Acheron!” is suddenly muted as the gag is pressed into place and penetrates between my lips. I work my mouth as though trying to chew, but whatever I do the round sphere I’m holding in my mouth feels too huge, squashing down my tongue, and distending my jaw. While Nastya is reaching behind my head to secure the buckle, lifting my skull with great gentleness, I bite down with all the force I can muster on the straps. Nothing. The ball is heavier and more solid than I would have predicted and the leather is thick and wide. The gag tastes unpleasantly of fear and sweat. I’m not the first wearer of this thing.

Nastya releases her hold on my head, lowering me back to the mattress. I’m now free to try to expel the sphere, moving my jaw and tongue in an attempt to work it forwards, but of course, it doesn't move.

I’ve been shackled, I’ve got my legs apart and what’s more I’ve been muzzled like an animal. Gods, things are going so badly wrong!

Once more I try to protest about the misunderstanding that’s occurred, but this time the only noise I emit is a series of muffled protests that sound more like moaning.

Nastya’s instructions were to “prepare the first female to arrive”. A stupid, poorly worded command has reduced a female who should be dominant to this.

I was assuming that with the muzzle my indignities must be complete, so when she then casually unfastens the bow holding my slave wrap and I understand what’s about to happen next I offer the most resistance so far, shouting at her through the gag and struggling in my bonds to prevent myself being exposed. But my writhing is futile, and worse, it reinforces to me even more completely how utterly helpless I am. I’m so defenseless that I can’t prevent someone carrying out the trivial act of pulling a string.

Crap, crap, crap, I’m gonna be stripped!

With ease they tug my wrap out from underneath my back, and suddenly I’m naked. I close my eyes with misery as they bare me. The imminent danger of Riyena and permanent slavery to Aghara-Penthay should still be my only concern, but somehow I can only think about how someone who should respect me – Acheron, is going to see me chained and naked - obscenely naked lying with my thighs apart to openly flaunt my pussy, and with my mouth stuffed with this degrading red ball.

I’ll so make sure there’s repercussions once the mission is over – I’ll report him to White Queen and make sure Gaianesian Intelligence don’t use someone so prone to mistakes ever again, but that won’t erase what’s happening here. He’ll still have the image of me nude and degraded to treasure for the rest of his pathetic life. Acheron Doe will have got the better of me.

Pausing in plotting my revenge, I open my eyes again to see Nastya is looming over me.

“Don’t try to be brave, slave girl,” she says, soothingly brushing back the hair on my forehead, “we all break in the end”, and as I automatically protest in muffled moans that I’m not truly a slave, for this is all an act, Nastya dares to kiss me gently on the cheek.

Then she straightens and leads her coterie from the room. No, no, Nastya! Don’t leave me… What happens if the Harken comes while I’m alone here? I cry mutely out after them, humbly pleading to implanted slaves, but see the door separating my torture chamber from the outer dressing room close behind the departing women with a soft swish. Too late I realize they still have my wrap with them – the blue wrap of a private slave. So that’s yet another indignity added to my miseries – later I’ll have to wait nude while someone is dispatched to retrieve it for me.

Spread-eagled and staring up at the lights, I deal with my fear by cursing all things male and particularly Acheron. Damn him, where is he?

I didn’t want to show the weakness of failing to defeat my bonds while I was in front of those pathetic slave girls, but once alone I allow myself to fight with all my strength against leather and steel, writhing to break and tear bonds and working my jaw and tongue to try and expel the ball.

Nothing helps. By the time I admit temporary defeat I’ve started sweating slightly, exertion not helped by the overheated room. I look down at my body to see the beads of liquid condensing on the fleshy swellings of my tits. Like many women on their backs their weight has shifted on my chest, pulling each lush mass to either side of the hard central divide of my breastbone.

I’m conscious of my exposed sex - the air of the room between my open legs. It’s so humiliating lying like stripped, bound and gagged like this that I crave some method of releasing tension, so I yell out in all my muted fury.

But when I’ve shrieked enough I’m still just as helpless. And shouting out has made the ball of the gag wet – I’ll look like I’m drooling if I’m not careful.

Oh, crap, crap, crap! Damn that man!

With nothing to do but listen to my pounding heart and wait for the dice role of fate that will deliver me Acheron and freedom or Riyena and slavery, I stare at the ceiling above me, and curse the day I agreed to take this mission.

18 - Riyena

When with the same swoosh the inner door opens, and instinctively I turn my head, fear blazes instantly to a crippling inferno of terror.

Gods no! It’s her. Riyena. My sister’s lover. The woman who will surely recognize me, markings or not, and who holds the power to betray me to a lifetime of servitude to the Slavers of Aghara-Penthay. Riyena is here, and I can’t even get off my back to flee or defend myself.

I just manage to hold back the panic, and to think. If I can keep her attention, or even better send her for Acheron’s whose presence would ensure her silence, we might still be able to save this situation. So I humble myself to the level of moaning at her. Don’t run for help Riyena, whatever you do! And my plea works. Thankfully she doesn’t raise the alarm, instead she moves closer, giving me a moment to take in the person who has been the target of my mission.

In the image advertising her services at the Palace of Roses she was naked, but the flesh and blood Riyena stands over me wearing a red slave wrap. The dark brown marks around her forehead that reveal her Harken heritage are not concealed by an Aghara-Penthay slave symbol branded into the side of her face. She’s slightly shorter than I’d have expected from her image.

Riyena is carrying a small black case like a medic’s bag. I don’t want to know what it contains, and yet I can’t help my eyes being drawn to the thing.

I must force her to summon Acheron. I try to lift myself from the bed, making muffled murmuring sounds as I attempt to explain that I’m not meant to be chained naked here, and she must release me or fetch my escort immediately.

“Shush, Gaianesian” Riyena says gently to me as the door closes, leaving us alone in this soundproof chamber. “I’m sure it’s very important.”

I’d been expecting her to know me, when Gara and I are identical. But at the word “Gaianesian” my thumping heart races yet faster anyway.

This is what being at the brink of catastrophe feels like. All she needs to do is tell one of the guards I’m a Gaianesian, and an implant will be my fate. Thank the Gods Riyena seems in no hurry to leave and raise the alarm.

In fact she wants to linger. The Harken reaches for the strings holding her wrap in place.

“Gaianesians are lesbians. Do you like me?” she asks, as she casually undresses in front of me.

With no option other than looking at her I do. I’d seen her small breasts and her hairless, rather puffy vulva before in the image. But standing over me I’m willing to acknowledge she’s not unattractive, for a Harken. Riyena is quite athletic, or maybe they’ve been making her exercise since her capture. Her eyes are as dark as her hair and they’re large, and feminine, but cold.

I nod my approval ingratiatingly, followed by shaking my arms a second time to demonstrate my wish to be released, but she just repeats “Shush, Gaianesian” in her Harken accent, and sits on the mattress close to my hip. Riyena is examining me with something like reverence – as though she’s a child given a gift too good to believe.

I realize her hand is hovering mere inches from touching me. I look at that hand and in the middle of all my fear and shame I feel hope. Here is the culmination of my mission – all that preparation, all those demeaning experiences, to bring me to that hand. I simply need her to make contact – skin-to-skin and the download will start from her chip to the anklet locked around me. However there is something I’m more desperate to know. And even with my mouth distorted and my tongue squashed by the ball I’m able to make a sound like “Gara”.

Riyena nods, and she says in the same soft voice she’s used since she walked in, “You’re asking me if your sister is alive, yes? You know you look just like her? Although there’s something tougher about her, and your eyes aren’t as pretty. I think that’s only dye you’ve used though.”

Ignoring those observations, I mouth a plea out through my gag, which no doubt sounds pathetic. How I look doesn’t matter. Just tell me - where is she?

Riyena chuckles.

“She’s down on the surface. Waiting for us.”

No! No! It’s the news I’d dreaded above everything. Pressing my head back into the mattress I stare upwards at the ceiling and blink back tears. Gara! No! She says you’re on the surface. If that’s true that can only mean you’re a sex slave of Aghara-Penthay. My beloved sister, implanted, obedient, degraded, raped, sold. If only you’d died when your ship was attacked.

I desperately need a moment to mourn, but Riyena does not allow me long to come to terms with this tragedy.

“No doubt White Queen didn’t give a crap about your sister, and only sent here to complete her mission and transfer the data from my secret chip, yes? So you’re eager for me to touch you?” she continues, and then without waiting for me to reply she adds, “Well let me oblige.”

And without asking my permission the Harken female does touch me, and not just a touch – she fingers me intimately, at the apex of my legs below my pubic bone, where only my lovers have been permitted. Of course she understands the female body, and the initial contact with the smooth pads of her fingers is in the correct spot to trigger a flare of arousal which immediately heats my abdomen. The prone position I’m in means I can’t look down to see what she’s doing properly. And left with only the nerve signals to inform me, they seem far more intense, and therefore worse when only a moment later my pleasure turns to suffering. Without warning I feel her squash the hooded folds of my clitoris between her knuckles, mashing hard enough to make me tense in my bonds and mutely moan in pain.

No-one has tried to harm my sex organs before. My flesh is sensitive there, and I’m astounded how much it can hurt. Fucking bitch! I scowl silently at her. I’m furious, but also aware how utterly unable I am to stop her. The adrenaline spike of pain makes my blood pound even harder. I’m going to have a heart attack at this rate.

“You moan just like she does when I torture her…” Riyena says approvingly as I move my pelvis, trying to shift her crushing knuckles into any place that feels less responsive. But shifting only seems to make it worse, and I must moan again.

So here she is – my first true sadist. I should pity her, turned by an implant into a monster, but it would be difficult enough forgiving someone who merely hurt me. I can have no sympathy for someone who claims she harmed Gara.

The pain from my core reduces to a dull throb when the Harken abruptly releases the pressure, but Riyena isn’t merciful enough to remove her hand from the private place between my legs. Her fingertips remain there, right on my clit. Unconquered I raise my head to show the contempt I have for the kind of person who could hurt my sister.

“Bitch!” I mouth from behind my gag.

Without the least sign of remorse for what she just did, the Harken woman laughs at me.

I try and reassure myself I’ll end up the true victor here. For although it was a humiliation she just inflicted there, forcing me to react when she squashed my clitoris, as Riyena said she just completed the most important part of my mission. The Harken female and I have had physical contact, and the download will be complete. The moment Acheron arrives he’ll release me, and I will leave, while this psycho bitch who claims she tortured Gara will rot in this place.

Riyena seems to be reading my mind.

“You’re probably feeling pleased with yourself, maybe thinking about the medal that White Queen has waiting back at home. Hero of Gaianesia, Yes? Well don’t start the party yet. See, you’re wildly mistaken about the data Lara. There’s no data chip at all. Never was. You went through all the humiliations to get here for nothing. Look…”

She holds up the wrist of her free hand, and indeed there is no trace of an implantation scar, but that means nothing. They don’t always leave marks. I shrug. It’s a trick, of course. Nothing but mind games. Raising my head again I shake it to let her know I’m not fooled – she’s a sadist and it merely gives her pleasure playing mind games.

I can’t entirely keep up this show of strong defiance when abruptly Riyena’s other hand leaves my genitals and travels up dreadfully slowly over my pubic bone, making me suck in my abdomen reflexively when she touches me there. But then I claim control of my body once more. I stare at the ceiling, trying to tune out everything that’s happening to me.

Like all narcissists, Riyena likes the sound of her own voice and she continues to talk.

“All that time your sister thought she was seducing me, when it was in fact the other way round,” she says. “How it aroused me, to see her so stupidly and obligingly yield her body for the sake of her planet. She walked so willingly into our trap, I think the only explanation can be that part of her must have wanted it.”

Boldly I shake my head again. Talk is cheap. This is nothing but the implanted Riyena trying to get under my skin. My mental defenses are secure.

It’s a different story with my physical form though. Again I can’t help but react when she starts playing with my breasts, gently shaking the flesh to watch the way I move, and then pulling at my nipples, one after the other. Left, right, left, right, inevitably stiffening the nubs. Since puberty I’ve had naturally sensitive nipples and it’s easy for her to make me erect and rubbery. They say women make the best torturers of women, because they understand how it feels.

I’m already preparing for Riyena to try and hurt my chest like she did with my sex, and I start tensing in my shackles in preparation for the worst. But anticipation doesn’t aid resistance, and sure enough when the pain does come for a second time, as she pinches my left bud between her fingernails ferociously hard, once more I must cry out.

When Riyena releases me and coherence returns I raise my head enough to look down and assess the harm. It felt hard enough to make me bleed, those sharp nails. But although my nipple is an angry red color, it doesn’t look damaged in the least.

At some time I’ve started breathing heavily and the ball of my gag has somehow become slick with saliva.

Enough is enough. Acheron, get in here now! I pull fiercely at my shackles, trying to break free. I want to be released and get out of here. Even the Bountiful Sluts would be better than lying helpless in this room.

“If you Gaianesians have a weakness,” observes Riyena relentlessly, “it’s that you’re too trusting around other women. Gara took in all my bullshit about being a discontented lesbian who wanted to flee the Harkens way too easily. And when she longed to believe me that much, she got sloppy. She didn’t even check I’m actually a Harken.”

At this comment I’m at least able to look scornfully at her delicate pattern of Harken markings, clearly visible over the slave tattoo. I snort my derision. This woman is a Harken if ever I saw one.

“But I certainly don’t come from Harka-Ringworld, and here has been my home since I sought out the master and willingly offered myself, many years ago. Aghara-Penthay.”

Ha! That’s the least believable part of her denials so far. It makes me feel a little better. No woman willingly calls Aghara-Penthay home and lets herself be tattooed, implanted, made slave. And Riyena is a woman. The thin deceit confirms everything she’s telling me is sadistic lies. The intelligence chip is in there. The data is in me. I will emerge the victor. Perhaps she’s too stupid to realize I‘m not fooled.

“The only part of the story I told your sister that was true is that I’m female.”

I roll my eyes sarcastically. Whatever. Say what you like. But looking away is a mistake. I don’t see her hand return to between my legs, so when it’s suddenly at my core I flinch. Then she moves my clit in steady circles, reigniting the pleasure that comes before more pain.

Angrily I shake my bonds. Get your hand away from there, bitch! I’m not letting you turn me on.

She speaks to me, voice heavy with amusement at my humiliated indignation.

“It was Salarin, the most sadistic of the faction leaders here, and my Master’s clan chief, who got a tip off two years ago that one of the top Gaianesian intelligence agents was an exceptionally beautiful woman,” Riyena says while I try to fight my swelling arousal. “What an excellent Rape Runner your sister would make, we thought. Gara would be a superb contestant – she’s exquisite, and seeing any Gaianesian break makes for good entertainment. But there was one Gaianesian we wanted even more than your sister – White Queen.”

“So we asked ourselves - what would be important enough to also lure White Queen to a place where we could take her? She knows well we want her, and is very careful. Perhaps a traitor claiming to have the entire defense plans of Harka-Ringworld would be good enough to draw her off world.”

(I close my eyes in private shame. Oh, her touch is making me so wet. It’s not fair that woman understands woman’s weaknesses.)

“My Master’s project began. He is one of the Aghara-Penthay bounty hunters, who captures special order slaves and difficult to retrieve women. Following his guidance I began to put myself in front of your sister. At the same time, to make your planet’s need to act more urgent by tipping the war against Gaianesia, the Slavers started supplying the Harkens with advanced blaster weapons, in exchange for a portion of the females captured on Calico.”

“We could have had Gara at any time from the early days onwards, but we held out for the bigger prize, and disappointingly White Queen showed no sign of rising to take the bait herself, not even when your sister made repeated risky journeys to our rendezvous on poorly defended shuttles. Typical woman, White Queen, letting others take the risk.”

“Unable to delay longer we decided to cut our losses and take Gara for the Rape Run. It had to be concluded before your people discovered they were being strung along and there never was any Harken data. I made sure she was captured alive from the freighter, and then under interrogation Gara gave us a wonderful gift – something she’d kept secret through my entire relationship with her up to then - that she had an identical twin.”

“There were rapid discussions between my Master and the faction leader, Salarin. Surely even Gaianesian women weren’t dumb enough to fall for the same trick twice? But we decided to give one last throw of the dice before this year’s Rape Run, and we advertised my presence on the Hub prominently. White Queen would know all that data was so tantalizingly within reach, if only the genetically identical twin could be persuaded to make the risky journey.”

Suddenly Riyena abandons my clit and jumps onto the bed, straddling me, her solid weight bearing down on my pelvis. Surprised, I flinch. Her face looms over me, and she looks quite insane with the delusion of victory.

“Did you like my naked picture in the advert? You didn’t know that was staged all for you, did you, my Lara? You, and White Queen?”

I shake my head again. I’ve heard nothing to convince me this is true. The biggest flaw in Riyena’s tale is still obvious - that a woman would never willingly go along with such debasement, sadist or not. If Riyena was working for Aghara-Penthay she must have had a thousand chances to escape her slavery when she was away from the Slaver’s planet and with my sister.

The Harken abruptly pinches my other nipple, and once more I can’t help but shriek. Then Riyena reaches with both hands for my face. She knots her fists in the leather straps either side of my harness, and uses them to shake my head so vigorously from side to side that I see stars.

“You know I was watching the first time they raped your sister. It was a gang rape, but I think she enjoyed it anyway,” Riyena gloats, so coldly and believably that mind games or not, I briefly lose the ability to restrain my growing hatred of her, and I growl and tense in my bonds, shaking my hands as though I want to claw her eyes out.

She chuckles.

“Good, hate. That’s the expression I want to see.”

And then…

“Please hate me Lara. We’re going to be spending a lot of time together over the next few months, and I really want you to hate me, and hate me almost as much as you’re going to learn to fear me. Yes, I watched them rape her and I saw how much she liked it. Wait ‘til you find out how wet the Reflex makes her. When we’d been lovers, before her capture, I was sometimes a little rough with her and even back then she willingly let me trigger her Reflex. I think when she was in chains, she was pleased to have an excuse to yield.”

Mind games or not I respond by struggling frenziedly to free myself and take vengeance against this disgrace to the female sex. How dare she say things like that about Gara? Gara would never, ever, consent to willingly play with her Reflex. When I get loose I’m going to rip this Harken bitch to pieces.

Right now Riyena is the person in the universe with whom I least want to be intimate, but she touches my core anyway, returning once more to the most private place between my spread legs. Those delightful unstoppable circles of my clitoris resume. I wriggle my pelvis and try to move away, but I can’t. I’m not sure if the arousal is harder to cope with than the pain.

“Shall we try your Reflex?” Riyena taunts, and I feel the most fear I’ve experienced since arriving here. “See how wet you get?”

Please let that be a bluff. Surely no woman could do that to another woman. And thank the gods it is a bluff. She is just scaring me.

“I’m not allowed, I’m afraid. The Master wanted to claim that honor.”

Riyena’s presence, the insistent warmth swelling from her steady circles between my thighs have become so overwhelming I’ve temporarily forgotten my own master, Acheron. But when she says “Master” I’m reminded - what has happened to Acheron Doe? Something must have gone wrong – it can’t possibly have taken this long just to pay for the session in this chamber of horrors, and make his way down here.

It shows how far my standards have slipped since my arrival, that when the idea pops into my head that maybe this is all a game, because Acheron wants to teach me a lesson before we return on the Bountiful Sluts, I feel relieved. I shake my arms and legs again and give a muted scream, in futile hope he can hear me through the soundproof walls. Fine, he wins. Let him know I’m suffering, and just come to let me go.

But still there’s no sign of the escort coming to save me.

Wet, and starting to ache with heat from Riyena’s circling touch, I summon fresh reserves of courage and look defiantly at the Harken woman. I’m brave, and I’m logical. If her story were true and all the time she was with my sister she’d disguised possession of an implant and a slave tattoo, I still can’t believe she wouldn’t have jumped at the chance of escape from Aghara-Penthay, the first instance they’d let her leave this world.

Once more Riyena seems to guess my thoughts.

“You’re wondering about this?” she asks, reaching for the swirling pattern on the side of her face delicately, “And this?” and she touches the place at the base of her skull.

Riyena chuckles. “Unlike you deluded sluts, I don’t mind accept the natural superiority of males. As his proven devoted slave, I get special access I get so much in exchange.”

She laughs again.

“That’s right, you don’t believe it yet, but your cunt is my plaything to share with him now.”

Between my legs the circling continues. She slips a finger into my slick warmth, only one of many women to have done so, then raises it to her lips and tastes me.

How dare she? How dare she?

“You know…” Riyena says, “I wasn’t even given an implant configured to make me sadistic towards other women. They don’t work on my species, so actually I don’t have an implant at all. But sadism is in the nature of us. We like our toys. For example – been wondering what this is?”

Abruptly she leans down, reaching for something out of my sight. When she straightens it’s in a way to let me see that she’s holding that small black case, and the jar of healing paste. With a click she opens the former and displays the contents.

I’m only here on Aghara-Penthay for a mission and I’ll be leaving soon, but I shrink back in horror into the mattress anyway. I see needles. Dozens of them, ranging in size from an inch in length to three inch needles, and from barely bigger than the width of a hair to a sixteenth-of-an-inch thick.

No. I shake my head, and then my pull with my arms. If this is a joke then there’s been enough teasing by my escort. He can’t hate me enough to actually let her stick one of those things in me. It’s time for Acheron to make his entrance, and for both of us to go home.

Riyena ostentatiously selects a needle, one of the heaviest ones in the set, letting me see it and anticipate where it might go.

“A part of me wants to make it last forever, this part of your life when you think you’re better than me and you still have hope. But I also can’t wait to see your face the moment I dash it all to ruins. And the Master doesn’t have forever. Unfortunately it’s time. So look at me, Gaianesian.”

Uncomprehending I do look up at Riyena, in time to see something strange happen. Her skin begins to ripple and shift, as though she’s become fluid, and she takes on a new shape.

Terror goes nuclear as I find myself straddled by Acheron Doe’s assistant, the blonde Kikizi who boarded the Gaianesian ship.

“You’d make a prize slave,” she says in the exact same tone she used measuring for my wrap on the Vengeful Goddess. Before I release the scream her shape is already shifting again, and this time she takes the form of dark-skinned Dealla, my fellow female on the tramp shuttle. “Erotic, isn’t it, feeling so vulnerable?” she mimics. The alien straddling me, an alien whose true form I’ve probably not even seen, ripples once more and reassumes the shape of Riyena.

No, no, no, no, no! She might look like a Harken now but she’s not one at all, and she was right. I am indeed the one who has been a fool. She’s one of the shapeshifting humanoids. And if Dealla, and Kikizi, and Riyena, are in the service of the Slavers, she must know about Acheron. Gara was tricked. I’ve been tricked. Acheron was tricked. We’ve all been tricked. My universe comes crashing down on me as I start to understand the enormity of the truth. I’ve just willingly walked into captivity, and delivered myself to the Slavers of Aghara-Penthay.

“It took some work to keep getting in front of you Lara, racing from Acheron’s office to the Bountiful Sluts and from the shuttle to the Palace of Roses, but man, was it worth it to see the look on your face now,” Riyena taunts.

I’m shouting hysterically, muffled calls of “Acheron! Acheron”, some illogical last chance that he might have evaded this trap and still come to get me.

Riyena shakes her head.

“You’ve never met Acheron Doe, Lara. You travelled here with my Master, Egregious Klink.”

If that’s true her words are another devastating blow. That man was Egregious Klink? Salarin’s bounty hunter? The one who recaptured Ja-Alixxe? Before I can process this additional catastrophe Riyena reaches for my clitoris swollen with arousal and takes the flesh between her fingertips, pulling it out and away from my pubis. I tense desperately in my bonds, now hysterical with fear as I understand there’s no rescue coming, and in seconds she’ll be pressing that needle into me. There’s nothing I can do to stop her, and I’ve been lost since I boarded the tramp shuttle.

“We’re going to be lovers, Lara, more intimate that you’ve been with any woman before, so you’ll have no secrets from me and you are okay to scream.”

I shouldn’t be weak, but I’m well on my way to doing that already, whimpering a plea of “No! No! No!” through my gag, when she pushes the needle into the focus of my sex for the first time. After that there is no sanity or understanding or the chance to form coherent speech, only pain.

19 - Tortured

A moment lasts for eternity when you’re being tortured, and yet in contradiction, you lose your mind and it becomes impossible to judge the passage of time. You only begin to re-evaluate reality in the moments in between – a hoarseness in your throat telling you that you must have been screaming for a long time; the aching muscles that have come from nowhere, sweat over your body showing just how fiercely you struggled, and the way you can’t stop shaking from the fear.

The female body has a defensive mechanism where after a certain amount of abuse the damaged area begins to lose sensitivity, and the mountainous peaks of agony flatten to gentler hills. Unfortunately Riyena seems to be familiar with this, and she also knows that the nerve endings in a vulnerable organ when given pause or smothered with cunt paste recover rapidly. Thus, when she tortures me for the first time she methodically alternates between my breasts and my sex, piercing her needles right through double-sided flesh such as my nipples and the hood of my clitoris, and embedding pins deep into surrounding areas such as the padded lips of my vulva and the heavy, full, masses of my boobs.

Each time a needle begins its inexorable progress it’s impossible not to scream as a part of my delicate body becomes white hot fire. The sounds I emit are not screams of fear, not the shriek of a damsel in the clutches of the monster in a movie, but are animal howls of unbearable suffering. Once a needle is embedded and I briefly regain some sanity, she likes to move it around inside me and enjoy the new reaction this produces.

Rapidly I lose all bodily control. Before long when Riyena takes one of her pauses I weep like I’ve never cried before, uncontrollably, my torso gasping with the sobs. I start shaking as if I’m a frail old crone. At one point when a pin goes into my vulva, my bladder involuntarily releases and I flood my urine across the mattress, leaving me lying in a warm damp puddle of my own stinking fluids.

I don’t know how long the torture has been going on before the man who I’ve been calling Acheron joins us. He wasn’t there at one time, and then he is, sitting quietly in a chair leant forward to watch us. He appears during one of the instances when Riyena was torturing my chest. She’s pressed needle after needle deep into the flesh of my breasts. There are so many of the things sticking out that I look like I’m carrying twin pale pink pincushions. I’m surprised there’s not much blood for so much agony – the merest trickle from the needles, except for at my nipples where she’s pierced right through me.

I must be a sorry sight. With it being difficult for me to breath around the gag, my crying has exploded snot from my nose, leaving my face filthy and disgusting. Bloody, disgusting and naked, I turn my head to Acheron and abandoning any show of Gaianesian strength I moan through my gag a humble slave’s plea for mercy. I don’t care about pride and whether women are better than men. I just want the suffering to stop.

But the man I see doesn’t seem concerned by what’s happing to me. I wouldn’t have believed my spirits could sink even lower but faced with his indifference it happens. Riyena told the truth - he’s not Acheron, but Egregious Klink, who hunts prize slaves for Salarin’s faction. I’m not about to return on the Bountiful Sluts with Gaianesian agent Acheron Doe, but to go to the surface of Aghara-Penthay for implantation, slavery, and enduring rape after rape after rape.

This fellow who now owns me utterly says casually to Riyena, “more pins, in her labia.” and I begin to blubber feebly, anticipation making what’s about to happen worse. My bladder releases again, but there’s no liquid left in me to spill.

She moves for me. My thighs are tensed rigid, as they’ve been each time, a desperate attempt to protect my vulva by closing my legs, but I do no better defending myself than I did against any of her other assaults and it’s hopeless. Riyena finds me just as open and immobile a target as if I’d done nothing. I feel her pulling at my lips and I pray for the miracle that death would be.

For infinity longer there is only more pain as my sex is immersed in molten lava. Instinctively I arch my back as though I were trying to snap my own spine, lifting my damaged breasts with their garden of pins up to the room.

Next time I have any sanity comes when a discreet chime from the door is alerting us to someone outside. A man I don’t know enters, dressed in the uniform of a Slaver of Aghara-Penthay. I look to this new arrival pleadingly, ready to accept any aid that ends my misery, but he only grins viciously when he sees my naked broken body and says, “Nice!”

Then he turns to Acheron and clicks his heels together with an unexpected salute of respect.

“Egregious, Sir,” he says, confirming the last Riyena’s words. “You wanted to be notified when the cruiser docked with the shipment.”

I’ve blindly handed over complete power over myself to Egregious Klink. Hysterical despair claims me when I hear his name confirmed, and I scream and scream and scream. I’m won’t ever be leaving the Hub. I’m the captive of Egregious Klink, bounty hunter to Slaver faction leader Salarin. It’s only when I’ve screamed myself to exhaustion that I regain fresh sense of my surroundings.

Riyena, if that’s her real name, is still straddling me, sitting on my pelvis.

“You believes it now, don’t you, little toy?” she says as she leans over me for a moment to kiss me in a way that deliberately lets her weight press against the pins in my breasts.

Gods help me I do. I do believe her. I look out to my shackled wrists in utter defeat. I’m lost. Inevitably they’ll send me to the surface, to be implanted, branded, and turned into an obedient sex toy like Riyena and apparently Gara. I’ll be ruined, unable to ever show my face on the world of my birth.

Any thought of my mission, whether the data is real or not, is forgotten. All there is for me is to hope I get chance to kill myself, and end this nightmare before it’s too late.

“Have the house sluts clean her up,” Klink orders Riyena as the guard leaves us again. “I want to rape her before the shipment gets here, and The Reflex doesn’t work if they’re too badly broken.”

I moan yet another plea. The Reflex? Oh please no. I’m not a virgin, so rape me if you must, but not my Reflex. But there is little time for me to ponder future torments, for Riyena is rapidly pulling pins from my chest, each one triggering a fresh flare of agony from which I can’t help struggling and mutely screaming, shaking my masses of flesh from side to side.

I start crying again when she rubs the healing cream into me. Not because the cunt paste brings torture, but because the sensation is so blissfully soothing that I instinctively feel gratitude to my torturer when I should be hating Riyena even more than Klink. Within a couple of minutes my body is as though nothing ever happened to me. Impossible as it seems I can’t feel a trace of the injuries from moments ago.

There is the sound of the door opening again. I lift my head from the mattress looking for some form of aid, and my restraints Klink with taut metal, but it is merely a slave – one of those menial girls from the House of Roses who escorted me to this chamber of horrors. I’d considered her with something close to contempt when I arrived only a short time ago, but now I’m jealous. She is allowed clothing - a red wrap, she is unbound, and not lying in a pool of her own fluid.

The slave girl has a bucket to clean me. This she does intimately, sponging soap between my spread legs and over my sensitive sex.

“Take off the gag first,” Riyena orders curtly. “Before cleaning her face, wet it with a sponge soaked with her urine. Leave her in the stink until last of all, and finally clean that pretty smile properly for my Master.”

Wide eyed, I look at Klink, but see no mercy. Riyena’s request will be permitted.

Inexorably the ball, wet with my own saliva, is removed. I am once more human and have the ability to speak, but I can think of nothing to say. Stoically I look up at the ceiling while my face is smeared with warm fluid reeking of my own acrid piss, and I’m forced to lie inhaling that stench while the rest of my body is washed clean.

I’m grateful to the slave when she eventually returns to my face, so I try to smile humbly at her, but seeing sympathy in her expression my lip trembles and I break. While I weep she towels me, gently, and with dryness goes all signs that I bled on this bed or wet myself with fright. Physically I look no different to the woman who first was chained here on the bed. Mentally I am a stranger – someone already defeated and shattered to pieces.

Then, without speaking the slave girl leaves, abandoning me to my tormentors.

This time it is Egregious who takes a seat on the mattress next to me. He said he’d rape me, and with The Reflex, once I was clean. Contemplating what’s coming, I find words to speak.

“Please don’t, I’ll give you anything,” I say, looking up at him as appealingly as I can from my place on my back. I don’t spare a glance for Riyena – I won’t get any mercy from her, but in Klink I might reach a grain of humanity towards a damsel in distress.

He strokes my bare breast appreciatively. Slaver men favor loose combat pants without underwear, so the penis is not restricted by tight clothing. I see he is already rampantly hard, and know I’m not going to evade a violation. We’re taught that once an unpacified male’s blood is up he loses his mind, and nothing can stop him rutting.

If this man’s penis is anything like the two I encountered at Subardin, I’m not going to be able to prevent him from forcing it inside me. But I’ve had sex before, so having Klink’s manhood in me is certainly not my greatest fear. That terror is something too shameful to speak its name.

“Please,” I repeat. “Rape me, but don’t do the other…”

Without responding to this Klink releases his dick and then he mounts the bed, overshadowing me with his bulk. His cock is large, in proportion with the rest of his body. He’s been circumcised and the crown is darker than the heavily veined shaft, almost purple with engorged blood. It’s one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen.

“You have nothing to offer me other than your body,” he at last tells me as he moves himself into position and pushes at me with the tip of himself. Stretched out on my back I brace myself ready to feel him enter.

During the torture I’ve become dry between my legs and I’m expecting his penetration to be painful, but just before he spears into me Klink drags back sharply on my hair and the thing Gaianesian females fear more than anything happens. The Reflex.

20 - Reflex

Although it is believed that there is a common origin between Gaianesian women and the Harkens, the millennia of separation during the dark ages after the solar flare led to a crucial evolutionary difference between our two species.

Harken women, in their more hierarchical society, were less likely to endure gang rape than Gaianesian females forced to survive alone or in the loose tribal bands roaming our world’s surface. So likely was mass rape on dark-age Gaianesia that damage to female reproductive organs became by far the most common cause of death among women in the population. Therefore women who had the capability to survive rape with only psychological harm had an evolutionary advantage over their less lucky sisters.

Lower species of mammals across many planets exhibit a phenomenon known as lordosis, where during mating a female reflexively arches her back to present her organs, while also remaining as submissive and still as if she were hypnotized.

It was perhaps another mutation resulting from the flare that triggered the re-emergence of something similar to this in Gaianesian women. When our hair is pulled, down towards our spines so as to bend our heads back, we instantly become lubricated between our legs and experience an arousal so intense it leaves us in a trancelike state, with absolutely no ability to resist the assailant. There is no sense left of anything in us but the pleasure, and the completion that comes from being filled. We have no control over it. It is The Reflex.

Had this emerged during a civilized age, the genetic aberration would have probably died out. But as becoming lubricated greatly aided a female’s chances of enduring on our violent anarchic planet, women who showed The Reflex were more successful and began to spread through the population. Our scientists estimate that by the end of the first millennia after the flare, ninety-nine percent of women exhibited The Reflex. By the third millennia, there was no-one without it.

Then, in the fourth millennia Listu Adorin and her followers established the female-dominated civilization that protects us today. But there were no women left for the breeding programs to weed back out the defective gene. It remained in us buried away, a humiliating dirty secret reminding us we were once the weaker sex.

Every Gaianesian girl knows about The Reflex from the time she reaches puberty. You can feel its edges doing something as mundane as brushing your hair, that little tug of euphoric relaxation. Mothers explain it to daughters, a blushing conversation in a private room. Don’t pull other girls’ hair. Or have them pull yours. It’s forbidden to yield to anyone. And they’ll find out – you’ll go purple.

That’s right - purple. When a woman is tempted to experiment (and many do, for the trance orgasms are said to be mind-blowing) and has her Reflex triggered too often, the brown patterning around our foreheads begins to change color, first going plum and then turning a fully purple shade, showing permanently that the wearer is a woman who likes to submit.

In some women, the alteration begins after triggering The Reflex after only a couple of times. Others can last as many as fifty before fully developing the badge of shame. It’s common for younger girls to take that risk and experiment with their most trusted friends – the young always believe they’re invulnerable, and most of us want to know what it feels like just once. But if the alteration in color does come, Gods help them, for on Gaianesia it is social suicide.

As I’ve already discussed submissives are outcasts. At the very least it means a life in exile in Subardin, and often fallen women are given a prison sentence. The lesson is clear. We must remain a strong, empowered people. We are not a planet of females who willingly let themselves be turned into helpless, waiting, sex objects.

For many centuries all Gaianesian women shaved their heads, rendering triggering of their Reflex impossible. But with our planet safe under the passivation program, there was little to fear and gradually we began to grow our hair again, mirroring the fashions popular in the rest of the galaxy. Only the women at the front fighting the Harkens, where they risk being disabled by the Reflex in hand-to-hand combat, shave their heads now.

I believe in Gaianesian values. My disapproval of female submission means I want nothing less than to be turned into a helpless, waiting, sex object myself. But when Klink pulls my hair The Reflex happens anyway. I melt, becoming limp as my body turns to liquid pleasure, and when he penetrates me I moan a different kind of moan as I experience stimulation like I’ve never felt in my life. Gods help me it feels good! My back curves so I might press my stiff tingling nipples against his chest and instead of shrinking from the contact between us I crave a more complete merging.

I barely feel his penis thrust into me – it is nothing, certainly not painful – and yet it is everything. I am a glove created to surround him, and now I’m fulfilling my purpose, squeezing him tight as he thrusts in, out, in, out, oh, the sensation is exquisite.

Words can barely convey how aroused I remain while Egregious Klink rapes me, using my hair to control me the way one uses the reins to control a beast. The chance of my resisting him was small enough with my wrists and ankles bound, but The Reflex renders me utterly defenseless.

Most of the time Gaianesian women are strong, but when our weaknesses are used against the surrender of control is total. My genes are no different, so when Klink ejaculates into me, a gentle tug on my hair is all that’s needed to ensure I climax with him.

It takes only seconds for my high to subside. Lucidity returns to confront me with the truth that I just orgasmed during my own rape. The shame that I was made to show sexual pleasure, as though a part of me was always submissive and craved to be conquered, is too much to bear. I can’t look at the victory in his face, and the cruel pleasure in Riyena’s, so I turn my head to the side and stare at the blank wall and my shackled wrist.

I’ve already lost track of the number of times I’ve wept since arriving in this room but that doesn’t stop me bursting into tears once more as I contemplate what just happened. He used my Reflex.

Klink is still pressing down on me, and the bouncing sobs of my chest no doubt move my body against him pleasingly, but I can’t help it. His cock remains hard, although I can feel it beginning to shrink. The muscles in my thighs and my abdomen are trembling with the aftermath of my orgasm. Gods no! He used my Reflex. How many times will I be able to endure it before my markings begin to change?

Women like to remain together for some time in post-coital intimacy, but only a minute or so passes before Klink pushes himself up, using my breasts to prop his heavy weight, then he withdraws. The sudden stimulation of his penis slicing against my walls is intense, making me cry out again and strain in my bonds.

“Fetch the control egg from my things.” He commands Riyena in a weary voice. I turn back to the room, wondering what new humiliation is a “control egg”, while he nonchalantly tucks away the prick that just ruined my world.

“Master,” she replies obediently. Riyena has watched every moment of me being degraded and violated and I can see from the dirty smirk on her face she enjoyed it.

I’m limp with shock. I feel perilously close to shattering into madness. I must say or do something, anything but think of truth that my future is a slave woman of Aghara-Penthay being implanted, broken, sold, and suffering an uncountable number of rapes.

The only question I can summon is, “What happened to Acheron?”

My voice sounds pathetic to my own ears. I’m almost hoarse from screaming and crying.

“Down a garbage chute at the Merlon starbase,” Egregious answers uncaringly. “Woman lover… he deserved what he got.”

I can’t feel any sympathy for a male, a male I’ve never met. I have more immediate concerns.

“Is that why you made me come here on that shuttle?” I croak.

“We could have used my ship easily enough, but I wanted to humiliate you,” Klink smiles. “And the look on your face when you first walked into the lounge was priceless.”

Riyena bounces onto the bed at my side. She grins maliciously, holding up something for me to see.

The “control egg” it turns out is a smooth chrome object about two inches long, comprising a metal egg on a round base. It’s rather like a distorted miniature globe on a pedestal.

“It goes in your cunt,” Klink tells me from across the room, and signals Riyena to place the object.

“No!” I protest, tensing my thighs yet again to try and resist an invader, but there’s the same clang from my ankle restraints and I’m just as unable to prevent the penetration as I’ve been since the slaves shackled me.

The rounded end of the egg feels cold against my vulva. Riyena pushes roughly – she wants to hurt me when she inserts it, but I’m so lubricated from the rape that it moves inside me with an easy slither. She probes deeper until the wide disc presses against my nether lips, preventing it going further.

It’s not the worst thing to endure, that is until I feel it suddenly swell inside me. “No! No!” I cry in horror, thinking it’s going to grow and grow until it bursts out of me. But when it’s reached what feels like the size of a newborn’s head, pushing against my inner walls, the expansion stops.

Nervously I look up at my two captors, my breathing rapid, hyper-conscious of the giant alien thing inside my womb.

Klink shows me a handheld control pad, an elegant graphite color thing with nothing more on it than a button.

“Until you’re implanted we’ll keep you obedient with this,” he says. “The harder we press, the more it hurts.”

And he demonstrates.

I howl, the noise deafening in the small room, and my body arches rigid in my bonds. It feels as though I’m being shocked with white hot lightning right inside the sensitive areas of my vagina - the pain spreading out from there to electrify every muscle in my body.

It’s probably only a few seconds of this next torture, but when the pain goes I’m gasping as though I’ve run a race, and I can feel the sheen of sweat beading anew on my skin. It takes a moment to bring my voice back under control and during that time I emit a feeble series of moans with each breath.

Gods that hurt. No human being would inflict that amount of suffering on another human if they understood how it felt. And that was just the physical aspect of the domination. Having this torture implement used on me because I have a vagina - turning my very femininity against me as a source of humiliation and leaving me knowing I’m even vulnerable from the inside - such cruelty.

“Again?” asks Klink.

“No! No! No!” I beg, terrified.

“You’ll obey every order?”

“Yes! Yes!”

“I have a controller too,” Riyena tells me, and she zaps me again anyway, just to teach me there doesn’t have to be a reason for using the thing on me. After the second jolt I just manage to keep my emotions under control and avoid giving the shapeshifter the satisfaction of again bursting into tears.

“You can let her go now,” Klink tells Riyena with a dismissive wave.

Thank the gods, at least they’re taking me out the bonds. I feel Riyena at my ankles first, until the restraints are suddenly loose and mercifully I’m able to close my legs. It’s too late to save myself from the rape, or the egg that feels as though it’s distending me, or to undo his using my Reflex, but it’s a mercy to be able to squeeze my thighs and hide the shameful metal object protruding from my pussy.

I still have my wrists shackled, so I can only wait as Riyena looms over me, her naked body pressing intimately against my own. The chilling smile she gives me, private meant to be just between us, is pure evil.

“Welcome to the family, slave!” she whispers, and she kisses me on the nose almost tenderly.

Ignore her, I tell myself. Neither words nor kisses will ever hurt me. My wrists are at last free and I’m able to cautiously sit up. I do so to find my whole body feels sore. The muscles in my limbs are aching with the ferocity of my struggles against the restraints.

Once upright, of course the first thing I want to do is to reach between my legs, take hold of the disc base and try to pull out the egg, even though I know in its enlarged state it’s not going to pass between my lips without tearing me as though I’m giving birth.

I’m ashamed on touching my warm genitals to discover my sex is unpleasantly sticky. I’m soiled, carrying the signs of a rape victim and of the Reflex.

I tug the metallic base away from me, but don’t get anywhere saving myself from the control device. Quickly I learn its size is not the egg’s only defense mechanism. As I begin to pull the pain restarts – just a tingling at first, but intensifying by every fraction of an inch I try to withdraw it. Before it’s out even the length of a fingernail, the electric jolts are too uncomfortable, and I have to give-up and let it sink back into me.

Klink laughs at my failure.

“You Gaianesians think men are stupid.”

After being bound so totally on the bed I’m expecting to be reshackled, or leashed, or endure at least some form of restraint, so it actually makes me more uncertain what to do when Klink and Riyena all but ignore me and prepare to leave. She wraps the red Aghara-Penthay slave’s robe about herself and fastens its bow under her arm. It doesn’t do much to conceal her – her legs and arms are bare and the robe has its gaping opening at her left side, but left with nothing I feel very naked in comparison.

At the door Klink looks back at me impatiently.

“Come slave, what are you waiting for?”

“My wrap?” I plead, and he sneers.

“If you want clothing now, you have to earn it.”

Covered or not, it looks as though I have no choice but to follow.

21 - Parade

Walking nude onto the mezzanine is one of the most unbearable moments of my life. The torture was the worst pain I’ve experienced, and being raped was the most psychologically damaging, but this tops the billboard for humiliation.

I’m naked, naked, in front of so many people.

It seems impossible to believe that barely an hour ago I had another life – one with a future. I’d considered myself superior to the red-wrapped girls and the naked ones then. Now I’m more pathetic than all of them, for they were probably captured in space piracy whereas I’m here because of my own gullibility.

My instinct is to hide my body, but Klink notices and orders me to keep my arms by my sides. A wave of the egg’s control pad demonstrates that obedience is in my only option. So in spite of showing a face red with shame, and nipples that are still rubbery with the aftermath of arousal, I waddle bloated out among the crowds with all my secrets on view.

It was embarrassing enough being among the crowds when I still had the blue wrap on. Undressed, it’s assumed I’m available, and I attract far more attention.

“Trading that slave?” says a wealthily dressed male who hurries up to Klink, looking at me as though I’m a piece of meat. “I’ll pay you three thousand credits to sell me your girl.”

“Sorry, friend,” says Klink with a grin, “but this one’s mine, and I’m keeping her.”

“Shame,” he says with a shrug. “This is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. We’re talking Rape Run grade cunt.”

“Help yourself to a free feel though,” Klink says in the same hospitable tone he used when I watched the video of him giving away Ja-Alixxe. “If she resists you she’ll regret it.”

Did he just say what I thought he said? I look at my owner, astounded. After they put in the egg inside me I decided not to fight any more, but pure instinct pushes away the stranger’s hairy hands which reach immediately for my breasts, and without warning I’m in agony on the floor, reaching between my legs to pull at the egg which feels as though it’s white hot against my tender inner walls.

I look up pleadingly to the stranger as I’m tortured again. Dark eyes and hair. Malicious grin. No mercy for me here.

The pain vanishes as suddenly as it arrived, but the hairy hands return, leaning down to me on the floor, and this time I override the urge to fight. This man’s skin is rough – the texture of someone who does manual work for his living. Large fingers squeeze my breasts uncomfortably, pulling and pinching my nipples until they stiffen further for him.

The shame, and fear, and futile anger I’m feeling are infinite. Death would be a mercy compared to this.

“Up on your feet now, slave,” hairy-hands orders.

I scramble up quickly. I’ve recovered some sense of self-possession since my initial insane panic in the torture chamber, so I try to reason a plan. I’m not ready to face another dose of the egg, and that means until I figure out a way to escape this situation, my best option is to play along.

My resolve to stay calm is tested severely by hairy-hands though. The groping I receive for the next few minutes is thorough and intimate. The only place hairy-hands doesn’t access is inside my pussy, stuffed as it is with the egg.

Of all things that could save me from his molestation, it ends up being the Hub’s public address system.

“Honored visitors to Aghara-Penthay – there will be a parade of slaves for your entertainment along the mezzanine level in two minutes.”

Klink laughs cruelly to hairy-hands.

“Oh, you gotta all see this,” he tells him, and then to me, “come, slave.”

Automatically I have my arms half crossed over my breasts, but at a frown from Riyena I drop them back to my sides. Apprehensively I trot behind my captors, over-aware of my nudity. What did the announcement mean? As a slave will I be asked to “parade”?

The crowd is becoming dense. Almost everyone in it is male. I suppose most women are working. Packed between bodies, hands brush me and grab at me. I’m unable to retaliate. There are too many men around me to report them to Klink, even if I knew who to blame for each sexual assault. Pinching my bare buttocks seems to be a particular favorite, as I can’t guard behind me all the time.

I’m not the only one suffering though, for I begin to hear the voices of other women, many women, growing louder. And then the rapidly growing crowd parts, and I see them.

It is White Queen who walks at the front of the line of barefoot captives. Her elderly face is proudly staring straight ahead, in spite of her chains. My heart goes out to them as I see one and then another and then another – every last one of the crew and passengers of Vengeful Goddess shuffling silently along the mezzanine, with their wrists shackled behind their backs.

The women are linked together in a chain – a metal collar at the throat of each one joined with a short length of steel to the wrist bound behind the woman ahead, so all must move together following the path of White Queen or risk dislocating the shoulders of the girl in front. There was no need to secure them this barbarically. It’s not as if there’s anywhere to go if the poor creatures do try to flee.

All of my comrades still wear regulation Gaianesian jumpsuits, but here and there a torn zipper exposes a vest underneath, and there are a few split lips and bruised faces to suggest that the abuse of my fellow citizens has already begun.

Spread around the captives like satellites come the Slaver guards, all carrying weapons that look like relay batons. I’ve seen these before – slave goads. Where the live-end touches a body, the contact produces a searing electrical discharge inflicting immense suffering on the victim, but there is not the least actual physical harm. It is a perfect weapon for controlling prisoners.

The guards wear badges I recognize as the insignia of Salarin’s faction. At the front of the group, close to White Queen, walks the guard captain, a heavyset man with a thick black beard and a low brow which gives him a primitive appearance. He nods respectfully to Klink.

Midway down the line of prisoners from Vengeful Goddess I spot Hoola. Like the others, she is connected to her neighbors by a collar around her throat and has her wrists restrained tightly behind her. Her face is tear-streaked, but she looks unharmed. The courageous resolve in her expression cracks into shock when she sees me standing stark naked among the crowd. She glances with incomprehension at the metal plate over my pussy.

Kikizi was Klink’s agent all along. It comes back to me how we foolishly let her walk right onto Vengeful Goddess, and turning to the red-wrapped shapeshifter I accusingly say, “You did this.”

Riyena is smug, and wants to explain.

“All it took was a neural agent to knock everyone out. You saw the dust when I opened the case. Then a tiny droid to drop the ship out of hyperspace, so our men could board her. Every single woman taken captive. Child’s play, really. You’re all too trusting.”

Meanwhile there must have been a signal at the front of the women’s line. The precession stops, and as my comrades bunch up defensively the crowd close around them. A circle of women trapped within a circle of men.

As silence falls female faces show uncertainty. A few are trying not to cry. Males in contrast are excited, anticipating some form of sport.

“Gentlemen,” the Slaver captain says in a loud voice. “You’ll see here we have an entire shipload of captured Gaianesian females. You’ll know about the Gaianesians – the women who believe themselves superior to men, and who neuter their males to deny them any right to pleasure…”

No! That’s not the way it is – we’re protecting them. But before my shipmates can clarify, a barrage of cruel name-calling is unleashed – “whore”, “bitch”, and “cunt” being the most common insults thrown at my comrades.

“Well,” continues the captain, “Here we have an entire shipload of those superior Gaianesians, but an oversight means that the women still have their clothes. They’re breaking our laws.”

He’s feigning surprise.

“They can hardly go down to the surface dressed like that, but my brave soldiers are tired. Is there any other man willing to help us correct this, and uphold our dear planet’s rules?”

Understanding of what’s about to happen spreads through the crowd like a poisonous cloud. My countrywomen see what’s ahead too. Fear distorts every Gaianesian face, heads shaking in disbelief, and they instinctively huddle closer together, as though proximity with other females can offer them some protection.

Men are already beginning to edge forward, but the captain has one final instruction.

“Just one rule before you start though - no raping them, as we don’t know who the virgins are,” he shouts over the increasing volume of voices. “But apart from penetration – knock yourselves out. Teach these feminist cunts a lesson they’ll never forget.”

I’m perhaps lucky that in the melee of bodies that surges forward I can’t see much of what happens, except for the occasional glimpse of the cream skin of female flesh. But I can hear it well enough. The sound of women’s pleas for mercy changing to screams. Tearing fabric. Male laughter. Brave efforts at resistance. Then an even more unbearable noise – the whorish moans of females in arousal as they fail to keep men from their hair and their Reflexes are triggered.

It seems to go on forever, but it probably takes about fifteen standard galactic minutes before the crowds surrounding my friends begin to thin. Perhaps men’s rage is spent, perhaps there is no more sport once every last one has been stripped, or maybe prohibited from penetration the men need to quench their arousal elsewhere.

Each one of my comrades is naked. One or two are on their feet, but most are lying on the floor, or on their knees. Most could get up but choose to remain low, heads down in a gesture of surrender and humility intended to deter further assault.

Not even White Queen’s age has spared her, and unable to use her arms to conceal her body her shriveled breasts are on view for the crowd. White Queen too is on her knees, slumped forward leaning against another nude woman as though she’s on the brink of collapse.

Many of the prisoners are panting – the aftermath of intense exertion resulting from the Reflex being triggered. Almost half have gobs of a viscous milky substance dripping from somewhere on their bodies. When I spot the naked Hoola, further around the circle than before the attack, I see she has one of these deposits on her cheek.

I’m not very experienced with unpacified men and it takes me a moment to realize it must be sperm. I shudder with pity and revulsion. As the ultimate show of contempt, some of the men in the crowd have ejaculated over my fallen sisters. A waiflike redhead flight officer, a pretty girl and one of the youngest crew members, seems to have been a particular target for this abuse.

“No…” I moan, and I also sink to my knees on the hard floor of the mezzanine. I don’t see how any sentient beings could permit others to be treated this way. We’re just women. Whatever our species we’re just women. But to these men our sex seems sufficient justification for horrific cruelty.

22 – Reunion

Down on my knees the last thing I’m expecting to hear is a familiar voice, but I’m sure I know the accent of a male saying “Man, I hate those Gaianesian bitches. I hope they’re made into the lowest cock whores it’s possible to be.”

I turn my head to try and avoid being recognized for the second time by the four men I pushed passed on the Merlon starbase, but again I’m too late.

“Hey, look,” one of them calls, “It’s Honey from the ship. Looks like you lost your clothes, Honey!”

Only hours ago in my jumpsuit I had told them they were being rude. Then they saw me reduced to wearing a slave wrap. Now I’m naked on my knees next to Klink’s feet. I’d tried to show them an example of a strong woman to prove they shouldn’t be disrespectful, but and instead I’ve demonstrated how worthless and vulnerable a woman can be.

“Guys,” my master greets them genially. “Enjoying your visit?”

“Oh, we had some fun with the Gaianesians,” the blond man with the stubbly face answers. “Got a tiny-titted little blonde piece almost to ourselves. We messed her up good. But it’s a shame they didn’t let us rape them. I’ve got a boner the size of a baby’s arm now, so we’re choosing somewhere to get laid.”

“Turns out this was here was a Gaianesian as well,” Klink says, and I flush and look away as he indicates me. “Covering her markings up didn’t fool Aghara-Penthay. That means mandatory impounding as Slaver property. She’s away down to the surface for processing soon.”

Staring at the floor I shake my head as I hear this. Please, this is a nightmare. I can’t be a sex slave. Anything but that. Someone save me from this horror.

The men laugh sadistically.

“Is that right? I bet you’re not feeling so superior now Honey, are you?” the lank one says to me. “Kneeling on that dirty floor with your boobs on show for everyone to enjoy. Well you won’t get any sympathy from me. I hope the Slavers fuck you till you bleed. If I could afford a piece of top line snatch like you I’d be teaching you your place myself.”

“Sounds like she really got under your skin,” chuckles Klink.

“Cunt gave us that look. You know the way free cunts do… Like we were scum. Like we’d not be touching her in a million years.”

“Well, we can’t let that stand. Tell you what guys, borrow her for an hour.” Klink casually says the words and it takes me a second to absorb what has just been offered. “I’ll get a drink and wait in that bar just there. Bring her back to me when you’re done.”

Shock overrides my fear of reprisal. “No! No way!” I protest loudly, the egg shifting inside my vagina as I start rising to my bare feet.

“She’s not been tamed yet, as you can see,” Klink continues. “But if you use this thing along with her Reflex, she’s easy enough to keep under control. Don’t damage her too badly, and the egg filling her pussy means you can’t do much there, but if you don’t mind that, then her other holes are all yours.”

I’m upright now. “No!” I protest again, red faced with indignity, but my sex turns to white hot lava and next thing I’m on back the floor screaming. One of them must have used the controller.

“Please!” When I can speak I beg my new tormentors with tearful eyes, reaching out in supplication.

There is no trace of mercy for me in this place. Not from the men. Agreement reached, and my objections ignored, I’m taken to one of the places on the Mezzanine that rents rooms by the hour, and for the first time I’m gang raped.

Back when I had sex with the two flight crew in Subardin they had been mostly tender, and even Klink caused me no physical pain, arousing me using the Reflex. But these men are brutal.

The room they hire has restraints, but they don’t choose to use them. They like the way I resist and fight, and any time I seem to be succeeding or getting the upper hand, they like how they can just reduce me to a helpless victim by activating the egg, or pulling back on my hair. They don’t want me defeated and docilely accepting my punishment. Nothing so easy. They want me to try to escape them, but to fail. They want me to learn I’m weak, contemptible, nothing.

At times they use their fists on me – particularly the dark haired lank man, who seems to hate me the most. Always blows to my body. They don’t want to detract from my allure as a sexual partner by spoiling my pretty face. I’ve fought girls in childish schoolyard fights before, but I’m shocked by the strength of these four, and it’s not like they’re even particularly big men.

A point is reached where they consider they’ve beaten me enough, or maybe they’re too aroused to hold back. The actual rapes start then, Lank-hair first, anally, using his bodyweight to pin me to the bed while I struggle to try and get away from under him. For a moment there is a glimmer of hope, when I almost manage to wriggle free, but with a jerk rough enough to jar my neck my head is pulled back by my long hair, and I become as limp as doll. Liquid hot pleasure erupts from between my legs, my juice slick around the egg. I’m wet, but The Reflex doesn’t help the backside, so the pain is terrible as he penetrates my anus. I’d been taken from behind before, during my experiment on the Pride of Torconi, but Gork had used lubricant to ease his entry. This time my muscle can’t stretch fast enough and it gives way with an agonizing tear.

“Oh, her asshole is so fucking tight,” he groans to his friends. “This girl is perfect.”

I weep with the pain when he’s done, and between my buttocks I can feel there’s something hot and wet. This state of defilement doesn’t stop the next one having me there as well though, a weedy fellow who keeps his glasses on to rape me. Still I try resist, writhing to escape my suffering. But two of them hold me face down by my arms while the weedy one mounts me and drills me into the mattress.

The third podgy guy chooses not to violate me.

“I promised my wife I’d only look but not touch,” he apologizes over the booing and taunts of his friends. So he’s married? I wonder what the woman would say if she knew the atrocities her husband allowed to happen to another female.

One left. The blond man is preparing himself, knotting his hand in my hair, so I know what he intends.

“Please!” I sob to him. “Not my Reflex. I’ll go along with whatever you want. Just not my Reflex.”

At first when he takes his turn he’s not quite ready to penetrate. He likes my breasts and plays with them, feeling their weight and pulling at my nipples while I’m forced to kiss him as though I’m his girlfriend. I go along with this, doing everything I can to please in case it deters him from the trigger of my hair. I’m counting the times my Reflex has been activated, wondering if it’s already been enough for the color of my markings to start to change. How many now? Once with Klink and three from these guys already.

Groping me and kissing me makes blond-stubble hard enough to be ready to enter, and he steers me back onto my belly on the bed. I’m not resisting any more, but he triggers my Reflex again anyway, moments before he cums inside my ass with a grunting climax. I think he does it because he know it’s the last thing I want.

I am empty. Blackness.

The dark haired one, he who took me first is already aroused again. I’m made to kneel and take his penis in my mouth this time. Cowed by the direst threats of punishment with the egg or the Reflex if I even touch him with my teeth, I work my tongue and lips to bring him to full hardness.

This is the first time I’ve tasted a man’s cock. They’re so disgusting I have to fight the urge to retch. Dark-hair didn’t think it necessary to clean himself after his first conquest of me, so his stale dick is flavored semen, my blood and the foul taste of my own backside.

It pleases him to see me react to what I’m enduring, so I’m forced to keep my gaze directed humbly up at him the whole time, never breaking contact. My eyes, he tells me are “big and beautiful”.

It’s not easy to keep looking up at him while flooded with the taste of my own shit, especially when he thrusts so deep into me he makes me retch from the sensitive trigger at the back of my throat. But each time I’m forced to look away, unable to avoid swallowing or even blinking, there is a harsh slap to my face, rough enough to leave my cheek hot and stinging.

Dark-hair partially withdraws as he climaxes, which means he dumps his load on my tongue rather than letting me immediately swallow it. I gulp, but my throat still feels coated with the vile sticky substance, as warm as body temperature and tasting of salt and urine.

“We’d better get her back,” blonde stubble says then. “We’ve been over an hour now.”

I feel soiled to my soul, but at least it sounds like for now we’re done.

Escorted by the men who beat and raped me, I pad back out the brothel, still naked. If I could I would try to walk with my thighs crossed, that I might hide the place between my legs, but I feel so swollen by the egg in my womb I have to keep my knees apart in a graceless hobble.

The men still seem to find the sight of me arousing though, and they make me remain ten yards ahead of them along the mezzanine, so they can watch my bare ass move. Our progress is slow because I’m in so much discomfort.

Around me it’s even busier here now – evening on the galactic standard time, so men are arriving from their day’s labor, and we frequently have to pause to let groups go by.

If I believed in any gods I would pray to them, begging them to kill me. My universe has become nothing but suffering. My backside is burning – I’m sure they’ve torn me. My thighs and buttocks are trembling with the aftermath of long futile effort, all that time I instinctively tensed to try and protect myself. Between the cheeks of my ass it feels warm, sticky and wrong, each step compounded by the shifting movements of the egg in my womb. All this and yet I also feel nothing. It’s almost as though I’m watching myself disinterestedly on a viewing screen, rather than participating in my life.

I make no effort to hide my nudity any more. My disheveled hair hangs in front of my face screening me from the crowds, and I’m barely aware the catcalls and lewd suggestions, and the hands that occasionally snatch at me.

We’re only yards from the bar and my master when the largest group of males yet pass between us, and suddenly I’m separated from the men who just raped me by a raucous train of guys four deep and perhaps a hundred long. They all wear matching shirts – some party group perhaps.

“Hey cutie!”, “Sweet cheeks”, “What a honey!” “Hooters on that!” the ones nearest call to me. I barely pay them attention as some defeated survival instinct awakens, adrenaline spikes and suddenly I’m limping away as fast as the pain in my damaged pelvis will let me.

I estimate I have twenty seconds before the column of revelers have gone by and my captors discover I’m no longer in front of them. Initially I flee like any prey is driven to escape - with no plan. But when a busy elevator offers the most immediate place to hide in the herd, I’m suddenly descending to the docking levels.

Someone pinches my bare buttock – a quick, sharp nip that makes me flinch.

I hardly dare believe none of these people are raising the alarm. It seems I’m not the only female in the elevator, and everyone assumes I’m the property of someone else. Logic begins to return to me.

I’m groped from behind again, for longer this time, a hand that cups my rump and squeezes the cheek, but I know better than to look round.

I’ve made it this far. Could I get further? Dying hope reignites as I consider my chances of bluffing my way back onto the Bountiful Sluts. “My master is waiting for me on board. Acheron Doe.” Oh yes, please Gods, let that work! If there’s anyone watching over me, let me get away from this nightmare. I’ll dedicate my life to you if only you spare me. Take all those other women, but not me.

The doors open and I limp purposefully onwards. My belly feels swollen with the shifting egg and the cramps that are the aftermath of anal rape, so I can’t go too fast without the pain becoming debilitating. I have to go slowly anyway - I’d not paid much attention to my route on the way up, so now I must read the signs on many identical docking portals as I search for my ship.

The egg – it hasn’t activated yet. What is the range of the controller? It can’t be far, as the men must know by now I’ve absconded and be trying to disable me.

Then, sweet relief, I recognize a face in the line of passengers waiting to board a ship. Bountiful Sluts. Just there, yards away through the viewing window, is the sum of all my hopes. And it’s leaving in just ten minutes. This might work, if only I can get past the two guards.

People are laughing, relaxed. I consider trying to push to the front, but that’s not the way submissives behave, and I would attract too many questions. A middle aged female in a blue wrap whom I recognize from the outbound journey has noticed me in spite of my discretion, and is whispering to her companion. I try to shrink into the crowd, even though concealing bare flesh is futile. Beautiful women are always going to get noticed. Naked ones even more so.

Many are staring at me now. But before the strangers can act, my time runs out. From somewhere back along the docking level there is a male cry, “Hey!” and I think I hear Klink’s laugh. Panic and despair grips me, and in final desperation I run as fast as my damaged body will permit along the passageway.

All hope is gone now. Now my search is for a way I can kill myself – running into an electro-shield, or in front of the guns of the guards, or throwing myself from a great height.

But fate denies me that too. There’s a supernova of pain from inside my vulva. My legs give way instantly and I hit the floor hard, cracking my skull, clutching between my bare thighs, and screaming as I pull uselessly at the burning metal.

Next thing I know Klink is standing over me, along with the four men, smiling. Riyena is behind them, flashing the sadistic smirk that’s already familiar.

“Sorry about that,” the blond man says, handing back the controller.

“It happens,” Klink says with a shrug. “They all try to run until they’re implanted.”

“Please!” I beg these four men who are my last chance of mercy, hoping that somehow in exchange for the sexual pleasure they took from me, they might turn on the bounty hunter. “Help me get away from him. I’ll give you anything.”

“Pathetic,” observes the dark haired one. “See how little it takes to change these women from superior bitches to groveling sluts? Well – you’ll get nothing from my world, Gaianesian.”

To prove his contempt for the woman he’s orgasmed into, dark-hair again pulls his cock from his pants and he pisses on me while I lie on the tiled floor. Spluttering and choking, I try to roll out the stream as I’m splashed with his hot steaming urine.

Sore from rape and the Reflex, filthy, stinking and naked, that’s how I end up. That’s the Gaianesian who is led away by her master to make her first journey down to the surface of Aghara-Penthay.

23 - Surface.

My home planet mostly has a temperate climate, so the first think that hits me on Aghara-Penthay is the wall of heat. Gods, it’s hot here! I feel faint with it.

The landscape around me shimmers under the blazing sun, making it difficult to discern anything more than a few miles away. But I can see enough to make out jagged mountains, desert, and scatterings of ancient looking buildings all made from the same oxide red rock.

The architecture is a strange mix of centuries-old structures and modern technology. There are only sandstorms to weather any buildings, no ice or water, so the Slavers are still able to use much of the habitation from their early years on this world.

Heavy security is in place on the landing pads to ensure women can only travel back up to the Hub under escort - when they go to be sold. In contrast arrivals receive only cursory checks. I submit to these with completely docility, for it’s now futile to resist when there is nowhere on this world to flee. The sky forms a perfect barrier. With no intelligent life on the barren surface other than Slavers and slaves, even if I did escape into the desert I’d find no one to help me. The Slavers could track me using the bracelet locked around my ankle, and it’s doubtful I’d have time to reach somewhere I could throw myself to my death.

“Lara, Come…” Klink orders me. In fear I approach him cautiously and he snaps, “Hurry up. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Up on the trading hub I’d tried desperately to void myself of the egg, but faced with the impossibility of extracting the swollen object I’d been helpless to evade its torments. Now Klink pulls it effortlessly from between my nether lips and it comes away with a soft plop. He holds it up to taunt me with the fluids that still lubricate it. This he smears under my nose, so I must inhale the distinctive fishlike scent of my own sex organs.

A parting of ways takes place then.

I have travelled to the surface with the captives seized from Vengeful Goddess. One hundred and fifty one naked Gaianesian women including myself, all chained together in an empty cargo hold with nowhere to sit. Riyena was the only female enjoying clothing for the voyage.

There was little conversation during our descent. Not even White Queen had words of inspiration. We all knew the certainties ahead of us on the surface. A few women sought to comfort their closest friends, but most huddled on the hard floor contemplating their futures by themselves.

No-one speaks to me. Perhaps it’s my disheveled, stinking state. Perhaps they blame me for their current situation, as I was the subject of their mission.

At the landing pad White Queen is uncoupled from the line, and led away towards a blast door by two guards gripping her upper arms. Back on Gaianesia she told me they wanted her for the Rape Run, and Riyena mentioned something similar. In that case she has a chance of being the survivor – for each year the last of the ten Rape Runners to evade capture released. Perhaps this explains why White Queen looks more stoic than the rest of us.

I too am separated from the rest of the Gaianesians. “Come,” Klink says to me, and he walks towards an entrance into of the sandstone buildings with Riyena following him. I take a last guilty glance at my fellow citizens before limping after my personal captors.

Inside the corridors of the building there’s no need for glass in the small high windows. It never gets cold enough on Aghara-Penthay. We weave a path forwards into a maze of gangways, and despite the signs in the Slaver script I’m soon lost.

“Home sweet home,” Riyena suddenly tells me, stopping abruptly at a nondescript blast door. At a wave of Klink’s palm it opens.

The rooms we enter contain the wealth of kings. I see the finest quality carpets from the Mellithian system. Intricate sculptures and paintings. Containers of precious gemstones are sitting out where anyone could pick them up. This opulence is spread around an airy den, with a vast video screen filling one of its walls.

Egregious Klink’s home contains a private indoor swimming pool that looks mouthwateringly cool in the oppressive heat. A well-equipped galley is stocked with wines and spirits that look as though they cost more than I earned in a year. There is a gym. The bedrooms all have silk sheets, and the master contains the largest bed I’ve seen in my life.

The furnishings are thoughtful and refined rather than ostentatious, and I would have had to grudgingly credit Egregious Klink for choosing well, were it not for the abundant evidence of more repulsive tastes.

Proof is all around me that what for Klink it is a place of leisure, is for women a place of suffering. The furniture and the soft beds are equipped with shackles to restrain captives. There are whips and a slave goad hooked on the wall. I pass a room configured as a torture chamber containing a cross the size of a Gaianesian, plus low benches with cuffs, cages and even items beyond my understanding.

Some doors look like the entrance to cells, and it is maybe for the best I can’t see what horrors are inside.

Klink’s bath is almost as large as the swimming pool. There is also a walk in shower area in the tiled chamber, but it has no screens to give any privacy. This is where the tour pauses, and I begin my sexual slavery by following an order to shower thoroughly. In fact I do this eagerly, longing to remove the signs of shame despite having an audience. I rinse my mouth under the spray. I scrub and scrub every inch of bare skin, trying to erase the feeling of men’s hands and cocks which lingers long after the reality has gone. Gingerly I clean my sore anus.

But all that water isn’t enough to prevent me feeling defiled. I’m not the same confident young Gaianesian woman I was so little time ago. I’m a naked slave woman, whose Reflex has been repeatedly triggered. I’ll always know myself as someone who wasn’t strong enough to avoid being raped. I’m no more than an object to these more powerful males. The individual I used to be, Lara, was proven to be insignificant when all that had value was her body.

I don’t want another living being near my sore backside ever again, but I’m a slave now, so when Riyena decides to join me under the spray, I comply when she orders me to face the wall. Then she parts my cheeks with her hands, stretching me open so wide I cry out with discomfort. My hands and forehead press on the tiles of the wall. Pain makes me breathe heavily.

“Look at that poor little asshole,” she coos. “Let’s tighten that up again, huh?”

Riyena rubs the healing paste intimately against my ring, provoking fresh moans when she penetrates a finger into me and I instinctively tense my torn muscle against the invader. Riyena isn’t out to torture me this time, but there is a cruelty of a different kind in returning my sphincter to a state as fresh as if I’d never been touched. Ready to start all over again.

I’ve cleaned myself thoroughly by now, but under her orders we soap each other up again, as intimately as I’ve been with my lovers. It turns out Riyena likes touching me, and she likes to be touched in return. My nipples respond to the caress of her sponge. She makes me kiss her – the woman who so recently forced needles into my breasts and my pussy. She teases me, by washing my hair and giving little tugs that trigger aftershocks of Reflex.

Klink watches us for a little while and the bulge forming in his pants show he’s getting hard again. I try not to make eye contact in case I incite him to rape me again.

Once out of the shower my long hair quickly starts drying in the arid atmosphere. I remain naked. There are red slave wraps discarded around Klink’s quarters, but I’m not offered one and I don’t dare ask.

“Follow me,” Klink orders me curtly, and I pad numbly behind him. What’s next? Another torture chamber? Violation in his bed? I’ve seen enough that my imagination is constructing a multitude of potential horrors which might be about to befall me. Riyena’s smile is getting broader as well. Whatever is coming it’s not going to be good.

It is at one of the doors I thought to be cells where we finish our short journey.

“You have thirty minutes, cunt.”

I brace myself uncertainly as he activates the button, but there’s something very different to a new torture waiting. The cell door has barely opened before I run for the naked woman trapped inside, a woman who is sitting with her back resting against the bare wall with her wrists locked to the stone by iron shackles. I run to embrace this mirror image of myself as my tears burst forth uncontrollably.

My beloved twin sister.

24 - Gara

The door closes behind us with a slam, but I pay no attention. There is only Gara. All I crave is to hold her close, so it wound’s me to the core when before I’m halfway across to her, she turns her head away and her body stiffens in her chains.

The explanation is not long coming.

“Don’t look at me Lara,” she pleads in a strangled voice. “Please, don’t look at my face when I’m like this.”

And I understand. My heart breaks. She thinks I’ll spurn her, like other Gaianesians would. But what I endured on the Hub has ended that forever.

“You’ve nothing to be ashamed of…” I tell her in anguished sobs as I crouch down beside her. “They did it to me too.”

Then my sister turns to look at me, and I see. The markings that adorn her forehead so beautifully, the markings that proudly identify her as Gaianesian, are a slightly different color to normal. Before my marks were disguised, mine were typical of females from my homeworld - a deep brown shade. Gara’s are more of a plum color. And only one thing can do that to a woman.

Seizing her face in my hands, I shower kisses on that shamed forehead. Then I clutch her tightly to me, not caring that we’re both nude, drawing comfort from her presence and trying to sooth her with mine.

Some topics are almost too painful to discuss, but we’ve never had secrets and from self-interest I feel compelled to ask, “How many times have they triggered your Reflex?”

Gara looks away, ashamed again, and she swallows.

“Fifteen…” she eventually answers, and is able to look at me again. “How many for you? Your marks are hidden. You look like a human.”

“Five, already, and they only captured me a few hours ago,” I admit, and then falteringly confess, “I always thought I’d be able to control it. I thought I could fight them off. But as soon as he pulled my hair I was helpless. It wasn’t my fault Gara. It wasn’t my fault.”

“I know, my beloved,” she says gently. “It will be okay.”

We both know it won’t be okay. Not for either of us. If Gara is forcibly aroused with the Reflex many more times, her markings will turn a much less subtle purple. And that will be her ruin as a Gaianesian. It won’t matter how much she resisted. She will be perceived as a female who yielded to men, and she will be ostracized from society. And I’ve been triggered five times already. I’m only ten behind sharing her fate.

As the emotion of our initial reunion subsides I’m able to take stock. Gara has been left sitting back against the wall, with shackles holding her wrists away from her body and above her head so her arms naturally hang with a bend at the elbow. It’s a degrading pose, for it naturally lifts her ribcage presenting her bare breasts even more completely. She could hide them if she drew up her knees, but as I’m the only on here Gara sits back with her legs stretched out, crossed at the ankle.

I pull at her metal wristbands for a moment, but there’s no chance of releasing her without a key.

She seems completely unharmed, apart from the change to her markings, and that she’s been stripped and chained. I’ve seen her naked many times, but never seen her in restraint before – not even in childhood games.

I turn to our surroundings then. There’s no furniture in this stone cell except for the shackles which decorate various places around the walls. It’s not hot in here, so there must be some kind of climate control operating.

Reconnaissance complete, I sit on the bare sandy floor to face her, propped on one arm and tucking my feet underneath me.

I update her on the events that led to my capture then. I tell her about the plan for my mission to Aghara-Penthay, and what I learned of the plot to capture White Queen, which led to the fall into slavery of Vengeful Goddess along with her passengers. I avoid the specifics of my violations. Gara must be able to guess from my hesitations, but it’s too shameful to say openly I was raped, and too fresh in my mind all those men looming over me, and the way I cried and screamed and begged. I only say that I was trapped by Riyena, and then encountered Klink up on the Hub.

“I was on a merchant freighter bound for Gaianesia, in a cabin with Riyena,” Gara tells me then. “The alarms went – a pirate attack. I jumped up ready to defend the ship, but Riyena injected me with something – a paralytic drug. Then she… well that part doesn’t matter. Afterwards I waited there paralyzed, listening to the battle. The first man to enter the cabin was Klink. He stripped me and…”

Gara swallows again.

“You can guess what he wanted. As well as Riyena and myself there were two human women on the freighter. The Slaver guards took them. Klink claimed me as his personal prize and brought me to Aghara-Penthay. I’ve been down here ever since. I’m Klink’s property, but he often lets other men use me. They like playing with my… my Reflex, and it’s a novelty for them to take a woman without a Slaver tattoo.”

“Why didn’t they mark your face?” I ask, touching her cheek. “Have they spared you from implantation?”

“Waiting to see if they’d catch you as well. They’ve been taunting me with you for a few days, telling me you were on your way.”

“Well they did catch me,” I say mournfully, sitting back against the hard wall. “They set a trap and I walked right in. Then there’s no hope left for us now Gara. All we can do is try to kill each other before they do anything more to us.”

“Sorry, Lara. You can’t even do that,” she replies with a shake of her head. “There’s AI monitoring the rooms. I was left alone on my first day and tried to hang myself with a silk sheet. An alarm rings and someone will come in here with a goad.”

“We’re lost then,” I sigh in defeat. “What did we do to deserve this?”

The answer is simple.

“We were born strong women. We’re a threat to their male order.”

As we continue to talk, Gara has nothing good to tell me about my new situation.

“You’ll see soon enough. They’ll mostly come for me at night,” she says. “When it’s Klink’s turn, I’ve learnt he’s only brutal if I don’t obey him. Like all men he’s mad with desire to take pleasure from the female body - so as I sate that desire his violence remains under control. Now I do everything I can to turn him on. Hold nothing back when it’s your turn, Lara. Learn to use your body in any way that arouses him, and there’s only the shame to live with instead of bruises.”

“Riyena is the one you have to fear most. She is turned on by hurting others, and the sex comes after someone has suffered enough. I’m a lesbian but I’d choose a night with Klink any time. I’d have given my life to spare you what’s ahead with her.”

Gara’s elbows twitch as she flexes her fingers and there is a clink from her chains.

“Now they have us both they’ll use us against each other,” she says despondently. “Men like to watch women with other women, and it will give them a particular kick to see twins forced together.”

I sit back to look horrified at my naked sister. How could someone do that to us? She’s beautiful, but I could never think of Gara in that way. Not with someone who is a mirror image of myself, and whom I’ve seen nude almost daily for our entire lives. How could there be any sexual chemistry between us? Me kiss Gara? Or have to be even more intimate with her?

“Gods No…” I moan. “What can we do to get out of this nightmare?”

But we’re out of time to think of a solution to that. The cell door opens with a whoosh and Klink and Riyena re-enter. I can tell by the expressions on their faces that what’s coming next isn’t going to be good.

25 - Duties

“Lara and Gara… those are lame names,” observes Egregious Klink. “Did your mother have no imagination? We’ll have to come up with something more suitable. Any ideas, Ri?”

It’s evening in Klink’s luxurious bedroom, and the balcony gives views of a beautiful sunset, the star making the distant barren mountains look as red as blood.

“The only thing worthwhile about them is their breasts,” Riyena says looking us up and down and smiling meanly. “So how about we rename this one Tits,” (and she indicates my sister with a gesture) “and this one Boobs?”

I scowl at her, but Klink seems to like it.

“Tits and Boobs…” he nods. “That will do.” Addressing Gara he asks, “What’s your name?”

The look she flashes him is surly, but when defiance only earns suffering Gara answers anyway, “My name is Tits”.

“And you?”

I hesitate, but I don’t want to be punished while I’m in this vulnerable state either, so red-faced I reply, “My name is Boobs.”

“The twins will look the same once Boobs’ markings come back tomorrow,” ponders Klink. “I’ll have to have their names put on them somewhere.”

My markings… He’s right. My markings will soon return. They might already have begun to change color – first to the plum shade like Gara’s that shows a woman has at least experimented with her Reflex, and then to the purple of the submissive – a traitor to the female sex.

Desperately I look at my sister. My forehead will turn purple along with hers; he’s going to have us implanted; tattooed with the Aghara-Penthay slave mark and on top of all that a demeaning mark on my body that says “Boobs”. What can we do?

Nothing while I’m tied like this.

When we arrived in this room they made me get on my hands and knees, and crawl to the foot of Klink’s bed. Then I was forced to continue shuffling forwards until I rested my torso on his mattress. That left me with my chest and belly supported on the bed, but my shins remaining on the priceless rug. As you might imagine it’s a pose that sticks my ass out obscenely.

Once satisfied with my position they restrained me, face down on my master’s bed with my hands stretched out to the shackles either side of me. Straps also hold my knees against the base of the bed frame, keeping my thighs slightly apart and leaving my pussy even more vulnerable.

Gara has her wrists shackled together behind her, but otherwise she’s unbound. We’re both naked.

“Tits, get on the bed,” Klink orders. And without a word I’m forced to watch while my proud sister complies, unresisting, almost overbalancing when she mounts the mattress without the use of her arms.

“Now Tits, kneel there facing Boobs – thighs apart so you can get as close as possible. I want her nose right in your cunt.”

No! That’s disgusting! I try to retreat further down the bed away from her, but my arms are already pulled completely taut. I lift my head to make eye contact again with my sister, and see misery and humiliation in her expression. A single tear has trickled down onto Gara’s cheek.

She doesn’t want this. I don’t want this, but she must obey and closes on me anyway, shuffling forward on her spread knees until she’s too near for me to look up at her face. Her thighs are open and all I can see is her sex. Gara’s organs are identical to mine, having unusually prominent folds that protrude like the petals of a fleshy flower. These earned us teasing at school. Nearer, nearer, and then I’m pressing right against her core.

Her body is warmer than my nose. The unmistakable scent of female is overpowering. She’s been aroused recently. There’s also a strange stale odor added that makes my nostrils flare with revulsion when I recognize it. Sperm. Someone has raped her and left her with his filth drying in her.

The bridge of my nose squashes against her clit. We’re more intimately connected than we’ve ever been in our lives. I move my head to try and break contact with this invasion of her privacy, but Klink barks from behind me, “Uh-uh Boobs, keep that nose right in there.”

I freeze. I’m hoping this is all, but Gara and I are not to be left alone in this position. Klink’s hand is suddenly there on my bare back and he explores me, as casually as patting a beast of burden and then deeply personal, making me flinch when without warning fingertips brush the sensitive lips of my vulva.

Next there is the sound of rustling and something firm and warm presses right against my opening. I think it’s the head of Klink’s cock. I know by now I won’t receive any mercy, and a woman resisting a man only makes his conquest more pleasurable, but I plead, “No!” anyway as he begins to force his way into me. Please, no, am I so worthless? Don’t let it be proved true that the male view of the galaxy was right all along, and women like me are nothing except for flesh created to arouse men. Don’t let him be proven stronger and better than me yet again. And above all don’t let me crash to my lowest right in front of my sister!

Through the years of my girlhood Gara and I tackled everything in life together. Being a team made us undefeatable, and I blush to think how two bossy madams were probably the terrors of the schoolyard. But today the strength of our bond has been turned to weakness. Having so rarely faced losing as long as we stood together, it makes my shame worse to be raped by the Slaver Egregious Klink knowing my sister is watching.

My pussy is dry when his cock first thrusts into me. The penetration causes pain intense enough to make me shriek, and it is perhaps uncomfortable for Klink too, for he makes a sharp pull backwards on my hair. Just as with the previous triggerings of my Reflex my cries turn instantly to groans of arousal and my groin is flooded with ecstatic sensation. Now each pumping movement back and forth from his engorged penis stimulates such unbearable pleasure I feel faint, and spots of light dance before my eyes.

Deep in my trance I’m barely aware of Klink’s order, “Trigger the other one – I want to see her juice go all over Boobs’ face.” Seconds later Gara’s groan vibrates through me, sensuous, erotic, and wanton. I barely consider how it’s a sound I’ve never heard her make before. And then the stench of her arousal surrounds me like a wall, and my nose goes slick and warm as her bodily fluids begin to ooze.

Behind, Klink is continuing to fuck me, thump, thump, thump, thump in a steady pounding beat that rams his cock so hard and so deep into me that I’m shoved further against Gara’s groin by the momentum. The stimulation of him grinding into my vagina is stunning to me, and in the hypnotic fog of the Reflex I’m unable to hold back the orgasm.

But that climax ends any pleasure I take from my rape, for Klink withdraws with a suddenness that makes me cry out and forces his way straight into my anus. He’s lubricated with my secretions, but his rampant penis is large compared to my orifice and he’s iron hard, so my recently repaired muscle gives way again with an agonizing white heat. Then the rhythmic violation resumes, only this time with a brutal stabbing pain accompanying every thrust.

“You gonna save your sister from me doing this to her, huh?” grunts Klink. “Go on, Tits. Where’s that Gaianesian superiority now?”

I can feel Gara’s pelvis start to shake silently against my face. My sister is crying freely now. Even in the depths of my own suffering I’m filled with pity. I’ve never seen her so defeated, so broken. Every instinct yearns to comfort her, but with my only option to massage her clitoris with my nose, I hold back. I don’t know if she’d find the stimulation a comforting distraction, or if she’d be repelled by the shameful sexual liaison with her own twin.

So helplessly I wait and endure, with my arms stretched out and my face in in Gara’s sex organs while Klink rapes me, and she sobs.

Riyena taunts us, from her place on the bed.

“That’s right Gaianesians, let it out…” she gloats. “Because you two are so screwed. You’re gonna wish you were dead a million times before we’re done, but after tomorrow’s over you’re not even gonna have that choice.”

So it’s as I feared. Tomorrow. Only one night left and then I’ll be implanted, marked, my free will destroyed by a chip in my brain stem that will make me subservient to men for the rest of my life.

In time with this news, Klink climaxes inside my ass with an animal grunt and for a moment I’m able to hate him more than Riyena.

When he’s done I weep too. I do wish I was dead, and I know I am going to crave that final release over and over during my future that contains nothing but sexual servitude. But there’s no escape, not from the surface of Aghara-Penthay. Not when you’re female. Not when you’re a slave.

26 - Processed

The ankle bracelet containing my fake DNA information is first to go. At the start of my mission, I was dreading a lifetime carrying that badge of shame linking me to Rosila Volati, Ilushin One. Who’d have thought its absence would be a bad thing for me and not a good one – a signal that far worse things are coming?

They’ve strapped me into a chair – the wide foot stirrups making it much like the gynecological ones used at home for the breeding insemination, only with those there were no restrains to secure the sitter. Today I’m as good as paralyzed. I’ve been buckled into place at my wrist and ankle. A heavy belt around my waist pins me back against the seat. There are two more bracelets encircling my knees to keep my thighs apart - as though my genitals weren’t already exposed and defenseless enough. A band across my forehead keeps my skull back against the padded rest.

I saw the small hole I saw in the headrest while they buckled me down. I know what it’s for, that hole, as I’ve already seen the matching tool among the medical paraphernalia on the counter. That’s where the implanter gun goes.

The medic about to end the life I know is a young fellow with a neatly trimmed beard. For a moment when I walked in I thought he was going to be more professional than the other Slavers, but when Gara was led into the room behind me he said, “Twins… Nice!” and I knew he was as heartless, and male, as the rest of them.

Gara and I had five minutes whispered conversation last night and we’d agreed to try and break away and end ourselves during the walk to processing, but that too we were denied. Klink arrived in our cell with a large escort of Slaver guards. There wasn’t the least chance of escape.

“Gaianesians,” Klink tells the doctor once I’m safely secured, although it’s probably unnecessary to state my species - my markings have returned during the night. I saw my haggard sorry reflection in the surgery mirror and also noted the first signs of their color beginning to shift. This catastrophe shocked me less than I would have believed. I suppose that’s because it doesn’t matter now if I’m shamed in the eyes of my own people or not. It’s not as though I’ll ever return to my home.

“Gaianesian man haters,” the doctor smiles. “Let’s give them hell.”

“Absolutely,” smiles Klink. “And let’s start that hell making sure they never lose their revulsion for us. I want them to be psychologically repelled by men, but have to follow our orders anyway.”

“That’s no problem,” says the doctor, typing configurations into a data pad.

“But just to make things even more unbearable,” continues Klink, “I want them mentally repelled, but physically addicted to the cocks they hate so much. You know - disgusted by dicks but need them inside anyway.”

“No!” my sister and simultaneously plea and I can hear the terror I’m feeling echoed in Gara’s fractured voice.

“Silence, cunts,” Klink says with a dismissive gesture of his hand.

“Nanotech is our usual method, as you know,” the doctor gives as his professional opinion. “We inject nanobots around the slave’s hole, and the tech stimulates her nerve endings. The tingling builds up and drives the slave insane until she gets a real penis in there. You can specify how frequently you want them to need it. It’s tricky to reprogram once they’re in though, so best not change your mind.”

Klink rubs his chin with his hand.

“One prick a week should do. I don’t want to have to service them so often that fucking becomes a chore.”

“No problem. Which hole, or holes? Vagina, anus, or mouth?”

“It works in the mouth?”

“The need for male contact is the same, but it doesn’t turn the slave on. Only the vaginal nanobots sexually arouse, unless we do some genetic modding to make other parts of the body responsive. That’s possible - some guys want to turn the asshole into a sex organ like a second pussy. But even without modding the nanobots makes the mouth tingle like a bitch, and if she’s neglected too long the slave slurs her speech and then becomes unable to speak at all.”

Klink laughs.

“So she has to suck cock if she wants to talk? A perfect punishment for Gaianesians.”

“That’s right. So is that the hole you want for both?”

Klink considers us. I shake my head pleadingly at him as he decides my fate.

“Do Tits in the mouth – she’s the argumentative one, and Boobs in the ass.”

As I hear him condemn me so casually to a lifetime of mandatory anal sex I cry out, trying to struggle and escape the chair. Please no… Is there no end to my shame?

“Anything else?” the doctor asks.

Klink grins again.

“It’s turning me on owning twins. I’d like to make the most of that. As well as making their natural lesbian sex drive much more intense, can you program them to be intensely sexually attracted to each other?”

Horrified I meet Gara’s tear-filled eyes, shaking my head in apology already. Sexually attracted to Gara? To crave my sister as my lover? No! No! No!

“That can be coded into the implant. But once the woman is configured it can’t easily be undone. They won’t ever feel the same way about anyone else.”

“Do it,” says Klink.

The doctor turns to his pad while Gara and I stare at each other in anguish.

“Get rid of the pussy hair and the hair in their armpits as well,” Klink says. “Gaianesians are lazy about shaving.”

“I’d already assumed you’d want that,” the doctor says indicating a tool that looks like an ear-piercing gun. “I can stop every hair below their necks growing with one shot of this.”

He picks up the tool and without my consent the slave processing begins, the gun pressed into my thigh and a soft click. Then leaning over to Gara she receives the same treatment.

In my leg is a strange icy cold sensation, as though I’ve been numbed. As it spreads through my body the chill fades until I can no longer detect it.

“Do you know about the new upgraded slave mark?” The doctor asks Klink while he does this. “Occasionally masters want to take their slaves through immigration into worlds that have outlawed slavery. It’s a nuisance to cover the mark over with cosmetics. So we found out how to add smart tech in the tattoo. With a command by the owner, the mark is turned invisible. All you need to do then is order the female to pretend she’s a free cunt, and her implant compels her to obey. Right past the Republic guards and into captivity. It costs three times the price, but that shouldn’t be a problem for someone with your credits.”

“Nice - give them that.” Klink says. “I have to travel into Republic space sometimes and it might be handy to take some pussy with me.”

“If you’ve no further specifications?” the doctor asks. “I can have your slaves deliver themselves once they’re under the control of the implants, or you can stay to watch if you like.”

“I’ll stay…” says Klink, shuffling in his creaking chair to get more comfortable. “I love to see the look on their faces when the implant goes in and they know they’re fucked.”

With that the doctor gives us the dreaded slave mark. It looks like a black box that he holds over the side of my face, but when it’s pressed down there’s a white hot pain like I’m being touched by molten metal. It’s over almost before I’ve had time to scream, but my face feels different afterwards and I feel as though the box has scarred me to my soul.

Gara’s cry when it’s her turn is like the howl of a tortured animal. Looking at her I can see a reflection of how I must appear – the marking of a healthy Gaianesian woman overlaid with the dark swirling tattoo pattern proving forever she has been defeated, and made slave on Aghara-Penthay.

No, no, please, no, I’ve been marked! Gods, I can never go home!

“I’m surprised the few slaves that are rescued never get their marks burned off.” Klink says conversationally. “They could remove them with acid and then repair their faces with the bacta.”

“That’s a good point,” remarks the doctor. “We wondered that too. A Slaver scientists did a study. Turns out it’s an unexpected outcome of the implanting that the female soon comes to see the mark as part of her identity, and she feels it’s as wrong to remove it as it would be chopping off a tit. We burnt them off a few slaves anyway. When the woman recovers the contradiction of knowing herself unmarked and yet implanted causes a psychic trauma and her identity shatters. Removing the tattoo is almost as risky as surgically digging out the implant.”

The implanter.

“No!” I plead, for I that’s what he’s reaching for now. The implanter gun. This is it. With implantation they aren’t just enslaving me. They’re destroying the Lara I know. What’s left will be a cruel distortion of my former self – submissive, incestuously obsessed with my own sister, repelled by men.

The doctor presses my head back against the rest with one hand. His skin is warm and clammy. For the second time in days, my bladder releases from sheer fear. The doctor has to jump back to avoid contamination from the splattering yellow fluid.

“Sorry,” says Klink. “She’s pissed herself. I’ll make them lick it clean afterwards, if you like.”

“It happens all the time,” shrugs the doctor. “I’ll have one of my girls tidy up.”

Once sure I’ve finished urinating he resumes his position. The gun moves back towards the opening.

“Keep still,” he tells me, as though I could do otherwise with his pressure added to the restraining band. There is fumbling behind me, Klink leans forward smirking, his eyes locked on my face. I feel the touch of something hard and metallic at the top of my spine, and then…

“Oh!” This piercing pain is as though a needle has been shoved deep within my skull, but it’s diminishing already. I look at my sister, beautiful beloved Gara, watching me from her chair with her gorgeous thighs wide apart in the stirrups so I can see the lips of her perfect sex. It’s all over. I’ve been implanted. I’d expected to feel different as though I’d been lobotomized, but there’s nothing. I’m still me.

I have to watch as Gara endures the same treatment – the shriek of pain and the look she gives me with her sensuous eyes wide in uncertainty.

“You know it was a woman who invented the implant?” the doctor asks Klink as he replaces the gun. “Doctor Perla Etochka… Roughly forty galactic years ago.”

“It was meant for men. They thought the implant could humanely suppress the urges of criminal sexual predators by leaving them as safe as eunuchs – repelled by the idea of harming women.”

“The Republic stupidly outlawed implantation as barbaric. Didn’t matter the benefits to society - it eroded the citizens’ rights to free will. But we’d got hold of the tech by then and realized it would be much more fun implanted into women.”

“Ah, dear Doctor Etochka… She was very pretty when she was young. We have so much to thank her for that we’re rewarding her by rejuvenating her body to her youth, and giving her a place in this year’s Rape Run. She was in that chair yesterday – she was a sprayer as well. I’m sure you can see the irony of the good doctor having to experience one of her own implants. Instead of stopping sex predators, she’s going to be compelled to spend her life pleasing them.”

Our processing is nowhere near finished. All this information is delivered while he fills an injector with a silver liquid that looks like solder. He leans in between my legs bearing this weapon, and splays my buttocks in the most humiliating part of my treatment so far. Argh, I can’t bear him being near me. Even his touch makes me cringe. I want to try and escape but in the restraints I can’t move my pelvis an inch.

Pain. Another pain. Another pain. He delivers the most intimate injections I’ve had in my life at twelve o’clock; four o’clock and eight o’clock around the muscle of my anus. The procedure hurts enough to make me shriek and struggle. This must be the nanotech which will apparently make me crave a man inside my asshole, but for now once he’s done there’s an odd tingling sensation in my backside, similar to the numbness around my new slave mark.

“Your turn,” he says to Gara. “Open your mouth. No need to wipe the gun. Taste your sister’s hole.”

Gara was always the strongest willed and should resist, but she obeys the doctor’s order as though she’s been offered a lollipop, closing her pouting lips over the injector. There are four shots for Gara, each which makes her flinch and give a muted moan.

“I almost forgot the last thing,” Klink says to the medic. “They look so similar I want their names branded on the side of their buttocks. An actual brand, not a mark. Boobs for her,” (he indicates me) “and Tits for the other one.”

“Branding – How old school!” the doctor smiles, reaching to a box on a high shelf. “I’ve got something for that - haven’t used this baby for a while. Not much call for it these days.”

The most painful part is thus saved for last - branding, a red hot wire and inch high and two long spelling my demeaning new title pressed and held against the cheek of my buttock while I shriek and writhe in agony. Gods, it feels as though it’s set me on fire! My nostrils flare with the smell of my own burnt flesh. With the earlier treatments my agony was brief, but this time the heat is real and it barely fades from its peak once the brand is withdrawn. In the aftermath of suffering I weep with misery. Such humiliation – knowing I now have the word “Boobs” on my rump.

“From now, on I order you to know yourself and each other only as Tits and Boobs, and to forget your former names,” Klink tells us while the wire is being reconfigured for my sister. I look at my owner with fresh indignation. This is barbaric – they can’t order me to forget my very identity. My name is… And my eyes widen in horror as I look to my twin. My twin, Tits.

With increasing desperation I scrabble round for a memory like I’m an insect scrambling to escape a trap. My name is… my name is… But the first one I latch on - early childhood, a teacher giving me a task, she simply says “Boobs, show us on the screen.”

Over my sister’s shriek as she’s burnt with the iron comes the next memory of my mother’s exasperation as she inspects the bruises and torn clothing of her squabbling offspring: “Tits! Boobs! Stop fighting each other.”

No! I had another name once, at least I think I did, but it’s gone. There’s only my new title branded into my flank. And they’ve done the same to my beloved sister. Tits has been marked.

Is that all? The medic is reaching for the buckles around her ankles. Slowly the layers of Tits’ restraints come away and she can move. Freed, she gingerly touches the angry oozing brand that scars the perfect luscious curve of her buttock. Even doing that she’s stunningly graceful. I’ve never truly watched her before today, but every movement she makes is like a balletic dance.

“Don’t scratch at it slaves,” chides the doctor. “It will be sore as hell for a few days.”

I’m grateful to be freed from the stirrups. While I stand trembling on the floor to stretch and flex sore limbs my owner Egregious Klink pulls two bundles of red fabric from pockets in his clothing.

“Graduation presents, slaves,” he taunts. “Put these on.”

I comply immediately. It’s been almost a day since I last wore a stitch of clothing. Then it was the blue wrap of a private slave, and not long before that a jumpsuit of Gaianesia. I was a woman with a future and hopes. Boobs, they called me. A proud citizen of my planet. Now I’m someone completely different. A woman wearing red wrap of a slave girl of Aghara-Penthay.

27 – Routine

A week of my new life passes. It already seems like an eternity from the other reality where I’d been free, and it becomes more and more difficult to remember how that felt while my new existence becomes ingrained.

My days begin to assume something of a regular pattern where Klink, Riyena, my sister and myself settle to living together in our Master’s luxurious rooms.

Tits and I are assigned the household’s domestic duties. We cook and clean. Our Master only likes shapely women and we are not permitted to lose our beauty, so for two hours a day we exercise in the gym.

There are three women in the household but my sister and I are certainly equal lowest.

Klink orders us to obey Riyena’s every command exactly as though she was a man, and similarly to do her no harm. Riyena tests part-one straight away, ordering Tits and I to fight. To disobey would invite far worse punishment than the suffering of compliance, so we both do as we’re told instantly and wholeheartedly, slugging away like a pair of tavern brawlers until Klink has been sufficiently entertained to instruct us to stop. Gasping for breath afterwards I see Tits has a nosebleed, and I have a smarting pain in my cheek and a cut above my eye that requires cunt paste for healing. We soothe each other and clean each other’s wounds with infinite tenderness.

We are not permitted to forget our former lives entirely. The remaining crew and passengers of Vengeful Goddess are kept in a large windowless pen a short walk away, and with such a large number of women in a confined space, their cell grows filthy and smells of filth and sweat and fear. The women require cleaning and feeding, and sometimes medical attention.

Tits and I are greater than our fellow citizens, and inferior. They too have been implanted to make them obedient and prevent mass suicides, and marked with the Slaver tattoo, but they don’t have the demeaning nanotech or special instructions we endure. We’ve been given slave wraps, whereas they’ve remained naked since their capture.

Tits and I have chores to occupy us, but there’s nothing for these poor women to do but to sit and wait nude in an unfurnished box for hour after hour, fearing the unknown that is to come.

Each time we enter their pen carrying the heavy pans of slave broth they desperately crave news of the outside universe. What’s going to happen to them? Where is White Queen? She was removed as soon as they landed on the surface – the only one of them permanently taken away from the ship’s compliment apart from me.

Riyena told us White Queen was for the Rape Run, I’m able to answer, but I know no more than that. We’re not permitted near the pens where Runners are held.

An odd thing happens occasionally - more than one of them refers to me as “Lara” and Tits even makes the same slip once, but I shrug off the mistakes. I am Boobs. I’ve always been Boobs. Look, I can pat my right hip and it’s printed there on the still-healing scar where they burned it into my muscle. Of course I’m the one who is right on this, but the Gaianesians look sympathetically at me when I argue, as patronizing as did the slaves at the House of Roses.

The Slavers do not seem concerned about retaining the virginities of any of the captives in the pen, so at will the guards select women they consider desirable. Compelled through their implants, the Gaianesians docilely follow the men to a room somewhere close by where they can be raped. The most attractive ones have endured this treatment multiple times, but none of them are sexually abused with the frequency of Tits and myself.

Tits’ species markings are fully purple now. Around her hairline is the unmistakable coloring of a woman who has permitted her Reflex to be repeatedly triggered. The color will never change back. She’s a sex traitor in the eyes of our society. And mine are little better.

The other Gaianesian women know full well we’ve had no choice in our transformation, as they’re enduring the same process more gradually themselves, but prejudices die hard and they can’t help looking down on Tits and I anyway.

Klink is away for long periods during the day. Sometimes he takes Riyena with him, but not always. She is only a woman when all said and done, and not even she is permitted to leave Klink’s apartment unescorted. Abandoned, she mopes about petulantly and takes out her frustrations on us. We dread these times of being alone with Riyena more than everything else, for she is utterly without compassion when seeking methods of amusement. I’ve never been so frightened of another living being.

Playing with her ability to alter her appearance is a favorite trick. When we a woman we don’t know calls by the apartment, we can never be sure if she’s a genuine visitor or Riyena in disguise. One night Riyena appears to me as Tits, and I make love to her with wild passion before having the ruse revealed.

I gradually learnt that her transformational ability has its limits, however. She can change her outer skin color and texture, change her eyes, and make minor amendments such as to the size of her breasts. She can’t seem to change her fundamental bone structure or add or remove appendages though. So she’s denied the chance to escape as a flying creature or something microscopic, and she can’t hide her chest completely, or grow a penis in order to masquerade as a man.

My belief is I have yet to see her true appearance, although she assumes the form of Riyena the Harken most of the time.

There are occasions during the daytime hours that one of our tormentors wants sexual gratification, but this is unusual. However every night during my first week our slavery takes that form of service. As forecast by Tits, although the penis is a revolting organ to me, I soon learn a preference for being summoned to Klink’s bed.

Back on Gaianesia I couldn’t have imagined the variety of ways a woman may be used to give physical pleasure to a man. On Aghara-Penthay I quickly grow in experience. We can be restrained or unrestrained. Oral penetration, anal, vaginal. Enclosing his cock between my breasts or buttocks. Hand jobs. Erotic massage. In positions with me lying on my front, back, side, on my knees, bent over furniture, shackled to objects, suspended. Using whips, clamps, plugs, dildos, chains, straps, rods, blindfolds, belts. Strangulation and immersion into water. Alone with him, or a threesome or foursome with Tits and Riyena. There is nothing romantic about it – we merely serve to sate a male urge, and once that’s done he has no interest. That is proven by the way he does not feel jealous or possessive. Voyeuristically he sometimes watches others have us. There are public displays. Gangbangs. One night Tits and I are given for the enjoyment of a cohort of guards from Salarin’s faction and seven men rape me, eight take her.

With Riyena I become as intimate as I am with my own sister. The shapeshifter likes to get inside a girl’s mind, and with my implant compelling me to obey Riyena as though she were a man, I candidly answer the most personal of questions. She learns about each one of my partners before capture. She learns that the sex I like least is in my backside, partly because I find excrement disgusting. At this revelation Riyena makes me perform daily cleanings on her asshole with my tongue, until Klink (who likes to kiss me on the mouth) discovers what’s going on and forbids it. Riyena learns how I fear having my breasts and pussy used to torture me. She learns I desire her and hate her.

When she’s had her fill of hurting me, my body shows its gratitude by reacting to her gentler caress and her naked form with an intense arousal. I lick Riyena’s core out eagerly. I try my hardest to please her, because I want her to show mercy.

The worst thing either of them can do is force me to abuse my sister. Riyena likes to order Tits and I to assume the sixty-nine position, and then make us bite each-other’s sensitive organs as hard as we can until we’re both screaming with pain. Afterwards we need the cunt paste to repair mangled flesh. Making Tits and I try to pull each other’s nipples off is another of Riyena’s favorite games.

Causing pain to Tits is worse than being hurt myself. I didn’t think I could ever love someone, care for them, desire them, so profoundly as I do my twin, but when I’m ordered to mash her perfect clitoris between my teeth I go at her ferociously all the same. Implantation was a lifting of a curtain for me, when it revealed that my sister is the galaxy’s most beautiful being, but she is also my greatest source of suffering.

It’s rare that Tits and I are alone, or not engaged in sexual service to the others, and this adds to my suffering when I long for intimacy with her so desperately.

“Tits! Tits! I love you, I love you,” I weep during a precious moment of privacy, and I can barely keep my hands from her with the intensity of my need. The taste of her juice or the feel of her nipple in my mouth is the most exquisite sensation in the universe.

Tits responds with a lust that matches my own when we have a rare chance to pleasure ourselves, but I note that when we become intimate she doesn’t grow as wet as I do. When I ask shamefaced how I might please her as much as she pleases me, she tells me she’s always found it difficult to lubricate herself and only the Reflex seems to induce full flow. Even identical twins have minute differences.

“Perhaps my markings reveal a different truth with me: that I am a natural submissive, otherwise why else would I need the Reflex to find most pleasure?” Tits says mournfully, and I soothe her, kissing “No, no, no, it’s just what they’ve done to us.”

There are other ways we’re not quite the same. Tits seems to be adapting to slavery better than I do – she cries less and has a stoic acceptance I admire and envy. Perhaps it’s because having to regularly feel a man in her mouth is preferable to the nanotech I have stimulating my anus. That steady tingling from my injections began immediately after processing and implantation. Klink specified we should need servicing one per week, but after four days of that hole being neglected the pins-and-needles electric sensation became so distracting that my legs trembled constantly, and I had to go red-faced to plea to my Master for relief.

The first significant change in my new unhappy existence comes nine days after my ruin up there on the trading station. It’s a slave cliché, but by this time I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been raped. It’s certainly into triple figures – more than twenty per day since my capture. My markings have turned full purple, identifying me to my countrywomen as a weak female, worthy only of contempt.

I’m naked in the bathroom, Tits and I on our hands and knees scrubbing a stain from the floor, when Klink walks in.

“Boobs, Tits,” my Master says. “Good. You’re both here, Get your wraps on. We’re going out.”

I know better than to ask and risk punishment, but Klink wants to tell us the reason anyway.

“I’ve been summoned, and I’d like to show you to the chief. It’s time to meet the boss.”

28 – Salarin

There are four Aghara-Penthay faction chiefs – The Master, The Libido, The Sadist and The Alien. The one known as The Sadist sits in a chamber resembling a throne room. When I first see Salarin he’s wearing a white robe, but this is hitched up around his waist to leave him nude below his middle, allowing the completely naked woman who is kneeling between his legs to pleasure him with her mouth. She has her back to us, but from the bobbing movements of her brunette head and the hungry moaning sound make it obvious what she’s doing. Judging by her curved rump she has an exceptionally beautiful figure.

I try to hide behind my Master’s bulk as I pad barefoot into the hall. I know enough of this man’s reputation that merely being in his presence makes me shake with fear. Attract Salarin’s attention in the wrong way and I could be tortured, killed even. I see Tits is feeling just as nervous and I reach out to her. We link hands in an attempt to reassure.

“Egregious,” Salarin welcomes Klink with a cold smile. “Congratulations at your complete success with the Gaianesians. A whole shipful put to pleasing men, and White Queen being prepared for this year’s Rape Run.”

“I couldn’t have done it without my two pets here,” Klink answers modestly. “Meet the stars of the operation - Tits and Boobs.”

Our owner steps aside to let the Chief get a proper view. I have to fight the urge to step back behind my owner as Salarin’s gaze takes me in fully.

“Take off your wraps, slaves,” he orders us, so of course we obey, dropping them to our toes and standing with arms by our sides showing our naked forms.

“Twins… Excellent,” chuckles Salarin, looking appreciative over our bodies. “More than double the fun when you can play inside twin’s minds. And exceptional beauties too. I can see why you kept these two from the bunch.”

The girl between Salarin’s thighs interrupts us with her sexual groan. She has given no acknowledgement of another group in the room, so busy is she with her task. The noise draws Salarin’s attention away from us.

“Enough, slut,” he snaps abruptly to her. “We can finish later. Into position number two.”

She spins round instantly, dark hair fanning gracefully, and settles in a position knelt at her master’s foot. Facing us now, the woman keeps her thighs wide apart to obscenely flash her sex, and she crosses her wrists behind her back as though ready for binding.

The woman watches us with her head up almost serenely. With complete surprise I realize I recognize her. It is Ja-Alixxe.

Klink laughs.

“I’d suspected you’d done something like this with her,” he tells Salarin. “It did seem a bit convenient, that explosion on the Hub.”

“Convenient?” Salarin questions. “Cost me a valuable Sadami slave. And it was touch and go with this one. I took a risk – she was dangerously close to being killed, but a week in a bacta tank can do miracles, and the gamble paid off.”

I study the woman, confused. But Ja-Alixxe was sentenced to be raped to death for defying the Slavers and escaping her fate in the Rape Run. Why would Salarin secretly save her? Klink echoes my question:

“She’s pretty enough but not exceptional. What was worth so much effort just to avoid losing face?”

After the video screen footage I’d seen of Salarin during Rape Runs, I expected him to be terse. But in the company of Klink, the faction leader seems relaxed and talkative, and he answers readily.

“I’ve never met a female with such stamina to tolerate suffering, and I’ve tortured thousands of slaves over the years. This one is quite priceless. You can make her scream and beg, but she hardly ever weeps, and she just does not break. Each time I defeat her she comes bouncing right back ready for the next fight. Isn’t that right, cunt?”

Ja-Alixxe gazes intently at her owner in answer, and Salarin smiles back at her almost affectionately.

“Look at the fire in her eyes. She wants to kill me right now, look, if only she could. I’m almost tempted to de-activate her implant and let her resist me, just to see her expression when she loses. Would you like that, cunt?”

“As my Master wishes…” Ja-Alixxe replies. Humble words, but her voice is steady with inner resilience and a hint of something almost sultry. He’s right – there certainly hasn’t had her spirit broken. And yet damage must have been inflicted on her, because something isn’t quite right. She doesn’t sit motionless in a classic slave pose, but moves her fingers reflexively and I see the muscles in her thighs and abdomen flutter and twitch. Salarin explains this before Klink can ask.

“They put nanobots in her pussy before the Rape Run, which stimulate her so she needs to masturbate every two days. It’s quite standard with the Runners. With inspired usage it makes for an entertaining torture though. I forbad my girl from having anything touch her cunt four days ago so she’s gone twice the recommended time. She’s hiding her suffering well, because you’re here and she doesn’t want to look weak, but she’s going slowly insane with the need for relief. She’ll beg me once we’re in private. Won’t you, slave?”

“As my Master wishes…” Ja-Alixxe says again, and I understand the cause of the intense tone in her voice now. Arousal.

“What did you do to her nipples and her clit?” Klink asks his leader.

I’ve been wondering the same think. Instead of being colored like the rest of her genitals, Ja-Alixxe’s nipples and the contoured bud around her clitoris are pure silver, as if flesh had been sculpted from metal.

“More nanotech,” Salarin says dismissively. “I got tired of constantly having to attach things to torture her, so I permanently injected pain stimulators. I can have her in agony at any moment, day or night. She has some in her anus as well. Her organs feel the same as all woman flesh, and you can’t tell in the dark. It’s worth putting up with the odd color for the convenience.”

I know Ja-Alixxe did some terrible things – betraying other Rape Runners to their doom. But my heart goes out to her anyway. No woman deserves this.

Concerns for my own peril soon overtake pity for Ja-Alixxe though, as the faction leader turns his attention back to us again. I quickly stare at the floor, too cowardly to meet his gaze.

“Do these two have a high pain tolerance?”

“They’re average,” Klink says. “Very pretty, and spectacular hooters as you can see, but the thing with Gaianesians is they break quickly in captivity. Once you’ve had a play with their Reflex, the most interesting thing about them is that they’re twins.”

“Are they the same, or do you prefer one to the other?”

My Master contemplates us.

“Boobs there,” and he indicates me, “is better in the sack. She’s the more passionate slave. Tits is more of a fighter. Riyena prefers her. Ry wants to keep them permanently as pets, but in a month or two I’ll tire, like I always do with a woman. I’ll probably sell them to the Harkens then, for their breeding program.”

I risk exchanging a glace with Tits at this news. She and I as breeders for the Harkens? Something we’d have once considered the worse fate imaginable. But right now any fate sounds like it might be better, when it would mean us leaving Klink and Riyena, leaving Aghara-Penthay. I feel a glimmer of hope.

“Tits and Boobs?” says Salarin. “Nice names. But let’s return to talking about your toy shapeshifter - you mustn’t let Riyena get above herself, just because she’s useful,” Salarin says, his chatty manner gone completely. “She is woman, and therefore slave. Perhaps she would make an interesting Rape Runner… There would be fun with one of her species playing tricks on the others.”

If I’m expecting Klink to leap to his loyal girl’s defense or resent the leaders lecturing, he doesn’t show it.

“I’ll sell her to you if you want her,” he says with a sly smile.

Salarin chuckles. “I think not. She’s been here too long. We’d get a new one. Fresh cunt is the best cunt.”

“Is that why you summoned me here today, Hunter? Catching Rape Runners?”

“In a manner of speaking. This year’s quota of Runners is already full. But I want you to be in my retinue for the actual contest,” he says.

Klink looks surprised.

“It would be my pleasure, but Bounty Hunting women across the galaxy isn’t the same skill as playing hide and seek with cunts in the Zone. You’d be better with a specialist tracker.”

Salarin smiles.

“Call it a long service award in gratitude for your loyalty. We have a Runner that would be of particular interest to you, and I’ll enjoy having you there to see her fail.”

“Really? Who is she?”

His expression gets even more chilling.

“Recently two of our cruisers defeated the pirate vessel of Alexa Goshenk in battle. She tried to blow herself up when she realized the fight was lost, but our men managed to get her into a bacta tank before she bled out and we kept her alive. She’s captive here on the surface. Went to processing for her implant this morning, actually.”

It’s the first time I’ve seen Klink wrong-footed. When Salarin speaks the woman’s name Klink’s expression turns almost desperate. His hand flickers unconsciously to the scar at his cheek.

“You’ve finally got Alexa Goshenk? I want her,” Klink says. “Don’t put her in the Run. Please… I must have her for mine.”

But Salarin’s verdict is final.

“She is to be a Rape Runner. She will make for an entertaining contestant. It’s already been decided. Of course if I catch her, you can use her once I’ve made the initial conquest.”

“But what happens if she wins?”

“She probably won’t,” Salarin says dismissively. “I have reasons to believe Alexa will be overconfident. But if she does win, we’ll make sure Alexa is rewarded with abandonment on a neutral world, where you can be waiting for her.”

“I want her.” Klink repeats.

I exchange glances with Tits. Who is Alexa Goshenk, other than another parasitic pirate? And why is she so important to our Master?

“You can probably afford to buy her in the auction,” Salarin is continuing. “That’s the other news. You’re a very wealthy man now.”

“That’s great to hear,” smiles Klink. “The Gaianesians?”

Salarin smiles coldly.

“I have a deal for every single one - all the remaining Gaianesians except for White Queen and your two. One of the galaxy’s richest clients is paying premium rate for the job lot.”

“Even better.”

“Oh yes. He admits his requirements are very specific, and only they will do, and he’s willing to pay what’s necessary. That’s the second reason I sent for you. I will need you to escort them to the buyer for me, as a final task to earn your share. It requires an errand into Republic space, so we’ll have to wait until the Rape Run is over. You’re the only one of us not easily recognized.”

Klink shrugs. “That’s no matter. A small effort for securing enough wealth to buy Alexa Goshenk,” and he chuckles. “That bitch better Run well, because she is going to regret she was ever born if she loses. I’ll take my scar out of her flesh ten times over.”

I glance at Tits again. So that’s where Klink received his injury. Gods, I’d hate to cross him and then end up in his power. I pity this Alexa.

“I’m sure taking your revenge on her will bring you a lot of pleasure,” Salarin says. “And the feisty ones who try to fight always make for the best fuck. Isn’t that right, Ja-Alixxe?”

“As my Master says,” she answers softly.

“Yes, cunt, that’s right. The prospect of it being you - the great Ja-Alixxe who receives my seed is making me hard again. It’s a good time to dismiss our guest. Egregious - I’ll let you get back to your slaves, and I’ll get back to mine.” Looking at the naked bounty hunter he snaps, “Ja-Alixxe – cock!” and his woman hurries to resume her place between his legs.

“Chief…” Klink says in farewell.

Our last view is of the brunette’s head bobbing up and down on her Master’s groin, before Klink drags Tits and I from the room by our hair. The tugging sends enough jolts of Reflex through us that our legs tremble, so we end up stumbling unsteadily after him.

“Alexa Goshenk…” he muses while we’re hauled along. “It’s making me so horny at the prospect of nailing her I want one of you right now. Which one of you is about to get her asshole torn open, Tits or Boobs?”

Turns out it’s me.

29 - Showtime.

I’m uncomfortable. I’m lying on my branded side, and my scar is still sore under the pressure of the mattress. I wish I could distract myself solely with the vision of beauty that is my sister, facing me across the soft surface of Egregious Klink’s bed. But our Master lies between us. Our heads are level with his crotch and rest in his lap. He is naked, as are we.

My owner is rampantly hard. He’s lying on his back so his erection points vertically upwards. Tits and I have been ordered to kiss either side of the shaft to maintain his arousal, but not to stimulate him past the point of climax. He is busy relaxing with a broadcast on the huge video screen, and doesn’t wish to peak until the appropriate moment.

Other than the burning from resting on my buttock, I’ve had worse tasks to do. I can look straight into Tits’ infinite purple eyes, and I can brush my lips against hers - albeit while enduring the warm rod of Klink’s flesh between us. Without attracting his attention I extend my foot and brush her smooth shin, and with my gaze try to express that I love her, and understand and share her suffering, and I’d do anything I could to ease her distress.

From the screen there is a groan of female arousal, and Klink laughs raucously along with the reactions of an all-male crowd.

Before each year’s Rape Run the Slavers screen a launch show where the Runners endure interviews with the foul host, Wagner. It is a tradition to play some humiliating prank on each of the women. Last year the theme was woman’s inability to control her sexual response. Runners’ groins were fitted with a stimulator which forced them to orgasm in front of the audience viewing across the galaxy. This year they’ve chosen to emphasize a different weakness of women – how likely we are to betray each other - cowardice that the Slavers believe is inherent in our sex.

Each of this year’s Runners is fitted with a strap-on dildo, which protrudes horizontally from between her legs. Women have the choice of conducting the interview with Wagner courageously, with their breasts exposed to the crowd, or taking the weak path. If they wish to remain clothed, they do so at the expense of a fellow female. They must talk while using that dildo to fuck a naked slave, a poor victim strapped down over a piece of furniture. So far every contestant has chosen raping that woman over baring themselves. Perhaps we are weak after all.

The Runners don’t need to be reminded what’s at stake if they end up one of the nine losers, but the Slavers have provided a reminder anyway. The slave bound with her ass in the air is living evidence of capture - one of the previous year’s losers. Once she was royal princess Palonae Noonian Aurora Tonova. She was noble. Proud. Beautiful. Now she’s a bound slave, lent by her owner to entertain the galactic audience by being fucked by woman after woman.

“Fetch me another beer,” Klink orders.

I’m careful not to look up as Riyena rises from her knees and leaves the room. Klink has turned colder towards her since the audience with Salarin. Perhaps that faction leader’s criticism is the reason he’s started reminding her that she, too, is only his slave. But I think it may be the imminent prospect of mastering Alexa Goshenk, the pirate who scarred his face, which has heightened Klink’s sadistic instincts.

Last night Riyena was chained to his bed while he used her brutally enough that we could hear it through the walls. Today while Tits and I service his penis, she has been made to kneel with her back to the screen, forbidden from watching. Her face is freshly bruised and her breasts look tender.

We’ve been careful to avoid meeting Riyena’s eyes, especially in a way that might suggest we’re gloating. We’re already sure Tits and I will suffer as the shapeshifter struggles to reassert her authority. We don’t want to provoke her further.

I glace frequently at the screen.

Wagner, the host of The Rape Run shows and commentator to its broadcasts is an overly coiffured man. He’s so effeminate he reminds me of the pacified males from Gaianesia. The Runner’s implants are activated for his interviews, forcing them to answer the most intimate of questions. One by one he probes into the personal lives of the poor women forced to participate in one of the universe’s cruelest sports.

No secrets are kept from the galaxy. For example, another tradition is for Runners to wear fine silken scarves, tied around their wrists which indicate their sexual history and their recommended fate as slaves. Red scarf for a slave for woman destined to provide sexual pleasure; green for a breeder; grey for live food. Then there’s the blue scarf to indicate a lesbian, and white to indicate a virgin.

All the ten desperate souls forced into The Rape Run, galactic standard year 4452 are examples of the most exceptional beauties found across the universe. There is the sultry dark-haired supermodel Emirie Kadjiz (red scarf) famous for baring her luscious breasts in a popular music promo; the athlete Tana Cagonnti (red scarf) who makes far more from her looks than she ever will from competitive winnings; and the green-scarf air-headed star of a reality video screen show Venda Varansilio (“VeeVee” to her fans) who seems to famous for nothing more than her ass and tits and the clothes she wears to celebrity events.

All of these three have previously posed topless or nude at some point during their careers, but they chose to rape Palonae with their strap-on dildos anyway, rather than endure the humiliation of showing their breasts to the crowd.

While Emirie, Tana and VeeVee are perhaps the most physically stunning, the women the Slavers and the audience like best are the ones who are not just spectacularly beautiful, but also where their degradation will send a message.

Just as the Slaver medic had promised during my implantation, the scientist who invented the implant, Dr. Perla Etochka, is presented to the crowd. She appears wearing a green scarf around her wrist, her age regressed in the bacta tank to her twenties, when she was an elegant pretty redheaded woman with a freckled face and piercing green eyes.

The investigative journalist Doorola produces video screen broadcasts about women’s issues, for example the effect of models on the self-image of average women, the exploitation of underage girls on poor planets and sex trafficking. She’s a proud feminist, but not beneath betraying a fellow woman in exchange for keeping her chest covered. While Doorola poles her fake cock in and out of Palonae’s pussy, Wagner cruelly discusses how the Slavers intend to force her to make a documentary about her own experiences as a sex slave, should she fail to win the Rape Run.

Laure Costaniodies is a Republican senator who advocated total gender equality across the galaxy. So determined was she to make the universe neutral that even Gaianesia was mistakenly criticized by her. Laure focused her life on politics and paid little attention to the fact that she herself was outstandingly pretty with a full curvaceous body and lush breasts. It was a fatal oversight, for the Slavers certainly noticed. Perhaps it’s because her voluptuous perfection is fleshier than her fellow Runners that she’s the only one chosen for the dreaded grey scarf - a woman suitable for those species who enjoy sentient females as food.

Even if Laure survives the Run, her political career is over. She has a slave mark on her face – she’ll never have the respect of her male colleagues again. She even worked closely with Palonae who also was one a senator and advocated the rights of women. In front of an audience of trillions though, Laure chooses to violate her personal friend rather than endure a shaming herself.

Next there’s Cassarinie “Cass” Ridath, a gorgeous alternative comedienne with pouting lips and a full cleavage. She became famous across the galaxy for the scathing sassy observations she made about the inadequacies of men. Wagner wasn’t a fan. His opinion is that that the funniest thing she’s done in her career is fucking the helpless Palonae. With a green breeder’s scarf tied to her wrist, Cass is reminded that if she’s caught there’s going to be a lot more fucking in her future.

“Keep your minds on the job, girls,” Klink interrupts.

At the head of his cock I briefly, hungrily touch Tits’ lips, before making descending kisses back to the base of his shaft.

I’m beginning to think that not one woman is going to spare the princess’s pussy until Twisted Elle, the lead singer of radical feminist punk band “Bitch Factory” takes to the stage. Like the others she’s in this year’s Runner uniform - a leotard, the color of the Aghara-Penthay sand, and loose camo pants in desert pattern. Army boots make it look much like a military battle dress. It’s modest compared to the Runner costume selected in most years, although not entirely without humiliation - the Runners are denied underwear so each woman has to show the outline of her nipples through the clinging thin fabric.

Elle always seems so sexually aggressive I’d assumed some negative experience must have turned her against men, but she carries the white virgin scarf, as well as the red pleasure scarf indicating her new purpose will be to entertain men between the sheets. She’s also the first to carry the blue scarf, of a woman whose sexual preference is for other females.

The choices are barely out Wagner’s mouth before Elle is pulling the shoulder straps down over her arms. She gives a deliberate shrug as she shoves the costume down to her waist exposing rather childlike small breasts with unusually rose-pink areola.

Twisted Elle used to be covered in tattoos like most of the girls in Bitch Factory, but the Slavers have withdrawn her right to self-expression during processing. The skin around her shoulders and arms has been restored to fresh cleanliness. There is only one mark permitted on her – the swirling pattern of the slave imprint on the side of her face. She’ll carry this for life even if she’s the winner.

Oddly they’ve left her punk hair – spikes dyed a glowing blue shade. Perhaps the Slavers thought it necessary to keep her identifiable. Or perhaps they decided to leave it in case she’s caught, as it might please her owner to decide what to do with it.

When Elle reveals her chest there is a roar of abusive shouts from the male audience. She is called a slut, a whore, and she’s mocked for her breasts being undersized. This doesn’t seem to faze her though, quite the opposite. She seems to like the hate. She even gives the auditorium crowd the galactic universal gesture of the middle finger, contempt all over her face.

With Elle’s interview complete there’s only two Runners left.

“Here comes your fellow citizen!” Klink taunts us, and we both look up. There she is. No longer recognizable as the Gaianesian White Queen I knew, a stunningly beautiful young blonde mounts the stage with a green breeders scarf and a blue lesbian indicator tied to her wrist. Her markings are in the vibrant dark brown of a Gaianesian female in her prime, and are barely obscured by the Aghara-Penthay slave tattoo.

Swaying between her legs is the strap-on phallus, just like the other Runners had to wear. But White Queen is not deterred by the pendulous cock or the intimidating audience. Her eyes look alert and strong as she mounts the stage. The only flicker of uncertainty is when she sees naked Palonae with her rump sticking up in the air.

“Ithya,” Wager greets her. “The galactic champion of female superiority. Are you feeling superior now, with a slave mark on your face and a control implant in your brain?”

I’ve always known her as White Queen, and one forgets she must have had a different name. Ithya. A beautiful name for a beautiful woman.

Ithya shrugs.

“You can break me as an individual and make me seem inferior, but that will not alter the truth. Men are made weak by their urges. Women are the stronger, the more moral.”

“You have nice tits,” Wagner interrupts, “I’d like to see them.”

White Queen is thrown for a moment by Wagner’s lewdness but regains her composure.

“That kind of talk just proves my point. You are the one who is a slave. A slave to your hormones.”

The noise of the crowd is building. They know what’s coming. Ithya doesn’t.

“Would you say then the moral decision could be to bare your breasts for us? We weak men all want to see… Don’t torture us by keeping them covered.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“To help a woman, maybe? What if you had to choose between fucking the princess over there with your strap-on, or showing us all those fine hooters?” Wagner presses relentlessly. “What would be the moral answer there? She’s a broken slave, after all. She’s betrayed womankind. She deserves no better than being raped.”

White Queen’s eyes widen briefly as she understands this year’s ritual humiliation, but then the same expression of steely resolve returns.

“Is this choice a hypothetical one?”

“No. I want you to choose. I order you to choose, an order from a man to a woman, and act on that choice.”

Rape Runners have their implants temporarily activated during the launch show. So with the word “order” Wagner has delivered the coup de grace. She has to choose, and go with the consequences.

“Fine,” White Queen snaps, and her hands reach for her shoulder straps. “But remember what I said. Defeating me changes nothing.”

She bares herself with same bravado that Twisted Elle possessed, but the heroine of our world is cursed with much fuller breasts than the punk girl, and the crowd roar out their lust and their scorn for Ithya. There can’t be any logic to men - her pale flesh is perfect and she has large rubbery nipples. Her body should be an object of pride, but they shout out their contempt anyway.

The broadcast’s producers have to rebalance the sound for the rest of White Queen’s interview, so we can hear over the unending verbal abuse and obscene suggestions for the Hunters should they catch her.

Wagner wraps up the conversation like the others, by giving Ithya her odds of winning the competition and her ranking in the “most want to see raped” category. The latter is the significant figure, for the unfortunate women at the top of the table suffer a handicap during the competition making it more likely they’re caught.

When the interview is over White Queen is dragged off the stage with her top still around her waist. There is only one Runner left.

Klink stirs in anticipation.

“Tits, sit on my cock. I want to fuck you while the pirate is on stage.”

“Yes, Master,” she answers with heartbreaking humility.

She mounts with her typical innate grace, and is lifting her thigh to straddle him when without warning Klink slaps her hard enough to almost knock her from the bed, and he barks, “No, face the screen, stupid. Watch the girl who’s going to be joining us.”

Tits rotates one hundred and eighty degrees and grasps the master’s cock ready to insert it, but she’s still not pleasing him.

“No, dumb cunt,” Klink rebukes her with a slap across her back. “Not your pussy. In your ass.”

I can see her shoulders slump with misery at the prospect of this, but she has no option but to obey. Her exquisite features crease with suffering as she eases onto him and stretches to accommodate a man’s penis where a penis isn’t meant to be. I shuffle closer, aiming to soothe my sister by kissing the silk perfection of her thigh, but Klink’s fist abruptly knots in my hair and he twists my skull painfully.

“Watch the screen, Boobs. You two dykes can fuck each other later.”

I watch the screen.

The pirate, Alexa Goshenk, is not what I was expecting. I’ve seen Klink with numerous slaves outside our family circle, and he’s only ever favored women with pale skins. But Alexa is java brown with wiry black hair woven into tight ringlets. I’d imagined a female pirate captain would be tall, physically intimidating like a Gaianesian woman, but there too I am surprised. Alexa has a small wiry build, more like a gymnast or a dancer.

She’s fit though, and undeniably attractive. Her dark eyes are large, and full lips give her mouth a sensual cruel pout that men probably want to tame. Her breasts are ripe with womanhood, and wide hips advertise her fertility. Alexa has spirit to match her beauty as well. She looks undaunted by her location or the shouts of the crowd “rape her!”, “rape her!” as she takes her place, and gives Wagner a look that’s almost mischievous.

Next to me Klink bucks his hips and Tits gives a moan of pain.

“Alexa,” Wagner greets her, “it’s always a pleasure to welcome a female space pirate to Aghara-Penthay. So let’s talk shop – pirate to pirate. Do you agree that it’s right to sell captured women as sex slaves?”

This is aimed at reminding Alexa of her likely future, but she brushes it off.

“I’ve traded women myself,” she states. Her voice is low in pitch for a female, giving it a sultry quality as though she’s talking to a lover in the bedroom. “No doubt some of those women are watching this enjoying seeing me in the same situation. But their pleasure will be short lived. I intend to win the Rape Run.”

She’s about to say more, but Alexa Goshenk is not to be allowed the chance to control the interview.

“You’re not a virgin.” Wagner interrupts. Indeed, Alexa only has the red scarf of a woman destined for providing sexual pleasure.

“I like cock,” she shamelessly admits, still refusing to be embarrassed. “But only as long as it’s strapped down and begging for mercy. The way a man should be.”

This is intended to provoke and it does. The roar of the crowd and its suggestions of what they’d like to do to Alexa is deafening. She looks out at the audience with a mocking smile.

“As you can see Alexa, a lot of the men out there think you’re the one who should lose the Rape Run and be strapped down, just like the dear princess over there. They want to see your breasts. They want to see you obeying your implant. Of all this year’s Runners, do you know you’re the one they most want to see lose?”

There is the first of Wagner’s attempts to get through the pirate’s defenses that hits home. The “most want to lose” category will mean a heavy handicap in The Zone. Alexa’s face flickers for a moment with uncertainty before her bravado resumes.

“Bidding on your ownership is fierce,” Wagner informs her.

Back in Klink’s room, that spurs our master to comment.

“Tits and Boobs… Want to know who is in front in that auction?” he gloats, giving a particularly fierce thrust of his hips that makes my naked sister groan with pain. “Me. She’s going to be mine! That cunt’s going to be licking your holes out.”

I look at the woman on screen trying to imagine myself intimate with Alexa, imagine her “licking my holes out”, but I feel nothing. The proud pirate, unbowed by the statistics that a most-want-to-lose Runner hasn’t been the victor in the Rape Run for many years, seems too remote to me.

When the interview reaches the part where Wagner offers her the choice of baring her breasts or using the phallus on princess Palonae, Alexa strides unhesitatingly across towards the helpless slave.

“Watch everyone. This is what I’ll do to those other Runners,” she declares, and instead of going for the woman’s pussy she positions the head of the cock against the star muscle of Palonae’s anus.

“No, No!” the princess starts pleading, but Alexa is already ramming her hips forward viciously, making her helpless victim scream.

“Yes!” cries Klink, and dragging my sister’s hair back forcing her to look up at the ceiling, he bucks hard enough upwards to lift her momentarily from the bed. Tits slumps, rendered insensible with the force of her Reflex while my owner pumps himself to orgasm inside her, violating my beloved sister’s anus at the same time as the pirate ravages the princess.

“Happy Rape Run, Alexa Goshenk,” Klink taunts to the viewing screen as the last of this year’s Rape Runners is dragged from the platform. “I’ll be seeing you soon.”

30 - Three

It’s been another day of wishing we were able to kill ourselves.

Klink has been feeling particularly vindictive towards women since he learned Alexa was participating in the Rape Run. A typical example took place just after his climax in my sister’s ass, when he wanted to watch me clean out the contents of her orifice using my tongue. I could think of little more disgusting, perhaps save performing the service for someone other than Tits, but I am implanted so I inevitably followed the order and tried to the best of my ability too.

The taste was utterly vile and I retched repeatedly, but that was all – I’d been ordered not to vomit. Apparently the effect of the implant in the female brain is so powerful it even overrides physical reflex, and I gulped back the repulsive mixture without being sick. I wish it had been otherwise. The acid aftermath of vomit is nothing, but at the end of the day I could still taste Tits’ back passage in my mouth, even though I rinsed myself every time I had the chance.

Things have been worse for her.

I completed my monthly woman’s cycle just before leaving for Aghara-Penthay, so today, with my time in captivity now at about a fortnight, I’m due to begin menstruating in just over another week. Tits’ periods have been guaranteed to synchronize with my own since girlhood, so she should have voided her womb while I was waiting to leave Gaianesia, but for the first time since puberty her bleeding didn’t arrive. It’s been over a galactic month since Tits’ enslavement and it’s not difficult to guess the unbearable explanation. Red-faced with shame, after the video broadcast she gave up and had to inform Klink that she might be pregnant, and when questioned further she admitted with the violations being particularly frequent early into her captivity its unknown who the father might be.

Egregious Klink beat her then, forcing Riyena and myself to watch. He beat her using his fists, and by slapping her with his open hand across her breasts so hard it knocked her to the floor, and I understood what a strong man can do to a woman when he’s really trying. I cowered and wept as she was thrashed and called names, “Stupid slut”, and “Gaianesian whore”.

Klink reminded us that until he decides otherwise, our only reason for existence is to provide sexual pleasure with our bodies. We are pleasers, not breeders. Fail to remain sufficiently attractive, and we will be ordered to the place underground where ugly or unwanted women go and never return. Male instructions can even override the imperative to live, so the unluckiest women of all just stand there, rejected slaves compelled by their implants to do nothing but stay and wait for the end.

It broke my heart to see Tits so defeated - slumped to her knees trembling uncontrollably with terror while our Master laid into her. I’d have swapped places with her in an instant. After it was over and Klink had stormed from the apartment, she was unable to stop crying for an hour, and her hands shook like she was an old woman. Even Riyena looked nervous.

A medic prescribed a contraceptive drink that triggered such powerful cramps it made it difficult for Tits to walk, but the discomfort from her bruised face and upper body were far worse. The black eye was already beginning to swell when the Master and I left her, and she was forbidden healing paste as an additional punishment. She’s going to be sore for a while.

Master informed us that I would be the only one accompanying him into The Zone. I would have preferred to remain behind and nurse my sister, but I’m only a slave.

I’ve had much time to reflect on my situation in this past fortnight, and I believe that now, down to my soul, I have been broken. Broken by him and the by implant and by defeat after defeat after defeat at the hands of men. I have no thought of fight or escape. There is no prospect of returning home or ever finding a life beyond this place. All I care about is pleasing him, which I do in order to avoid punishment. Fear fills every pore of my being. Even the Rape Runners, now out there in The Zone fleeing capture by the four Hunters and their entourages, are probably less afraid that I am afraid, afraid of our Master.

Following the launch broadcast, the Slavers left little delay before the commencement of the contest. The ten Rape Runners were rendered unconscious and then dumped at locations spread across The Zone. As soon as everyone was awake, Wagner opened the contest and the four Hunters began the chase, my master leaving on a Speeder with Salarin, kicking up a cloud of dust that would have been visible for miles.

Live footage of the Rape Run is broadcast across the galaxy and is hugely popular. Within The Zone however, there is a blackout of news to avoid giving Runners’ locations or their tactics as clues to Hunters. The only updates we see are brief broadcasts showing “highlights” of each rape when a Runner is caught, with Wagner’s sick commentary enjoying the poor woman’s downfall.

There have be three of these already, and it’s not even the end of the first day. Ashamed of her conduct at the launch show, pretty investigative reporter Doorola chose to make a stand for women’s rights across the galaxy by simply refusing to participate, and she called out for an emergency flare the moment the contest began. Previously she’d fucked Palonae rather than bare her chest. If she’d hoped that by finding her courage for the Run she’d be permitted to retain some modesty, she was mistaken.

The coverage of his initial rape of her was almost perfunctory – the audience don’t like the ones who simply surrender.

Lotho-etsarra, the so-called Libido because of his insatiable appetite for women, was the first Hunter to reach her. Seeing as Doorola’s particular focus of investigative journalism was the exploitation of women – prostitution, pornography, and sexual slavery, it amused Lotho-etsarra to force her to dance naked on a stage for the pleasure of his men. While this show took place, they placed bids on the order in which to rape her. During the earlier launch show Wagner told us she would be making a final documentary about her experiences as a sex slave. No doubt the footage of her subsequent gang rape will be included.

Beautiful brunette athlete Tana Cagonnti, who had been high in the predictions to survive, ran right across the path of the gigantic alien faction chief, Jackran-ad-aktar as she tried to move between the cover of ruined buildings. It takes luck as well as ability to be last caught in the Rape Run.

Jackran-ad-aktar’s cock is so large few human women are able to tolerate it and Tana was no exception. Chained on her back she screamed at the moment of penetration, and her head lolled in unconsciousness through the rest of her rape. There was so much blood that when he withdrew I thought she might be dead, but Wagner told us she’ll soon be physically healed and ready to pass around the other men. Lucky her - as good as new.

The beautiful supermodel Emirie Kadjiz is the third woman whose Rape Run is over. But her footage of her defeat was very different from the other victims. All we saw was the briefest of images depicting Emirie Kadjiz crouching down somewhere resembling the inside of a wrecked ship. She looked up at hearing a noise and smiles openly.

“Oh, it’s you,” she grinned to someone off-screen.

People have written articles about the beauty of Emirie Kadjiz’s face, and she’s made a fortune modelling cosmetics and lipsticks, but all that perfection was ruined as she was struck with a metal object so hard that her skull seemed to explode. There was a second blow and a third blow, and with each strike I could hear the grunt of a female voice in intense exertion. The use of such force was cruel and unnecessary. Emirie Kadjiz was dead before she’d hit the ground.

“What a waste of a nice cunt,” Wagner said, disappointed. “The killer better make sure she’s the survivor, or she’s for it afterwards.”

Salarin and Cronorgan have been so far without a trophy. This is bad news for me – we can expect reprisals at nightfall if The Sadist has no-one else to play with.

I am stationed at the same camp Salarin traditionally uses – a circle of crude huts around the restraints for his victims. Wooden frames, large enough for captives to stand inside, are currently empty. Despite the desert heat I shiver as I look at those frames and remember the heroic Republic space fleet colonel, Melena de Santo, being bound there last year and then being abused and degraded in the worst ways imaginable in front of an audience of trillions.

There is other furniture here. Tight cages barely large enough to fit a woman inside swing from posts like gibbets in the hot breeze. An open pool which smells foul serves as the cesspit.

There are rules for Hunters as well as Runners in this competition, and Salarin is only allowed a retinue of ten men. The maximum six of them hunt with him at the moment. Four man the camp where I serve. As well as the huts here where the men sleep, our camp contains some buildings given over to stores of food, and some to munitions, restraints and sadistic equipment for the maltreatment of slaves.

My duties are to prepare food, to clean the camp and run such errands as I am given, and to serve the sexual pleasure of any man who asks. I am forbidden from leaving the camp area, but I have no interest in doing so anyway – there is nowhere to run to on Aghara-Penthay.

I get little work done, for the four men who remain here all desire me. Much of my afternoon is spend lying on my side on a cramped camp bed while a grey-haired, small man paws my breasts. He likes pressing his erection at the apex of my legs and moving it steadily against my clitoris until I become wet. There is no consideration of my consent in having sex with him, but he is gentle and for some reason that makes me cry after we’re done.

He strokes my hair and asks my name, smiling a little when I reveal the truth that it actually is “Boobs” as branded onto my flank. He asks me about life on Gaianesia, and if I like being Klink’s slave (no).

The man comforts me, stroking me all over, but touching makes him hard again, and soon after he enters me for a second time. During taking me he tells me that he finds my body very desirable and if I please him enough perhaps he’ll buy me. I try to move in the way men like to encourage him, but later, in front of the others, he treats me with contempt. “Gaianesian slut”, I am called.

The next man to rape me is much larger than me, and very physically strong. He orders me to resist him, for he wants the psychological pleasure of my defeat. So I struggle as hard as I can, trying every tactic apart from hurting him to evade his solid bulk, but then he pulls my hair and it triggers the Reflex. Next thing I know I’m face down on the camp bed. I’m oozing and receptive between my legs, but this man is a sadist and there would be no malicious satisfaction in having me without pain. I fight to the end, but pinned down to the sheets by his mass he inevitably penetrates my anus inducing a flare of agony, and I’m raped roughly.

Big man has done me a slight favor in that the nanotech stimulating my anus had been neglected by Klink for a few days, and it was getting hard to walk with the tingling. But this is little consolation. It is to the camp’s obvious amusement that I limp between the buildings when it’s over, torn and injured, but forbidden from using healing paste until my Master approves. I’m not permitted to clean myself either, and he will see the trickle of dried semen and blood down my inside leg which bears witness to my shame.

Klink was not the only one who brought his personal comforts to the hunt. Inside another of the huts close by waits Salarin’s personal sex slave, Ja-Alixxe, ready to please her owner. Unlike with my situation the men have been forbidden from using Ja-Alixxe, not that anyone but the most desperate would be interested. Since I saw her last, Salarin still hasn’t let her sate the desperate craving induced between her legs, and the frustrated need has driven Ja-Alixxe insane.

She’s no longer capable of speech, and only makes animal moans of lust. She twitches and moves constantly, touching her flanks, her belly, her rump, her breasts with their silver nipples, anywhere but the one place that can bring her relief.

When I first arrived she blocked my path intimidatingly, staring at me flexing her fists and making cavewoman grunts. But once she understood I wouldn’t be the one to ease her torture, Ja-Alixxe made a howling noise and fled from my sight.

“The first Runner I catch, I told her…” Salarin said gleefully to Klink as they watched me with the brunette, “Once I’ve had my fun with the first Runner and got her out of sight of the cameras, I’ve told Ja-Alixxe she can use that woman to relieve herself. The poor Runner won’t know what’s hit them. It will be hilarious to watch.”

“You’ve not been near her pussy since we met?” Klink questioned. “How are you keeping your own needs under control?”

Salarin shrugged. “I pulled one of the Gaianesians from the shipment. But she was a weeper, and broke quickly. Nothing like the stamina of my own treasure.”

Whether Ja-Alixxe is insane or not, the company of another slave is preferable to the hungry eyes and groping hands of the men. So when I have the chance I seek the former bounty hunter out, hiding with her until I’m missed and summoned with an irresistible order.

Thus I end up nearly jumping out my skin when from right next to me Ja-Alixxe shrieks deafeningly, clutching at her breasts and writhing on the ground. It takes me a moment to understand the pain stimulators in her nipples have been activated, and that means the Hunter must be close by. Gods help us... Salarin is coming. I wished a crack would open and the planet would swallow me up, but when you’re an implanted slave your wishes mean nothing.

“Boobs, come!” a male voice calls, and almost before I know it I’m hurrying from the hut out into the late afternoon heat ready to serve the returning Masters. There is work to be done.

31 - Fourth

I was never a great fan of the comedy of Cassarinie “Cass” Ridath. It is a common conception around the galaxy that Gaianesian women hate men, but the opposite is the case. We understand male weaknesses, and the duty of care that places on women to act on their behalf. We protect men - from themselves.

Cassarinie calls herself a feminist, but her jokes are laced with contempt for the male sex. Their inadequacies, particularly when performing in the bedroom, are the topics of much of her humor. She is heterosexual and yet a man hater – a misandrist.

However, while we might come from very different philosophies, that doesn’t mean I wish her any ill. Certainly not what’s happened to her today – being kidnapped for participation in the Rape Run, and of all the Hunters to fall foul of, getting caught by the sadist Salarin.

When I see her first she has some kind of yoke around her neck, which keeps her wrists trapped out and away from her body at the level of her shoulders. Restrained by this device she can do nothing to protect herself, and her captors have demonstrated this by removing her boots and stripping her to the waist. Cass arrives in camp still in the camouflage pants of the Runner uniform, but barefoot and displaying a slim torso with the kind of lush full breasts that men desire so much. Their ripe forms are enhanced by the yoke lifting Cass’s arms. Her nipples are a deep pink, and large.

Although I am summoned to my Master I don’t immediately see him, so I pause for a moment to watch. Ja-Alixxe has been forbidden from show herself – she was supposed to have been vaporized by the bomber - and she shrinks back into the shadows.

The men have run a rope from Cass’s yoke to Salarin’s speeder and used it to run her barefoot behind the vehicle. She must have fallen once or twice trying to keep up, because scrapes and grazes mar her perfection. Cass stumbles into camp already exhausted and slumps immediately to her knees. Her ordeal is only beginning though. Men run to her, and defeated easily by her restraints and their numbers, she soon has ropes secured around her wrists and ankles. She gradually starts struggling with returning energy after this, but her situation is as hopeless as any woman on Aghara-Penthay. She’s released from the yoke, lifted by two men and easily carried towards one of the wooden frames. They thread her wrists through the top spar in the frame first, and tie the loose ends of rope off far from Cass’s reach. I watch sympathetically as she looks out to her wrists, struggling in an attempt to pull her hands free through the tight loops. She would be better to keep still – her writhing makes her breasts move alluringly, and I can see men who lust after her beginning to gather, ready to enjoy the sport.

Her ankles are spread apart, as men pull the lower ropes and secure those too. Now Cassarinie stands in her frame, her limbs roped out to form an “X” shape.

I’ve watched some previous years of the Rape Run, and Salarin sometimes leaves his captives in their frames to anticipate being undressed. But perhaps because Cass is already topless, he approaches her with a knife and cuts the rest of her clothing away without ceremony or delay.

She doesn’t cry or beg as she’s stripped, but I can see from her expression she’s struggling to keep her emotions under control. A fair proportion of the galactic public will be watching the broadcast of her naked body. Her fingers twitch reflexively, brushing the ropes around her wrists.

I don’t see more, because my view of her is blocked by the intimidating bulk of my Master.

“Come, bitch, I’m horny after a day’s work,” he says, and snatching a fistful of my hair he uses it to tow me to the hut we’ve been allocated. The tugs to my crown trigger spasms of Reflex which flood me with arousal, and only with supreme effort can I keep from fainting. I was ordered to follow though, so I stumble after him.

Klink takes a route around the back of the buildings. He seems almost as camera shy as Ja-Alixxe.

Inside the hut I’m flung forwards onto the narrow camp bed with too much force to stop, and I crack my head on the crude mud wall.

“Strip.” Klink orders me. Without checking the bump to my head I reach for the tie at my left shoulder – the only fastening that holds my precious meagre slave wrap about my body. The flimsy garment is discarded on the dust of the floor and I lie back, nude, the heavy masses of my breasts spilling on my chest.

He has extracted himself from his clothing and is already hard. Klink is in loose camouflage pants ironically similar to the Rape Runner uniforms. I look humbly at the disgusting organ with its dark hooded crown.

Sometimes he likes me to use my mouth on him before he enters, but today he just wants to penetrate my sex. My owner mounts the cot with a creak. Docilely I part my knees while he probes with the head of himself against my vulva lips. And then he thrusts forward, filling my post-Reflex wetness with his hard foul prick.

Klink looms over me as he rapes me, groping my boobs yet again. He has a preference for slim girls with big breasts, so unfortunately I’m perfect for his taste. While he mauls me his hips thrust backwards and forwards in a steady rhythm, almost withdrawing from me and then burying himself as deep as the hilt.

Klink is a big man in every way and the stimulation from him against my inner walls is almost overwhelming, but I’ve learned during rapes to be able to at least partially disconnect from what’s happening to me. Sometimes I try to recall the woman I was only weeks ago – a young student on Gaianesia with her future ahead of her, unknowing of men, not implanted. Others are still there like I was. Life goes on for many women in the universe. They still experience kindness and mercy. Perhaps there’s some way I can borrow their hope and belief to carry me through the endless horror.

The sound of a woman’s scream brings me back to the camp cot with a start. She’s close by and the sound is almost deafening in the confined hut. It’s not a terror scream, but an animal scream of unbearable agony.

I stiffen, fearful of my nearness to such cruelty, and try to move under Klink.

“Stay there. You can see when we’re done,” Klink orders, and instructed by a male my implant immediately renders me passive and unresisting as he continues to pump into me.

The woman screams again, the same inhuman tortured sound, and then I hear her desperately gabbling something before speech is cut off with another yell.

Klink’s orgasmic groan is barely audible over her suffering, but I feel him pulse within me as he empties his slimy seed. His seed… Gods… Yet more of his seed in me.

Gaianesian women have evolved to fall pregnant more easily than humans – being swollen with child is a good way to avoid rape in a world where men vastly outnumber nubile women. The odds I’ve escaped fertilization after so many have released themselves into me are slim. When the inevitable occurs, is he going to beat me to a pulp as he did Tits, or will he understand it wasn’t my fault? Or perhaps I won’t be permitted to void myself of my crossbreed offspring, and my stomach will slowly expand with more proof of my defeat.

My Master withdraws from me. As is routine for one of Klink’s sessions, once sex is over I must clean his penis with only my mouth. The taste of semen mixed with female juices is now familiar to me. I will endure the stench filling my nose until I’m next permitted to rinse myself clean. Bu my revulsion makes no difference. Diligently I use my lips and tongue while the woman shrieks and screams in the background. Only when Klink thinks my efforts are satisfactory does he tuck himself into his pants and watch from the door.

“Hurry up and put your wrap back on, slut,” he says. “Then let’s go and see.”

It is of course Cassarinie Ridath who is screaming. Salarin is brushing her breasts with a slave goad, one of the many instruments of torture that he likes to use which inflict intense pain without the least physical damage. Every muscle in her nude body is rigid, as though she’s being electrocuted.

There is quite a crowd now – perhaps fifty men here watching the torture. I see the faction badges not just of Salarin’s clan, but of the other three Hunters, come to enjoy a Rape Runner’s downfall.

Salarin looks almost bored as he abuses Cassarinie, looking at her contorted features with disinterest. When he moves the goad away from her he sighs.

“Try again. Tell me a joke,” he says.

Cass’s eyes flicker desperately as she tries to come up with something.

“Why do women have breasts?” she stammers in a trembling voice, and then a moment later answers, “So men will talk to us.”

Klink chuckles, but Salarin shakes his head.

“Not good enough. Tits or pussy?”

Cass seems to be trying to pedal backwards in her frame.

“Oh, no, no, no, please!” she begs.

“Tits or pussy?” Salarin demands more aggressively.

“Tits!” she says in a voice dissolving into hysteria. And the Hunter lifts the goad to her breasts and brushes the wand over her exposed flesh. Cassarinie screams insanely, the same sound we could hear during sex. It’s probably only seconds the goad touches her, but it seems like eternity.

“Try again. Tell me a joke,” he says.

“No, please,” Cass sobs. Snot is bubbling from her nose. He lifts the goad and just in time she gabbles, “Okay - Why do women talk so much?” before answering, “Because we have two sets of lips.”

“Tits or pussy?” Salarin asks and doomed again she slumps in the frame, weeping incoherently. I’m not sure if she vocalizes a reply but this time the goad is stroked over the sensitive folds of her womanhood, and I cringe wondering how that might feel.

“I think the more frightened she is, the funnier she gets,” Salarin observes to the circle of watching men, but he continues to torture her all the same.

On and on it goes. He is merciless.

“Why are women like steaks? Because it’s better to beat us first to tenderize.”

There’s probably no joke that will spare Cass the suffering, and this exercise is purely to teach her the futility of her effort. It is only at “Why do women have periods? Because we deserve them” that he seems to have had enough.

Salarin unsheathes his cock and pierces straight into her, making Cassarinie shriek with a different kind of pain. Roped into the frame, she can do nothing to stop the humping, first vaginally and then before he reaches climax moving behind to ram into her rear.

The Hunter’s face screws up into a hideous grimace as he finally reaches orgasm. He holds himself inside her until his pleasure has dissipated completely and then dismounts. Cass screams when he withdraws, and she slumps in the frame to dangle semi-conscious from her wrists. As Salarin walks away the Hunter doesn’t even look back. His erect cock points directly forwards and I see blood on the head.

“Help yourself to seconds,” Salarin tells the crowd with a gesture back towards the naked woman. His offer seem to trigger a new lease of life in Cassarinie and she manages to stand and plead, “No!” to the approaching predators.

“I’m a fan,” says the first man who steps up, a burly fellow almost the size of my Master. “I like to watch the way your hooters jiggle while you’re on stage.”

With that he draws back his hand and slaps her with tremendous force across the breasts he likes to see jiggle, leaving Cass hanging limply yet again in her bonds. As the circle of men closes around her I’m mercifully spared seeing more.

Salarin is approaching me and my Master. Fear skyrockets and I try to withdraw back into the hut, but my implant forces me to keep my ground.

“The sun will be down in less than thirty minutes,” he says to Klink. “It’s not worth going out again today – we won’t get another catch before they’re out of bounds for the night. Might as well settle down.”

“Okay Chief…” Klink acknowledges the decision, and then asks, “How was the Runner?”

“A nice enough piece of tail,” he shrugs, “but nothing special. She might be more entertaining when Ja-Alixxe uses her later. Want to come and watch that?”

My Master’s grin answers that question.

“I’m surprised so many of the men have come in to try her out,” Klink says with a glance towards the crowd. “There must be guys from all over the Zone.”

Salarin shrugs again.

“There’s not many other options this early in the Run if someone wants a taste of A-grade cunt. The athlete is going to be good for nothing until she’s healed up. Our friend, the alien – his cock does leave an impression. And with Emirie Kadjiz spoilt for everyone by our mystery assassin, that leaves either coming here for Cass or at they’re at Lotho-etsarra’s camp waiting for a turn with Doorola.”

In the pauses between his words I can still hear the comedienne’s miserable pleading over the laughs and taunts of male voices.

“Good thing they don’t know the famous Ja-Alixxe is in camp as well,” says Klink. “She was a popular Runner. You might have problems keeping a few of them away from her.”

Salarin smiles coldly, and adds:

“Your female is also desirable and she’s beginning to attract attention. You might want to hide her away unless you feel like sharing.”

I look up automatically at the crowd to see he’s right. Two men in Slaver uniform have stopped nearby, and instead of looking at the naked woman in the frame they’re watching me, with that hungry expression I’ve come to know so well. They make an odd pair – one is hairless and tall with large eyes and a blue tint to his skin, marking him as non-human. The other, the dwarf, is one of the ugliest men I’ve ever seen.

I back up fearfully against my Master, hoping the possessive nature of men will work in my favor for once, and I’m grateful when his right arm goes round me, reaching across my collarbone in a posture that feels protective. But I’m mistaken about Klink’s intentions. By the time I realize he’s actually going for the fastening bow of my wrap, the clothing is already falling away.

My breasts and my sex are suddenly on view to these men. Before I can think about that I’m stumbling forward, naked, propelled by a shove between my shoulders away from the seclusion of the hut and into the open circle.

From behind me Klink calls to the men. “Help yourself boys. Prime Gaianesian pussy. You all do what you want. Just make sure she’s back to me in a couple of hours.”

Others turn at Klink’s voice to see what’s on offer. Five men, ten men, as my stomach knots and I go sick with dread. No, not so many of you… please…

I’m bare and defenseless, half leaning forward in a pose like a runner about to begin a marathon. My breasts hang forwards, ripe and full, the prize displayed for these disgusting animals. In moments they’ll be on me, but I feel no compulsion to stay and with the instruction “you all do what you want, just make sure she’s back in a couple of hours” he’s included me. Klink has left me free to move.

I’m running, streaking stark naked towards the barren terrain of The Zone before I know it. But although unpacified men might be beasts, they’re not stupid.

“Trip, slave!” a male voice shouts after me. My ankles instantly cross over, locking as close together as though they’re bound, and I go sprawling face-first into the sand and grit. I scrape myself badly on landing – my hands and my breasts bearing the worst of the damage, but the adrenaline of blind terror prevents me feeling much pain.

I’m getting to my feet when someone barrels into my back and I crash into the dirt a second time. Before I know it the crushing weight of an obese male is on top of me, and as fit as I am I don’t stand a chance of lifting him off. A second man arrives, and then a third. As hope vanishes for me, there is laughter from them. The weight of fat-man leaves me, but others have a hold of my wrists and they use them to pull me to my feet. A hand squeezes my naked buttock, making me jump reflexively forward, but that takes me closer to the ones reaching for my breasts. And where the first hand began, many follow.

32 - Relief

Klink laughs cruelly at me when we’re reunited. I enter his hut stooped over like an old woman, only able to take short shuffling steps because of the crippling pain in my lower torso. Yet again I’ve been gang raped. Yet again my holes have been damaged, and I have the signs of shame dried on my inside-legs. Yet again they found my breasts particularly pleasing, leaving my chest is sore from the unending mauling and squeezing and pinching. The muscles in my thighs and my buttocks ache from being tensed for so long, and I’ve pulled something in my shoulder.

So many hands, oh, so many hands! Everywhere on me. And where hands probed and entered, inevitably their hateful pricks followed. Enough of them male crowd turned on me that I probably spared Cassarinie some of the assaults, but I’m selfish and I’d rather they’d raped her, killed her even, than come anywhere near my skin.

When Wagner’s mocking footage of Cassarinie’s defeat was transmitted to The Zone and the galaxy, I was visible in the background, on my back naked in the dirt, while four men held out my arms and legs and a fifth mounted me. Slaver broadcasts are in glorious HD and even from a distance my tear-streaked face was recognizable and it was obvious I am a Gaianesian. Friends at home might recognize me, see how low I’ve fallen.

That shouldn’t upset me – it’s not likely I’ll ever return alive to my homeworld to see these women, but I don’t like them thinking I was weaker than they, or I somehow deserved what I got.

“Do you hate me so much, Master?” I ask, slumping to my knees, and once more hear that cold laugh.

“You still don’t get it do you?” he says. “You’re not significant enough to hate. I don’t hate you. You don’t hate a piece of property. You’re just an object. An object men want to fuck. That’s the only reason you’re permitted to exist.”

I contemplate this for a moment. I am nothing but an object men wish to fuck. I say, “Yes, Master.”

Klink seems satisfied.

“Good. Stop moping and get on with your work. Cassarinie Ridath is waiting in the next hut. Find some water and clean her ready for fresh use.”

“Yes, Master.”

I need permission to repair my damaged body. Requesting something of him is always risky but I’m better able to perform my duties if I can move freely.

“Master – may I heal myself with the paste?”

That same chuckle.

“If you ask for it by its proper name.”

He wants to hear my say the vulgar word. It’s worth a little indignity to relieve the burning pain.

“Master – may I heal myself with the cunt paste?”

“Of course slave. Your body must be ready for further use, after all. But seeing as you still seem to be a little prudish with your language, I think it’s time to train you in the proper names for things. Until I decide otherwise you will only know and refer to the place between a woman’s legs as a cunt. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Master.”

There’s a flash of memory - I was once ordered to forget an important name before, but it’s hard even to remember when that was. That, like this is of no consequence, for it matters not to change what was always that way. What else was that place ever called? For example – back in my sex education class. I am among a room full of pre-teen girls. Tits and I have just learnt how most of the galaxy reproduces, and we’re giggling at the strangeness that such a thing might be plausible. The teacher frowns at us for laughing when she said, “An unpacified male will want to stick his penis in your cunt.”

And in the present:

“Go now.”

“Yes, Master.”

I am familiar with the layout of the camp stores so it doesn’t take long to acquire a bucket of warm soapy water and a sponge. First I apply the magical paste to myself, feeling blissful relief of the pain as I smear it into my cunt and my anus. I massage the cream into my breasts as well, and I’m rewarded with the familiar easing of the soreness. I feel almost back to normal, ready for the next man to rape me.

I’ve had weeks to come to terms with sexual slavery but Cass Ridath is just beginning that journey. She looks emotionally shattered when I find her, lying on her back shackled to one of the foldable cots by her wrists and ankles. They’ve ruined her - she has bruises on her thighs and a mixture of filth and blood dribbles from her cunt. Another poor woman’s life shattered just for casual male entertainment.

The hut is completely empty except for Cass. Whatever cruelties are to happen next in this room, the focus of them is her.

Sympathetically I study her. I probably looked that bad when they first tortured and violated me, back there at the Palace of Roses. I remember vividly how afterwards I was desperate for any sign there was still kindness in the universe, and grateful when the lowest slave showed me mercy. It’s my turn to show that kindness to Cass.

“Don’t be afraid of me,” I say gently. “I’m only here to clean you.”

I begin soaping her shoulders first, so she becomes familiar with the sensation of my hands on her body and won’t feel threatened when I move to the more intimate areas.

“I saw you. You were out there,” she croaks in a voice hoarse from screaming. “When all the men took me. Some of them had you on the ground too.”

I don’t want to remember all the hands, but I say, “Yes. That was me.”

“But you’re okay already?”

“The cunt paste. It helps. It will help you too.”

When I clean her breasts she tries to lift her arms and shield herself, making her restraints clang.

“Can you help me get away?” Cass pleads with breaking voice. “I don’t want to be a slave.”

“There is nowhere to run,” I tell her sadly. “Not once you’re carrying an implant. There is only enduring, trying to forget what was before, and accepting that now you exist only to please men.”

The defiled Rape Runner then reaches a chained hand to touch me, as though I’m the one who deserves sympathy. “How many times did it take to make you like this? How many times has a man forced himself on you?”

I interrupt her curtly, for I don’t really want to think about the answer. “I’m going to clean your cunt now. This might be a bit sore.”

Fresh tears form in her eyes and I feel instantly guilty. She’s only seeking reassurance. But I have no hope to give to her.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know. Two hundred, perhaps? Nineteen times just today.”

“Gods…” she whispers, blinking as she stares at the bare ceiling, and then she moans with pain as I sponge away the crusted matter between her legs.

“It’s going to be easier for you than for me. You are a prize slave – a Rape Runner. Your Master probably won’t be from Aghara-Penthay. Once you’re off this world, you will only have him to serve.”

She begins to cry softly, and I say, “Be brave… while we live, there must be some chance.”

Although I don’t really believe that myself. There isn’t a future for me. I can’t ever return to Gaianesia when its people will look at my face and believe I’ve shamed womankind. Here on Aghara-Penthay, as Klink said I exist only to be fucked. Year after year of suffering lie ahead until I become old and unattractive, and then unless I’m worth the colossal expense of regenerating me like with White Queen, they will dispose of me.

My best chance would be the fate that once was my nightmare. If Tits and I are traded to the Harkens as Klink threatened, we join other Gaianesian women taken prisoner in one of the Harken breeding pens, and we’ll churn out baby after baby for our captors. I’ve heard that as long as the Breeders fulfil their purpose without resisting or rebelling, they are not badly treated. And some females who please, and serve their owners well will reach a pampered concubine status. It sounds like heaven compared to this place.

“That hurts,” Cass moans, bringing me back to the present.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “but I have orders.”

“You could leave me, and pretend you’d done it,” she pleads.

I shake my head.

“You’ll understand when your implant is activated. Your Master gives you an order and it becomes your own will. It’s impossible to resist. I was told to do this, so I must.”

There is one last swipe with the sponge. It makes Cassarinie flinch.

“It’s over now. Your cunt and your ass are clean.”

Perhaps the men were waiting outside for me to finish, or maybe it’s a co-incidence. But I have barely retreated from her before Salarin and my Master enter. They carry foldable chairs, which they open facing the chained captive, as though they were visiting her in a hospital bed.

Cassarinie begins to whimper as they take their places, struggling on in a way that makes her chains clang.

“Cassarinie Ridath… Tell me - who would you like to have fuck you next?” Salarin asks bluntly. “Ladies choice… A man or a woman?”

I dare not give a sign to warn her that I know what madness awaits outside if she chooses a woman. The bounty hunter Ja-Alixxe must be just outside, denied the chance to relieve the urges of her nanotech for such a long time it’s driven her into insanity.

I remain motionless, kneeling at the side of Klink’s chair so he may reach for me if he wishes.

Most women, if forced would choose indignity with a fellow female rather than a man. And Cassarinie is no different.

“A woman,” she says with an uncertain glance my way.

Salarin smiles cruelly.

“Then slave, come,” he orders.

I’m rising to my feet before I know it, when he says to me, “not you, stupid Gaianesian.”

He does not need to ask the intended recipient twice. Something the color of pale flesh passes me in a rush. And Ja-Alixxe stands before her master in a feral half-crouch. She is naked. Her hands rub her thighs in an obsessive unceasing gesture and her eyes are wild with insanity. She has her thighs apart I can see the lips of her cunt glistening with unsated need.

Cassarinie takes in the bounty hunter, Ja-Alixxe with her silver nipples and cunt, and she starts to move in her bonds trying to withdraw into the bed.

“You?” she stammers. “But you’re…” and then she looks to Ja-Alixxe’s deranged face. “No, no,” she begs. “A man. I meant a man.”

“Ja-Alixxe?” Salarin says. “When I say ‘go’, fuck the woman on that bed. I want you to fuck her, and fuck her, and fuck her, until you’re too exhausted to stand up. You may cum on her. In fact I want you to rub your pussy on every part of her body you can reach, but especially her face.”

“No! No!” Cass is pleading in a breaking voice. To Ja-Alixxe she begs, “Fight the implant! I saw you – you’re strong. You don’t have to do this.”

Ja-Alixxe pleads in a different way, an animal moan of uncontrollable yearning. She stares at her Master, desperate for the word that will release her

“Go.” Salarin says softly. And the unrestrained girl mounts the bound one in an instant, Ja-Alixxe leaping athletically over Cassarinie’s face and looking down the length of the other woman’s form. Pinned between the bounty hunters toned thighs, there’s nothing Cassarinie can do as Ja-Alixxe then begins to rut on her, pelvis bucking at maximum speed as she grinds her cunt into the other girl’s face. The bounty hunter moans constantly after landing, a sound gradually increasing in pitch as she approaches her first climax. It is unsurprising that denied orgasm for so long, Ja-Alixxe only needs seconds to reach that first peak. I don’t need to hear her cry to know it’s happened. She releases more clear fluid than I’ve ever seen from a woman’s climax before. Cassarinie is inundated, as though rather than orgasming Ja-Alixxe has urinated on her.

The bounty hunter stops all vocalizing for a few seconds after climax, closing her eyes for a few moments and swaying on her knees. I think she’s going to faint. But then she opens her eyes with a snap and behind shifting her body down that of Cassarinie, dragging her pelvis to maintain contact the whole time. Ja-Alixxe begins moaning softly with desire again, starting the process of ascending the pleasure curve to her next ecstatic peak.

The men make me watch this repeating cycle for long enough that I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Ja-Alixxe orgasm. As ordered, she smears her wet cunt all over the helpless comedienne’s body. Cassarinie pleads and struggles against this humiliation for the first ten minutes, but then she just lays still, turning her head to look away from the men so she doesn’t have to see the sadistic pleasure in their faces.

On and on it goes. After half an hour Ja-Alixxe seems to have discharged enough of her lust to regain some sanity.

“No choice,” are the first words I’ve heard her say since we met in Salarin’s audience chamber. These spoken to Cassarinie by way of apology as she humps the other woman’s thigh.

As the show loses its interest for the men, conversation begins.

“Are you healed, slave?” Klink asks me.

“My cunt and ass are better, Master,” I confirm.

Salarin finds my reply amusing for some reason.

“Her cunt? Your Gaianesian is getting a filthy mouth, Egregious.”

“I’ve blocked the memory of any other words for it,” Klink explains. “That’s all she’s allowed to call it.”

I frown, trying to probe my mind, but no – that is the only name for it. It’s my cunt.

“I’ll get bored of messing with her head soon, just as I’m getting bored with the rest of her. She has a nice pair of hooters, but as I’ve said before Gaianesians are too dumb to be interesting once you’ve broken them. I intend to trade her once the pirate is ready for my use.”

If the threat of sale is supposed to intimidate or frighten me, it has the opposite effect. Hope blazes in me. Gods yes, please Master, trade me. Anywhere in the galaxy is better than this world of horrors. Trade me as live food. I don’t care as long as I get off the surface of Aghara-Penthay.

I want the men to talk further about my fate, but we’re interrupted.

The man who walks into the room is dressed in the livery of Salarin’s faction. He is one of the underlings who roughly raped me this afternoon, the strong one who triggered my Reflex and then put his penis in my anus. We’ve been sexual partners - the most intimate state possible between man and woman, but he barely glances at me now.

“Hunter,” he says to the clan chief. “I think you need to see this.”

“We’re busy, look,” Salarin says dismissively, indicating the strained movements of the bounty hunter as she pushes herself to yet another orgasm.

“Sir,” the man repeats, “forgive me, but really, you’ll want to see this.”

With an irritated click of his tongue Salarin gets up from his seat, leaving the two women on the bed to their pleasure.

“Come,” says Klink, so of course I follow too.

33 - Cheek

It’s dark in the open and the temperature has dropped from the oppressive heights of daylight. It’s not cold though, so the large fire in the center of the circle is for light and to be a social focal point rather than a source of warmth. Men sit around laughing and joking, passing around a bottle of liquor, although there’s an odd off-note in their banter, as though it’s forced.

As we approach they acknowledge Salarin their leader, and then the eyes move over me in the way men always do around a nubile female. I scan the ring of males in camouflage uniforms shyly, looking for the man who showed me a little gentleness when we had sex, but I gasp at the sight of something unbelievable.

Alexa Goshenk, the dark skinned pirate Rape Runner, is sitting amongst the group. Unrestrained, dressed in her Runner’s uniform of camo pants and leotard. On her lap is a pack of rations matching the ones in our stores, and she clutches a bottle of spirits in one hand.

Alexa grins impishly as she recognizes the two men.

“Truce?” she says. “You can’t lay a finger on me after sunset, remember? So let’s talk business.”

I’m already cringing in expectation of an explosion of violence, but Salarin laughs more warmly than I’ve ever heard him do before. Klink, on the other hand steps forward with his fists clenched, and Salarin has to lay a restraining hand on my huge Master’s upper arm.

“I see you’ve made yourself at home with our stores,” Salarin then says genially, indicating Alexa’s rations while the men take seats close to the fire.

“I’m not touching that Runner crap if I don’t have to,” Alexa agrees moodily. “I mean… look what they make us have: Water!” she commands to the sky, and sure enough, having spoken the Runner cue that gets her supplied with hydration, a moment latter a small parachute descents from the starry heavens.

Alexa gloats as she unscrews the lid of the metal canister. “Men across the galaxy have jerked off and paid their credits so I can drink this cum. Well, fat chance of that – I hope you give refunds.”

She tips the canister up and I see a viscous fluid like raw egg white spill out. Alexa laughs maliciously at the puddle, and brings the bottle of spirits to her pouting lips instead.

“You’re not making any friends here and around the galaxy,” Salarin says calmly. “Messing with your sponsors, and that stunt today… I presume it was you who ruined Emirie Kadjiz for the galactic public.”

Alexa laughs again.

I realize I’m holding my breath as I watch her. I find the pirate stunningly attractive – she has vivacity, a natural lithe grace and a lush ripe body. She reminds me of Riyena’s blend of viciousness and desirability. I am Gaianesian – bred over centuries to be strong and beautiful, and Alexa is a mere human, but in a slave wrap with marks of shame on my face I feel an inferior failure compared to this woman.

“That wasn’t me,” Alexa says, “but then I would say that wouldn’t I? Only they know for sure,” and she indicates around us where the invisible cameras will no doubt be relaying this first for the Run to viewers across the universe.

I look up to the heavens with sudden anxiety. I might be on screen too. Gods… they will see me at home. Gang raped on the screen behind Cass, and then this.

“My money is that the Gaianesian bitch did Emirie,” Alexa says, making me start before I remember White Queen. “They think I’m a cold one… So-called White Queen would walk over her own mother to get what she wants.”

Ithya? No… Gaianesians stand up for all women.

“The Gaianesians think submission to men is a fate worse than death,” Alexa continues as though she’s an expert on my culture. “Ithya would think she was saving someone by butchering a Runner.”

“Is she right, slave?” Salarin asks me directly, making me jump. “Answer truthfully.”

It’s not difficult to know what White Queen would think. Death would be infinitely better than slavery on this place.

“That’s true, Master.”

Alexa nods smugly.

“See? Even Bigtits over there thinks it was her. Well the viewers and sponsors won’t like it if White Queen massacres too many of your prize little peaches before the Hunters get to them,” she presses. “So let’s make a deal. The audience don’t want a Run that’s too fixed - one where the Hunters are told where little Ithya is hiding out. But Rape Run Command could let me know, and I’ll take the spoilsport out the game without killing her. Runner fighting Runner… Woman on woman. That’s the kind of entertainment the public want to watch.”

“As though we’d…” Klink bursts out angrily, but Salarin stills him once again. Most of the time Salarin seems relaxed and laconic, but every so often there’s a flash of his real authority.

At the protest Alexa seems to notice Klink for the first time.

“Egregious,” she says mockingly. “How’s your face? I didn’t burn you too deeply when you tried to catch me, but it was enough. How fitting that Salarin’s pet has a scarred face, just like his other little bitches.”

This makes my Master jerk as though he’s going to leap for Alexa’s throat, but he just manages to suppress his temper.

“I’m leading the auction to buy you,” he tells the pirate woman with icy rage. “Say what you want now, but you’ll wish you’d groveled the first moment you saw me before we’re done.”

“Master,” she taunts, her voice thick with sarcasm.

“I’m gonna rape you in so many ways,” Klink promises, “Wait and see.”

“I don’t think you are,” Alexa answers confidently. She glances at the sky and says conspiratorially to Salarin, “You might want to make sure the cameras aren’t on us while I explain why…”

I don’t understand. There’s no trace of the usual frightened Runner in Alexa Goshenk at all. It’s as though she can barely contain her mirth.

“You see… you Slavers aren’t the only ones in the galaxy who know about nanotech. When I discovered months ago you dumb pricks wanted me for the Run, I went to see a medic on Rushinda Prime. Very specialized, very expensive, but worth every credit. The nanobots they implanted in all my holes are linked to a genetic modification in my skin. If I’m penetrated any time my stress levels are high, such as during a rape, the nanotech sends a signal and I emit a neurotoxin from my pores. They’ve always said I’m poisonous, but now it’s literally true. You don’t want to fuck with me without my consent unless you’re wearing a hazard suit.”

Klink goes rigid with fury as she explains her clever defense mechanism, but Salarin laughs uproariously. “Ah, so you’re saying we can’t fuck you? Is that why you walked into camp so boldly?”

Alexa nods. “I knew an implant would compel me not to harm men, but it doesn’t matter when the response of my body is involuntary. You’re the only ones who are fucked.”

Salarin is still laughing. Alexa drinks in Klink’s impotent rage like she’s having the time of her life.

“So…” she says, “to avoid the Slavers becoming a laughing stock in front of the galaxy for the second year running, let’s have a drink, and then talk off camera about how you’re going to rig this pissant little competition to make sure I’m the one who walks away.”

I’m stunned. Both at her, and at him. She’s outwitted them entirely, but Salarin doesn’t show the least trace of anger. He gets to his feet still laughing heartily.

“Bravo, Alexa,” he says. “An amusing opponent, you are. Let’s see what we can do. What you’re suggesting is above the authority of any one faction chief, but stay here and I’ll talk in private to Rape Run Command,” and he moves towards the hut containing the communications equipment.

“You can’t let her get away with this,” Klink calls after him. My Master jumps to his feet. Unable to take out his rage on the pirate woman but exploding with the need to harm someone, he swings his huge arm in a wide haymaker punch and strikes me hard in the side of my skull, sending me sprawling in the dirt with my head spinning.

“Come with me, Egregious,” Salarin calls back, and the tone of authority is back in his voice. “You need to be involved and I don’t trust you alone with Alexa yet.”

“Maybe I’ll have them make you part of the deal, Klink…” Alexa calls after him. “An implant to obey me… I’d have a lot of fun with your balls.”

Salarin almost has to drag my Master away then.

Enjoying her victory to the full, the pirate stretches back in her seat, arching her back in a way that lifts her breasts, and she sighs happily. With the two men gone the rest of the circle wait stunned.

“That Gaianesian girl is pretty,” Alexa breaks the silence by commenting to the guards, and her eyes turn suddenly on me. “And I’ve never seen The Reflex used. She’s Klink’s, yeah? Why doesn’t one of you fuck her while I watch?”

34 - Seven

It’s broad daylight when I awaken, and it’s already like I’m in an oven. I’m lying on my back on one of the foldaway camp cots, nude, with another naked woman lying draped across me. Ja-Alixxe. I’m entwined with Ja-Alixxe.

By the time the two of us were permitted to rest, it was late into the night. The men of the camp used me until Salarin send them to bed. Ja-Alixxe followed his orders, and fucked Cassarinie until the bounty hunter was too exhausted to stand up.

“Use each other if you wish,” Salarin commanded as the bounty hunter was dragged into the room with her head slumped and her eyes half-closed. “And neither of you can refuse the other.”

But last night, more sex was the last thing either woman wanted. What of this morning, though? I feel the compulsion of the implant still enforcing Salarin’s will, and know for sure if she wakes and wants me, I’m going to let her have me.

I remember I have power over her too. I’ve been the victim for so long it’s an odd concept that any sentient being might have to obey me. Especially one like Ja-Alixxe. But although she’s very desirable to me, and there would be kudos for bedding one of the galaxy’s most beautiful women, I’m not going to force her. I stroke my finger tenderly down the graceful curve of the bounty hunters bare back and over the mound of her buttock, and she stirs.

Ja-Alixxe looks up from where her head’s resting on my breast. She’s very beautiful, with a mane of dark hair and an intense stare. Her expression is uncertain – maybe considering the precarious mutual power as I did moments earlier.

“Truce?” she says, taking me right back to Alexa speaking that word last night.

A bargain of some kind must have been struck between Salarin and the Runner, for the dark-skinned pirate walked unmolested from the camp armed with a rucksack of supplies and a weapon like a cattle prod that can render its victim unconscious on contact. She walked away at first in the direction of the high mountain peak, but at the far range of the firelight Alexa cocked her head, as though she could hear something, and she turned instead for a vast derelict spaceship lying out on the plane.

Salarin must have mollified my owner as well, because Klink seemed pacified on his return, and although he glowered at Alexa’s farewell jibes, there was no sign of the violence he unleashed on me being dispensed for a second time.

“Truce,” I agree with Ja-Alixxe. I feel acutely aware of her body – of her breasts pressed against my stomach and her thigh between my own legs. I continue to stroke her back, trying to offer her a little physical tenderness amidst so much horror. But Ja-Alixxe has recovered some of her spirit, and it seems the bounty hunter has other things in mind than caresses.

“Are there blaster weapons in camp?” she asks me abruptly.

I’m taken aback by such bluntness, but I answer.

“Maybe, in the munitions hut, but they’re no use to us. We can’t harm the men and there’s nowhere to run. They’ll just track our implants and we’ll be punished.”

“We can’t harm the men, but we can harm other women,” Ja-Alixxe says. “So we can use them on each other. Both of us firing at the same time.”

My skin goes cold as the enormity of what she’s suggesting sinks in. A suicide pact.

“Please,” Ja-Alixxe asks, with the most humility I’ve ever heard from her. “Kill me. I don’t know how much more I can stand.”

I’ve said to myself many times since the day I first boarded the Bountiful Sluts wearing a demeaning blue slave wrap that I wished I was dead. And I have no hope of any dignity in my future or of a return to my former life. But when push comes to shove, to actually take the final irrevocable step…

I’m still deciding whether to let Ja-Alixxe shoot me when we lose our chance to act on the idea. With terrifying suddenness she screams in agony, so immediate and loud that I too cry out with fright, and in my arms the bounty hunter tenses so much with her pain she almost doubles up. Understanding I look around fearfully. They’ve activated her pain stimulators again. That can only mean Salarin must be close by, returning with his first catch of the day.

I don’t want to witness yet another woman’s ritual degradation, so when I hear a number of speeders pulling into camp I hide in the hut. Ja-Alixxe remains with me - she isn’t permitted to show herself. The two of us cling to each other in the darkest corner of the bare room, while some poor woman’s torment begins outside.

“Blasters,” she mouths silently.

Outside the screams of agony and the voice pleading not to be tortured and raped does not sound like Ithya, our own White Queen, and so I take heart Alexa can’t have run my leader to ground yet.

The seclusion cannot last forever though, so when I hear “Boobs!” shouted in my Master’s voice I leap from Ja-Alixxe’s arms like I’ve been electrified, and hurry into the open.

It is the punk singer, Twisted Elle, who stands naked in the torture frame with the hot sun beating down on her. She’s been bound in the same “X” shape they used to secure Cassarinie, only with Elle’s restraints there is the addition of a wooden pole embedded in the ground, which runs upwards to terminate in a large rubbery phallus sandwiched between the woman’s buttocks. It looks to be too deeply sunk into her anus for Elle to dislodge it by moving her pelvis.

Cassarinie was caught late in the day, meaning the men used her at leisure and en-masse. With other Runners still out there in The Zone, Salarin’s triumphal rape of Elle has been quick, to speed his return to the hunt. In a sense she’s had it easy. The dribble of shame from her cunt is nothing to the ruination Salarin and his men inflicted on Cassarinie’s body. The singer is still alert and she stands upright in the frame, silently looking out across the camp.

My Master is relaxing back in a canvas safari chair, his loose pants bulging with an erection. Watching the torture of Twisted Elle must have made him horny, and he wishes for sexual gratification before returning to the chase.

“Do you want to put it in my cunt, Master?” I politely check.

Klink waves dismissively.

“Use your mouth. I like the way your tongue feels on me. Kneel down in front of me while you work.”

“Yes Master,” I confirm, falling to the ground so quickly it’s as though my legs have given way.

Freeing him from his clothing, I begin to pleasure him with my lips.

Klink must have exerted himself during the morning’s hunting, for he exudes stale sweat, making the familiar taste of his penis even worse. He makes no apology for this, saying nothing as he hardens further in response to my circling tongue and bobbing head. My Master seems relaxed today. I sense none of last-night’s tension that was triggered by Alexa’s mocking.

It takes only minutes before he reaches full hardness and there’s the feeling of pulsing that signals the imminent jet of seed against the back of my throat. My owner releases himself into me.

“Klink!” Salarin calls while I’m unsuccessfully trying to swallow the rest of the residue without tasting it. “Enough of that. There will be time for pleasure later.”

“I’m already finished. On my way,” Klink calls back languidly, pushing me firmly away from him. I rise to my feet, wiping my mouth.

“Keep the camp ready, slave,” Klink then orders me. “And serve the sexual needs of any men who require it.”

“Yes Master,” I say, and then the poor bounty hunter’s offer comes into my head. “And what of Ja-Alixxe?”

I was hoping he’d interpret my question as permission to resume our liaison, but it’s a mistake to mention her.

“Leave her alone. If you want relief, touch yourself or ask one of the men.”

So with that order any chance of mutual self-destruction is gone. Now I can walk on water as easily as I can approach her.

“Yes, Master. But my cunt needs no attention.”

Klink looks at me closely, and just for once something in him seems to soften.

“Stupid Gaianesian,” he says gently. “You will remember the other names for your cunt, and you can call it what you wish.”

At first I don’t know what he’s talking about, but then it’s as though conversation triggers a tidal wave memory of childhood to return. I didn’t always call it my cunt. That’s a disgusting name for it. My vagina, vulva, pussy, sex, womanhood, snatch, slit, and a thousand other slang names, but not my cunt.

My mouth drops open in horror.

Gods help me, the implant did that? One order was all it took to lock away that part of my mind. That’s how helpless I am, as long as this vile chip is lodged in my brain-stem. Truly I am a slave.

“Thank you, Master.”

He nods. Without a backward glance at Elle or myself, Egregious Klink hops onto a dusty speeder with Salarin, and the two men roar out of the camp, leaving me alone under the inferno of heat. After watching them for only a moment I make myself busy with my chores, fetching soap and water to clean the defeated Rape Runner Twisted Elle.

I’m expecting more humiliation, but none of the men molest me on the second day. They’re all busy doing something out beyond the perimeter of the camp, digging small holes. It looks as if they’re laying a minefield, but that makes no sense. There are wild creatures in The Zone but we’re in no danger here.

At one point Ja-Alixxe appears in a hut doorway and beckons to me, but I shake my head. I was ordered to leave her alone.

On the second day of competition the Slaver faction leader Cronorgan, known as the Dominant because of his pleasure in the complete subjugation of females, makes his first capture. Perla Etochka, inventor of the control implant, stumbles into one of the many traps littering The Zone – a deep pool of highly adhesive syrup disguised with the planet’s ubiquitous red sand.

Wagner’s commentary explains that as a reward for her contribution to science, the first thing Cronorgan did was to give Perla a second implant. This one compels her to obey female’s instructions, with the caveat that women’s orders don’t superseded the masters’. The scientist will end her days as the lowest of slaves, with no ability to resist instructions from anyone.

To demonstrate, Cronorgan activated both her implants and ordered Perla to remain completely motionless while he raped her. Of course, she did everything he asked. The steady flow of tears was the only sign of her inner torment. Then, the broken Cassarinie was forced to do the same thing.

While this is broadcast, the competition continues, with survivors still being pursued out in The Zone.

I don’t know if Alexa lied to us last night, and she was in fact the one who murdered Emirie Kadjiz. Perhaps it was Alexa. Perhaps it was White Queen. Perhaps it was someone else. Either way, whatever secret deal was struck doesn’t seem to work, and the killer stalking The Zone turns out to be as successful as the Hunters when it comes to tracking down women.

The Runners will have seen the broadcast of Emirie Kadjiz’s murder, just as we did. They should be cautious, but the killer seems to have Senator Laure Costaniodies’ trust. Wagner’s broadcast shows Laure walking ahead of our view chatting happily, when someone out of shot bludgeons her brutally in the back of the head.

“Do you know how much that woman was worth?” a clearly pissed-off Wagner thunders for the benefit of those remaining Runners in The Zone. “You’d better be the survivor, Runner, or they’ll take the credits out of your flesh.”

Laure’s death means only three Runners are left with the chance to be the winner. Alexa Goshenk, the pirate, with the competition seemingly rigged to make sure she’s that one. Ithya, my own poor White Queen unknowing that a deal has been struck to doom her. And then who is the last? Ah yes, Venda Varansilio, the bimbo star of that stupid reality show, where her and her dumb family do nothing more than party and wear expensive clothes. “VeeVee” she’s known to her fans. I’m surprised she’s still in the game, but then there is an element of luck in the Rape Run.

If I didn’t guess how much the audience must be enjoying Alexa’s impudence, I’d be expecting the pirate to come across an unlucky “accident” - ending up in a fatal trap or devoured by one of The Zone’s voracious night predators. But she was right that the galaxy will want to see rapes, not more women dispatched by other means. As the day draws on Alexa remains at liberty.

The sun is getting low in the sky and it will soon dip below the horizon, signaling the end of the day’s Run and the safe time for the Runners. I happen to be out in the open, moving between the huts carrying crates of liquor, and that’s why I see it – an incandescent white flare meandering lazily back to the ground.

I gasp. A flare means a Runner in distress – something so terrible it overrides their fear of rape, and the survival imperative of their implant orders them to summon male help.

The flare is descending near the ruined super-cruiser, where Alexa was headed in the darkness. But is it Alexa who called for it, or did she find someone else there? VeeVee, or White Queen? Please, if there’s any justice in the universe let it be Alexa in trouble, and let White Queen send a message of female empowerment by winning the Run.

I see multiple plumes of dust. The Hunters will be converging as they race to the source of the flare. Whoever gets their first will claim the girl as their prize. No doubt the contest is exciting viewing for the galactic audience.

Let it be Alexa, I continue to pray. I’m degraded and ruined, but White Queen can still be a symbol that there is truth to female superiority.

Ten minutes, half an hour, what can be happening out here?

The sound of Salarin’s speeder reaches me only seconds before the vehicle follows it, roaring into camp so fast the jets spray me with grit. Salarin and Klink are riding it, laughing to each other. I hurry over to serve them and note they have no captive.

“Who did they catch?” I can’t help asking.

“Come and see,” Klink says, and I try to interpret his delighted manner. Alexa, or not Alexa. “Climb up with me.”

I risk a second question.

“Where are we going, Masters?”

Klink seems pleased to tell me.

“Cronorgan’s camp.”

35 - Eight

When Cronorgan found the pride of Gaianesia out in The Zone, she had already been hogtied by an unknown assailant, her wrists lashed to ankles behind her, and left as immobile as an animal waiting for slaughter. Whoever overpowered her, as a final indignity once Ithya was bound and helpless her attacker needlessly went for her clothing, leaving White Queen with her breasts bared and her sex displayed.

Alexa. It must have been. Alexa Goshenk’s hallmark viciousness is all over this crime.

Waiting defeated for the Hunters to arrive, White Queen would have had time to look at her exposed organs and consider how important a part her erogenous zones were going to play in the rest of her life.

By the time we arrive at Cronorgan’s camp White Queen has already been stripped completely. Ithya’s bondage is some of the most elaborate I have seen since arriving on Aghara-Penthay. A web of ropes surround her body, immobilizing her torso at its center. By means of this web she is suspended in the middle of wooden frame, a frame formed of an open cube rather than the squares I have seen in Salarin’s camp. Ropes are lashed to her wrists and ankles interconnecting her limbs through an elaborate system of pulleys. Ankle goes to pulley, to pulley, to ankle. Wrist goes to pulley, to pulley, to wrist. This gives Ithya the illusion of some freedom of movement. She can flail her feet and bend her knees, but it is impossible for her to close her legs entirely, thus hiding her obscenely displayed sex organs. She can also move her arms, but not close enough to reach any of the knots of rope, or protect vulnerable places on her own body such as her breasts.

When we arrive she is still struggling, paddling the empty air like a naked swimmer. I am in the presence of the regenerated White Queen in all her glory for the first time. What an example of Gaianesian breeding! Her body is toned to perfection and her breasts are full. Silver blonde hair spills about her creamy shoulders. I find her intensely beautiful, and think it’s a tragedy that such a woman should be reduced to this state – stripped and awaiting degradation.

The Slaver faction leader Cronorgan greets Salarin like an old friend. I try to look inconsequential as the two men clap each other’s shoulders genially. Cronorgan is a bald, almost hairless man, with a fat body that gives his full lips an effeminate manner. I could have taken him for a homosexual or even a pacified male if I hadn’t known his taste for subjugating and then raping women.

The one known as “The Dominant” looks me up and down appreciatively in my meagre red slave wrap, and I feel myself tremble. Quickly I look away, not daring to meet his eyes.

“You’ve brought another Gaianesian,” Cronorgan says. He has a high, rather reedy voice. “Making her watch the downfall of her great leader?”

“She was involved in Klink’s sting to catch the White Queen,” Salarin explains. “Klink kept her as part of his reward. Nice piece of cunt, don’t you think?”

We’ve arrived from a direction behind White Queen so she can’t see me yet, but Ithya has heard the men discussing another Gaianesian and she freezes in her mid-air flailing. Her head turns from side to side as she tries to look round and glimpse me.

Because have my eyes to the ground I miss seeing Cronorgan’s expression change when he has the idea. But I hear the words perfectly clearly, and I’ll never forget them.

“Shouldn’t we use your female, to show the galaxy that Gaianesian women aren’t superior, and in fact they’re weak enough to publicly betray each other?”

I look to the men in alarm, but see only cruel possibility dawning in their faces.

“Would you lend me your slave to participate in her shaming, Egregious?” says Cronorgan.

“No!” Even in the intimidating presence of two faction leaders and my Master I’m too appalled to remain silent. Me, forced to harm White Queen? “Please No!”

“Of course, help yourself,” Klink answers generously, and then dooms me completely with. “Boobs – follow his orders.”

“No, please,” I beg, my eyes starting to fill with tears.

“Come here and remove your wrap,” Cronorgan orders, and even though my mind screams its revulsion I’m stepping off the speeder and walking towards him before I know it.

“Guard!” he orders one of his men. “Fetch me a strap-on. One of the double-headed ones.”

A strap-on? Like at Wagner’s interviews? Gods, I thought this couldn’t get worse. Oh, no, no, please, no! Close by Ithya also pleads, “No!” and once more begins to flail in the air.

All the same, I pull the string fastening my wrap docilely and expose myself to Cronorgan. He nods approvingly as his eyes take in my pneumatic breasts. Once I was proud of them, but they’ve been the curse of my life since boarding the Bountiful Sluts.

“Excellent. You really are A-grade woman-flesh. Your body will arouse the galaxy, while they’re also entertained by watching you rape your leader.”

I’m weeping openly now.

“Please no, Master. Don’t make me do it.”

This is a worse disaster than I could have ever imagined! Everyone on Gaianesia will be watching this. I’ll be a pariah on my homeworld for publically violating White Queen. And Tits being identical, she will share in my disgrace. I’ll destroy both of us.

“Stop complaining slave,” Cronorgan snaps dismissively. “In fact I order you to enjoy this. Her mission is the reason you’re here as a sex slave. Take some revenge for what’s been done to you.”

My thoughts are racing, trying to come up with a way to avoid what I’m about to do. But Cronorgan’s words also trigger something new, as abruptly as though he’s flipped a switch in my understanding. When I look at White Queen it’s obvious Cronorgan is right. She is the reason I’m here. Red Duchess tried to talk her out of sending another woman to Aghara-Penthay, didn’t she, but no. White Queen wanted those precious plans which never actually existed, and she used poor Tits’ captivity to emotionally blackmail me. All that humiliation I faced alone, travelling to the Hub wearing that demeaning blue wrap while White Queen stayed safely behind the scenes.

And Tits was also enslaved because of White Queen’s scheming. Tits, my beloved sister, destroyed. Made a sex slave – her face tattooed, implanted, her markings forevermore turned the purple color of a defeated woman. And my face tattooed, implanted, my markings also purple.

I bet they didn’t give White Queen something as shameful as nanotech inside her ass perpetually stimulating her, not like I have to endure. She had it so easy. Even when I’m old and withered, I’ll need a man’s cock in there once a week. Tits has the same thing in her mouth. All because of the cold scheming bitch hanging in that frame.

She does deserve to understand the consequences of her actions.

While my perceptions realign themselves, the strap-on is brought to me. It reminds me of a pair of panties, only backless, leaving the buttocks bared. Inside the crotch is one phallus. While the men smile I push this eagerly into my dry vagina. The good news I soon discover is a set of rubber bumps also line the crotch. These will graze over my clitoris with every small movement I make, and it’s going to be very arousing to wear.

The cock protrudes forward, a black rubbery affair larger even than my Master’s organ. It feels heavy and unnatural. The contraption also has fake testicles, of a color to match the penis. I’m very aware of my new genitals swaying and changing my balance, particularly because it is connected to the inner phallus and any movement shifts the object penetrating my body. Is this what a male feels with an erection – a growing sense of pleasure between the legs while the mass protrudes forward at ninety degrees?

I like it. It makes me feel powerful. Just for a brief time here on a planet of horrors, no one can rape me there because I have a cock. My balls brush against my inner thighs. Let someone fear me, for a change.

“Let the other Gaianesian be the first to trigger White Queen’s Reflex.” Cronorgan announces. There is quite a crowd now, all male except Ithya and myself, and the numbers watching from space are too great to comprehend. Yet I don’t feel nervous.

“Do it. Trigger her Reflex, slave girl!” Cronorgan orders me. “Make her wet and then fuck her until you climax yourself.”

“No, please, not like this,” my leader begs.

It’s not enough for me just to witness Ithya humiliated by an unknown woman. I want her to know it was me, so I pad round to face her. I see her steel eyes widen in recognition, take in my purple markings for one moment, and once again she flails the air. Good. They’ve bound her floating at the height of a man’s groin, so for the males she’ll be easy to rape in the ropes, but I’ll have to stand on tiptoe.

“Gara…” she says anxiously. “Or are you Lara?”

Who? This deserves only contempt.

“So, White Queen, you didn’t even make the effort to learn my name, before you sent me here to become a sex slave. My name is Boobs.”

“No!” she protests, although I’m not sure to what. I begin wrapping the mane of her lustrous hair in my hand, balling my fingers into a fist. I tense her, but don’t pull hard yet – it’s too soon. Let her anticipate. She hasn’t suffered enough.

“You killed those women,” I spit, “Emirie Kadjiz and the senator. You didn’t give them a chance. You deserve to end your life pleasing men, after everything you’ve done.”

“No!” Ithya stammers pathetically. “That wasn’t me. I swear. I think it was the pirate. That’s why they never even showed her hands on the screen. The dark skin would have given it away.”

“Lies!” I insist.

I crouch down so I’m inches from her face.

“I want to see it in your eyes – the moment that the mighty White Queen’s Reflex is triggered by a mere sex slave, Boobs.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Ithya gabbles on the edge of panic. Pathetic. “It’s the implant. Fight it! Show them a woman can be strong.”

Listen to her beg! I can’t believe I used to respect this person. She doesn’t understand the least thing about what lies ahead for her, and about who holds the true power in the universe. Women are weak, and the sooner we accept that the better.

“You show the galaxy how strong a Gaianesian woman can be,” I say, and tug her hair back painfully hard.

I’ve never watched a woman enduring the Reflex from so close up until now. The brave leader of Gaianesian Intelligence gives an erotic moan of near orgasmic lust, and in front of me her eyes roll back in her head, her pupils dilating with the rush of arousal. Her body goes limp, except for spasmodic twitches from her thighs. When I release her hair her head hangs forward semi-conscious.

I walk round behind her and between her still legs to see her pussy is already glistening. Ithya moans again as I position my phallus against her lips. I don’t care if her cry is pleasure or suffering – actually I’d have preferred suffering – but I was ordered by Cronorgan.

I thrust my fake cock all the way into her, and the stimulators massage my clit at the same time, igniting pleasure that begins to warm through my body. Marveling in the power of my penis, I begin to move my hips back and forward in a steady rhythm that mimics a man in sexual congress. Each time I penetrate into her, Ithya moans in a wanton whorish demonstration of how the Reflex reduces a sentient being to a slut.

With the apparatus around my pelvis stimulating me, I then bring myself to orgasm by raping one of my planet’s greatest leaders. This is my turn! If Ithya shows any signs of recovering from her sexual hypnosis I simply tug her hair again, after giving her long enough to comprehend what I’m about to do. Let her worry about how many times her reflex needs to be triggered before her markings begin to change shade, just like I once did.

Pathetic bitch! Almighty Boobs! This is how Riyena must feel when a woman squirms in her power. I can understand it. Perhaps I too am actually a sadist.

My own climax comes upon me intensely, although now I’m experienced I know my release of pleasure, without The Reflex, is a pale imitation of the impossible ecstasy of Ithya’s submissive state. Crying out loudly in time with her moaning, I orgasm, and my eyes refocus to discover Cronorgan has his penis out and is ready to join in White Queen’s defeat.

“Thank you, Master,” I say, withdrawing from Ithya’s pussy so abruptly that she shrieks. “That’s the best fuck since I landed.” And for a short time I mean it.

36 - Night

It is after dark we return to camp, to find a jubilant Alexa Goshenk has joined us for a second time.

“Did you see her? It was me who caught the White Queen,” she crows. “She put up a fight, but I shocked her with the prod and then tied her up. Left her with her breasts and snatch on show to wait for you. She didn’t like that one bit.”

“We saw...” Salarin says uncaringly. “She said you’re the one who killed the other women.”

“Wait and see the footage when the Run is finished,” Alexa shrugs confidently. “That will prove who was telling the truth. But of course I won’t care - I’ll be gone by then. There’s only the big-titted bimbo from reality TV left in my way, and as soon as we catch her I can leave this shitty planet.”

“Maybe,” replies Salarin wearily. “Maybe. But although the audience prefer to see one of you raped, we may still send you an accident. It would save us all listening to more of your gloating if you were killed in The Zone.”

Salarin’s tone is less tolerant tonight. And he’s not the only one who seems tired of her smug superiority.

“I’ve had enough of the attitude as well,” Klink tells her. “So unless you intend to yield yourself right now, perhaps you’d get the fuck out of our camp.”

This time no rations and liquids are offered to Alexa. No need so close to the end of the Rape Run, she is told. And not even she has the bravado to remain much longer with her cool reception, so before long Alexa’s is striding off towards the starlit shadows outside the ring.

“Activate,” Salarin says with a gesture to one of his men. I am puzzled. Activate what? I don’t understand the command.

The female pirate has already been swallowed up by the darkness. I must admit she has courage. There are some vicious predators hunt The Zone at night, and even with a prod it’s risky. Being surprised by an attack from behind is a particular danger.

“There are four Hunters left to two Runners.” Klink says as soon as she’s out of earshot. “What happens if VeeVee is caught first tomorrow, and Alexa does win by accident?”

“I don’t think that’s very likely,” Salarin says. “My men have been very thorough while we hunted. Wait and see.”

And with that Salarin relaxes back in front of the fire, unconcerned. I, in contrast, have sunk to the deepest despair I can remember. Reality came crashing back in on me after the show at Cronorgan’s camp. The fat Slaver ordered me to enjoy raping our leader and compelled by my implant I did, but afterwards I was horrified. I degraded someone who is an icon to Gaianesians, and in front of the whole galaxy.

During Cassarinie’s gang rape I was barely visible in the background enduring my own ordeal, but this time my fellow citizens will have no illusions to the identity of the woman who betrayed the beloved White Queen. My face was in close-up on Wagner’s highlights, contorted with cruel arousal. Boobs, the Gaianesian, stark naked and broadcast in super high definition and recognizable instantly to anyone who once knew me. My face was twisted with sick pleasure. Oh Gods, what am I to do?

I couldn’t have returned to Gaianesia without joining the shamed ones anyway, but for degrading a heroine of the planet I might be executed for treason. This is a nightmare. I have nowhere to go any more. Aghara-Penthay is all I have left.

I’m only brought back to the present of this planet by the sharp sound of a woman crying out in surprise. The noise comes from somewhere fairly close by, but beyond my sight in the darkness.

“Excellent,” says Salarin to Klink. “All according to plan. Want to check? Let’s go.” And arming ourselves with a lantern we set out in the direction of the noise. We only have to walk about a hundred yards into the night, but the stony ground of the planet’s surface is uncomfortable on my bare feet. I estimate we go as far as the circle where I saw his men working earlier today.

There we discover the pirate Rape Runner, Alexa Goshenk, sitting on the ground with her legs extended and her booted feet squeezed together. It takes me a moment in the lamplight to see that she has a narrow wire, like a garrote, looped tightly around her ankles.

Alexa has activated some kind of pressure pad under the gravel, which has triggered a wire noose to snap closed in a fraction of a second, cinching tightly and trapping its victim.

She is pulling futilely at this device. From closer to I see there’s some kind of ratcheting closure on the wire similar to a cable tie, and this prevents the noose releasing until cut by a suitable tool. So although Alexa’s hands are completely free, she can’t walk or move more than a yard from where her feet are anchored to the buried trap. Out of reach I see have fallen her remaining supplies and the electric goad. She must have released them when she tripped.

“Slavers,” Alexa says ruefully, squinting into the lamplight. “I seem to have walked over a buried booby trap.”

Salarin looks down at her.

“Hmm. Yes I see you have, Alexa. You have indeed walked over a booby a trap. Wouldn’t you agree Klink?”

He turns to my owner, who replies, “A booby trap. Yes, her boobies do seem to be trapped.”

“Technically it’s her ankles that are trapped,” Salarin corrects, “but unless she can leave her legs behind, her boobies will stay where her ankles are.”

Alexa tugs at the tight wire again before giving up and looking irritated at the faction leader.

“Well hurry up and cut me free from it, then. It’s going to be hard for you guys to make rigging the ending of the Rape Run look authentic if I’m caught before VeeVee.”

Salarin considers, then assumes an air of fake sorrow as he looks down at her.

“True Alexa, it will be difficult to explain, but there’s a fine point of Rape Run rules, here. While Rape Run Command did let us point you to White Queen’s location, we’re still not allowed to physically interfere with the Rape Runners between sunset and sunrise, even in a helpful way. I’m sure you see the problem here - that much as I’d like to help, we have to wait until daylight, unless of course you call for an emergency flare. But that would mean you admitted defeat in the Rape Run. An awkward situation for all of us.”

Alexa tries to re-cross her ankles but there’s some kind of tech in the loop’s locking mechanism, and it only closes tighter. She looks up again, more impatiently.

“You rule this planet,” she insists. “Give an order. You could have me out of this if you wanted.”

“The Rape Run is bigger than all of us,” Salarin disagrees. “Do you know how many people will be enjoying watch you lie there after they’ve endured your arrogance? I can’t let down the public just to spare you a few hours discomfort.”

“Come on, Salarin,” Alexa insists. “This isn’t funny. There are wild animals out here.”

“I could leave a guard to watch you until morning?” he considers. “But then what’s in it for me? If you were devoured in the night, VeeVee conveniently wins the Rape Run this year. No one will ever find out you beat us by preventing us penetrating you, because of that toxic skin trick.”

Alexa’s courage doesn’t desert her.

“You won’t do that. I’m too entertaining a Runner to waste another desirable female. So stop being an asshole and cut me free, or post your damn guard to let me loose at first light. Don’t try to intimidate me though.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Salarin smiles calmly. “Guards it has to be then. Sleep well, Alexa.”

With that the faction leader turns his back on the pirate and walks away. She calls after us, profanities I don’t want to repeat, but we leave her anchored to Aghara-Penthay by her ankles and facing a night on the rocky ground. Klink picks up her belongings and the prod, but rather than offer them to her he takes her supplies back to camp. Of course this makes Alexa even more pissed off.

“Toxic she might be, but we don’t have to let her win everything,” Klink explains with a smirk.

Back at the camp Salarin instructs two of his guards. One of them is the older man, he who was kind to me when he took me and said he might consider buying me. I look pleadingly at him, trying to send a signal. Master - please buy me – you must be better than my Master.

“Keep watch over the pirate,” Salarin tells the two men. “I want you there all night to make sure the others know we had her first. Take some blasters in case the wildlife bothers you.”

“Yes, Chief!” the two men say.

Salarin’s voice takes on a chilling tone, then.

“For tonight, you’re to follow the rules and let her think she’s calling the shots. Don’t interfere with her in any way until sunrise, but as soon as the game is on instead of releasing her, I want you to strip her and put her on the table. Be careful not to penetrate that body, but do anything else you feel like while you’re getting her in place. Take your time and enjoy a good grope. Have someone wake me once she’s ready. I’ll send a signal to the other Hunters and Run Command at dawn to inform them Venda Varansilio is the survivor of this year’s Rape Run.”

“Hunter!” the men say in unison, clicking their heels together in immediate acceptance.

I look at Salarin with incomprehension. What is this? With Alexa’s toxic skin the Slavers can’t complete their conquest, so why does he still want the pirate over Venda Varansilio? What’s the point? Have they some way to immunize themselves against her neurotoxin?

I shouldn’t have forgotten my own situation while puzzling over the pirate. Without warning there is a tug on my hair – gentle but still enough to trigger sparks of Reflex between my legs which make me go light-headed. I slump against my Master and he takes hold on me.

“Come, slave,” Klink says. “I think it’s the turn of your ass tonight. I’m going to drill you as a substitute for drilling her.”

“Yes Master,” I slur in my drugged stupor.

And with that we make for our modest hut, ready for me to yet-again serve every sexual desire of the man I hate most in the universe.

37 - Prepared

The “table” Salarin mentioned resembles a java table, knee high and rectangular, like those common in many living quarters across the galaxy. On top of this furniture the former pirate and Rape Runner Alexa Goshenk waits, on her hands and knees, the combined height of woman and structure trapping her genitals at the comfortable level of a male pelvis. Leather bracelets are locked to her wrists, ankles and lower thighs, keeping her in place and forcing her to adopt a position with her knees spread. I imagine this increases her sense of exposure.

I call it a table, but in fact only the bare minimum of the polycarbonate frame remains – pads to support the victim’s ankles and shins, and a shell to serve as anchor points for the restraints. This emptiness permits maximum access all-round the body of the unfortunate captive, including behind and underneath her. Additionally Alexa’s forearms are threaded through vertical pipes welded to the frame – these trap her limbs upright and further restrict freedom of movement – someone on the table cannot rest back on their buttocks for example, or shift forward to avoid blows to their rear.

The captive on hands and knees is Alexa Goshenk. Stark naked, her demeaning position means her breasts hang down like udders. Nude she reminds me even more of a gymnast, dark skin making her lithe musculature more prominent. It’s already hot this morning, and she glistens in the sun. Alexa has a figure that will no doubt be pleasing to men, with a slim torso but wide childbearing hips that make her look noticeably feminine. The lips of her sex are prominent and rounded. Rape or not, the Slavers will not go easy on her.

By now I’ve seen many women in the early moments of captivity. Most of them are unable to disguise how vulnerable they feel in restraint, and they become humble. Formerly strong women plead. But I’ve never seen a captive incandescent with fury before. Alexa moves constantly, her restraints clanging loudly and she jerks her arms as though she might have the strength to break her bonds.

“This is an outrage,” she almost spits when Salarin approaches her. “The winning Rape Runner always leaves the planet unmolested. Your men took away my clothes and they touched my…” but she is too ashamed to complete the sentence. “The public will not be pleased that you’ve broken the rules.”

“What breach of the rules has there been?” Salarin asks, calm in the face of her storming fury. “Venda Varansilio is the winner of this year’s Rape Run. It is being announced to the galaxy as we speak. She will indeed leave unharmed. You were caught in a simple trap, and you are a loser. You will be raped while the universe watches, your implant will be activated turning you into a slave, and then you will be sold.”

“We both know that’s not going to happen,” Alexa growls, although she moves her pelvis in the frame as though trying to evade an enemy. “You’ll drop dead the moment you stick your tiny prick in me.”

“Perhaps it will be worth it though,” Salarin says, seemingly unconcerned about his imminent demise. “Your implant compels you to avoid harming men, so you will struggle pleasingly right to the end as you instinctively try to prevent me penetrating you.”

“You’re bluffing!” Alexa hisses. “You will die the moment you touch my skin. No woman is worth that.”

“I recall you told me the nanotech activates when you’re penetrated at times of stress, yes?” asks Salarin. “Well we’d better make sure you’re good and stressed if we’re going to test how lethal you are. Torture will be ideal way to do that.”

He signals to one of his men who depart, smirking.

The objects then delivered are placed deliberately in front of Alexa, so she may contemplate them and consider how they’re about to be used upon her. She jerks angrily in her restraints as she takes in a field electrical generator with a dial to regulate the current, the plastic container holding around a quart of a viscous pale slime, and something that looks like an aerosol spray can.

“Stop trying to frighten me,” Alexa demands. Was that a trace of uncertainty in her voice? “We know how this will end. You can’t strip and torture a winning Rape Runner. Get me out of this thing and bring me some fucking clothes.”

“Quite right - you can’t strip and torture a winning Rape Runner,” he agrees. “But enough irrelevancies. We all noticed how much it amused you pouring away the sperm from all your sponsors. However this did not please the Slavers. It took some effort to collect donations for a second time, but here we are – every single man’s seed in one dose. And now the Run is over there’s no need to dilute it to hydrate you. The pure semen is good enough for a slave.”

The liquid in the container looks as thick as soup. The mere sight of it makes me feel nauseous. Two pints of undiluted sperm. I can’t think of anything more disgusting, and Alexa agrees.

“Like I’d ever drink that thing…” she laughs sarcastically. “Once you’ve released me I’ll pour it into the dirt all over again.”

Salarin merely shrugs. He picks up the aerosol can and without asking fires it at Alexa’s naked shoulder. He sprays down her right hand side next, then continues to work his way around her body. In the air forms a fine cobweb of a silvery material. The substance seems to be sticky, for where it settles on Alexa’s skin it clings to her. Gradually every exposed inch of her is covered in threads, as though she’s walked nude into the web of a vast spider. He even sprays her face, an indignity which provokes an even more furious reaction than the coating of her sex organs.

But the female body is never far from the mind of a Slaver, and Salarin concentrates most on her nipples and her genitals, giving those a thicker coating than the rest of her lush body. In Alexa’s position with pelvis thrust out behind her and her breasts hanging down, there’s nothing she can do to keep her private places out of the spray.

“Fuck off!” she yells at him. “Get the fuck away from my body, you pathetic little man.”

“The web is an electrical conductor,” Salarin tells her, unruffled by the verbal abuse. “It transfers the current excellently, but will wipe away easily when it is time to rape you. I don’t often use these old torture methods as there’s some danger of harm – a slave’s heart can stop from the shock – but you’ve made this year’s Rape Run especially entertaining, so you deserve some special treatment. Rest assured a medic is standing by. The female sex organs are sensitive and provide particularly excellent sources of pain. I recommend you avoid wetting yourself during our time together as urine is also a reasonable conductor and will add to your discomfort.”

At a signal from the Hunter one of the underlings clamps power connectors to opposing corners of the metal frame.

“That’s enough!” Alexa insists. She’s still trying to be bold but her dark eyes are wild and I can hear the unmistakable note of fear in her voice now. “Let me out of this thing!”

Salarin sits calmly on the surface of the generator, so he can reach between his legs for the dial. He smiles almost gently at Alexa.

“We will pause only while you wish to drink,” he informs her, while patting the plastic flagon of filth affectionately. “Please inform me when you feel thirsty.”

Then he turns the dial up a quarter of the way, and the naked pirate Alexa Goshenk’s first shriek rings out across The Zone.

38 - Ninth

I haven’t witnessed a woman being tortured by electrocution before, and I hope I’ll never have to see it again. Electricity locks the muscles in Alexa’s body so rigid that it’s difficult for her to use her lungs to scream, and what I hear is an animal gurgle of pain.

Salarin only jolts her for periods of about ten seconds, although each one seems like an eternity to watch. Then he pauses, halting for deliberately random intervals so she can’t predict when it will begin once more. Sometimes only a few seconds. Sometimes half a minute. Alexa uses the intermissions to struggle in her restraints, probably driven be instinct because she must know the bonds are inescapable.

At first I try to look away from the unbearable scene, but Klink grabs my hair and orders me to watch. “You should be grateful to her,” he tells me. “She’s replacing you and your sister at warming my dick soon.”

Is he really selling me, or is that a threat? And to whom? To the Harkens, or another Slaver?

Alexa screams again. Salarin had advised Alexa not to wet herself, but a few minutes into being tortured her bladder releases anyway with a spray that soaks her inner thighs. It’s hard to tell from her strangled cries whether the urine makes the pain worse. I just know it’s terrifying enough to watch, let alone endure, and I wouldn’t swap places with her for anything.

“She’s tough,” Salarin says approvingly to Klink over one of Alexa’s screams. “There’s plenty would have been begging for a taste of that cum already.”

Alexa can’t hold out for ever though. The torture has being going on for about ten minutes and Salarin has the dial nearly half-way up when she first says, “I’m thirsty.” By this time she is gasping with exertion so intensely she’s barely able to whisper. Her body gleams wet with sweat under the hot sun.

Salarin gets up and lifts the plastic canister to her lips. “Swallow it all,” he orders, “and don’t puke. If you do I’ll just make you lick it up from the ground.”

But Alexa has barely gulped back two mouthfuls before her face turns a funny shade and her breasts heave as she retches. There is panic as she battles to keep the foul slime down, and she only just succeeds. I don’t know how, for my own gorge rises merely from watching the thick brew get poured into her.

“Gods, no!” croaks Alexa. “It’s disgusting.”

“Have it your way,” shrugs Salarin, and he resumes his seat on the generator.

“No, no!” Alexa protests urgently, “I didn’t mean it, more please!” but her final words are cut off when she emits another bubbling scream of mortal agony. The pirate pleads to drink as soon as her muscles are released to speak, but Salarin gives her another couple of minutes enduring further doses of torture anyway before giving his captive pause.

I’m shaking just from watching this. I can’t believe he could be so cruel as to make her drink an entire quart of pure sperm, but inexorably they do progress through the container. Once she understands what’s inevitable Alexa tries to avoid unnecessary suffering, but she can literally only stomach so much before she’s overcome with revulsion and she hesitates. Then, over her protestations the electrocution begins once more.

I have to respect her endurance. She doesn’t beg once, and she doesn’t address Salarin as “Master”, which some captives quickly do as they try to ingratiate themselves. I’m sure I broke much more quickly when Riyena first used those terrible needles on my flesh. The closest Alexa comes to giving in is when the last drop is gone, and knowing what must be next she hoarsely croaks, “No… don’t rape me.”

“You seem to be stressed now,” Salarin smiles, “so the neurotoxin will certainly activate if I penetrate you. Let’s find out,” and he walks round to Alexa’s rump, slapping her naked hip hard like she’s a beast. I don’t understand his suicidal bravado as he releases his rampant erection from his pants. Does he have some kind of antidote to the toxin?

There is no foreplay to lubricate Alexa’s womanhood so she screams again as he forcefully buries himself inside her body. Knotting his fingers in the black curls of her hair he begins to rut into her like an animal, rubbing his free hand over the woman’s bare back appreciatively.

“I’m still alive,” Salarin observes. “How quickly does this thing work?”

“No, it can’t be. How?” moans Alexa, her eyes streaming tears, and then echoing my own thoughts, “I don’t understand.”

Salarin laughs.

“Maybe this will help – answer a question: how many days before the Rape Run were you captured, cunt?”

She looks confused, but to the rhythmic slapping of flesh against flesh she gasps, “Four days.”

He laughs again.

“And what if I told you that you were captured unconscious twenty four days ago?”

“No…” says Alexa. “I’d have known…”

“We give every incoming cunt a medical inspection, and yours happened to reveal your clever little defense mechanism. The toxin would have been a problem, if we hadn’t had more than enough time to burn off every last cell of your skin in acid, and regrow you in the bacta tank. You were kept in a coma the entire time, so you woke in captivity thinking you’d only just been knocked out, and never realizing you were already entirely safe for use.”

“No…” says Alexa, her eyes wide with horror.

“I’ve had an entertaining Rape Run watching you strut around thinking you were better than everyone else. The more the woman thinks of herself, the more erotic it is when she finds out she’s a slave. But now the game is done. It’s time for you to learn the true place for a female on Aghara-Penthay.”

“No!” she says again, more desperate this time, but he is relentless.

“After my men have gang-raped you Alexa Goshenk, your implant will be activated and you will sexually serve your major sponsors. Finally you will become the property of the highest bidder in the auction for you. Currently our own Egregious Klink, although your sexual response is so pleasing there may be other bidders.”

“No!” Alexa wails.

As if she needed her defeat confirmed, there is a blare of sound and the viewing screen in the sky comes to life.

There is a relieved Venda Varansilio waving to the crowd as she boards a shuttle leaving the trading hub orbiting high above us. The Rape Run is finished, and the news blackout with it, so Wagner can reveal behind the scenes tactics and strategies of the Runners to those of us in The Zone. VeeVee played a masterful Run.

Everyone forgot that to survive in a galaxy of constant scrutiny from the media a thick skin is required, and to build a business empire like that of the Varansilio family needs some shrewdness. So she played the empty headed bimbo angle to the hilt until she was in The Zone, and then VeeVee combined strategic movements from hiding place to hiding place with taking out any other Runner unlucky enough to cross her path. Soft, airheaded VeeVee. Everyone’s friend. White Queen was telling the truth. Ithya wasn’t the murderer. VeeVee was.

To this news, Salarin climaxes with a grunt inside the pussy of the last Rape Runner to be defeated – Alexa Goshenk - the one who came so close to being the survivor.

“Help yourself boys,” he says to the dead eyed men who are already closing. “Teach her what it means to be a slave.”

“And you, Scar-face?” Alexa gasps to Klink, still undefeated, while the first man releases his penis from his pants and pulls at the pirate’s breasts. “I suppose you’re going to join the line?”

“You’re going to long for me to rape you before we begin, Alexa,” he answers coldly. “You’ll be the lowest slave in the galaxy.”

Then the next man spears into her, and for a while she can speak no more.

39 - Space

Dressed in a standard issue female jumpsuit, I am wearing the most clothing I’ve had for weeks. There’s even the feeling of underwear hugging my pussy, but I know the sense of protection this gives me is entirely illusionary.

I am no longer on Aghara-Penthay and my slave tattoo is concealed, but the disguise as a free woman is also false. My implant is in there and functioning normally, so I will obey any command delivered by a man. I have technology in my anus that means the stimulation from there will become unbearable unless one of them puts his penis inside me within a few days.

Standing at my side, my sister Tits is also dressed and pretending to be a free citizen, as are the hundred and forty eight surviving women around us who were captured on the Vengeful Goddess.

Deception is necessary as we travel into Republic space, and to a high security facility where we will soon have to pass inspection by Republic troops. Slavery is illegal in the Republic. Until we reach our destination we need to maintain a fiction that we are free women, free women who go to a place where no free woman would travel.

I witnessed the meeting between Salarin and Klink where the deal was finalized. Every captured Gaianesian except Tits, White Queen and myself has been sold to the same buyer. The discussion took place in the same throne room on Aghara-Penthay where Salarin holds court. Ja-Alixxe knelt nude at his feet.

“It will be fifteen days while Alexa serves each of her sponsors,” Salarin said to Klink. “Before taming her, there is time for you to travel to the Republic and manage the handover of the Gaianesian crew.”

“Who is their new owner?” Klink asked.

“His name is Sour,” Salarin said. “Governor Sour, to use his title. He is one of the galaxy’s richest men, for he runs the Republic penal colony at Cancis Rock.”

At this I looked wide eyed at Tits. Gods no… don’t sell our poor women there.

Cancis Rock is nearly as notorious as Aghara-Penthay. Another barren world, but with temperatures close to freezing, where Aghara-Penthay is hot. No one would bother with the place except it holds the Republic’s primary source of trimium – a mineral vital to hyperspace travel but only found in small amounts except for on a few vital planets. Almost all the Republic’s trimium comes from Cancis Rock. The next largest source in the universe is Calico.

Trimium mining is dangerous, as the mineral is usually found in combination with pockets of explosive gas. Cancis Rock is particularly lethal, as the gas levels are unusually high. No amount of credits will attract volunteers when lifespans are so short, so the Republic established a penal colony of forced labor there three hundred years ago. The prison population used to be diverse, but now as the Republic has grown it houses only sex criminals. All the worst rapists, sexual serial killers and sex traffickers are contained in one inescapable world. Five thousand sex criminals who work the mines. Two hundred male guards. No women.

For a while the Republic offered enough credits to make prostitutes willing to endure a stint in the hellhole very wealthy, but with most of the convicts criminally depraved, the death rate among the hookers was higher than that of the prisoners. Once word spread, the males had to make-do alone.

“I can see why he can afford so many women,” Klink said, “trimium is essential to the Republic, but it won’t be easy smuggling slaves past the security ring orbiting the planet.”

“The implants will be good enough to conceal their true natures,” replied Salarin. “Each woman will be instructed to say she wants to work on Cancis Rock as a prostitute. Imagine that? A whole shipful of Gaianesians who claim they’re betraying their planet’s values because they secretly want to be abused by the worst of men.”

Klink smiled. “There is a poetic justice to seeing those bitches reduced to the lowest whores. But what happens if an immigration guard asks a woman to tell the truth? He is a male, and she’ll be compelled to speak.”

“The implant doesn’t work like that,” Salarin interrupted dismissively before Klink had finished. “The victim of implantation psychologically identifies a primary owner – the “alpha” owner. They will still obey the commands of other men, but not if they override the alpha. It has to be configured that way, or we’d have slaves getting mental breakdowns every time they were given conflicting orders. The Gaianesians will identify Slavers as alphas, followed by Sour’s people. We will tell them to lie to lesser men, and they will. Once on the surface, as all the guards are involved in the conspiracy the women can show their true status. It’s only passing immigration security that there’s a problem.”

“Why does Sour want so many? For his guards? He can’t keep a hundred and fifty to himself.”

“Far from it,” Salarin answered. “There are disciplinary problems on Cancis Rock. Riots last year over too many deaths in the mine. And you can’t bribe them to behave - some of the convicts have too much credit to ever spend. There’s only one thing they can’t buy – women. The Gaianesians will be given to them as incentives for good work…”

“At least until the killers thin them out,” Klink said uncaring.

I blanch at the barbarity of it. Five thousand sex criminals. Two hundred guards. And one hundred and fifty women to please them all. The math makes me feel sick – thinking of the number of men each woman would have to entertain every single day.

Correction – one hundred and forty eight surviving. Klink and the Slaver men did not want to risk one of the slaves giving the game away so far into enemy territory, so they devised a test to confirm the implants are working. The hateful chips can even override some natural body responses, so a simple check was to order every woman to lick out the anus of another, while being forbidden to retch.

As disgusting as surviving this ritual sounds, it was in the interests of the women to succeed, for those who puked were flushed immediately into space. Both the unsuccessful ones tried to hide by vomiting into their hands. The poor creatures had faulty implants where they were only partially compelled to comply, or their command compulsion didn’t work at all. Two women, women who pleaded and begged, “Please, we’ll be good slaves,” while the rest of us watched shaking with horror as they were forced into the airlock.

Salarin had one last instruction for my Master.

“Take some of the nanocameras with you and record the whole thing. There might be a time one day we need leverage on our friend Sour, and I want to have evidence. Keep close to him – the more directly he’s implicated, the better.”

“It will be my pleasure, Hunter,” he acknowledged with a malevolent grin.

“Yes, well, I hope the journey is not too onerous.”

“Not at all. This will work out well for me. I’m off to sell my own Gaianesians before Alexa moves home. We can drop the motherlode of women first and then deliver these two.”

“In that case there is nothing more but for me to wish you safe travels,” Salarin said.

Our flight is in a large Slaver vessel best suited to transport of freight – Sha-Lohdan, with its insignia and weaponry disguised so it resembles any ordinary merchantmen. In the freighter’s docking bay is Klink’s small personal ship – Cunt Catcher – that we will take further later.

Tits and I share a large cabin allocated to Klink and Riyena. The rest of the Gaianesians are prisoners in the hold, aimlessly milling around or clutching each other for comfort as they wait for delivery to a fresh hell.

I am just as much a slave as I’ve always been, I’m disgraced in the eyes of my homeworld after raping their beloved White Queen with a strap on dildo, and yet I can’t help feel a lifting of my spirits and some rekindling of hope as the freighter shifts into hyperspace. Perhaps it’s leaving behind that hateful world, and facing the prospect of an owner who surely can’t be worse than Klink. I saw the same emotion in Tits’ face as well as we walked through the trading station to board the freighter – a spark that’s been absent for too long.

“Hold on, dear sister,” she said to me last night as she massaged my clit into orgasm. Not long.”

It was a strange experience passing through the orbiting Hub to board the freighter. At one point a woman in the blue private-slave wrap cut across our path, hooting raucously as two grinning men pursued her. I stared after her, bemused. It was only recently I was a blue slave, looking with pity on the women from Aghara-Penthay. I’d never imagined I’d become one of the pitiable ones myself. Me and my beloved Tits.

But I mustn’t use that name. On Sha-Lohdan I’ve learned that for a while, she is no longer to be Tits.

“I don’t want you calling yourselves Tits and Boobs through the security checks,” Klink told us. “It will attract attention. You…” (He said to my sister) “will lie, and say your name is Gara. And you…” (He said to me) “will pretend your name is Lara.”

Ignoring Riyena’s smirk, I made eye contact with Tits and she looked questioningly at me. She felt it too – something resonating in my memory for an instant, but already gone. A truth erased by implant and out of reach. No matter. My name is Boobs. A scar where my name was burnt onto my flank proves it forever, but under orders I will even lie about that. That is the nature of slavery.

40 - Sour

“Form up for inspection, slaves!” barks a senior member of the guards with the manner of a drill sergeant. Most of the Gaianesians have done military service, so women instinctively shuffle into neat lines, leaving the space of an outstretched arm from person to person. One hundred and forty eight women – thirty seven times four.

Klink’s personal slaves are the only three females on the planet of Cancis Rock exempted from participation, and we stand at the edges of the vast space alongside our owner, watching. So that we don’t feel superior to our fellows we have been ordered once more into the humiliating red wraps of Slaver women.

Most of the guards who are not on duty have come to greet the new arrivals, and a considerable all-male crowd look eagerly at us, especially we-three who are the most revealingly attired. But we’re not the three revealing most for long, for although in space the Gaianesians needed jumpsuits to maintain the fiction of free will, here on the surface there will be no modesty. With obvious pleasure the drill sergeant calls to them, “Strip to your underwear!”

Cancis Rock is barren like Aghara-Penthay, and both are terrible places to be female, but the similarities end there. This world is far from its sun, and even in the middle of the day there is only a half-light from the dirty skylights high above us. It rains almost constantly on the surface, and biting winds make it perpetually cold.

Sentient life survives almost permanently underground, dwelling in the prison complexes and the mines. These are brutal industrial structures of grey concrete, pipes, steel and rock, and after only a short time I already miss plants, color or artwork that give a place some warmth.

The implanted Gaianesians disrobe in a large space like a hanger, standing only in their regulation white panties and vests. Guards move among them collecting the jumpsuits for disposal, whispering lewd comments to the most desirable and groping one or two. It’s cool in here, and I wish I was permitted more clothing. The chill has kept my nipples erect since we landed here, meaning my breasts are attracting even more attention than usual.

I keep stealing curious glances at Riyena, for she appears as I’ve never seen her before.

With there being shapeshifters among the male prisoners, the prison authorities were obliged to take measures to avoid escape attempts by changing identity. Thus the entire habitable complex is blanketed with an EM field which suppresses shapeshifter nerve activity, meaning that those like Riyena are forced to remain in their true form.

So the woman who has caused us so much suffering, I see in her real shape for the first time.

Her species are entirely hairless, with a green tinted skin patterned like scales and only vestigial ears, giving her a slightly reptilian appearance. Riyena is unnaturally thin and has a bald head, but remains feminine in spite of that. The unchangeable shape of her hips and her skull are as womanly as they were in her Harken guise, and her breasts are round, with nipples that protrude like mine. For some reason I’d always assumed we were similar in age, but from the signs of ageing skin I’d put her years closer to forty in the galactic reckoning. She has a strong resolute expression, except when my Master glances her way and then she lowers her eyes.

“Ladies!” bellows the drill sergeant. “Stand to attention to welcome your owner – Governor Sour of the Cancis Rock prison facility.”

Every single implanted women including me stands tall, and looks to the man whose word is now life and death.

I can tell immediately that Governor Sour is not a man to mess with. He has the same manner as Salarin – that of someone with little empathy – a man who doesn’t shrink from making brutal choices. Sour is in his fifties but with a full head of grey hair. He has a weathered face with a hooked nose and a hard expression. Taking his place on a podium, he looks imperiously down on those who are his possessions.

“Ladies,” he says in a strong, authoritative voice. “Welcome to Cancis Rock. You will spend the rest of your lives here, as my property. My orders are that you willingly serve as sex slaves to the male population. You will have no limits and submit to every request, no matter how degrading.”

I feel tears welling in my eyes as Sour condemns every woman. These females are implanted. Of course they will willingly serve as sex slaves. They will submit to every request. They have no choice.

“You will not attempt to escape, nor to communicate from the surface of the world to appeal for help. All that matters to you is pleasing men.”

“The most beautiful of you are lucky. Shortly I will inspect you and choose the most desirable female of all to be my personal slave. The guards will chose the next ten to remain in their private brothel. The remaining women, those whom we consider less attractive, will serve five thousand of the Republic’s most depraved sex criminals, beginning your work this very night as you fight for our entertainment over the rape pit. Are there any questions?”

Of course no one says a word. Sour’s words chill them like they do me. Gods help them, some of these poor women are already shaking with fear. But the smartest ones – the survivors, have understood the score, and realized that whatever the “rape pit” is it can’t be good. With the high chance of sexual violence from the inmates their best chance of a bearable life is to be one of the chosen eleven. I see girls pinching their cheeks to create a healthier glow; some adjust their breasts to make them more prominent in the simple vests, and a few even pull at their nipples so they stand prouder for masculine attention.

Sour steps down from the podium and begins moving up and down the lines of Gaianesians. Sometimes he lingers with one female, touching her breast or stroking a cheek. Words are whispered. Service to only one man should be the best option of all, and yet when the Governor closes in, women shrink away from him, like a wave recoiling on a beach. Many of the women are exceptional beauties, but perhaps Sour is dissatisfied, for at the end of the rows I distinctly notice him frown, look the group over, and then resume his selection.

He peruses the lines several times, revisiting several girls before making a choice.

“This one,” he says loud enough for us all to hear, indicating a long limbed girl. She’s young, and has small breasts and a face with large eyes that make her look underage, but if his taste is actually for the Lolitas he’s mistaken, for I know this creature. She was a junior medical officer and is older than she appears.

“Please! No Master! Let me go!” pleads the woman, shaking her head and looking round helplessly for aid that isn’t going to come. Unlike some of the Gaianesian prisoners her markings are fully purple. She must have been used frequently back on Aghara-Penthay.

“Have her chained in my bedchamber,” the governor commands one of his guards, who grins at the prospect of manhandling the girl. “But only fix that chain to one of her ankles. Leave the rest of her limbs free. I like giving them a bit of room to fight. And something to begin taming her – a whip, or a goad maybe?”

“Sir…” his man acknowledges without judgement or disapproval in his face.

“Please, no! Not me!” the young woman is desperately appealing to the crowd, but all the guard has to do is order, “Follow me, cunt,” and her legs begin propelling her towards her inevitable rape.

Members of the prison guards chose their ten next, taking even longer over moving up and down the lines and pulling women from the formation. I do not entirely understand their selections. While there is a preference for the younger women with pretty faces and more feminine curves, some of those I consider most attractive are left behind. Hoola is one of those rejected to remain in the lines. Her eyes are wide and her body is rigid with fear as she contemplates what this failure means.

While the remainders look at each other uncertainly, Governor Sour makes his way towards our group. With a hard look on his face he stands right in front of my Master Klink. They’re almost the same height.

“Aghara-Penthay were paid for one hundred and fifty Gaianesians. There are one hundred and forty eight here.”

Klink shrugs. “We had to destroy two units on our way here. Their implants were defective.”

Sour shakes his head.

“I note you have two Gaianesian women with you, and propose a more likely explanation. You removed two of the most prize specimens for your own enjoyment, and fabricated the story of defective implants.”

Klink bristles at this accusation, flexing his arms.

“Are you saying I cheated you?” he demands, and then aware that he’s on a Republic facility surrounded by armed guards tries to control his temper. “These two were captured separately to the main group. They are my personal property. Aghara-Penthay can provide all the documentation to prove their history and my ownership.”

“Nonetheless,” presses Sour, “I contracted for one hundred and fifty Gaianesian women. The best thing is for you to hand over yours, and have Salarin compensate you for their loss.”

“Not a chance.”

“Then we have a problem.”

Klink folds his arms and the two men square up against each other like children preparing for a playground fight. Tits and I look in despair at each other. Things were improving. We were about to be sold as Harken breeders. If we end up as sex slaves to criminals on this rock we’re as good as dead.

Sour breaks the deadlock first. “Are you familiar with women fighting over rape pits?” he asks.

“We have a similar sport on Aghara-Penthay,” my Master answers stiffly.

“Then I suggest a compromise. Your Gaianesian women form a team of two, and fight two women drawn from my stock. If your twins lose, they join the prison whores – assuming they survive falling in the pit. If your team wins, you may leave with your two girls and I settle for one hundred and forty eight.”

“That offer seems all in your favor,” says Klink. “I suggest an alternative. We’ll compete, but if my team win I get to keep your two.”

I stare at my Master in wide eyed anguish. Tits and I, forced to fight our fellow women? Please no… And what nightmare is a “rape pit”?

“You are in breach of contract,” insists Sour. “Only one female from my stock if your team wins.”

“And what if I disagree?” asks Klink.

“Then you will be detained as a pirate from Aghara-Penthay, and join the prisoners without trial.”

Klink has no choice, but he still rubs his chin considering.

“Seeing the women fight would be entertaining,” he concedes, “but I propose one last amendment. My Riyena will act as the referee, driving them together. I have the most to lose, so we deserve that small advantage.”

No! No! I plead with my eyes, too afraid to speak. Don’t do this to us, Master.

But Sour says, “That seems acceptable. We have a deal,” and the two men shake hands.

41 - Fight

On the platform I’m trembling uncontrollably. For now I know what a rape pit is, I know that if Tits and I lose we’re probably dead.

The platform where we stand is circular, cut from raw stone and about ten yards in diameter. We reached its flat top by a retractable bridge, and with the means of escape now removed we’re surrounded in every direction by a twelve-foot drop into the pit.

Prison is a brutal place, and prisoners enjoy cruel sports. When there were no women on Cancis Rock, inmates would be made to fight on this platform, and those who fell or were forced from the precarious heights would be met by vicious carnivores in the depths below. Now predators of a different kind await.

There must be a hundred men down there. Denied contact with women for so long they’re baying insanely for our bodies. Most of them are already hard in anticipation of the rapes to come. And those who enjoy female suffering are not just waiting below. I see merciless, cruel men everywhere I look, all bulging muscle and tattoos and grizzled faces. The excitement has proved too much for some, and several times we’ve had to dodge gobs of semen thrown at us by those lurking in the depths.

The space around the pit is tiered with seats like an arena. Here sit the rest of the population of Cancis Rock. Over five thousand men screaming and shouting for fear, and blood, and entertainment, and women, and sex. The deafening sound terrifies me.

Sour and Klink watch from a box with the best view of the sport. The rest of the women are also obliged to watch, caged in a fenced-off section of the seating. Locked inside they’re safe from the inmates, but men leer through the chain-link and abuse is not the only thing being thrown at them either.

I don’t think anything can calm such a savage crowd, so the demonstration of authority when Sour stands and the din recedes immediately intimidates us in a different way.

“Residents of Cancis Rock,” he says. “Please welcome our new citizens – these Gaianesian women who have seen the error of their culture and decided to make recompense by serving as prostitutes for you all.”

The sound of men is thunderous, but once more Governor Sour gestures and order is restored.

“Some of our new females have the honor of providing special entertainment for you this evening – fighting to evade the rape pit. You will all know how it works already, but for our new females the rules are simple. The first two women into the pit suffer the consequences from the men below. Whoever is left on the platform will be permitted back across the bridge.”

As the volume increases I look uncertainly around the circle.

The rules might be simple, but fighting will not be. It is going to be brutal, and hellish. All four of us have our hands folded and restrained behind our backs, in a contraption like a straightjacket. We are left to battle using only our feet, but there we have been handicapped by fitting us with the most ridiculous boots, made from a black vinyl material which comes up to our thighs and possessing the highest, narrowest heels I’ve ever worn. I’m barely going to be able to keep my balance, let alone kick using the pointed toe. How many blows will it take for the poor losers to be defeated, and how much damage might we sustain purely from kicking?

The rest of our bodies have been left naked and exposed. Without the use my hands to protect myself, I’m feeling very aware of the cold air on my breasts and around my holes, and of the consequences for those vulnerable parts of my body if I end up as one of the losers.

“I have to survive this,” Tits said to me in a tender voice as we were strapped into our costumes for what might be our last moments together. “I can’t be lost, not when we’re so close. I’m sorry. Even if that means sacrificing you, my beloved sister.”

I wanted to ask what she meant – so close to what? To the Harkens? But then she pressed herself against me, bare breasts to bare breasts, and she kissed me softly on the lips, and all that was left was desire.

“I love you,” I told her.

Riyena is the only one on the platform dressed. She’s in a costume like one of the flight suits, only it’s much tighter around her body and is made of a shiny black material. It’s sexy - revealing of her figure, and yet covering almost all of her. It zips up to her neck, and makes her legs look long and elegant. Only her hairless reptile-like head is left bare. Riyena is in boots as well, only hers are knee-high and lack the precarious stiletto heel.

She has one other accessory - the whip. A thick flexible strand, long enough to reach anywhere on the platform, cracking white with energy. Anywhere it touches the skin it leaves a sore red stripe that flames like a burn. I know this for she’s already tested it across my buttocks.

When she looks up towards my Master I scowl at her. I hate her, as much as I hate Klink. But the implant compels me to serve them, protect them, even desire them if I’m ordered to do so.

“Remember Ry, you’re only to use the whip to drive the fighters together and keep them on their feet, not force them over the edge,” Klink cautioned his favorite as we prepared backstage. “It’s all about putting on a good show, so don’t let it end too fast or be too biased towards our girls, and Sour will be satisfied. But make sure we win if you can.”

“Yes, Master,” Riyena answered, looking at us maliciously. She’s going to enjoy this.

The four participants will not enjoy it. When we can only wound with the points of our boots and the sharp heels, only force a woman from the platform with a shoulder charge, this fight is going to be long and painful.

“I’ve made you two keep fit, whereas the other Gaianesians have been waiting in the pens,” Klink then counselled Tits and I as our pre-match pep-talk. “You have the advantage of stamina, so take your time, and don’t take any risks. Fight as hard as you can, let them wear themselves out, and with luck we’ll be on our way to Harka-Ringworld in the morning.”

“Yes, Master,” we said in unison.

Up on the platform Governor Sour echoes Klink’s words: “Slaves… When I say, fight as hard as you can, and show no mercy.”

Then my racing heart almost bursts from my chest as he says, “Begin!” and Sour makes a cutting gesture with his hand. The crowd roars – support for those women they want to see win, and abuse for those they wish to see raped.

Neither of the men really needs to compel me to fight for my life. Two women stand between me and the comparatively better existence of a Harken breeder, and I’ll take any steps necessary to protect my sister. It’s a pity that one of those selected as my enemy has to be Hoola, but her lush breasts which I once kissed are now strategically vulnerable targets, and the soft pussy into which I sank my tongue is the perfect place for a kick.

The other girl is an exotic look creature with almond eyes, olive skin and midnight black hair held back in a long ponytail. I do not know her name, but gather she was one of the security detail on the Vengeful Goddess. In that case she will be able to take care of herself, and will have some experience of hand to hand fighting, probably with active service. It is unlikely she will have fought naked using only her feet, but I predict she will be the greater threat.

It is almost over for me before it begins. Almond-eyes charges at me instantly, and as I side-step my ankle turns on the high heel. I go down heavily onto the platform’s dusty surface, unable to break my fall with my hands, crashing on my front so close to the edge it feels like my heart stops with fear.

The crowd roar.

“Get her, get the twin with the nice tits!” a man bellows.

Almond Eyes and Hoola are on me before I can move. Hoola gives me kick after kick in my side and my branded buttock, trying to force me into taking the only direction which evades the pain - rolling off over the edge and into the drop. Her pointed toe catches me right in the ribcage, just above my breast. A crack and a flare of white hot pain worse than the whip tells me she’s probably broken a bone.

Paralyzed with agony, I crane my neck to my sister to see her barreling towards up, a fearsome expression on her face. But Tits skids to a halt when I feel a stabbing sensation from behind me and one of Almond-Eyes’ heels shoves its way right in the vulnerable cleft between my buttocks.

“Any closer and she gets a second asshole.” Almond-Eyes’ words are audible even over the cries of the crowd.

Tits has frozen, but before the two women can press their advantage to victory Almond-Eyes gives a scream. The whip whistles across just above me, and our opponents are forced back to the far side of the platform. I’m free to move. This intervention by Riyena is not a kindness to me. I recall Klink’s words, “Don’t let it end too fast.”

For once the implant is on my side. Without the order to fight as hard as I can, I don’t think I’d have the willpower to overcome the pain and get back to my feet. Desperately slowly I get first to my knees, and then bring one foot under me to push myself upwards. Once standing I’m even more certain I’m damaged. I can’t breathe in properly without my ribcage flaring with pain, and my left hip is so sore I think she might have bruised the bone there as well.

In Hoola’s face I see understanding, sympathy even, but also determination. She will not relent or show mercy. Her implant is working too.

“Fight!” says Riyena, and we close again.

For several minutes the battle is roughly even. We all get in near enough to trade kicks, all of us aiming for defenseless shins and knees that might weaken a girl’s balance, so that she can then be driven by a charge over into the abyss and the hell waiting below. I sustain further harm, including a kick from Almond-Eyes to my right kneecap after which I’m bent forward and limping. But I also dish some damage out. One kick of mine gets Hoola right in the pussy. She crumples to her knees near the precipice and my hopes surge before it is my turn to be driven away with the whip.

Tits is the least injured from our team, so I keep close to her and follow her lead. She seems to be using a strategy of keeping her back to Riyena, as though the shapeshifter will protect us with the whip. I consider this plan to be flawed as we’re struck several times across our backs, adding additional stripes to the ones already across my buttocks. All the same Tits sticks to her guns, continuing to move position when Riyena does, facing our opponents and with her vulnerable back to the sadist.

That’s why the accident happens. Almond-Eyes charges my sister, her torso low, so her weight comes at us at the height of the pelvis and a strike is meant to overbalance. Tits retreats instinctively and at speed, trying to avoid being knocked over, and she backs hard into Riyena. The shapeshifter hadn’t been expecting any risk to her own person, and the impact occurs with her standing dangerously near the edge of the circle, and before we know it Riyena has stepped backwards into the empty air and falls, seemingly in slow motion, into the pit.

For a moment all four of us pause, stunned by what’s just happened. By the time awareness returns, sex-mad men below are already on the sadist. I can’t see Riyena for the scrum of so many male bodies but I can hear her – pitiful high pitched screams louder than the roar of pleasure from the crowd. Instinct from my implant is to try and save her and Tits also looks uncertain, but from up here there’s nothing we can do. My orders were to fight.

“Master!” I hear her desperately cry.

Klink and Soar are the only ones with a chance of intervention and I’m expecting the Governor to rush in his troops, but the two men are laughing heartily as though they’re lifelong buddies. When I understand they’re not going to help, I detest my Master even more. So casually he abandons the woman who served him loyally and completely for many years. He has Alexa waiting back home, a new plaything. Riyena can be discarded.

My implant is not relenting, and I return my attention to the fight. We eye up our remaining opponents cautiously. All of us are recalculating. Two in the pit, Soar said. The rules were simple. Only one more needs to be sacrificed and that somehow makes the imperative to not be her even more desperate.

Again fierce-eyed women close on each other. We’re getting tired, and all of us are breathing heavily and coated in a gloss of sweat. With my broken rib it’s particularly hard to exert myself. Unable to evade her, Almond-Eyes almost catches me once again, but she has an injured knee too and when it gives way it is her turn to go face down on her belly, rump up into the air.

She’s almost in the center, so there’s no possibility of kicking her to the edge of the circle, but I have my idea. I throw myself onto Almond-Eyes’ back as though I’m going for a wrestling pin, ignoring the terrible pain this causes in my broken chest.

Hoola and Tits watch with incomprehension. Before any of them can consider what I might do, I’ve seized the ponytail of Almond-Eyes hair between my jaws and I’m pulling back down her body. Without the use of my hands the buildup of pressure on her skull is terribly slow and Almond-Eyes fights desperately once she understands the danger. But it’s too late. She emits a low, almost orgasmic groan, and her body goes limp underneath me. I almost sigh with relief. By the time she’s free of the hypnotic stupor of The Reflex, it will all be over.

I get back to my feet to see Hoola backing away warily. We have her outnumbered, and Tits is closing confidently for the kill. Quickly I say to the frizzy brunette, “Help us… it doesn’t have to be you.”

Tits looks at Hoola. Hoola looks at me. She nods.

So I’m not proud of how it ends. I’ve always detested bullying in any form, but if one of us has to go – well then, Hoola was my lover and I care for her still. So a team of three girls end up mobbing one girl, one poor almond-eyed girl who gets to her feet so drugged she barely understands where she is, and then it takes the least of nudges and prods to drive her over the edge into the doom waiting beneath.

It couldn’t have been a more complete victory for us. Tits and I are both safe, and added to our numbers departing Cancis Rock will be Hoola. Of all the women captured from Vengeful Goddess she was closest to me, and would have been the one I’d have chosen to save.

But I do not send another woman to mass rape lightly, so unable to escape the sounds of Almond-Eyes screams from in the pit I weep like a child, more from remorse than from my wounded body.

Tits and Hoola are looking to the box, uncertainly. All compulsion to fight is gone from us.

The crowd are booing, hate coming at us from all directions. They’ve made it clear Tits and I were the prettiest, and therefore they’d rather the two of us were being raped to death in the pits below.

The Governor also looks pissed, but Soar cannot be weak enough to go back on his own rules, so he gives the sign to extend the bridge and we limp back across to safety. Tits has blood seeping down her leg, wounded by a kick from another woman. I’m fighting to breathe.

I’m led limping up to my Master’s box in time to overhear a rapid consultation between Klink, Sour, and one of the high ranking guards.

“The Teeth is not happy,” says the guard. He is a big, imposing man, but he looks anxious. “He wants the use of the twins. He says they’re the pick of the bunch.”

“The Teeth?” asks Klink, baffled.

“Kind of a head prisoner,” explains Sour. “He runs the data network. If he doesn’t get his way he’ll spike the network, and there will be a riot.”

My Master looks Tits and I over. Bruised, bleeding women, ruined versions of the Gaianesians we once were. I remember his words – I am nothing more than an object.

“If it’s just a matter of a couple of hours fucking them, let him do it and we’ll be on our way.”

“It’s not that simple,” admits Sour. “The Teeth has a history of damaging women. He chews on their breasts. That’s how he got his name.”

We were supposed to be on our way to the Harkens soon, but instead once more I’m sinking into dread and despair. Oh Gods, please, no!

Klink laughs with familiar cruelly as Tits and I edge protectively closer. “Paste will probably fix that. And there’s nothing in the contract from their new owners about their hooters being perfect anyway. As long as he doesn’t ugly their faces so much that no-one wants to use them to pump out babies that’s fine.”

Soar laughs as well, and he claps Klink around the shoulder. “Let’s have a drink while we wait for the girls,” he says. “This has been a very satisfactory deal.”

“Most definitely,” says Klink, and he eyes the bleeding Hoola up and down. “So you’re mine now? Come over here and let’s get acquainted.”

“Yes, Master,” she says, and hobbles forward to her new owner.

I can still hear the animal sounds of the males from within the pit, but the women who lost have fallen silent. If Riyena and Almond-Eyes are no longer alive, perhaps it is a mercy.

42 - Teeth

“During the galactic years 4335-4441,” the man says, “The largest city on Ilushin One was troubled by attacks from a serial rapist.”

“This man favored as his victims young attractive women, who were slim, but with large breasts. Women like the two of you. Each was stalked for days until he’d learned her routines and vulnerabilities, and then he’d drug them with a chemical that produced results much like an implant, rendering the women suggestible and compliant to his commands.”

“Under his orders they followed him to hotels, where he always forced them to pay for the rooms so there was no trail back to himself. Once upstairs they were ordered to undress and then he restrained and gagged his victims, making them pose in their shackles for demeaning bondage images and videos. Seeing the women thus shamed, as you are shamed now, would arouse him intensely.”

He pauses to caress my naked side, touching the scar where my name “Boobs” was burned into me. The speaker is as aroused as the man in his story, and his erection bulges painfully in his pants. He’s a small silver haired man, but his penis looks gigantic. His voice is gentle, and I would think his face kindly if I didn’t know better.

The elderly man teases my nipple, and I instinctively tense, trying to evade his fingers. Of course I fail, for I’ve been rendered helpless. With my arms still behind me in the leather sleeve and my legs in these high boots, it was an easy matter to lash my ankles together and pull them back to my buttocks, stretching me in a painful hogtie. With most of my body naked and exposed, I feel utterly vulnerable. It’s also incredibly painful on my damaged knee, which is bent right backwards. My broken rib feels like it’s piercing into my lung.

I lie on my side, facing Tits who is in a similar predicament. Her mouth is stretched wide to accommodate the ball gag. Her eyes look frightened. This is the first time we’ve been gagged since I was in the Palace of Roses. Implants render gags unnecessary – the slave simply has to be ordered to silence. I’ve forgotten how much I hated it.

“Once the man’s penis became hard the real fun could begin,” the speaker continues. “His taste, and taste was literally the word, was for biting the breasts of his helpless captives and then raping them. Unfortunately for these women the man was of one of the many species who resemble humans but are not – the Kachyn. One of the differences between the two lifeforms is that Kachyn saliva contains an enzyme harmful to the healing bacta. So when this man used his teeth, unless the breast was removed entirely and regrown, the victim could not erase the marks and had to live forever with a scar from his bite.”

“A further difference between the species is that Kachyn women produces a more waxy vaginal secretion than humans. In order for the male’s sperm to function this wax must be broken down. The skin of an aroused male’s penis oozes a caustic secretion which does this. It is harmless to Kachyn women, but he discovered it was intensely painful to the vaginas of other women – humans for example. He has never raped a Gaianesian but he predicts the effect will probably be similar.”

He rolls Tits onto her back and she begins to squirm, and she moan desperately. The arched hogtie pushes her hips obscenely up towards him. Her thigh is still bleeding from the fight – a kick from the tip of someone’s boot.

I moan as well, trying to attract back his attention. Although this man terrifies me, my love for Tits overrides fear. I want him to use me and spare her.

“Shush, pretty,” he soothes me with stroke of his hand at the intimate place between my legs. “He has plenty for both.”

He suddenly pulls my sister’s hair and her eyes roll back and she goes limp. Her sex, plainly on view to me, glistens with arousal. The Teeth rubs a finger between the lips of her pussy, anointing the tip, and he looks at it curiously before resuming his story.

“The man was a genius with data technology. He made preparations with each victim and planted erotic imagery of bondage and torture onto their personal networks, so if he was caught he could claim the women were aroused by the situation and had consented.”

“He also threatened them with distributing his recordings. This strategy worked for a while. Most were too ashamed after they had been raped to contact the authorities, but eventually a woman was brave enough to inform Republic security. Five others made themselves known. The media christened him ‘The Teeth’”

As the man speaks I can’t keep from glancing at his mouth. It chills me more than the perpetual cold on this world. The flashes of teeth I see don’t reveal ivory like a human or Gaianesian, but sharp triangular points. Gods, this is going to hurt…

“His own cleverness caught him out. Only a handful of men had the skills to plant the images. And only one was Kachyn. He was arrested and his bite marks matched those on the victims. Another thirty four women came forward once he was in custody.”

“The man was sentenced to life on Cancis Rock, but his skills were too valuable for the mine and he was left to run the data networks. He became wealthy.”

He most certainly did become wealthy. The chamber we’re in hardly feels like cell. It’s almost as luxuriously furnished as Klink’s apartment. In this room the Teeth nudges Tits’ thighs apart, and he moves into place between them. With only moments to save her I’m moaning louder, squirming in my bonds to try and intervene in some way. But I barely shift an inch.

“Occasionally the Governor would pay a prostitute to go with him, but they were always desperate, older, unattractive women. He never thought he’d find a perfect beauty, like his former victims. Until the day there came two of them. Two immaculate twins.”

The small, grey haired man pauses.

“He tasted the first.”

And leaning forward he sinks his teeth into the defenseless soft flesh of my sister’s breast. Tits screams, a heartbreaking cry of pain even through her Reflex, and she stiffens, pushing her back into a steeper arch.

He bites her a second time. Then once on the other breast. He shakes his head vigorously when he has her, like an animal gnawing prey. Each time Tits screams. Each time when he releases his jaws another mark mars her perfection – the dark red oval where his teeth have pierced her.

The man inflicts seven bites before he’s ready to penetrate her in a more intimate way. His penis is a strange pale grey color and it glistens, as though it’s a long dead specimen removed from a sample jar.

Tits seems okay for the first few seconds when he’s inside her, and I dare to hope The Reflex spares us the pain. But then her eyes widen and she begins to struggle. Instead of letting her retreat, he holds her closer against him, using her hips to prop them together, and she begins to scream again. The Teeth barely moves for the next minute, but my sister’s cries build in intensity until she’s howling insanely through her gag.

Abruptly he withdraws, and Tits slumps instantly. She looks as though she’s unconscious. Her breasts are a mess of bleeding sores. Turning, he shuffles on his knees across the mattress towards me.

His cock, red with my sister’s blood, is rigidly hard. It comes for me like it’s a sightless worm searching by scent. A few minutes ago I’d wanted him to pay attention to me instead of her, but now I have my wish I can barely think from fear.

It’s been a while since I’ve wet myself from sheer fright, but my bladder releases and a warm stream of liquid runs down over my thigh and my hip to soak into his bed.

I whimper as the man rolls me onto my back. The pain from my wounded rib intensifies and I gasp for breath. I try to plead, “The Reflex! Please don’t fuck me when I’m dry,” but only manage to emit muffled murmurs.

The Teeth looms over me, and his head goes to my right breast. I writhe as much as I can with my injuries, mad with panic. No! No! Here it comes, here it comes.

“It screams when he bites it, like the other,” is the last thing he says before his lips are on me. He suckles me like he’s a baby for a moment, and my nipple swells eagerly in his mouth. Then the jaws clamp down on me and I do scream.

Merciful Gods it hurts!

It’s worse the second time, because I know how bad it’s going to be and anticipate it. The residual suffering from the fight is swamped by this new pain In spite of my injured rib and knee I go rigid in the hogtie, as though I’m trying to fold myself.

He gives me one bite to each nipple, and then several around it, like petals to the center of a flower. I receive four on each breast, where Tits only had four and three. I wanted him to use me and spare her, and yet I hate her for a moment for having it easier than I do.

The pain in my chest has barely receded from its peak when I feel the head of him pressing at my core.

“The Reflex!” I weep, but he rams into me anyway, and I’m only spared the worst of the tearing because he’s already lubricated by Tits’ fluids. Then he’s inside me, and rhythmically I am humped.

The rape is a bit like a spicy meal. At first I only feel stretched, like getting fucked by any well-endowed male. But then the burn begins. It’s as though his cock is hot, deep inside me but I feel it most at the sensitive lips where there are more nerve endings. It’s hot, then unpleasantly hot, then uncomfortable, then painful, then really painful, and then unbearable agony. I’m not sure if I’m screaming or not when all I can think of is bucking my pelvis round, trying to pull away from the source of such suffering. It feels as though someone has heated a poker to red heat and forced it inside my opening. Someone please kill me, I’m praying. Anything that spares me another second of this torture. But no. Yet again Boobs’ thoughts and feelings matter nothing.

It is me who he chooses to climax inside. I do not feel his release – there is nothing but the white hot sun between my legs and my own pain to consider. But he stops moving. When he withdraws the pain barely seems to abate and I howl continuously, unable to think that I’ve survived Cancis Rock and I’m about to be shipped to the Harkens, and my time with Klink is almost finished.

43 - Reckoning

The mood is somber aboard Cunt Catcher, the spaceship of Slaver bounty hunter Egregious Klink. I never felt any goodwill towards Riyena, but I don’t wish any woman to end her life suffering such severe sexual violence that not even a healing tank can save her. Even Klink is a little quiet as he thinks over his lost slave.

We feel remorse, and survivor guilt towards the other one hundred and forty seven women left behind on the planet’s surface. Their sexual slavery will be worse than what is now ahead for us. Hoola is to be offered to the Harkens with Tits and myself. No doubt they will accept her. Then Klink will take Cunt Catcher back to Aghara-Penthay and begin enjoying the service of failed Rape Runner Alexa Goshenk.

Klink’s ship is small, built for speed and maneuverability rather than out-and-out weapon power like the larger cruisers. Behind the flight deck is one cabin. There is a small galley and washroom. A hold contains rations, weapons, and the items of slavery such as binders and goads. A cage, large enough for several women to stand in, is bolted to the floor.

Two hours out from Cancis Rock, one of these goads rests on a control panel in the flight deck, level with my eye line. Klink has been using it to torment Hoola, the new plaything. As soon as we’d passed the prison security control, disguised once again as free women, he set the ship to auto-pilot, ordered us all to strip and he raped her. Even though she’s bruised from the fight I gather he found her satisfactory.

Tits and I are ignored. We would deter many libidos, the state we’re in. The sores on my breasts haven’t stopped oozing blood. I have a bruise on my ribcage that’s already turning purple where my rib is damaged. My knee is swollen and I can barely stand. My vagina feels like it’s on fire. Tit’s condition is little better.

But we left that hateful place, boarding Klink’s ship just as a huddle of weeping Gaianesians passed us being herded towards the prison blocks.

“Time to start earning your keep, ladies,” the guard was telling them.

We took off into the night with Governor Sour and all his guards unaware that Klink was carrying a new trump card. A data stick with a recording of everything from the moment of our arrival to the moment we left. Enough to ruin Sour, if Salarin decides to release it.

Three hours away from Cancis Rock, after Hoola’s rape and with me barely able to stand, Tits was ordered to the galley to prepare celebratory meals for four. Hoola’s orders were to sexually stimulate me. From my knees I stare out the front viewing port of the flight deck into the hyperspace tunnel of light, while Hoola’s rhythmic fingering of my clitoris soothes my injured groin. It takes a while to awaken me, as my bleeding nipples are too sore to allow the rest of my body any pleasure. We are kneeling on the hard floor facing one another while Klink sits in a chair beside us, programing the ship’s controls.

I happen to be positioned with the doorway into the rest of Cunt Catcher out of my view, so it is only the change in Hoola’s expression that reveals something is wrong. Her eyes widen – some emotion between uncertainty and fear – and her fingers leave me as she gets to her feet.

The detonation of the blaster makes my ears ring, and my eyes burn with the afterimage of the bright light. The force of the impact throws Hoola against control panel, knocking the nearby goad aside, and she slumps limp to the floor. I see a red mark on her naked chest but no blackened burn of a blast set to kill. She’s been stunned.

Instinctively I turn at the same time as Klink to see the source, and look up in utter incomprehension at my own sister. She holds a heavy duty blaster in her arms. The weapon points right at me.

“I’m sorry, Lara,” she says determinedly. “This is for your protection as well as mine.”

And she fires again.

I barely feel it when I’m slammed back against the hull. The stunning makes the body entirely numb, a total loss of sensation which renders the victim immobile for several minutes. Thus I’m left lying inert on my side, right beside the goad, unable to do anything but listen to the conversation which unfolds as follows:

“Well… Gara… Not so docile after all,” says Klink. “I should have guessed. It seemed suspiciously convenient, what happened to Riyena. I suppose that was deliberate, yes? I’d begun to wonder if your implant was defective.”

“Pushing her into that pit gave me almost as much satisfaction as this will,” Tits replies, and she turns the dial on the blaster from stun to kill. I’ve never heard her speak with such force in her tone as that before. She’s inexorably cold. Beautiful. Naked. A vengeful goddess if ever I saw one.

“Killing me won’t bring closure,” Klink says unconcerned. “You’ll never forget all those times I raped you. I’m still the victor. How ashamed you must have felt, following my orders for day after long day when there was no real compulsion to obey at all. By willingly serving me, you’ve betrayed the principles of Gaianesia more than your poor robot of a sister.”

“No, killing you might not help me,” says Tits with a shrug, “but I’m willing to try.”

“But why now?” presses Klink. “You could have escaped as soon as we took off from the Hub, and saved yourself all the suffering on Cancis Rock.”

“I had to have those recordings,” Tits answers unfalteringly with a nod towards the data stick. “Can you imagine the scandal there’s going to be in the galactic media when it sees evidence the Republic paid for Gaianesian women to serve as sex slaves on its prison planet? In reparation, they’ll probably have to take our side against the Harkens. This will change the war.”

“Ah.” Klink says. He seems almost disinterested.

“If I could I’d let you live,” says Tits, getting angrier at his lack of response. “I’d take my time and blow you apart one joint at a time. I’d torture you as you’ve tortured me. But as soon as Lara and Hoola can move, we both know they’ll answer your commands and turn on me. There’s no time to enjoy it. You have to be dead before the stun wears off.”

“You’d better get on with it then,” says Klink. “But step good and close. Have the guts to look right into my face when you shoot.”

It seems she’s under no compulsion to follow orders, but Tits steps nearer to him anyway. I listen motionless, but inside my mind I’m going frantic. The urge to place myself between her and the Master - so she would shoot me rather than him, is everything to me. But I cannot move an inch. Just in front of my face is the goad, still lying where it fell.

Everything happens quickly. “See you in hell,” says Tits, and she squeezes the trigger, but there’s only an empty click from the blaster. Klink is already moving, swinging his huge arm in an almighty blow to the side of her head that puts her flat back on the floor. Then he’s on her, pinning her to the deck with his massive weight as Tits struggles underneath him.

“Smart weapon, dumb bitch,” he growls. “Can’t fire on its owner.”

Tits is fighting, trying to scratch him, but he strikes her forehead hard with the flat of his palm. Her skull slams back hard into the deck. Tit’s eyelids flutter and she groans, semi-conscious.

“I’m going to enjoy this,” Klink says, and his hands go for his pants. “With the implant, you sometimes lose the satisfaction of raping a woman who’s truly resisting. But no implant for you, no Reflex, nothing to make it easy this time. Fight me, cunt! Fight me and lose.”

It’s only been an hour since he took Hoola but Klink is hard again. He frees himself and spears into my sister’s body as she tries futilely to push him away.

Not far across the floor the numbness in me has turned to a sensation of pins and needles. I’m able to twitch one of my elbows. Hoola is also beginning to stir.

“Boobs,” Klink calls across to me, “as soon as you can move grab the goad, and torture your sister. You’re doing it to save me, so keep going until I tell you to stop.”

Hurting Tits is the last thing I want to do, but orders are orders and I must protect the Master. Meanwhile, raping Tits must be pleasurable for Egregious Klink. He grunts “Uh! Uh! Uh!” as he pounds his cock into my sister.

While the violation goes on, I try to command the muscles in my shoulder, and see my upper arm shift by a couple of inches.

“No!” Tits says desperately, as she sees me move and faces the imminent failure of her rebellion.

“Know what, Gara? I might keep you after all,” my Master says as he stiffens and orgasms into his slave. Meanwhile I try to reach for the goad, the imperative of his order “As soon as you can move grab the goad” compelling me to action. Any moment now I’ll be ready and able to obey. Tits wails, panic stricken.

I’m so driven to aid my Master that I shift position, but with my arm still lifeless as a log, my hands are numb, and instead of taking hold of the goad I accidentally send it skittering across the floor of the flight deck.

Right into my sister’s outstretched hand.

“I bet this isn’t smart!” she says viciously as she seizes the goad, and managing to turn the dial to maximum at the same time as moving the weapon towards him, she slams the baton against him. Tits activates the goad and Klink gives an inhuman scream. His rigid body spasms as though he’s having a fit.

Somehow she manages to roll him off her, and in spite of her injuries Tits moves fast and gracefully straight into a crouch. The Master is limp and seems to be unconscious. Hoola and I are inching towards him like caterpillars as we instinctively try to save him. All that matters is Klink.

But Tits has other ideas.

“Sorry again sisters,” she says, and with the blaster back on stun Hoola and I both receive a second numbing dose. “As soon as he’s dead and there are only women on the ship, I’ll let you be.”

Rendered inert once more, I watch her stand there, looming over Klink still holding the heavy blaster, not aiming the tip but reversed so the butt points outwards.

“Smart weapon or not, this still has its uses,” Tits says. And naked but victorious, she slams the butt of the blaster with tremendous force over and over into the skull of Egregious Klink. The crunch of splintering bone and squishing brain is nauseating, but she does not relent until my Master is unrecognizable and nothing remains of his face but a blooded mass.

Afterwards the flight deck looks like a charnel house. Blood-spattered, Tits only stands over the ruins of the corpse for a moment before dropping the blaster with a clatter and rapidly programing commands into Cunt Catcher’s control panel.

As feeling returns to my body I get first to my knees, and then to my gingerly to my feet. Now I don’t feel the least urge to defend the Master or try to heal him. What’s there is just meat. I feel no compulsion to obey any order. It’s a very strange sensation. And then I remember. This is what free will feels like.

“What are you doing?” I ask her rather humbly.

“Setting the destination for the Republic Fleet shipyards at Vanaxa Dust,” she answers. “Don’t worry Lara, the Slavers won’t follow us to the heart of that military.”

“But what about the Harkens?” I ask in a trembling voice. “Aren’t we supposed to go there?”

After so long in misery it seems impossible that there’s anything else. Hoola joins us, her expression showing the same uncertainty I feel as her universe also realigns itself from one inescapable doom to a future containing possibility, and even hope. I’ll never return to Gaianesia as a traitor with purple markings, but there might be a life for me somewhere. Suddenly I’m shaking so much my legs give way, and I find myself kneeling on Cunt Catcher’s hard deck next to my sister’s hip.

Moments ago we were sex slaves. I’m right next to the evidence of that, shame still seeping from between my sister’s nether lips. But what now? I try to remember how I ever made decisions without a man to take them for me.

“What am I going to go?” I wail, for some reason on the edge of tears.

My sister crouches next to me.

“I’ll take care of you Lara,” she says gently. “I always will.”

But I’m not reassured.

“Lara…” I say puzzled. “You keep calling me Lara.”

Tits pauses then, and she looks at me tenderly, then reaches out and squeezes my bare shoulder.

“It’s your name,” she says in a kindly voice. “You won’t remember, because Klink ordered you to forget during our processing, and unlike me your implant is working. But your name is Lara. Perhaps in time you’ll overcome the lost memories, and start to believe it again.”

No, I don’t remember that bit of my processing, but there’s much I’ll never forget. And when my mind races through those other commands I suddenly feel exquisitely humiliated. With my face blazing red I say, “He told us to desire each other and I did. Is that untrue for you as well? All the way you behaved towards me was fake? Are you even a lesbian?”

Tears are streaming down my cheeks. I should be celebrating, but my heart’s desire has just crashed to ruins. I want her to come over and hold me, caress me, but Tits stands up and goes back to the control panel, deliberately avoiding eye contact.

“I love you, my sister, more than I love anyone else alive,” she says quietly. “That’s all you need to know.”

Epilogue – Cancis Rock

My quarters here are humble, but I am satisfied. It is a better home than I could have ever dreamed of a few months ago – instead of Klink’s apartment on Aghara-Penthay, a heavily defended former penal colony, turned into the Republic’s first refuge for the victims of sexual slavery. Compared to the horrors of serving men like the Slavers the dangers of mining are inconsequential, and implanted women eagerly labor here in exchange for the military’s protection.

Our male guards are carefully vetted by the Republic so they don’t take advantage of the power a word holds over us. Not that they need to use it, with so much readily available sex.

The shameful need to regularly have a male inside my rear will never abate, and many of the other women here suffer similarly from nanotech and have to seek a man’s companionship. To avoid being driven insane, once every few days my sister and I have to go to the social clubs where we can mix with our protectors, and find partners willing to help with our predicament. Yes, her too – for although her implant does nothing, the nanotech in her mouth functions perfectly.

A ready supply of beautiful women such as myself and Tits (no, sorry, I must attempt to think of her as Gara even though my memory still insists I am wrong in this), women who might be considered “easy” by galactic standards, mean there is no shortage of men willing to relocate to this inhospitable planet. We have a few undamaged female protectors as well from the Republic Marines, I think largely to police their male colleagues.

I have dwelt here almost since the events on Cunt Catcher, and it seems unlikely I’ll ever leave. I will never have a conventional relationship, not when a chip in my brainstem is configured to find men repellent, and my heart will always crave an incestuous relationship with my sister. A relationship that will never be.

Gara isn’t vulnerable like me, and travels frequently offworld. Her slave mark has been burnt away. She can find other lovers – perhaps even finding comfort with a man.

When she’s absent it pains me terribly, but I share the pride to see her rejuvenated as a heroine of Gaianesia. No longer the twin-face that humiliated White Queen and our planet with her. Gara: the woman single-handedly responsible for our homeworld being elected the latest member of the Republic and ending decades of war. The vote in the senate was close, and not all planets accept the view that pacified males are not oppressed second class citizens, but the images of so many of my fellow Gaianesians walking helplessly into slavery on Cancis Rock melted hearts. Even among the advocates of male rights the sense that the Republic should make reparations was strong. My homeworld was ratified and Gaianesia enjoys the protection of the fleet. A settlement was quickly reached over sharing the disputed world of Calico, followed by a treaty with Harka-Ringworld.

While Gara is away, I seek comfort in the companionship of my newest lover. She can never mean as much to me as my sister, but her presence soothes me, and she can understand me as one who has endured ordeals perhaps worse than mine.

Rescued slaves usually let their appearance lapse as soon as they have liberty, gaining weight and making themselves as repellent to men as possible in an attempt to deter any future potential abusers. But Melena de Santo, former Colonel in the Republic space fleet and one of only two women in recent history to escape the Rape Run, looks just as beautiful as she did the first time I saw her on a video screen. She is one of the most desirable human women I’ve ever seen – almost to Gara’s standard - and I think of males as even more incomprehensible knowing so many of them could take pleasure from degrading such perfection.

But the hormones that course through their bodies turn men into animals, and degrade her they did.

The finely featured face with its steel eyes and the long curtain of perfectly straight wine-colored hair, I will never forget seeing distorted with pain as she was tortured; driven almost into insanity with unending sexual arousal; weeping and screaming in unbearable terror. I’ve tried to soothe away those terrors with kisses just as she comforts me, but on Cancis Rock we all wake up crying out from the nightmares.

Like me, the mark on her face is still there – the mark that declares us a female processed as a slave of Aghara-Penthay. That mark, dark like a tattoo, is only ever applied after a woman is implanted with a control chip into her brainstem. The medic said we can’t burn it away and heal ourselves with the bacta. Not without triggering some kind of mental breakdown. It’s as permanent as the pale scars disfiguring my breasts.

Melena’s toned body with its long legs, slim waist and those famously pert breasts I still remember standing stoically in a wooden frame, her limbs roped to its corners, while they stripped her, and then that same body gradually slumped to hang limp as she was raped time after time after time. Now at nights it entwines with my own form and hands try to caress tenderly where once there was so much hate.

In private we are often naked, but during the day Melena wears a functional jumpsuit in colors identifying her as a civilian. There is no return to fleet for a colonel unable to refuse a male command.

I was nervous when I first met her, shown into the pleasingly furnished apartment that was Melena’s home, in the same way one feels meeting a respected celebrity. She dwelt somewhere underground in the most secure levels beneath the surface of Cancis Rock. There were no windows, and oddly no technology – no video screens or communication devices.

Without thinking, it was the first thing I commented on, not really the best way to begin a friendship, but she answered openly.

“The Slavers have given up on most of the other women here, but they’ll chase me as long as I live. And all they have to do is order me to return in a news broadcast, and from the moment I hear it I’ll do everything in my power to escape back to that living hell. They tried it once or twice, apparently. My content all has to be checked for me.”

“Oh,” I said, and then with nothing else in mind I stated, “I was there too. Aghara-Penthay,” (although she’d already seen the slave mark). “My name is Boobs.” But immediately I felt foolish. “No, that’s not right. The Slavers made me believe it was that. I mean Lara. My name is Lara.”

Melena looked at me with a mixture of sympathy and curiosity, her head cocked slightly to one side.

“You’re not the only one to have their memory tampered with,” she said. “Would you prefer I called you Boobs?”

“No, I should get used to Lara.”

She served me java. Gradually we began to exchange confidences. I told her I had nanotech in my anus that needed a male cock, although Republic labs are working on a synthetic version that fools the robots. Melena told me the Slavers injected nanotech into her pussy which stimulates her, so she is forced to masturbate every couple of days to relieve the tingling. Apparently they thought she was cold, and that keeping her aroused would make an amusing lesson.

I’d already known about her processing. There is extensive coverage before the Rape Run and the treatment of each Runner is explained in detail. But not everything took place on screen.

“What wasn’t shown to the audience”, she said, “Was something that happened after I was caught. The Slavers put me in a pool where parasites invaded my body - leeches that injected hormones which gave me an uncontrollable urge to mate. Once the hormones started working I completely lost my mind for a while. You can’t imagine what it’s like being that desperate to be fucked.”

My hand went out to her in sympathy, but I remembered that perhaps after her ordeal she didn’t wish for physical contact, and I froze. Melena interpreted this as a fear she was still infected, and my blush got worse.

“Don’t worry,” she said with a wry smile. “Those creatures are now safely gone and my hormone levels are only slightly above normal. Apart from consequences of the trauma, I’m sane and have free will, as long as I keep out of earshot of men.”

She got up from her soft padded chair then. I felt I could ask the question the galaxy had been waiting to know.

“How did you get to Cancis Rock? After escaping with Ja-Alixxe from Aghara-Penthay, I mean?”

She looked away and frowns as she recalled painful memories.

“I was unlucky at first,” Melena began. “Ja-Alixxe left me at a deep space trading station called Escarod. I’d hoped to contact the Republic outpost there and to be taken under the protection of the fleet.”

“Ja-Alixxe is alive, you know…” I interrupted. If Melena lived in news blackout she wouldn’t have heard that the whole galaxy knew the bounty hunter’s death was faked. That purely by living Ja-Alixxe had made the Slavers look ridiculous for a second time.

“Alive and free?”

“I’m sorry. Salarin has her. On Aghara-Penthay. She’s kind-of a personal pet of his.”

Melena shuddered.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I interrupted you.”

And she resumed:

“Once I got to Escarod two things went wrong for me. I ran across the crew of a humble cargo ship called the Rishi Herald. One of the male crew members spotted me, and asked me to stay with them. The implant compelled me to remain and not to call for aid, so that’s what happened. At the same time the toxins the leeches were feeding into me reached a critical tipping point, and what little sexual self-determination I possessed left me entirely. I couldn’t wait to get to their ship so we could start fucking.”

“So they kidnapped me, and fuck we did. There were six male crew members and one female, and I laid with them all, whenever they wanted me and in whatever manner they wished. Of course there was no obligation from my implant to follow the woman’s orders, but one of the males told me I must obey her words as though she were a man, and that was that.”

“I was principally the crew’s sex slave, but I also served in other menial tasks such as washing and cleaning, and cooking in the galley.”

“Once I was free to speak the first thing I did was tell them of the leeches, and it was a simple matter to remove them in the ship’s medical pod. But the damage done was semi-permanent – it took a long time before I could think of anything but craving pregnancy by one of the crew.”

“That wish was granted. With so many couplings it was unsurprising that with every monthly cycle I’d find I’d been fertilized. But they didn’t want a baby on board, or to have their toy disfigured with an unsightly swollen belly. Every month there’d be a trip to the medical pod, and I’d be left ready to be impregnated all over again.”

At the mention of swollen bellies being unsightly it was Melena’s turn to blush, and she added, “Sorry. Their views on mothering, not mine.”

I’m still not sure why I chose not to abort my own pregnancy, especially when there are so many possible candidates for the father. The chance of having to see someone with Egregious Klink’s face every day certainly gave me pause. Perhaps it is simply that I won’t have to go through the process of breeding ever again once I have a family. Perhaps it is a memorial to those lost or left behind – Riyena dead, Ja-Alixxe still serving on that vile world, White Queen, Elle, Cassarinie and Alexa Goshenk kneeling before masters unknown.

I prefer to think that of it as a sign I still have hope. If I believed the galaxy was so terrible a place for women I would have spared half-something, half-Gaianesian twin girls growing in my womb from experiencing it.

I reassured Melena that no offense was taken, and she continued:

“One of the crew also gifted me with my second sexual parasite – a type of louse that makes the genitals itch unpleasantly.”

“None of what I suffered deterred me from serving them. For three months I co-operated with everything they asked. I trained diligently in the ship’s gym to keep my body in the most desirable shape.”

“I thought of nothing but pleasing them, but meanwhile the rest of the Galaxy hadn’t forgotten me. The Rishi Herald went back and forth along the same route time after time, and with my implant broadcasting my location to any bounty hunter interested in finding me, it wasn’t long before someone tracked us down.”

Surprisingly, at that recollection Melena smiled.

“Believe it or not, that was when my luck changed. Koren Solasto was his name, and he wasn’t like any man I’d met before.”

“I was nothing but a commodity to him at first – an object with value – but he wasn’t cruel to me. Koren didn’t believe in raping women and he didn’t usually work for the Slavers. He dressed me decently, and once I’d been ordered through my implant not to escape or try to sabotage his ship, I was trusted to do as I wished.”

“We talked. As though we were equals, and I wasn’t an implanted slave.”

“What happened then was the most unexpected part of all. We fell in love. It doesn’t take much for a man to develop feelings for a woman if she’s sexually attractive, but after what the male sex put me through I’d never expected I would ever enjoy the company of any man in a million years.”

“Perhaps it was the hormones that were still raging through my body. But I think there was more than that. On my second night in his ship I sought out his cabin and for the first time in my life I actually made love to a male – of my own consent instead of being raped.”

“After a couple of months the idea of him handing me over for bounty was impossible. I was willing to remain at his side forever, but Koren was a wanted man in the Republic and his profession heightened the risk we’d meet another bounty hunter who was ready to trade me.”

“We thought of going to Gaianesia for a while, but Koren couldn’t have stayed long and I believe in equality, rather than the galaxy being run by the females. For a while we hopped from world to world. But we had a near miss with a Bothick bounty hunter and it became clearer and clearer things couldn’t continue as they were.”

Melena looked sad.

“What came next was a betrayal, of sorts. After everything I’d stood for, a man still thought he should make my choice for me. Without my knowledge he’d contacted Republic fleet, and arranged a handover on neutral territory. I went to sleep on Koren’s ship and woke up a virtual prisoner on a Republic cruiser.”

“Some of the marines knew me from before, and it was extremely humiliating to be among them again, powerless to their command and knowing they’d all seen those broadcasts, watched me naked and degraded, and they could watch them again any time they wished.”

“But I was safe, and remained under heavy guard until being brought in secret here. By now the Slavers must know I’m on Cancis Rock – they can find our implants forever more, but it’s too difficult for them to get a hunter or assassin through security.”

She sighed.

“I hope one day Koren will settle his affairs with the Republic and can come for me. Until then, I keep mostly to the company of women who have endured similar ordeals. Women who will not judge me for being so weak.”

I placed my hand over hers.

“You were never weak,” I told her.

On the rare nights when the storms abate enough to see gaps in the cloud cover, I like to go up to the surface and look at the stars. I think of the many who are still sex slaves, and wonder if one of those poor women are looking at the sky for a sign of hope. Nastya at the Palace of Roses, captive Runners Palonae, Doorola, Tana, Cassarinie, Elle, Perla, Ithya, Alexa, and Ja-Alixxe being tortured over and over by Salarin.

I don’t know why but it is Ja-Alixxe I think of most. I knew Ithya better than the others, but Ja-Alixxe is the one who haunts me, always accusing – why didn’t I kill her when I had the chance?

But my body and mind are weak. That is proven by the truth that so many were able to rape me and only one has ever suffered the consequences – Egregious Klink. It is proven by the scars disfiguring my breasts, by the purple markings and the slave tattoo on my face, and the brand saying “Boobs” on my flank. I cannot help but obey any command given to me by a man, a condition which makes me totally vulnerable.

But I can’t give up the fight. Ja-Alixxe – I will save you somehow.

Galactic Daily News, Sports Pages.

Results of the Rape Run: galactic-standard-year 4452

Captured 1st: Doorola (red scarf), caught by Lotho-etsarra. Cunt occupation: Investigative Journalist. Ranked 4th most likely to win. Ranked 7th most popular to see raped. Generously donated to the Rape Run by Jackran-ad-aktar.

Captured 2nd: Tana Cagonnti (red scarf), caught by Jackran-ad-aktar. Cunt occupation: Athlete. Ranked 3rd most likely to win. Ranked 6th most popular to see raped. Generously donated to the Rape Run by Lotho-etsarra.

3rd: Emirie Kadjiz (red scarf), killed by Runner Venda Varansilio. Cunt occupation: Model. Ranked 8th most likely to win. Ranked 2nd most popular to see raped. Generously donated to the Rape Run by Lotho-etsarra.

Captured 4th: Cassarinie “Cass” Ridath (green scarf), caught by Salarin. Cunt occupation: Comedienne. Ranked 7th most likely to win. Ranked 9th most popular to see raped. Generously donated to the Rape Run by Cronorgan.

Captured 5th: Twisted Elle (red scarf, white scarf, blue scarf), caught by Salarin. Cunt occupation: Musician. Ranked 6th most likely to win. Ranked 5th most popular to see raped. Donated to the Rape Run by Cronorgan.

Captured 6th: Dr. Perla Etochka (green scarf), caught by Cronorgan. Cunt occupation: Scientist. Ranked 9th most likely to win. Ranked 10th most popular to see raped. Generously donated to the Rape Run by Jackran-ad-aktar.

7th: Senator Laure Costaniodies (grey scarf), killed by Runner Venda Varansilio. Cunt occupation: Politician. Ranked 5th most likely to win. Ranked 8th most popular to see raped. Generously donated to the Rape Run by Cronorgan.

Captured 8th: Ithya – Gaianesian “White Queen” (green scarf, blue scarf), caught by Cronorgan. Cunt occupation: Military Intelligence. Ranked 1st most likely to win. Ranked 4th most popular to see raped. Generously donated to the Rape Run by Salarin.

Captured 9th: Alexa Goshenk (red scarf), caught by Salarin. Cunt occupation: Military Intelligence. Ranked 2nd most likely to win. Ranked 1st most popular to see raped. Generously donated to the Rape Run by Salarin.

The surviving Runner, winning the Rape Run 4453 and released with an inactive implant is Venda Varansilio.

The winning Hunter is Salarin, with three captures.

The award for most entertaining rape was given to Salarin, for his violation of Alexa Goshenk.

Nominations for the 4454 Rape Run are being accepted. In order to nominate a Runner leave a ten out of ten score review for this story on the hosting website, including the name of the cunt you wish to nominate. Cunts may nominate themselves, but may not withdraw the nomination after selection. Reviews will be collated by the Galactic Daily News. Your scores will help publicize the competition.

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