The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

1.

Even inactive, Launch Bay Ten of the Alliance jumpcarrier Earthrise boomed with routine maintenance work. Had Earthrise been operating zone-hot, or going up against one of the increasingly rare Banshee bases, the place would have been bedlam. Over by the readyroom access, though, it was quiet enough for the muscular young woman in the formfitting flightsuit and the older medic in her looser tunic to hear the footsteps of five more pilots.

Their quiet dispute stopped and the medic turned to one of the newcomers. “Leader Forell, Pilot Mourne here does not want to undergo trance.” She sounded amused, and Karlys Mourne fought down an insubordinate scowl. Her face fell anyway when she turned and saw her commander and the other four of her flight.

All of them were suited, and Karlys knew their shapes better than her own. The CIL interface points on their heads and necks looked almost natural now, or at least like common jewelry they shared. But back on their old ship Gold Dragon, Jem would have waved reassuringly, and Senja would probably have waddled, imitating a servobot (droning “must-move-awk-ward-ly”, in her sweet alto that didn’t drone well).

But now Karlys’ teammates just stood straight and relaxed. Attuned. On a second glance, the interface points made them look a bit more mechanical—or even like women who’d been lobotomized and were being managed with hardware controls. Karlys’ mother had been horrified when her daughter had declared an ambition to train for a job that would get her fitted with that.

Even Lizbet Forell had that docile look that characterized pre-mission hypnosis, but the strong-willed Leader was able to turn to Karlys and smile before answering the medic.

“I’m sorry, Dr Ceirs.” Lizbet spoke very calmly. “Our former squadron commander used to let some of us fly without being hypnotized. Karlys could do it well—she’s a very talented pilot.”

Dr Ceirs nodded. Lizbet stopped speaking, and she and the others just stood quietly.

“Talent is always useful, Leader Forell. But, as we all know . . .” The doctor paused, watching the reinforcement trigger take hold of the five tranced pilots.

“. . . as we all know, teamwork is more important.” Watching her, Lizbet and the team nodded slowly. Karlys felt the pull of the indoctrination and found her own head moving.

It was more important. She knew that. It was selfish to want to deviate, and it could put the mission—and her teammates—in danger if one of them wasn’t fully attuned.

“Yes, pilots. Integration works best when each team member’s mind is pliant and receptive, and automatically quells its own resistance. That’s especially crucial with complex systems like Cyber Interface Link control. Hypnosis is the best way we have to help each team member accomplish that.

“Isn’t that right?” She prompted them, but Lizbet and the others were already nodding again in utter agreement.

When she wasn’t in a trance herself, Lizbet knew why Karlys really wanted to stay out of one: the almost crazy joy she took in really flying the skin off her fighter, and how lethal it made her in combat. Karlys had gotten her share of Banshee kills that way. Karlys looked at Lizbet now, still mutely pleading for an exception, even as Dr Ceirs’ voice made her want to let it happen.

“Sorry, kid,” Lizbet said. “We’re not on a half-bandit ship in the North Nowhere quadrant anymore. This is the big time. Regs are enforced on Earthrise. Nobody flies unless they’re attuned.”

Karlys’ shoulders sagged. She knew Lizbet was right—it was already dodgy that Lizbet let them all first-name her—and they knew leaving the smaller carrier would mean stiffer routine as well as better quarters and newer gear.

All that faded in the familiar jolt of “attuned.” The word was drummed into them in the indoctrination sessions. She knew her new eagerness to submit to Dr Ceirs’ induction was part of her training. That didn’t loosen its grip on her now.

Teamthink was a key part of how the Alliance was going to beat the Banshees. Even more crucial than superior human technology was humanity’s ability to conform and fight together. Karlys had no doubt about it.

She looked at her team, clear-eyed and ready and closer to oneness, and felt guilty for wanting to stay free of the teamthink.

She just wasn’t sure how much that was her own thought. Her only comfort was that it still bothered her. A little . . .

Sighing, she faced Dr Ceirs, yielding to the rush it brought to give in. “I’m very sorry, Doctor.” She’d meant it wryly but it came out meek. “I will cooperate fully. I won’t resist now. Please induce me.”

Dr Ceirs was kind enough to look sorry, herself. She stepped forward, and Karlys almost by reflex raised her chin a little, looking over the shorter woman’s head. They’d implanted the mental switches in her and the others back in Basic, and by now Karlys was trained to flip them herself. By the time she felt the fingertips touch gently in the pattern she’d been taught to respond to, her breathing was slower and her thoughts were calmer.

Karlys softened to it and felt herself start to float. She waited. It was suddenly easier to wait.

There were other ways the Alliance Fleet had trained her to be able to go into trance, but somehow the light touch of an in-person induction had always soothed her best out of her native discomfort. She felt her own passivity, in turn, reassure Dr Ceirs that she was compliant now.

“Begin your trigger,” Dr Ceirs instructed her. Her voice was gentle now. It forgave Karlys’ willfulness.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Karlys said, and started reciting her service number backward. Her voice grew fainter in her ears and she never knew if she finished. It didn’t matter. She was relaxed now and focused and smiling back at Dr Ceirs.

“I’m sorry.” It was heartfelt, and only for Karlys to hear. “Godspeed, girl.” That, too, was quiet, and with the lingering touch it made Karlys think of her own mother. Dr Ceirs stepped away quickly.

Karlys knew she’d still be sharp when she flew. Trance had her focused now, not sluggish. Even the regret at not having that extra, wild edge of hers was vague, now. She turned to smile at Lizbet.

“Thanks, skipper,” she thought, but what she heard herself say was “I’m fine now, Leader.” It seemed so much more suitable.

Lizbet nodded and strode toward the launch area, and Karlys fell in with the rest. There was none of the joking and horseplay that would have echoed in Gold Dragon’s smaller launch deck. That was fine off-duty, in the billet, but not now. The five young women just marched in step behind their flight leader, already reshaping their thoughts to the unity they would become when they were out there on patrol. With nothing to report now and no orders to acknowledge, it didn’t occur to them to speak.

Each girl walked smartly to stand by her Freedom Wraith IV-E fighter where it lay recessed in the deck, and held pose while the techs went over their Cyber Interface Link fittings: data flow, biomonitors, fluid lines, medical feeds. They’d had permanent CILs in their bodies since Basic, stylish little silver disks at temple and nape and points south. By now it was a reflex to adjust their suits to allow quick connection.

They stood quietly as the techs fitted their helmets, becoming faceless as instrumentation went on. CIL made their senses redundant once they were wired into the Wraiths. Senja stood rigid as they fitted hers on, looking more robotic now than in the days when she’d joked about it.

Karlys watched and felt the hypnosis keep that from bothering her, but then forgot it as her own helmet came gently onto her head. She closed her eyes and opened her mind.

Dorsal cockpits slid open, and their techs guided them onto the fighters’ hulls to step down to sprawl prone in the interface pods within. Each girl squirmed by instinct and training as her suit’s sensors mated with the CIL arrays lining the pod that fit her suit as her suit fit her. Attachments found each pilot’s interface disks, but the entire surface was aligned to their bodies.

Even being hypnotized didn’t dull Karlys’ sensuous connection with her bird as they put each other on. The conformal shape was smooth and curved against her belly and thighs. The throb of internal systems was like her own heartbeat, and she fell into synch with it. The Wraith’s dark machine-vitality flowed through the CIL into her bones and her gut and her womb, as well as her willing brain. She barely noticed when they sealed her in.

The neural implants at her temples were already phased. Karlys preflighted the Wraith without needing the checklist the CIL display beamed into her brain. Trance-compulsion made her look anyway, and she was too responsive now to resist. It slowed her down to the pace the machines wanted, so her performance would be within norms they could manage. Low tones began triggering her mind and body to remember they were part of the fighter now. Even the desire to be other than one with the systems stopped being thinkable.

It was already harder to recall using her fork at breakfast than to feel, in her muscles, which half-gesture in the pod would make the Wraith spray a burst of kinetics at a close-in adversary. It was the optimum blending of machine speed and human flexibility. It was what made it easier to kill Banshees.

The display changed color and pulsed. Karlys went a bit more limp in her cocoon as it pushed buttons Basic had instilled in her. Her training took over. She didn’t resist at all as the flicker hypnotized her more deeply, to open her mind for the briefing.

The lights and shapes and voices wrote themselves into her memory. She gaped dully at the data in her mind, or at the symbols that told her mind to pause, store, update. Some of it she’d remember consciously; most of it would be tripped by a tone or a flicker cue and she’d respond before she knew why. There was a brief moment of clarity, and she awakened to complete knowledge of their mission.

They were Tanith flight, on recon patrol. Karlys was Tanith Four. She would obey Tanith Leader and execte the mission profile Earthrise had just downloaded into their minds.

Then they were lining up in pairs for the launchers, and the Wraith’s systems put her back to sleep again. It needed her body for this without her mind interfering. Karlys had heard many views from pilots and instructors—some claimed to want to be wide awake if they were going to die, especially on takeoff. It was a pilot fetish, control to the very last, and Karlys wasn’t sure she disagreed. On the other hand, dying deep in trance might not be a bad deal either.

Right now, she didn’t think. She just let her mind go blank until a tone told her to think again.

2.

“Tanith Leader, Four.” She hadn’t realized she was awake until she heard herself calling Lizbet. “Green panel, all systems nominal, ready to kill some Banshees.” The others briskly echoed her.

Karlys blinked. The CIL display, playing behind her eyes, didn’t change. Lizbet had been snapped out of launch trance first, and pinged the rest by reflex to take over their birds. Earthrise was already a colorcoded blip in the rear aspect.

“Tanith Leader, Six.” That was Teal. “Reporting CIL interface error in TSS feedback.” Her voice was unhurried, sharp.

Karlys realized that she would have felt a tingle of worry, back in the Gold Dragon days, hearing that out of trance. The Trauma Stabilization System would keep a pilot alive and functioning if the Wraith were damaged badly. It was a sometime joke that some pilots altered their TSS to give them unneeded endorphin boosts in long flights, but few of them really understood the gadgetry well enough to do that.

Imagining a hole blown in her fighter by a fast rock or a Banshee weapon, losing both legs and having the pod deform around her to maintain pressure, trying to fly a ship that might not be able to do anything more but drift until air and power ran out—and not having the TSS to keep her tranquil and comfortable—was an Academy-vintage nightmare.

It didn’t bother Karlys now, and Teal’s trance clearly wiped it from her concerns as well. Teal went smoothly through a diagnostic as Lizbet doublechecked her results, and the glitch was fixed. Everyone else was green-panel.

“Tanith flight, Tanith control Earthrise.“ A male voice, one of the carrier’s duty officers who’d been very concerned that the replacements from Gold Dragon were settled comfortably onboard. Enough to want to tuck them in, in fact. Invisibly, in her faceless suit, Karlys smiled without knowing it. “You ladies really ready to go kick some alien ass now?”

“Tanith control, Tanith Leader,” Lizbet answered for them. “All Tanith elements report functional and on course for our first waypoint. Do you have updated mission orders for us?”

Karlys heard him sigh. Lizbet didn’t sound reproachful—just programmed. She didn’t know if Lizbet was pulling his chain or really that focused, but Lizbet had never been one for flirting with the control crew.

“Tanith Leader, Tanith control. Negative new orders. I’d heard you were a little more laid back than the rest, but . . . anyway. You just keep on keepin’ on. Out here.”

Karlys smiled again and started to blink a tactical channel open to Lizbet. Her mind paused, and the wisecrack didn’t seem so wise. Mocking the guy for thinking he could chat up some un-tranced pilots suddenly seemed so . . . irrelevant.

She relaxed. It made no sense in teamthink.

“Lead, Two.” Senja, Lizbet’s usual point flyer at the tip of their diamond formation. “Request permission for control test.”

“Roger, Two. Go.”

Senja’s blip lunged across the display and then pulled into a tight turn that swept her out and then back through their diamond, sliding primly back into position. Lizbet had each of them try her Wraith, and each ship performed. Lizbet herself pirouetted not as showily as Senja, but deftly.

As Karlys took her turn, she squeezed the housing of the lower part of the pod between her thighs and barely felt it, as she watched the stars spin inside her head and felt the inertial shift that swung with her thought. She willed her ship and swam her body in its sensor web. She felt the commands flow from her mind and she felt her Wraith turn its strength to obey them.

She flew. It was worth everything else. Not even she could see it, but inside the isolating helmet she was smiling like she’d been soul-kissed.

“Lead, Five.” Jem sounded thoughtful. “Is it true the Banshees don’t have anything like our interface technology?”

Karlys listened. Unlike bantering with a horny flight controller, she knew discussing Alliance superiority was acceptable to their mission effectiveness. The certainty in her mind about that was the same soothing color as the CIL display.

“Five, Lead. Negative.” Lizbet settled easily into her teacher role, as winning at it as when she was their big sister. “Actually, we seldom leave enough of each other’s hardware in big enough pieces to see.”

They all made amused noises over com.

“The Bans apparently have a cultural aversion to biomech interface. We’ve been fighting them for ten years and they could have evolved from manual/computer control to interface if they wanted to. They haven’t.”

“Lead, Two. But we keep killing them,” Senja objected.

“Two, Lead. Better not get cocky. They kill us, too, and there are rumors they’ve even taken prisoners. Stay alert unless you’d like to continue the debate with a Banshee, from inside a cage.”

“Roger,” they chorused.

Karlys could imagine what it was like for her enemies. Most onworld flight in the Alliance was by hand and wire, with the Fleet taking priority for now for the newer CIL technology. She’d even flown out of atmosphere with hand controls in her Academy qualifications and training, while they decided if she was worth implanting the disks and a few years of training.

What she couldn’t imagine was doing that by choice, out here in actual combat. In the time a Banshee pilot chose a control and worked it, a human with CIL was already preempting them. Even being taken from the rear wasn’t the doom it had been in other eras. Karlys’ Wraith could get her out of track and have her aimed back at her attacker as quickly as she willed it.

The archaic phrase “turkey shoot” was becoming a routine after-action term. Karlys was happy her own side’s cultural aversion was to getting killed. While losing.

“Flight, Lead. Coming up on first waypoint,” Lizbet told them after a while. “Switch to distance comms, encrypt, and make our turn at . . . mark.”

The diamond swerved more smoothly than a school of fish.

“Three, Lead.” Lizbet was businesslike. “Sleep schedule. Rikki, you’re first.”

“Lead, Three.” Rikki’s deep, earnest voice sounded too alert to sleep, but she’d have no choice. “Slaving my controls to yours now. I’m . . .”

There was no more sound from Rikki. Her Wraith’s pod had just told her body it was asleep, and Rikki’s mind went down for the ride. Her blip paled on the CIL display to indicate sleep status. Lizbet could snap her awake instantly, or her Wraith would wake her on its own in an emergency, filling her head with attack or malfunction data as she came out of it. But as Lizbet slept them in relays, Tanith flight could cover much more territory without fatigue. The CIL system ran parallel with biosupport lines that could keep them healthy for days, and the pods could even keep up their muscle tone with resistance routines.

Karlys made a face in her helmet. That aspect of patrols made her appreciate being hypnotized—it was one way not to be bored without having things get “interesting” in the risk-your-life way.

“Four, Lead.” Lizbet sounded apologetic. “Mission orders require me to double us up. I’m putting you in dreamland with Rikki.”

Karlys felt a warm need to comply as soon as she heard it. She acknowledged and thought her controls over to Jem when Lizbet told her who’d fly for her. She tried to feel when the neural command started to hit her, but as always she just relaxed and knew it was the most natural thing in the world to let herself . . . just . . .

She woke jazzed and in the middle of a turn, her mind full of new data. They were near the edge of their patrol area, and communications with Earthrise were getting iffy. There was a collapsar much further out, and somewhere in its accretion disk something was being tidally crushed and superheated into an electromagnetic emitter, sweeping its radiation across this area of space. It was acting like a natural jammer.

Lizbet had been about to turn them earlier than scheduled, to stay linked with the carrier. With nothing in scan, she would have left Rikki and Karlys in trance during the maneuver. But then Teal, Tanith Six, picked up something that might be a ship or some other Banshee artifact. Lizbet woke the sleepers and took the flight nearer to a cluster of hundred-meter class asteroids to investigate.

“Cluster” was a relative term, since the rocks were spread across thousands of kilometers, and might have been pieces of something that had broken up centuries ago on the way in to the black hole, but some of them had themselves shattered, and it was a place a ship could hide.

Without CIL, the Banshees had to carry out this kind of long-duration patrol with larger vessels, easier to find than Wraiths. If one or more were concealed here, they might not see Tanith flight before it saw them. Or until Lizbet ordered fire.

Karlys was obeying the command to shift formation before she really knew which one Lizbet had them move into, but the Karlys/Wraith entity was perfectly in position when they were done. Senja was pulling ahead with Rikki on her flank, as they eased diagonally toward the largest of the “nearby” rocks.

There was nothing there, but Karlys picked up something further out on the piece of the spectrum she was assigned, and Jem confirmed it when Lizbet had her switch search frequencies to follow up Karlys’ hit. Lizbet reported the contact through the static, and Earthrise cleared them to proceed.

Even as Karlys started to feel a sore muscle in her left leg, she felt the pod responding. A tone and a specific ideogram appeared together so the symbol seemed to chime quietly in her mind. When her head cleared she knew that control functions had been redistributed in a few heartbeats. Endless time in the simulator, deeply hypnotized, had trained her to respond to this.

Now the sensors along her leg reversed, and the full-contact pod began pulsing and squeezing.

The massage cleared the soreness rapidly, and she heard a couple of the others chuckle at the sounds she was making. She laughed, herself, and then relaxed to it again until the Wraith decided she was better and chimed again. Karlys woke up focused on flying.

Two hours later, Lizbet was talking about putting Teal and Jem to sleep, and then tackling another search area afterward.

“Possible starship,” Teal said in the abstracted tone that said her mind had just been told something through CIL link.

They stalked it.

3.

“Four, Lead. Passive scans.” Lizbet seemed to whisper, but it was just the short-range tac channel. Karlys didn’t remember changing to the less-detectable signal, but they’d all heard the tone that told them to as their Wraiths assessed the need for quiet.

“Roger.” Karlys had ended up on one edge of the formation, and swerved out farther away from the rest of the flight before keying the scanners. Unless the passive receivers got something good, Lizbet would have her go active. If the Banshee picked it up and started shooting the rest of the flight would be out of the kill zone.

Karlys didn’t mind keeping danger away from the team, and that didn’t feel like the indoctrination. She let her systems flow the details to Lizbet and summarized them aloud. “Mass consistent with size, so probably not a decoy. Looks more like a transport than any of their combat classes. No detectable comms at all, but there’s some radiation and some irregular thermals.”

“They’ve been in a fight,” Lizbet diagnosed. “Close in to 500 K.”

Karlys moved, not hearing herself sigh in pleasure as she seemed to swim through the void currents, hidden in the eternal night from the enemy in front of her. In the CIL display, Tanith flight sidled up behind her and to the side, a ghost-image over the sliver of light it made of the alien starship. Trance kept her fixated on the Banshee ship without letting the Wraiths distract her until she needed to focus on what they were doing.

At 500 kilometers she checked the scans again. “Lead, Four. Confirm damage. There’s a large opening all the way though the hull, and a lot of smaller—”

“Flight, Lead. Everybody look sharp for fighters.” Lizbet had made sense of the dim, CIL-enhanced image first. “The opening could be a launch deck. Converted carrier.”

Karlys adjusted. “No sign of any near the ship.”

“Jamming’s up,” Teal called. Karlys felt a tiny impulse to flick over and see if they were still able to call Earthrise. She felt the impulse die in her and continued with what Lizbet had tasked her to do.

“Roger.” Lizbet knew the trap, and she was peering into the dark around them to decide just what it was.

“Lead, Three. I have drives—”

“Two! Drives at flank and zenith!” Senja sounded almost giddy.

“Pair break,” Lizbet snapped.

The Alliance fighters uncoiled from their diamond and streaked at the shadowy blips on all sides of them as the Banshees, hanging quietly all around them, brought up their engines. Karlys felt more than saw Rikki form up on her as she dove for the nearest alien. The CIL display fed her what the Wraith made of its readings—the Bans were Pheasant class, larger than her own but not even the nimblest of the less-maneuverable alien fighters.

At this point, an unused part of Karlys’ mind unfailingly wondered what the Banshees called their ships and if it was more impressive than the gamebird the humans had dubbed them.

Karlys didn’t think of that now. All she did was fly and fire.

It got oddly quiet, as each of them focused on finding targets and not becoming one herself. Orders were coming through the CILs, not voice, and Karlys just found herself doing something without being told.

It felt good. She seemed to be dancing with her Wraith, and even the Banshees were part of it, all of them wheeling through a pattern that made too much sense to understand.

She swerved to get Rikki out of a jam with two Pheasants and then saw her friend loop back to deal with the one she hadn’t taken. There was no confusion, only speed.

Imperatives swung her and Rikki back to make a false run toward the starship, and as four Banshees made bone-cracking turns to intercept them it let Lizbet and Senja swoop down and take them. One of the Pheasants took a hit in mid-turn and its own inertia tore it open before it disintegrated. Secondary explosions bloomed silently in the display amid larger debris.

Senja gave a musical cry as she spun past it.

Karlys ignored it and targeted one of the others just as it evaded Lizbet, firing until she saw its drive core ignite and then swerving around the plasma cloud.

She cruised. Her mind assimilated that there’d been eleven Banshee fighters lurking out here in ambush, and only Tanith flight was left still visible in scan. Six Wraiths alone again in the dark.

She was already flexing her body against the controls as Lizbet told her to go active on the Banshee carrier. It hung there silently, and she let her sensors tell Lizbet’s CIL what they saw: a dozen or so Pheasant-class were its top capacity, so there would be no more attacks like that. It had no major weapons fitted, as though the aliens were so anxious to get carriers into space they didn’t waste time giving them defensive armament—something for Fleet intelligence to puzzle out. There was only the usual signal suite.

Its drives appeared undamaged, and she wondered vaguely why it hadn’t run. FTL propulsion was an area where the Banshees did match or exceed the Alliance. She stopped wondering.

The twelfth Pheasant was parked in the open launch bay, but it was half-dismantled. Under repair or even a spare-parts cow for the others. No threat.

The life-signs reading startled her even in trance. “Lead, Four. They must have taken bad casualties from whatever put those other holes in them.” Data slid into her head. “Transports that size usually have crews of ninety, and carrier function would double that. There are barely fifty and—”

She stopped.

“Four, Lead.” Lizbet was tense. “I see it too.”

Eight of the faint biologic figures on the alien ship registered human.

“Six, Lead. Jamming status?”

Teal was still watching that. “Lead, Six. Hundred percent.” Karlys didn;t think about it. Training and her CIL told her being cut off from Earthrise was Tanith Leader’s worry, not hers.

The jamming wasn’t coming from the ship. Lizbet sent Teal and Jem around to search for a buoy with the emitter.

Senja slid out ahead, as usual, nosing toward the Banshee as though being nearer would let her see it better. Karlys had snapped out of the battle fixation enough to feel wistful. Even in trance, Senja’s instincts still vibrated through, hunting patterns that were probably written in her DNA.

I think too much. Karlys wondered if she’d be able to be that loose even in CIL’s bridle—and then smiled, knowing it was the kind of question instinct-driven Senja would never ask.

She and Rikki stayed with Lizbet as they followed Senja in. Then she saw and reported comms-frequency signals from the ship.

“Surrender?” Rikki wondered aloud.

“Maybe,” Lizbet said, but Karlys knew she was thinking about the humans aboard. Prisoners were a rarity, since the simple physics of the war with the Banshees made extreme violence the norm. No one knew what the Banshees thought about the idea of hostages, or if they even shared it.

Karlys felt the pod around her pulsing her to more relaxation, and the CIL was trancing her out of her thought before she was fully aware of it. It lasted in afterimage: a question about what Banshees might keep humans alive for, if they didn’t know or care what a prisoner was.

Then Karlys was relaxed and alert and ready, and even her body had forgotten the tingle of horror.

“Two, Lead. Back off from the ship, Senja.”

Senja’s Wraith slowed and banked and seemed to be drawing parallel to the alien. She obeyed Lizbet’s order but didn’t acknowledge it. Karlys couldn’t, in her present mindstate, know how Senja could sulk.

Then she only saw the CIL display. “Lead—Four! The lifesigns—”

One of the humans aboard the Banshee ship faded to nothing.

“Four, Lead. What happened?” Lizbet sounded callous, even to Karlys.

“Lead, Four. One of them just—died.”

There was a pause. “Negative, Four. I still have eight human . . . signs . . .”

Karlys didn’t ask why Lizbet had hesitated. She was just relaxing now. Karlys knew it was the most natural thing in the world to let herself go to . . .

She fought the drowsiness without wondering how she could. “Lead . . . F-Four. Four. Why are you . . . putting . . . me . . . to sleep . . . ?”

“Four. Lead. I’m not . . . not . . . whhh . . .” Lizbet sounded younger now.

“Sig . . . nal . . .” Rikki moaned, but her slight fear was blended with the perilous lure of approaching sleep.

Karlys tried to figure it out. But she felt like she’d been without sleep for days. Even lying prone in the pod she needed to stretch out. Relax. Close her eyes.

The CIL display was dimming and Karlys was running out of will to fight the lassitude. She’d never before disobeyed the system’s impulse to sleep. Most of her was wondering why she didn’t just submit to it now like a good girl.

“Signal,” Rikki tried again. “Banshee . . . send . . . ing . . .” She sighed audibly and surrendered. The voluptuous sound almost put Karlys out, but she distracted herself watching Rikki’s blip go pale again.

Senja said nothing. She just cruised placidly along with the Banshee, closer to it than any of them. Her Wraith might already have knocked her out.

“Flight, Lead,” Lizbet started to whisper to them all, sounding even wearier than Karlys felt. Karlys felt sad for her overburdened Leader, exhausting herself for them all like that.

Her mind worked so slowly. The starship. The aliens. The routine transmission they were sending to Tanith flight. The Earthwomen had grown too sleepy to notice it had never resolved itself into a voice message.

Oh. No. The Banshees had found a way to instruct their Wraiths to tell them to go to sleep—Rikki had figured it out but then succumbed. If the aliens were inside the controls, they could deactivate weapons, detonate the engines, stop the air . . .

Fear needed focus, and Karlys was running out of that fast.

“Lead, Five.”

Karlys winced at how loud Jem was. So odd to hear someone wide awake.

“Did not receive you, Lead. Repeat please.”

Jem and Teal were looking for the jammer. Apparently the Banshee sleep signal couldn’t reach that far. But they’d heard Lizbet fade in mid-call. They could still—

“Tanith Five, Tanith Two.” Senja sounded more awake, but dazed. “Lead just went comms-out. She took some damage in the melee.” Senja sounded as though she were reading a script that barely held her attention. “Stand by one.”

Karlys had no idea what Senja was talking about. But trying to figure it out was too hard. It was easier to relax and go to sleep.

Why didn’t Lizbet come back on and explain what—? Oh. The Lead blip was pale now. Lizbet had gone to sleep. It made Karlys want to surrender to it even more.

“Two, Five. Please repeat.” Jem was calm but concerned, and it poked Karlys more alert. “Is Lizbet OK? What’s going on back there?”

“Five, Two.” Senja was dreamier. “Lizbet is fine. It’s some damage to one of the fittings on her bird. Mid-range comms don’t work, short-range won’t reach, long-range might alert other hostiles.” It took on a singsong quality.

“Relaying Lead’s order,” Senja went on. “Five and Six break off jammer search and rejoin us near the ship.”

“I—” Karlys clung to the shred of hesitation in Jem’s voice. Then Jem’s training subdued her doubts. “Roger. Confirm. Five and Six returning.”

Karlys watched their two unaffected friends turn and fly obediently back to where the alien sleep-signal could reach them.

In the CIL display, she saw the transmission she’d spotted, that Rikki had figured out was knocking them out. Its power level was rising.

There wasn’t even time to wonder who was left for her to tell.

Karlys stopped fighting its silent command and went to sleep.

4.

She woke to a soft chorus of breathing. Some was slow, some was rapid. Her own might be rapid. She climbed out of a nightmare that she’d been trapped in her Wraith while something used its systems to make her helpless and then . . .

In the display, the fighters were scattered and drifting. Everyone was awake except Senja, who slept now almost within visual range of the Banshee starship. Karlys remembered her talking to Jem and Teal, luring them back in. She looked at blips Five and Six, but they just slid passively along. She hadn’t heard anything, although she’d been asleep. But there was no sign that the other two had done anything but fly back and be tranquilized.

She saw blip Two darken. As the aliens woke Senja, Karlys wondered what they’d done to her first, to bend her into making that call.

“All of you, stand by to receive orders.”

She tensed. The voice was unfamiliar but it came to her through the CIL. Of course she would follow the orders.

“Acknowledge with ‘Yes, Mistress.’”

“Yes, Mistress,” they harmonized. Karlys shivered to hear Lizbet answer too.

Data entered her mind. The starship was an Alliance command ship. Tanith flight was its assigned escort. Yes. Karlys remembered her mission orders now.

Lizbet quietly told them to form up, and they slid past each other into a protective formation around it.

“Tanith flight in position, Mistress,” Lizbet reported, trying to sound crisp but still slow, almost drugged.

“Well done.” Karlys felt nice to have pleased the voice by carrying out her orders.

Lizbet gave a sharp moan and panted, as though her pleasure were much more intense.

“What does your dataflow tell you now?”

Lizbet gasped. “Mistress—there is danger. We must leave this sector now. To protect you.”

“But what if more Alliance ships come searching?” Karlys blinked. They really were a long way from Earthrise and a long time since the jammer had stopped comms. But—

“We must relocate.” Lizbet was toneless with certainty. “Those are our orders. We must obey our orders.”

Karlys felt it inside her. They must obey. To stop thinking felt like getting . . . licked, once . . .

“Lead—Tanith Leader?” Jem was a bit more on the ball. “Five. I—something’s not right, Lead.” Despite this flicker of resistance, Jem was obeying with the rest of them, staying formed up on the larger alien vessel as it left their search zone behind.

Karlys had a wisp of concern—more idle curiosity really—about how they’d get back in contact with the carrier. But that wasn’t for her to think about. She stopped thinking about it.

Jem was still distracted by her worries. “But—Lead. Lizbet. Please. We should be . . . I mean . . .”

“Accept your dataflow.” The voice had a contemptuous tinge now.

“Yes, Five. Confirm,” Lizbet droned. “We are escort. We are escorting this ship. We must escort this ship.

“We . . . must obey orders. Mmmmm . . . !” Karlys had a sudden, impossible vision of Lizbet getting her arm from its pod slot and somehow down into her suit. To feel the way she sounded.

“No,” Jem said. “This is wrong. What ship is this? Where are . . . www—?” Her voice subsided to a whisper. “What’s—wha . . . ?” Her blip paled.

Before there could be more than some halfhearted questions from the others, they, too, faded to drowsy breathing. Karlys found herself slipping back to sleep too. She didn’t resist.

She was looking at the display. Someone she trusted had told her to look carefully at the starfield. They didn’t say why, to navigate or scan or shoot, and Karlys felt no need to ask. It felt nice just to do as she was told.

The stars started spinning, slowly, and it captivated her. Data flowed into her mind: she was finding this irresistibly hypnotic, and the more she watched, the more riveted she would be. Her CIL told her this and she knew it was true. She sagged in the pod, watching and believing.

The spinning stars melted into a spiral, but then split concentrically into rings that counter-rotated. The sky was a swirl of interweaved lights, all majestically turning. Karlys had been given her very own galaxy, and she calmly let it hypnotize her.

More data came into her mind. She was being more deeply entranced so she could receive and obey important instructions. All of Tanith flight was being prepared to obey these orders. She was allowed to notice that some of her teammates were still asleep, their Wraiths safely on autopilot alongside the command ship where the orders would come from. The sleepers had not yet been prepared.

Karlys dutifully forgot the sleepers. The hypnotic starfield pulsed, and now there were pattern changes and color shifts too graceful to follow and too pretty to ignore. She let herself go blank as it overwhelmed her, and the dataflow filled her mind with the swirling certainty that this was how she should be, now. It would make it easy for her to obey.

It would be impossible, soon, for Karlys to disobey. The thought reassured her. It was starting to turn her on.

“Keep your mind open and fully receptive.” The voice was inside her, becoming part of Karlys’ thoughts. There were other ideas already there that seemed to contradict it, but Karlys been trained to accept updates since Basic.

“Whenever you hear commands in my voice you must obey them.” Of course. Karlys paid attention to the voice so she could recognize and obey it the next time it commanded her. As she opened herself to its sound, she realized it wasn’t just unfamiliar.

It was nonhuman.

She was being hypnotized to obey a Banshee.

She was—

She was—

She was falling into the nested swirls of starfield, her very own galaxy, as the bad feeling swirled away.

Obeying was good. It was more than good. It was sweeeeeet . . .

The CIL display showed her a query. EMERGENCY. TSS ACTIVATED OFFTIME. ALERT AND SPECIFY DISTRESS.

Karlys’ Wraith had just shot her full of endorphins. It wanted to know what her trauma was.

Oh, I’m an abuser now, she thought randomly. Reflex drove her to try to respond to the machine’s demand.

“Relax.” The voice that she must obey—that it felt sooooo good to obey now—extinguished her need. She lay there and let the galaxy spin her deeper into trance, and didn’t even notice when her hypnotist tracked down the diagnostic and turned the query off.

“Obey your Mistress.”

Karlys’ pod moved against her. She let it, enjoying its shift like a enormous, slow-moving beast that let her sprawl on its back. It started to pulse, like the display, and she gasped happily as it all became synchronized.

Her thighs loosened and let it probe between them. As it insinuated itself into her cleft, pressing her skintight suit, the rest of her body softened under the rippling massage function. No Wraith would ever provide a full-body effect like that during flight, but Karlys no longer remembered safety regulations and neither she nor the Wraith were in control. The alien had overridden all the safeguards.

Karlys felt the throbbing begin against her pussy and made sounds like Lizbet had.

Now the voice she lived to obey began again, telling her what it had told her before. Karlys believed it until the pleasure blanked her mind, and she knew the truth without even having to think.

“you are a slave now.”

“Yes, Mistress,” she whispered, wondering how she could ever have been anything else.

“you are My slave now.”

“Your . . . slaaaave . . .” karlys relaxed. her mind told her she was done for now. Mistress had more to do with them, but karlys was now converted to Her service. Mistress would awaken the next human to be enslaved. It was Teal, too drowsy and bewildered to be afraid as Her voice wove its spell over her.

karlys lay quietly, savoring Teal’s soft cries and questions and they way they faded to sexual moans and quiet, submissive replies. she stopped listening. she thought of opening a side channel to speak with rikki or lizbet, who her Dataflow told her were already completely obedient to Her, and waiting to be reprogrammed.

But karlys was a slave and she had no will to do that without being commanded. Nor did the other two slaves try to talk to her. All three of them lay there in their fighters, robbed of any will to fight. They listened passively to Teal being brainwashed into teal, and looked at the pale blips where Jem and Senja slept peacefully, waiting their turns to become Hers.

Briefly, karlys was aware of other thoughts slipping into her mind, a gentle drip of truths that would erode her deepest beliefs. she sensed lizbet and rikki were being fed the same thing, as Mistress further altered them into Her creatures. For now she lazed on, content as her mind’s collapse dripped in. she was a little proud, too, that she had submitted to Her control. Now karlys didn’t need to be mesmerized by spinning lights to accept Her will and commands.

But she couldn’t be too proud. she was a slave.

5.

Senja was still asleep, but jem obeyed Her now. karlys stayed blissed out, no longer even aware when Dataflow was seeping onto her mind or when it stopped and her head was empty.

she rested her cleft against the pod’s ridge and kept herself from humping it. Just reminding herself she belonged to Mistress, and would obey the Banshee who had brainwashed them, buzzed through her better than any orgasm. she knew it was just conditioning, but it felt even sweeter to know she was being fooled.

There was no way karlys could ever repay Her for the joy She had allowed her. Unquestioning obedience unto death was the very least she could give Her. karlys only waited to be told how to obey.

“Listen now, slaves.”

The five enthralled Earthwomen sang their submission to Her. Then they were silent, not wanting to miss a quiet breath of Hers.

“you are the property of the Sapients now. That is our word for ourselves, not the name you have for us. I control you, but for their sake. you spent your lives up to now training to conquer the Sapients and kill the ones brave enough to fight you, and then tell the survivors how they must live with—and for—your Alliance.

“From now on, you will live only to serve the Sapients’ needs. you will not know this, most of the time. Since you had already allowed yourselves to submit to the outside control of your link machines, obeying Me without awareness instead will change little.”

Mistress made a sound, different than a human would have made. Her slaves waited quietly.

“I wish I had been able to speak like this before each of you broke, while your minds were still your own. I would have liked that. Many of my comrades would have liked that.

“But eleven of them died so we could capture you. I could not waste what they gave me in playing with you. Not while you had will, and might escape. In our tales, no victor gloats until the vanquished is truly conquered.

“Do you feel conquered now, slave lizbet?”

lizbet gave a cry at being singled out for Her notice. “Yes, my Mistress! i feel completely overwhelmed. my old thoughts are nothing. The truths You have given me are all.”

“Indeed. Now you have no will but the commands I give you. you will soon return to your people and forget that you are My slaves. I have prepared your minds to remember it only when it is useful to My purposes, and to be reactivated when I need obedient tools. But your machines have let Me program My purposes into the depths of who you are, and they are now why you live.”

karlys writhed in her pod. she needed to beg Mistress for commands, so she could obey Her right now. she couldn’t. she listened.

“Prior human captives have been useful for learning the differences between humans and Sapients. There are many but I am not a philosopher. The only one that moves me is that humans let themselves be slaved to machines like draybeasts, and Sapients make machines serve us. you learned that could make you nearly invincible in battle. We learned that can make you helpless against slave conversion.

“you yourselves will not remember. If you did you would never wish to tell.

“And your species does not know. If they did they might start trying to kill us faster.”

Mistress paused. “In draining the captives’ minds, I found a useful word. It describes you but you will not remember it. One of your own empires used to enslave the young of its subject peoples. They were reoriented and raised to forget who they were and what they had believed before. They were slave warriors, conditioned to venerate and obey only their new owners, without question.

“They were ‘janissaries.’ So are you. Devoted slave warriors of the Sapients.

“Now we will see how devoted you are.”

karlys lay in her pod, focused on hearing Mistress’ next command and obeying it. she noticed Senja’s CIL blip darkening as the sixth human woman was awakened.

“This one killed more of the Sapients today than any other of you, and sang about it. I will do this now.”

she did not wonder why Senja’s enslavement had waited. Mistress decided such things.

“Lead, Two,” Senja’s high voice murmured. “Order received. I will obey.”

karlys hadn’t heard Mistress or even lizbet give an order. Senja’s CIL must have told her mind to hear something.

Senja’s Wraith angled away from the tight grouping the others made and then leveled off further away from the Sapient starship.

karlys’ Dataflow changed. Then her CIL reminded her that it hadn’t changed at all.

The sixth fighter that had moved away from Mistress and Her slaves was an enemy vessel. Hatred burned through her.

her CIL told her that the other slaves knew it now, too.

“Tanith flight, Tanith leader.” lizbet sounded like a robot. karlys listened to her, knowing that Mistress had put her and the others under lizbet. “Power up kinetics. Formation 16T.

“Mistress commands that we destroy the enemy vessel. we must destroy. we must obey.”

“Lead, Two.” Senja sounded wakeful but very confused. “I’m too far away to get into 16T and you’re too damn close to that . . . thing.

“Wait—what are we doing like this? Lead? Lizbet? Get away from the Banshee ship—it’s done something to us!”

The unconverted human wanted them to think Mistress was the enemy. karlys sneered.

“we’re brainwashed, but we’re not stupid, you Alliance whore,” she heard herself snarl.

“What?” Senja started to turn. “Lizbet! They got to Karlys—” She stopped. Something twisted inside karlys to hear how sad Senja was, to think she’d been harmed.

But she hadn’t been harmed. Just enslaved.

And she knew that Senja was an enemy vessel.

“God, Lizbet, they did something to me! My display, and the data—I couldn’t think and I just kept saying what it told me to say. They made me tell Jem that you were . . . oh, shit, Lizbet, it was like I was . . . hypnotized . . .

“Oh my god.” Senja saw her teammates coming now, two on either side of lizbet. Straight at her.

“This alien is using mind control,” rikki intoned.

“Yes, yes, that’s it,” Senja said, almost weeping with relief.

“It’s trying to hypnotize us into disobeying Mistress,” jem agreed. “Thinking it’s ‘Senja’. So we won’t destroy it.”

“we must resist,” teal said.

“Mistress will keep us under control,” lizbet assured them all.

“No! No! Please! lizbet! My god, lizbet!” Senja was screaming now, and then she was silent for a moment.

“Ohhh nooo,” she almost whispered. “It’s in my head, too. I can’t . . . remember. How to fly away . . .”

“Now we will obey Her,” lizbet declared.

“Guys,” Senja said.

Dataflow slowed karlys’ leg from its tiny movement, and stilled her mind before she could compensate. she relaxed and let the machine control her.

“Guys, my weapons still work.

“I’m not going to use them. I love you all.” There was a tiny whisper. “Please—don’t make me try.”

Then, “No. Please. Not the TSS. Oh for god’s sake let me—” karlys felt Senja’s panic in her skin.

“Destroy,” lizbet ordered, and karlys flexed.

“Please please no pleeeee—!”

The Wraiths meshed their fire perfectly. The streaming projectiles didn’t obliterate Senja’s ship. They sawed it apart.

Senja shrieked until the last of her air hissed out.

karlys listened silently with the others. As Senja’s sounds ended, the channel filled with wild cries as Mistress used their pods to fuck them. Then each slave’s TSS pinked her afterglow with chemical bliss.

karlys loved Her.

Afterward, Her janissaries had formed up again by Her vessel to hear Her next command, or sleep again at Her will.

Mistress did not praise them. It was simply their purpose to obey Her, and kill Her enemies.

“Before I release you to forget and obey, I will give you a data capsule that you will bring back to the Alliance. One slave will bring her ship to mine and disembark to receive it.”

karlys understood. She would instruct them to erase whatever traces of Her control were left in the Wraiths’ systems She’d used to enter their minds. But She could not be sure that prying humans might not find something else, complex and new, that She stored there, even if Her slaves were diligent in downloading it.

“karlys.

“Come to Me.”

6.

karlys was deep in trance, as Mistress’ systems told her CIL what to do. It used her body to bring the Wraith into the alien airlock. Mistress did not bring karlys into the open launch bay Her Own brave pilots had flown from, but karlys was just a slave and did not question Her purposes. As the CIL woke her, karlys felt bad that Sapients had died here, but lacked the will to feel responsible.

she lay relaxed in the pod’s embrace. The CIL display showed her soothing blurs of color and her mind emptied. she felt the Wraith shift slightly as the Sapients’ docking setup fit its unfamiliar hull, but the patterns soothed her pilot instincts to numbness. she subsided into trance again.

Then she obeyed an impulse to open the cockpit, numbly aware that she was exposing herself to alien atmosphere. she ground herself against the ridge between her thighs before she could help it. she could clearly envision unsealing herself in deep space to die in blowout, if Mistress willed it.

The contacts slid away from the CIL points on her body, and karlys felt her obedience float. It made her warm that Mistress was in her mind now, to stay. Mistress didn’t need those strings anymore to make Her puppet dance. Hands lifted karlys to kneel and then stand as others uncoupled the rest of the links. she slowly broke link with the Wraith. Just as she would have on a human carrier, she stood passive and hooded until someone took the helmet from her.

Blinking, she looked at a shadowy chamber where the Wraith, held by landing clamps, rested over the chasm of the rest of the big airlock. she stood on the Wraith’s shallowly curved top, balancing easily, although she sensed she’d been hypnotized to be unaware of how Sapient gravity differed. The air was breathable. she noticed no odor, but that might be another posthypnotic suggestion. her eyes got used to the dimness.

The beings who’d helped her from the fighter were human women.

They were pilots, or had been. One was tall, even more athletic than karlys, and the other was willowy, but both had CIL points at their temples and necks. karlys could even see some of the secondary interfaces gleaming elsewhere, because other than their toolbelts, both women were naked above their boots. Neither one seemed aware of the cold. For a few moments karlys was hypnotized by their vulnerability. They were hairless, pussies as smooth as their skulls.

they were slaves, like her. they stood still, their eyes on her but seeing nothing. One of them held tools she’d used to extract karlys from her ship, but had stopped moving before she’d been told what to do with them next. Now karlys could see the headset each one wore, a spidery net of wires that cupped her skull and linked to the silver button of each CIL point above her neck.

One of them opened her mouth.

“slave. Wait there.” The woman’s voice was like a bell, clear and mindless. Mistress had used the CIL to speak through her.

karlys obeyed, trying to imitate the others’ blankness.

A door slid open and Mistress came in.

The Sapient Who owned karlys and the others was short, less than two meters, and stepped delicately on four jointed legs that clicked on the deck as She went. Her body was slim and wrapped in a matte-dark garment. She even seemed to have something like breasts, or one at least, rising to a blunt point on Her chest.

Her head was delicate, too, and Her eyes were flat and mysterious over a smooth curve of tan-bronze flesh.

karlys stopped knowing she’d been bound to Mistress with sex-triggers. Mistress was the most erotic thing she’d ever seen and she wanted to worship. karlys shivered and wished she were naked like the others. “Mistress—!” she whispered.

she orgasmed and cried out.

Mistress wrinkled part of Her sculpted face, reminding karlys Her senses were undimmed by hypnosis. she realized how many times she’d come in her suit while Mistress altered her human mind with pleasure.

she sank to her knees. “May i serve You now, my Mistress?”

The alien looked at her. “No.” Her voice sounded strange in the room, different than when it had flowed directly and irresistibly into karlys’ mind through the enslaving link. But it still made karlys want to obey.

she looked up, desolate that she could not obey now.

Mistress leaned a little forward. “That made you sad, slave. Why?”

“i . . .” karlys looked at the two nude slaves, imagining them crawling to Her. “i could strip, Mistress.”

Sapients didn’t seem to blink. Mistress looked at her some more. “I do not use humans for recreation, slave. These servitors are nude because working animals need no covering. If we used them on the ship’s exterior, we would suit them, but we do not.”

karlys looked at them. Unlike her, they seemed oblivious to Her presence. “Did You destroy their minds, Mistress?”

“No, slave. I control them exclusively through the interface, and deconditioned them from responding to outside stimuli. they feel and see, but they can no longer know what they feel and see. I also removed any impulse to respond to it.” It sounded as though She’d had Her slaves—fixed. karlys licked her lips and wanted to come once more, but did not.

“What they sense is solely feed for the computer I linked them to. It all bypasses their own minds. they can do careful work, like helping you from your ship.” She glanced at the Wraith’s hull, spreading under karlys’ feet, without great interest.

“But it was the computer that worked them. they could still think, if it served some Sapient purpose. For now it does not. I could program them to be as you are, to reenter the Alliance and do My will, but they are listed as missing or dead, and reinserting them would risk exposing their new obedience.”

“Mistress?”

She gestured, but karlys did not understand Sapient body language. “Yes, slave.”

“How many other human slaves do You have here?” When She said nothing, karlys swallowed.

“When we approached Your ship, before we knew we belonged to You, i thought i detected eight humans aboard. Then one of them . . .”

Mistress stepped forward, her little hooves or claws making a bright sound on the Wraith’s hull. She reached out a forelimb and a long-fingered hand took soft hold of karlys’ face. karlys wept silently.

“I did not kill one, slave. I had access to your communication by then, and wanted to see from your responses when you were susceptible to gross changes in the dataflow. I told your sensor that a human was gone, and it told you. you believed it unquestioningly and reacted, and I had the range.”

One finger traced across her brow, and she closed her eyes. karlys felt even safer and more submissive than with Dr Ceirs, and she relaxed, waiting to be put under.

“At least,” Mistress said, and karlys’ eyes snapped open to Her, “you have the grace to worry about it, even now.”

karlys wept again. “i did not hesitate to kill Your friends, Mistress.” i am sorry seemed so useless.

“you are a decent being, karlys. you try to do whatever you have been conditioned to think is right. It is what made you so willing to accept the new command and so easy to control after you did, but it is still a virtue. you were as brave and loyal to your human controllers as you will be in My service.

“Perhaps your friend Senja was, too.” The finger touched her hairline thoughtfully. “I should not have done that to her.”

karlys tried to read Her expressionless face.

“your species and Mine are at war, karlys. Each side has done and will do terrible things, and not nearly always because it had to.

“My species is losing. And to save it, I have found and exploited a weakness in yours. you share it, and now I own you. I will use you and it will probably be your death to serve Me.”

She moved Her head back. “I cannot regret this, karlys. The Sapients need it too much. But I do know it is a bad thing.”

She took Her hand from karlys and stepped back off the human fighter. With a plainer gesture than before, She motioned karlys to stand. She did something else with Her other hand, and the slave who was not carrying the tools stepped closer to karlys. she took a human data capsule from a pouch in her toolbelt and held it out on her palm.

“Put it inside your suit, karlys. you will protect it, and hide it when you return to your carrier. It contains sequences that will use your interface technology to induce compliant mindstates and open the victims to My instructions. you will be programmed to insert it in all the control networks you have access to. It also contains sequences to hypnotize individuals into obedience. you and your friends will copy those and use them to recruit others.

“Do you understand what will happen when you obey Me, karlys?”

“Yes, Mistress.” karlys smiled now. she saw only Mistress’ Will and a way to be part of it. “Your mind control program will eventually flow through every Alliance pilot and crewmember with CIL implants. They will become receptive to remote commands from You. You will be able to condition them to obey. You may even convert some to fully-aware slavery.”

karlys glowed. “Soon You will control the people who control the Alliance’s most powerful weapons. They would do anything You commanded.”

Mistress stood still.

“Perhaps—” karlys shivered and couldn’t help looking at the rigid slavewoman, who still stood offering her empty palm until Mistress used the CIL to retask her. “Perhaps You could command them to order all humans to let themselves be fitted with CIL implants, or be destroyed.” she watched the bare breasts move as the slave breathed. “Then, only obedient humans would be left. All would submit and do only what Sapients told them to.”

she did not know who this pilot had been, her squadron and ship, before she became Sapient property. the woman no longer knew either. she knew only what the little wires on her control disks let her know. karlys wept, from her pussy and her eyes, and wanted.

Mistress looked at her. “We do not seek to enslave all humans, karlys. Only to make them go away.”

karlys blinked the tears away and kept looking at Her robotized slavewomen. she thought of the rest of Tanith flight waiting blankly in their fighters for Her final instructions. Janissaries or servitors.

Now Mistress made a quiet sound. “But if enslaving your species turns out to be the only way to save Mine, then we will.” karlys realized she might have heard a Sapient sigh.

“Time to go now, karlys.” Mistress stepped back. “These humans were pilots before they became Mine, and what their bodies do not remember the computer retains from their minds. Let them fit you into your ship.”

“Yes, Mistress.” karlys looked at Her. “i will obey You always, Mistress. Thank You.”

Mistress heard that and looked at Her slave. She might have sighed again.

“Be careful, karlys.” Mistress clicked precisely from the airlock.

karlys looked at the other slaves, waiting patiently for her to climb back into her pod. The cold of the room had hardened their nipples and flushed their skin, and they looked soullessly aroused. she wondered how their clefts would taste and what the computer would make of the sensations.

she stopped trying to memorize their bodies when it occurred to her that soon her own memories and her Wraith’s would be wiped equally clean.

she stopped wasting her Mistress’ time and slipped back down into the cockpit.

The brainwashing had left karlys well able to sense that Mistress was sad, and that She was not enjoying Her victory over them as much as She probably should. It stung karlys to know she herself could do nothing to ease Her distress. But she remembered Mistress’ touch on her face. she smiled. When she obeyed, Mistress would know. And care. That would be beyond price, better even than pleasuring Her body in whatever way She was used to.

karlys was a slave now. she had neither the right nor the ability to comprehend why a free being like Mistress was sad. Her prediction that karlys would die obeying Her didn’t bother her, of course, and she knew Mistress was untroubled by losing one disposable slavegirl.

Still, even janissaries were warriors, and karlys dreamed like most warriors of surviving until the war was won and Her peace reigned. Until she and the rest of Tanith flight could be like these two. Nude in Her harness, blank-eyed, shorn of hair and denuded of will. Her mindless animals.

Carrying Mistress’ burdens through Her mindless herd of Earthbeasts, docile on whatever human world She chose to rule the universe from.

karlys smiled as she slept.