The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

The Slavers

Chapter Eleven

Chicago, which Carl Sandburg called the “City of the Big Shoulders,” had begun to scream.

The air screamed… the very molecules in the air screamed. Screamed silently.

The field wrapped around it smothered the city like an invisible yet restricting cape. From Downtown to the West Side, the field pulsed like a thing alive, tugging at the very stuff of space-time, eating away at it as a hungry swarm of locusts would consume a bountiful crop. The very bonds that held matter and energy together were at risk, had in fact already begun to unravel at an elementary state as yet undiscovered by Earth’s physicists. Had someone had the foreknowledge to pay close enough attention, this unraveling might have been noticed. A surveyor with the right equipment in the right area might have observed, for instance, how LaSalle Street first seemed to “grow” a few quarter inches one hour and then “constricted” by similar proportions the next. A pair of synchronized atomic clocks, one outside city limits and one inside, would quickly have fallen out of phase, first by only a few microseconds, then by increasingly larger margins as two o’clock in the afternoon approached.

That was the time scheduled—more or less—for Celestra’s lieutenant Kormira to activate her projector and pull one million people out of a substantially weakened continuum.

Out of their clothes, too, for that matter.

And then everything changed.

* * *

Life had been so simple. All 317 had had to be was pleasing to her masters and Mistresses, and, of course, to her Goddess especially, the Goddess Celestra. To be a dream of erotic perfection for them. To be a wanton slut for their desires, especially Her Desires, Her willing fucktoy. And she had been willing. She still was willing. She loved being a fucktoy! Being a fucktoy was the best thing in the whole universe. The unit could think of no better place for herself.

317 had known her place, and she loved it. Even when the Goddess Celestra whipped her, she loved it. She had urged the Goddess to hit her harder, the pain being so delicious, so like a pleasure unto itself… and it had brought 317 pleasure, for she had known the Goddess Celestra was enjoying her suffering, and knowing that made the pain feel even better!

She remembered screaming. Harder! Oh, Goddess, please! Harder, Mistress! Harder!

She had served her Goddess well.

But then all these confusing things happened, and 317’s lowly but perfectly rightful place in the universe was upset. A Servant of the Goddess had come to her, but instead of using the unit, or taking the unit someplace where she could fuck and serve someone, She got down to Her Own knees and cried. Cried with the unit! Then She—a Servant of the Goddess!—said strange things to the unit, things which had made absolutely no sense.

Mother? Daughter? Ro—sa—lie?

The unit’s mind was spinning. What made it worse was her own lack of… of desire for this Mistress.

She was a Servant of the Goddess whom the unit felt no deep-held wish to fuck.

None whatsoever. Indeed, the very idea of fucking this strange Servant made 317 feel ill.

She knew something was wrong. Dreadfully wrong.

They had gone somewhere, projected themselves somewhere through the Goddess’ Magic, and now somebody—a man!—was attacking the Servant! This made the unit’s head hurt worse than her back.

“Seems like you didn’t trust me there, little girl,” the male said, approaching the Servant.

317 knelt close to the cold, plastic floor but couldn’t help but keep her head up to watch. She absolutely couldn’t believe what was happening. None of it made sense at all. The deep-seated emptiness in 317’s loins didn’t help either.

Goddess, but the unit needed to fuck someone soon! Her whipping earlier had gotten her so hot and bothered!

“I can make it all better,” she heard. “You can trust me on that.” The unit saw the male grab a slaving module from the window. Her mouth opened in surprise, even without a dick in front of it. He was holding the Servant disrespectfully. He was holding her up by the hair.

He looked like he was going to encode the Servant!

“You’ll be a lot happier being a slave, dear. Being my slave.”

No, a voice spoke up in 317’s confused head. It wasn’t the Voice of the Goddess, nor was it the Voice of Wisdom. This was a different voice, but one that felt almost as familiar. No, that can’t be.

That can’t be.

The unit crawled forward and knelt beside the male, spreading her knees apart like the proper slut she was, offering her obedience and need. Unbidden, she clutched at his scrumptious legs, his delicious thighs. “Master,” she begged. “The unit lives only to please and serve.”

He looked down at her. “Huh? What?” He kicked 317 away. “Get off me, you …”

He paused, taking a closer look at the unit. “… slut.”

317 felt the usual warmth in her stomach and loins whenever somebody gazed upon her, saw her as the tasty fuck she was and wanted to be, and she lifted her tits up to him higher for inspection, widening her legs more in desire. Again, though, something felt wrong. She wanted this master to use her, of course, just as she wanted every master to use her… yet at the same time this master was somehow different.

This master had done something to her before, something wonderful… yet awful.

She loved him… and she hated him, and it was all connected with the Servant he was holding!

“My god,” the weird master said. He looked again at the Servant, then back at the unit.

“You found her,” he said, a note of amazement in his voice. “You really are something, Rosalie. I know what I told you, but, just between you and me, I was lying!” He laughed.

He pushed 317 aside with his boots again, and she knelt before him in submission.

“This is better than I hoped. Mother and daughter.” Unbidden, 317 dared to look up at him. He was addressing the Servant, who was trying to twist away but was unable.

“Now you can take turns sucking my dick when this is over.”

He raised the encoder to the Servant’s forehead.

317 felt sick. She felt sore. Something bad was about to happen.

And for the first time in her life, she thought, she had no clue what to do.

* * *

A large digital chronometer ticked down the last few seconds to P-time, projection time, and Celestra watched eagerly inside her control room. All eyes were on the clock.

00:10 00:09 00:08 00:07

Celestra’s hand clenched inside its leather glove, the fine material snapping just this side of audibility. A shark’s grin filling her face, she glanced down through the window at the reception area. Hundreds of Bitches were in place. The gas canisters were set. Male subordinates waited to cart off the paralyzed and encoded bodies. Everything was set.

00:04 00:03 00:02

Her breasts lifted. She almost felt good. She felt almost happy.

00:01

00:00

The room hummed with excitement. History in the making!

Then… . 00:01 00:02 00:03

Celestra’s hand clenched tighter, tighter. There was an undercurrent of mumbling behind her.

00:04 00:05 00:06

Only someone close to Celestra might have seen her grin shrink. No one wanted to be that close to her, though.

The leather glove popped again loudly. Slowly, gradually, it began to crack open.

* * *

Gordon put the module to the teen’s forehead.

Goodbye dear, he thought. And say hello to your new life.

His hand tightened on the control… and abruptly he felt his legs pulled out from underneath him. The slave—Rosalie’s mother, for God’s sake!—landed on top of him and hit him.

“No! No!” the slavegirl screamed and clawed at his face. He felt the slut’s chains rattle against his chest.

What the hell!? Gordon raised his knee and twisted to the side, trying to get the crazy bitch off him. She was spitting and cat’s eye furious in his face.

What the hell? She was a slave!

“Get off me, ya’ whore!” He pushed with his leg, and he managed to get the former Dr. Pitzler a foot length away from him. “No! No!” she screamed again, and he felt blood drip down his face.

Behind him, the relay’s glow covered everything in a ghastly radiance.

The slave tried to get up, and Gordon swung with the encoder in his hand. He struck the half-naked girl across the head, and she collapsed, crying. “Mistress. Don’t touch my mistress!”

She struggled again, and Gordon kicked at her, pushing her back even further. What the hell happened!? She was a programmed slut!

Gordon got to his feet. Behind him, the light in the small, barren room increased dramatically, flaring like a rocket going off. He turned around. The box-like relay in the center of Celestra’s complicated array had turned all one color: a single, brilliant yellow-white, so bright Gordon could barely discern the outline of its structure. The machinery around it was also glowing, only slightly less brightly.

As he watched, the light increased even more.

Uh oh, some part of him said silently. That doesn’t look good. Then he remembered.

He spun around just in time to catch Dr. Pitzler trying to leap on top of him again. Drawing his arm back, the Associate hit the slave savagely across the chin. Pain settled across his fist, but the slut went down, finally.

The relay grew even brighter. When Gordon turned he found he could barely look at it. The light painted his shadow across the wall so deeply it looked like a carving dug into its plastic surface.

“What the hell?” he said again, this time out loud… and something hard struck him across the shoulders.

The floor rose to meet him in the face.

* * *

The technician approached Purple Cloud Base’s Governor with a portable display device. “This is the eleventh complaint. Something’s interfering with projections across the city. All known frequencies are blocked.” He handed the display over for his superior to see.

Celestra, the older man thought, bile rising up from his stomach. She’s taking over the Base.

“Mok,” he said, turning, addressing the other technician in his chambers.

The little man shook his head. “It’s an upsurge in tachyons, sir, beyond anything I’ve ever seen before.” He tapped controls on the wall monitor. Numbers flashed by incoherently. “It’s like another relay field has come into focus, overlaying our own, and supercharged with tachyons.”

The Governor remembered his meeting from a few days ago. “Uh ho,” he said simply.

This didn’t look good.

* * *

Celestra’s torn leather glove fell to the floor in tatters.

The grin hadn’t disappeared from her face, but all her lieutenants in the room could hear her teeth grinding. They all began backing away slightly. None of them—not even Clio—dared approach their Mistress when she was in this kind of mood. It wasn’t prudent.

03:12 03:13 03:14

One thing was for sure. Kormira was fucked. If she were lucky, she would spend the rest of her life on her knees somewhere, begging and pleasing. If not, well… there were worse things Celestra could do to a person. The lieutenants didn’t like thinking about any of them, but there were worse things.

All of them blessed their fates that they wouldn’t be on the receiving end. And that’s why they started to back up a little.

* * *

Rosalie collapsed to the floor next to the Associate, her arms smarting, her entire left side feeling like it was going to burst open. “Momma,” she cried, trying to get back up and failing.

The projector with which she had hit Gordon lay abandoned by the wall.

Gordon stirred. “Bitch,” he said softly, struggling to get up. His hand held the slaving module in a death’s grip.

Their shadows on the wall had turned into veritable voids in space.

Rosalie twisted herself around—Oh, that hurt!—and tried to push herself across the floor using Gordon’s body. She kicked, and he grunted in pain. “Bitch,” she heard. He reached for her smooth, latex-clad legs and fumbled around for the ankle. “You’re dead. Dead,” he mumbled.

I’ve got to get the immobilizer, Rosalie thought, crawling.

She saw the small cylinder lying next to her mother, who was moaning and lying on her side. The incandescent light edged everything in brilliant outlines. The very air was humming with power. She thought maybe the relay was about to explode. Part of her was glad. Better that than being his slave, she whispered to herself, and tried to crawl faster.

* * *

The relay, actually, was operating exactly the way in which it had been modified. The field it produced extended far across the Base and the surrounding hills, past Celestra’s Auditorium and beyond to the trackless and empty wastes of that nearly empty world. The energy the field was receiving from Celestra’s generators continued unabated. Since the relay in fact was now closer to those large generators sitting in the Auditorium, sharing the same planet, in other words, the power it received was even greater than before. The tachyons inundating the field, pulled en masse with the relay and its equipment, ate away at the Base’s space-time like an acid dribbled over a thin sheet of rubber.

* * *

Timidly, in a manner normally quite foreign to her, Clio sighed and slowly approached her superior, who stood staring at the clock, grinning, fingering her bloody whip.

“Ma’am?” she whispered and gulped slightly. “Ma’am? Should I… uh, go see what’s wrong?”

Celestra didn’t answer her. One hand, bare, with shreds of ruined leather dangling around it, reached around to grasp her personal projector. The other continued to finger her whip.

“Ma’am?” Clio said.

Celestra turned to her lieutenant.

“I hate surprises,” she said, almost mildly. “I’m going to flay Kormira alive, and when I’m done, then I’ll decide what species she’s going to enjoy sucking off of. Preferably one with detachable parts.”

She raised her projector up.

* * *

Oh no you don’t, you little bitch, Gordon thought, seeing the direction Rosalie was headed. He turned over and clamped his hand tightly around her rubber-encased ankle. He pulled her back with a screech… her screech.

He made sure not to let go of the encoder in his other hand.

Meanwhile, behind them, the relay and its surrounding apparatus turned into a blazing star.

* * *

The Governors hurried to meet in the face of an alarming situation. They had to get their teleportation grid back into operation. Their Base relied on its interstellar traffic. With Celestra’s field interfering with their own, nobody could go anywhere. Their businesses would collapse. They had to present a united front. Ironically, though, they were having trouble doing so. They, like so many other societies that utilized Client-based projection technology, had long since grown dependent on that technology for all their transportation needs. When it was no longer available, just getting from place to place proved enormously difficult. They couldn’t even talk to one another easily. Why set up an expensive communications system to talk to somebody, after all, when you can project yourself there in an instant?

As such, the authorities in charge of the Base were slow to handle the relay problem, and, by the time the Governors and their assistants finally did get together, it was far too late for them to do anything about it.

Even if they had arrived earlier, though, it is debatable whether or not they could have done anything.

The situation was unprecedented.

Conventional wisdom held that two projection relay systems on any one planet were redundant. Handheld projectors were extremely powerful tools. They could send a person almost anywhere on a planet’s surface. Their operating range, in fact, encompassed a sphere whose radius was only slightly less than the average distance of Jupiter from the sun. This easily resolved most transportation needs. For those who did need more, though, only one projector relay was ever necessary to provide the extra-needed boost to send one to the stars and beyond. Only one, and without such a relay’s encompassing power field, travelers were stuck, planetbound, or, at the most, system-bound.

Control over relays was how Agencies like the law firm of Frank, Bennet, Weschler, and Marx and the Base Governorship of Purple Cloud stayed in business.

Control of a relay meant a control over interstellar traffic. The Clients gave them out but rarely.

No one on the Base—human or otherwise—therefore knew what would happen if two such fields were in operation at once, let alone what the effects might be if one of those fields happened to be charged with superluminal particles. It was simply a situation that had never before come up before.

And such are the things catastrophes are made.

* * *

Celestra looked at the clock one last time.

“Fuck it,” she said, aimed the projector at herself, and pulled the trigger.

* * *

Gordon pulled Rosalie’s body beneath his with a grunt. She screamed and flailed at him with her hands. Smiling grimly, he pinned her arms down with his knees and raised himself in a half-sitting position on top of her, looking down.

“Now, goddammit. Now.”

He brought around the encoder.

Rosalie was struggling with every ounce of strength in her injured body. As such, she didn’t see her mother—317… the pleasure unit… the slave—pick up the projector lying near the wall and swing it in a wide baseball player-like arc and connect with the side of Gordon’s head. Gordon didn’t notice her either. He mumbled heavily and fell over on top of Rosalie, the encoder trapped between them and humming wildly. Rosalie tried to push him off and couldn’t.

“Ros…a… lee?” the slavegirl whispered. “Rosalie?”

And then the projector relay beside them released such a concentrated burst of light that for a brief second each of them there—Rosalie, a semi-conscious Gordon, and the slave who had been Dr. Sandra Pitzler—saw the very bones in their bodies outlined in a stunning, frightful yellow and black.

It was like an atomic blast without the accompanying noise.

A shiver ran through the walls.

The massive, tachyon-enhanced projection field Celestra had worked so hard to set up triggered.

The problem was, instead of her lieutenant’s projector on Earth being the activating mechanism, Celestra’s own projector did the trick… in the wrong place, in the wrong time, on the wrong planet.

Once the relay hit maximum power, any projector would have done it, but only Celestra’s projectors still worked, set as they were on frequencies not blocked by excess tachyons.

In any case, the field took form.

Across the Base, the Auditorium, and the badlands in-between, the spatially twisting light condensed around every living thing that could definably be called a human being. The Governors, entering their meeting hall, saw the flickering radiance dance across their plastic robes and arms. They looked at one another in total, absolute amazement. In the communities and settlements surrounding the low mountain range the Base used as headquarters, people in varied activities—fucking, lunching, working, whatever… but mostly fucking—also began to glow like incandescent beacons.

The floating man bobbing along and above the street lit up like a hovering light bulb.

The white-furred slave and her owner stared at each other from an interesting and more than slightly ribald position as each became engulfed in yellow flame.

The man and woman inside plants in the square flared up like Roman candles.

The plants themselves remained untouched.

At the Auditorium, the soldiers saw the rising field and screamed in outrage. The men cursed. The less educated ones tried to run away. Clio, standing in the Auditorium’s control room, saw the shimmer and reached for her projector in a fast-draw that would have done any Old West gunslinger proud. Other lieutenants were slower on the uptake and didn’t get anywhere near as close, not that it would have helped much. The hundreds of slaves kept below in barracks and pleasure chambers cried out as one, dreaming of appearing before their Goddess in all her Glorious Splendor.

They were being touched by the Goddess, they thought, as they had been touched before, pulled from whatever worlds and nations that had given birth to them.

Everywhere, a projection effect designed to handle a million people settled.

Celestra too vanished in utter yellow brilliance. At first she paid no attention to the projection, so familiar was she with the sensation of being in two places at once. The control room sparkled away and was replaced a mere instant later with her receiving coordinates, the room outside the old freezer in her abandoned meat-packing plant in Chicago.

What the fuck? she had time to think, seeing in a bare instant her lieutenant Kormira and another soldier lying inert on a pile of rubble. The room had been wrecked. The freezer door lay face down in the middle of the room, blood splashed around it the same way a bug squashes when it gets stepped on.

Then Celestra felt a tug “backward” from the field surrounding her.

What the fuck!? she thought again, feeling at the same time an unexpected and body-length draft.

Horrified, Celestra’s uniform drifted away from her, falling from her body as if she had turned into a ghost. Her leather accouterments fell atop the rubble and her paralyzed soldiers, along with a whip, a spiked collar, a few other interesting toys, and her projector. She tried to hold onto the latter, but it slipped through her fingers like a dream.

No! NO!!!

Earth coruscated away in yellow fog.

Through the glare, the dominatrix felt the two relay-enhanced projection fields fighting over her, one determined to send her to Earth, the other programmed to send to the receiving area in her Auditorium… that or to store her away in a spatially non-existent but nonetheless mathematically definable chronal pocket. She appeared back in her control room for a second, and in that brief instant she saw her troops vanish in glittering blurs, their faces scared, furious, or both.

Their uniforms and other instruments fell noisily to the cold floor.

The room vanished again, and Celestra screamed soundlessly, suddenly nowhere and everywhere at once, her body stretched between planets like an infinitely elastic doll.

Between wildly dissimilar temporal flows.

Between realities.

Celestra screamed, though only creatures with more highly evolved senses than man’s were able to hear her.

The two relay fields, meanwhile, bounced invisibly against one another. Tachyons stolen from Earth flew back and forth wildly. Client technology was designed to be foolproof, but there were limits. Applications that no one could foresee have their consequences. No one would be hurt—that was primary—but the two relays were stretched to their design capabilities and beyond.

Something had to give.

Across the Base, every handheld projector, even those in the hands—or whatever—of aliens, crumbled quietly to dust.

The two relays—the one in an abandoned Base corridor, the other hidden in a secure area beneath the Governors’ meeting chamber, also dissolved from the inside out. Simultaneously, the great teleportation field surrounding the Base and its encompassed inhabitants flared and disappeared, taking with it over two hundred thousand people.

A great many items of clothing suddenly succumbed to gravity.

The receiving platform in Celestra’s Auditorium flared. Ten thousand humans—masters, slaves, and everything in-between—reappeared in clouds of greenish gas. None happened to be among Celestra’s army; that would have been statistically unlikely, given the numbers involved. None, therefore, had the gas’s antidote saturating their bodies.

They emerged from the projection field, startled beyond words, as thoroughly paralyzed as if they had each been hit with an immobilizer. It would be hours before any of them could move again.

The other one hundred ninety-odd thousand humans drifted helplessly… elsewhere.

When they would move again was a more difficult prospect to predict.

The Base, a mostly human concern, became very quiet. The handful of visiting aliens unaffected by the field experienced emotions corresponding to agitation and surprise. Then, in their own different ways, they tried to figure out what had just taken place. No one was left to answer their questions, however… except, ironically, for the three human beings who in all the Base knew the least, sitting as they had been in the eye of the storm.

In the space, to be precise, in the field Celestra had programmed not to be affected when someone in it was supposed to have activated her projector and trigger the cascade.

The three there now were the only humans left on the planet.

Rosalie, pinned beneath the Associate, tried to get her arms free to rub her eyes. When the relay had gone up, it had gone up. Black-and-red spots swam in front of her eyes, and she could barely see a thing. Gordon groaned. Blood leaked from one of his ears, the same side her mother had struck him on. Rosalie looked around. Her mother lay kneeling just above her head.

“Help me, Mom,” Rosalie whispered. She could taste blood in her mouth. “Help me get him off me, please.”

The radically transformed doctor looked at her daughter for a moment, then edged forward to help push. With a painful groan, they managed to roll the Associate away.

Rosalie struggled to sit up. The slavegirl helped her.

“The immobilizer,” Rosalie said, pointing. “Get the immobilizer.” Her mother looked around, a dazed expression on her doll-like, heart-shaped face, and did as she was asked. Rosalie took the small tool, turned it around in her hands, then reached over and pressed it against her assailant’s arm. The Associate, who had still been groaning, stopped making noises as abruptly as a radio turned off.

Rosalie could still see the hate-filled glare in his eyes, though.

Now all she needed was to get the projector. They would go back to Earth, the three of them, and she would figure out a way to force Gordon to help her mom. They had the relay, after all, and… she remembered. The relay was gone.

Rosalie scanned the room quickly. The relay, the surrounding equipment, even the projector, had turned to a fine, silvery dust.

“No,” the teenager whispered, holding her side with one hand, hugging her enslaved mother with the other. Without the projector… why, without the projector they couldn’t go home!

They were trapped.

The slavegirl gently stroked her daughter’s sweaty brow. “Rosalie?” she whispered, uncertain.

“Mom?” Rosalie struggled to retain consciousness. She tried to turn to face her mom and couldn’t on her own. Her legs were turning numb. What were they going to do?

She would question Gordon. That was it. She would force him to find a way back home.

Rosalie was about to ask her mother to help her move when a bright flash appeared near the doorway to the room. It was a projection effect, and in a burst of brightness two figures took shape within it. Rosalie gaped. The slavegirl beside her whimpered when she saw who materialized.

The two men looked like identical brothers… Humpty-Dumpty brothers. They were short, pudgy, and all but completely bald. Aside from the institutional gray uniforms they wore, they looked like the stereotypical, Rod Serling-esque bank managers one saw on old TV shows. Between them, suspended in the air, a box-like unit like the one Rosalie remembered floated. The brothers stared at the ruined trio before them with utterly bland expressions.

Judging from her mother’s reaction and her own experience, Rosalie didn’t think they were the cavalry coming to rescue them. She rapidly palmed the immobilizer and hoped they hadn’t seen it. In her condition, she thought she would probably get only the one shot at them.

“Help us,” she whispered, trying to draw them in closer. They each held projectors.

One of the brothers turned to the other and spoke in a foreign tongue, not in English, not in Language.

The other nodded, reached over, and began touching controls on the hovering relay. The first raised his projector up and also made adjustments. Neither of them made the slightest move to approach.

A moment later the one who had spoke was pointing his projector at them.

Oh, no, Rosalie just had to time to think before a wave of light washed over her, her mother, and Gordon and whisked them away. Her vision, still sensitive from the relay bursting, swam again in wild and unearthly colors. It was some time after the projection effect ended that she could see where they had been sent. Her first impression was of blackish-red clouds in the distance.

“Mom? Mom?” she cried, then felt her slavegirl mother’s comforting hands on her shoulders.

Rosalie craned her neck around to see.

The three of them were now in the middle of a large metal platform beyond the edge of which was a steep fall. The smooth surface gleamed like polished silverware. Around them, the sky was a dull orange-red, with black clouds in the background lending a perspective of vast distances. The ground, from what Rosalie could see of it, looked soft and muddy, like an ocean of mud, with small, isolated bushes scattered here and there. A faint, organic odor filled the air.

Around them, other lustrous platforms were clumped together like a metallic forest. Each rose from a single, dangerously thin-seeming silver stalk. Many were empty while others held blocky lumps of silvery crystal or assortments of spheres, pyramids, and other more complex geometric shapes. The platforms raised and lowered in a way that reminded Rosalie of that arcade game where people had to bop the heads of plastic gophers. The image came to mind as their own platform began to rapidly lower, sending a familiar elevator-like sensation through the teen.

In front of her, an apparent mountain of glass or crystal came into view, becoming larger and larger as their stand fell from what must have been an incredible height. The structure was like a pyramid of opaque glass, in the milky depths of which Rosalie could see moving sparks of color.

Rosalie also saw a large something dimly reflected in the glass. She turned around to view it.

She screamed. A moment later her slavegirl mother joined her.

The creature—the alien—lumbering slowly up to meet them was huge, easily equal the size of the structure mirroring it. It was the size of a whale… a dinosaur… a pale, purplish-brown Godzilla of a monster, sloshing through the mud at them at a snail’s pace, not that there was anywhere for them to run. The platform stopped lowering but was still at least a hundred or more feet in the air… which put it right about level with the leading bulge of the enormous beast.

Rosalie and her mother scrambled around uncontrollably, panic-stricken, sliding a bit on the flat but slickly smooth surface, bumping into and rolling on top of the Associate as he lay there unmoving.

The fact that the platform looked a little like a silver serving tray was not lost on the teen.

The monstrous alien stopped before them.

Roughly whale-shaped—a thick, rounded brow narrowing slightly to a stumpy end—it used two broad flippers to guide itself through the soft, liquidy terrain, its locomotion perhaps in this regard more like a sea lion’s. There the parallels to Earth morphology ended. A vast, solid, and emerald-green oval sat over the creature’s ship-size prow like a single, pupilless Cyclopean eye. This orb was shiny and polished; Rosalie could see the three of them reflected in its endless depths. Below this central organ, the single trunk of what were together perhaps hundreds of thin, purple tendrils waved… thin only in comparison to the creature’s bulk but each easily the width of a man’s forearm. Overall, the monster’s flesh appeared made of old, brown leather, pitted in places and wrinkled in huge, overlapping folds.

Rosalie could see nothing resembling a mouth. The alien sat before them, its building-sized sides slowly throbbing. Its tendrils rose in a banyan-tree bunch and waved in the air.

A Voice spoke.

Rosalie screamed again. The Voice came from everywhere, from the air, from the platform as it vibrated the necessary noises. It spoke in four or five tones at once, a chorus of sounds, the different phonations overlapping one another.

The Voice spoke, chaotically, as if trying to interrupt itself:

“They wanted to see her twist her, dark eyes tear and her mind with programmed instructions, chemical aphrodisiacs, or perhaps with programmed instructions—34 positions of all space groups to lattice complexes produces a total of 402 lattice complexes—earth/property agents/partners/humans rendered non-optimal/dysfunctional/property—13 21 55 89 Change in Status Change in Status.”

Rosalie just stared at the monster, uncomprehendingly. Her mother kept on screaming.

The platform flashed from silver to bluish-gray, a sudden light rearing up and turning the three of them a ghastly, ghostly pale shade. The pain in Rosalie’s side stopped abruptly, turned off like a switch.

She looked down, seeing her latex-clad form dimly reflected in the metal surface.

The pain was gone. Behind her, and slightly beneath her, she heard the Associate groan.

He could move! “It’s a Client,” he managed to whisper.

The Voice spoke again, a bewildering cacophony of different speeches, like a dozen radios playing at once:

“Criminal/poacher/slaver/celestra was/is/will be responsible query? perhaps with what they wanted to see her a person to enslave her climax for convenient and her person to see her, dark eyes tear and easily pushed to the bottom and her full mouth quiver with full mouth quiver with some slip of a slave.”

“What?!” Rosalie screamed, understanding at last that the creature—the Client (This is a Client?)—was trying to communicate something. She had heard the name Celestra in the mélange.

Another voice, this one sounding perfectly human, spoke, though again from out of nowhere. It sounded like the voice of a man sitting behind a desk in an office somewhere.

“I’ve been looking through your recommendations/genetic codes/electrodynamic thought processes, and I have to say I’m favorably impressed, Ms. Pitzler.”

Gordon tried to get to his feet but couldn’t find traction. Rosalie slid off of him, not noticing.

“I’m with the Partnership!” he yelled. “I’m an Associate!”

The Client spoke:

“144 233 377 Change in Status The ache of marriage thigh and tongue, beloved it throbs in the teeth—replacements/partners/agents required!”

“What? We don’t understand…”

“Change in Status It is leviathan and we in its belly looking for joy extended coordination vector can be used as a local topological constant.”

The light changed again, turning from a bluish-gray to a greenish-blue. Suddenly Rosalie found she couldn’t move. Her mouth had opened to yell out something—a plea, a threat, she didn’t know—and now it hung open in mid-speech.

From the corner of her eyes she could see her mother and the Associate similarly caught. The Client’s tendrils dipped down out of sight for a minute, then rose again. Two of them she saw were wrapped around familiar-looking tools.

Encoders.

Slaving modules.

“Humans/martin/rosalie acceptable/functional/optimal/replacements.”

No! Please God, NO! Rosalie struggled with all her might, but there was nothing she could do as the behemoth Client lowered the modules to her and Gordon’s foreheads. No, anything! NOOO!

The metal-plastic felt cool against her skin.

Momma!

There was a hum… and Rosalie’s universe exploded one final time.