The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

The Slavers

Chapter Seven

The Associate was a desperate man. It was the only reason he had taken such a desperate measure.

He had wasted an incredible amount of time back on Earth. The planet where Celestra had her Base—not the same Base which the Firm most regularly dealt with but one of innumerable others—must have been in a part of the universe where time moved much more quickly, relatively speaking, than to rates on Earth. Unfortunately, he had discovered this only after his return this morning. What had been three weeks for him had proven little less than a day back in Chicago. That was bad. That was very, very bad. Celestra had made no secret of her plans at the Base and its surrounding complexes. Her plans were too big to keep secret, and only days away from implementation when he’d left. While he had run around Chicago trying to get in touch with the Partners, who knew how much time he had lost?

At the warehouse, when he realized this, the Associate knew that if he had any chance of stopping the tall blond bitch, he had to go back then… right then, with no delay.

But there was no use kidding himself, either. He needed help.

Mysteriously, his superiors in the law firm of Frank, Bennet, Weschler, and Marx—the Partnership—had disappeared, no doubt the result of Celestra’s influence again. He could not stop the woman on his own. He had to take the Pitzler girl along with him.

Desperate measures.

It’ll work out, the Associate thought, the projection aftereffect blurring light around him. He felt a solid surface form beneath his feet again. All I’ve got to do is convince… .

The girl he was kidnapping stepped up and sprayed something in his face.

The Associate screamed. Blinding pain—a literally blinding pain—settled in his eyes, then his nose and mouth. He doubled over, losing his balance, and began flailing along the smooth, plastic floor they had materialized on. The world turned a sickening red-black color.

He screamed again, missing most of what the girl was yelling at him.

“… mother, you son of a bitch!?” The Associate tried to roll over, and that was when he felt the girl’s foot connect with his groin. He stiffened up. The young attorney tried to let out a third scream, but all he could make was a sick sort of groan. The pain in his face increased—his eyes had popped open automatically with the impact, and more fluid from the spray leaked in—and he shook like a fish out of water. The pain was unreal. He couldn’t think; he couldn’t breathe; he could barely move. It felt like his face was melting. It felt like someone had set fire to his groin. A monstrous, sickening weight settled into his stomach, and he tried to vomit but couldn’t, and that of course made it all even worse, trying to vomit and instead making only rough grunting noises. And then the girl kicked him again, once just wasn’t enough, this time in his side, right in the kidneys, and finally the Associate did scream again.

He felt like he would never stop screaming.

The world blurred again. This time it was not from projector effect.

“Where’s my mother?” he heard Pitzler say to him, barely. The teenager kicked him—this time she connected with solid muscle and the pain wasn’t quite so bad—and continued to kick him, emphasizing each point with a separate blow. “Where’s (kick) my (kick) mother!? (kick)”

All the Associate could do was gurgle at her.

“… christ, let up, let me…” he tried to say, but his voice was too low. She couldn’t hear him.

He felt something heavy land on his back. He fell even flatter to the cool floor.

His hand reached around for his belt, toward where he kept his immobilizer. He grabbed it, the tool fell out of his hand, and he groped around for it but missed.

She could kill him, he realized. Forget Celestra. Forget Celestra’s plans for Chicago.

This teenager could kill him right there and then. It felt like she was killing him. The Associate groaned in pain and dismay.

So severe was the pain he was in he didn’t notice when the attack stopped.

When this fact finally registered, the Associate tried to open his eyes. His first attempt failed. Even the dim lights of the deserted Base corridor scalded him, felt like needles were being inserted through his eyelids. He turned over and at last managed to vomit. In the distance, he could hear footsteps running. Bitch, you won, he thought, almost coherently. No need to run now.

But she was. The Associate steeled himself, found the wall, and pulled himself up into a sitting position.

Through a tear-stained blur he saw Rosalie Pitzler running off into the distance.

The Associate groaned, reached around, and picked up the immobilizer. He held it impotently as the girl fled down the huge corridor. He tried to stand up but couldn’t. He wished the immobilizers worked at a distance, like the projectors did. But they didn’t. And there was no good reason why they didn’t, in his opinion. The Clients could build interstellar teleporters, for God’s sake! Building paralyzers that didn’t require contact should have been child’s play for them. But, apparently, they didn’t want that. Immobilizing at a distance could be dangerous, he’d heard someone say once. People could fall and injure themselves. Suddenly driverless vehicles could cause death. The Clients had a thing about not causing physical harm. The only kind of sex games they didn’t like were those involving death or the threat of death. Everything else went, but never that. And, so, they never built weapons.

You had to find those yourself. Devices like their immobilizers and stunners worked only by touch.

Stupidity, the Associate thought, getting to his knees. In his experience, anything could be a weapon, just as anything, under the right circumstances, could be a turn-on. The Clients were definitely missing out on something. But who was he to argue? He had to get Rosalie back before someone here made her a slave.

She was the only hope Earth had.

Somehow, the attorney staggered to his feet and after a time was able to go limping after the teenager.

* * *

The women on the stage had resigned expressions on their faces. They knew what was going to happen, and they were not looking forward to it. Celestra watched from the stand above with no small amount of satisfaction, though. She was looking forward to this little demonstration.

“Begin,” the blond Amazon said, speaking quietly into her throat-mike.

The women thirty feet below tensed. Some of them shuffled from side to side nervously.

The stage they were on—an even twenty of them—had been raised above the level surface of the Grand Auditorium. The perpetual, purple-tinged night sky of the Base shone down upon them all. A certain sense of electrical pressure filled the air. A few seconds after Celestra’s whispered command, a bright, yellowish glow came into being around the stage. The projection effect surrounded the score of women and in an instant enveloped them, tinting their skin, hair, and clothes with an unnatural and seemingly internally generated radiance. For a moment, a very brief moment, it was as if they had been turned to glass. The light shone through them, making them each appear almost perfectly transparent.

Then the projection field took hold completely. The light intensified for a split second, the air popped with explosive decompression, and they were gone. Simultaneously, over two hundred feet away in a space cleared off by Celestra’s soldiers, the receiving field crackled loudly as it accepted the spatially transferred mass. The women rematerialized in a burst of green gas.

Celestra turned to the monitor next to her. She gave a short verbal command, and a consolidated image of what had just happened replayed in slow motion. The actual process of teleportation was nearly impossible to observe in real time. It happened too quickly for human senses to catch. This time, though, the leather-clad despot needed the enhanced detail. It was crucial every step in her plan was perfectly executed. The screen split into halves to display both the sending and receiving fields. As Celestra watched, she saw the projection effect appear in both locations nearly simultaneously, the one on the left showing the glow forming around the women, the one on the right appearing but a few milliseconds later and encapsulating empty space… making sure in fact that the space was empty in order to receive the projected material. Nothing would happen otherwise.

Celestra told the monitor to slow down even more.

On the left, the projection field sank into the women’s flesh, merging with it and causing their skin to shine with internal radiance. Their garments, however, were left untouched. Celestra had selected these herself from clothing she had seen the people of Chicago wear during her reconnaissance. Some, too, had been gathered from the lawyers and staff of Frank, Bennet, Weschler, and Marx, who, of course, would no longer be needing them. Most had received their second-stage programming by now, and the idea of wearing suits and dresses, functional but plain undergarments, and the like would have been painful to them. Nudity and pleasureware would be far more comfortable to their new personas. Their former outfits remained unaffected by the light while their current occupants began to fade into nothingness, like photographs developing in reverse. For a brief but clearly measurable moment, the suits, jogging pants, and dresses worn by Celestra’s bitches continued to stand upright after the soldiers finished teleporting out of them. The bizarre sight, captured by the monitor, raised a rare but honest grin of amusement on Celestra’s face. The hollowed-out clothes stood in precisely detailed poses as if worn by a group of invisible tourists. A woman’s purse floated in mid-air next to an unfilled but upright spring dress. A gentleman’s tie hovered at neck level like a waiting noose. A dozen other garments hung in similar display, caught like flies in transparent amber. Then gravity took its toll, and the various accouterments began to fall in slow motion. Celestra turned her attention to the right side of the screen.

Like movie images coming into focus, the dominatrix’s soldiers—stripped bare—materialized in the middle of the prepared area. Gas canisters set around the enclosure and tuned to release their contents when they sensed an incoming projection started spraying billowy green clouds of immobilizing gas, a chemical concoction Celestra had had developed in her labs. She told the monitor to speed up again slightly. She saw the women appear. They were confused, uncertain, denuded, and unsteadied by the abrupt deprivation of their clothes, borrowed though they were. Then they began to choke. Even with all their experience jaunting from world to world in Celestra’s service, none of them stood a chance. They fell to the floor like lemmings. Celestra spoke once more, and events proceeded in real time.

Soldiers waiting in a circle around the receiving area—properly leather and latex-clad as all the dominatrix’s bitches were, and inoculated against the chemical’s effects—swarmed in upon the victims, slaving modules in hand. They flipped their fellow soldiers’ faces up and encoded them with an ease gained from long experience. Practiced encoding them, anyway. These modules were only for show.

This time.

Celestra turned back to the platform’s edge. Her soldiers—the ones who could still move—stood at attention. Their uniforms, stiff corsets raising their breasts high while loop straps forced each into a hardened peak, gleamed liquidly beneath the stars and the Auditorium’s artificial lights. In multiple stands surrounding them, a thousand other similarly-clad women applauded briefly and then too came to attention in respect for their leader. Subordinate male workers in even greater numbers stood in precise rows below the latex-and-leather-clad women.

“That was excellent,” the blond giant in the main stand said, her voice amplified to overwhelming levels.

Outside of view, the hundreds of pleasure units programmed to recognize and respond to Celestra’s voice moaned in ecstatic submission. Their cries lent a carnal tenor to their Goddess’ report.

“The best so far,” Celestra said. “But there’s room for improvement. I want the next group ready for session in an hour… and I want to see some better times!” The Goddess brought her riding crop down in an imperative gesture.

“YES, MA’AM!!” the Auditorium roared. Everyone started moving.

The paralyzed soldiers on the field were picked up and carried off to recover. They had been one of the first groups to work the receiving end of the practice session. It was their turn to play the acquisitions. Celestra wanted all her troops to know what it was like from both sides. That way, they could anticipate what problems might arise. When the real operation went down, when all of Celestra’s bitches were waiting for the incoming cargo from the Earth city, she wanted no stupid mistakes. Those who made them would be joining the Earth humans in permanent bondage.

Celestra watched the frenzied-looking but actually very organized activity below with a wicked smile, one a bit more customary than the one she had worn before. Projecting the slaves-to-be without their clothes had proven a serious problem earlier. It was a standard practice for Slavers, of course, convenient and possible with only a slight modification to the settings of any handheld projector unit, but that was when dealing with one or two subjects at a time. With the numbers Celestra was expecting, scattered over a city-wide area, the modifications had become more complicated than she had liked. In the end, though, the problem was solved. She had known it would be.

That was the beauty with Client technology. It always worked. There was always a solution. Always.

Client machines were all the same: self-contained and semi-organic, a seamless mixture of metal, plastic, and other less identifiable materials, and impossible to take apart and figure out how they operated, even if one wanted to. They self-repaired too. If a piece of Client technology existed, and you had it in your hands, you knew right away it would work and that it was safe to be around. Otherwise, Client tools disintegrated, reducing themselves to their component atoms, poof, just as they did if they were ever broken into or damaged beyond their ability to regenerate. It was a neat and elegant system, Celestra had to admit, for preserving a corner on the interstellar market. The Clients maintained control over their Agencies, Firms, and whatnot scattered throughout the universe through this deliberately impenetrable technology. They paid off the same way, in the only commodity that had any real value between the stars—information.

How to do this. How to do that.

My, but that gadget sure would make my life easier.

My, but that other gadget sure would let me take over my planet easily. How much for it?

It was the basis of an economy, Client technology. That… and slaves, too, of course.

“Ma’am?” someone behind Celestra spoke. The dominatrix looked up from her reverie.

Her red-haired lieutenant Clio stood in the doorway, saluting. The two women were dressed alike: slick, ebony bustiers, high boots, and tight black panties, along with the usual whip, spiked collar, and firmly coiled hair. Aside from their hair color, the two women could have been sisters. They even had had some of the same genetic surgery to alter their body chemistries to produce heightened pheromones, a scent which drove slave and non-slave alike wild with sexual anxiety. Only Celestra’s yield was greater … and, too, Clio could still feel a modicum of real physical pleasure.

Celestra had sacrificed that away a long time ago. “Yes?” she said.

“Ma’am, the Governors of the Base wish to speak to you. They’ve expressed… concerns.”

The lieutenant snarled the last word, expressing clearly how much she thought of those concerns and the men—men!—who had dared approach her about them. Celestra snorted softly, amused as much by Clio’s reaction as by the news.

“I told you, didn’t I?” she said, turning back to the work scene below. “I’m merely surprised they waited so long.”

“Let me take a squad down and put an end to this once and for all,” Clio said. “They’re worms, each and every one of them, fit not even to lick our boots clean.”

Celestra shook her head, though she agreed with her lieutenant’s assessment completely.

“No, Clio. No.” She sighed and turned to face the redhead. “A situation like this requires a gentler touch than yours… a bit of subtlety.” She laughed. “Tell the Governors I’ll meet with them after the next session, say in two hours.” She met Clio’s eyes. “You shouldn’t let these things upset you, bitch. Remember: control. Control is everything.”

The lieutenant nodded slowly. “Yes, ma’am.” She saluted. “I’ll relay the message at once.”

“Yes.” Celestra resumed her observations. Behind her, the latex-clad redhead came to attention, spun on her high-heeled thigh-highs, and left to carry out her leader’s commands.

Subtlety.

Clio chuckled. Whatever her Mistress had in mind, she doubted a “gentle touch” would play a big part in it. Subtle just wasn’t in the bitch’s nature.

* * *

Rosalie ran not knowing where she was going.

It all happened so fast! One moment she was in that horrible warehouse, with the man who had done… done something to her at the hospital standing in front of her, claiming he knew where her mother was. The next thing she knew she was falling. Lights had flashed all around her. The floor seemed to disappear, and she fell into a bright light.

It was a long fall… but at least she had held on to her pepper spray!

Then she was kicking him, kicking the bastard, kicking him the way she had been taught at all those women’s defense classes her mom sent her to. Mom! That bastard had kidnapped her mother!! He knew where Mom was!

Then… then she wasn’t sure what happened next. She had grayed out for a minute, the way people do in extreme situations. Mom had told her that. Panic. Stress. Did it every time. Rosalie had started running. Running. Running and running. She felt a growing pain in her side.

The hallway she ran through was mostly circular in shape, though flattened at the bottom. The walls looked like white plastic. They glittered with that internal shine Rosalie associated with good plastics. Her mother knew a lot about plastics. She was a doctor. Hospitals used a lot of plastic. She had sat in Mom’s office one time while a man talked to her about buying plastic products. She had been… been what? twelve? fourteen? She couldn’t remember now.

She ran.

Rosalie came to a t-intersection and blindly went right, bumping into the far wall and bouncing off it. She got up and continued her run in sheer, undisguised panic. She made other turns at other intersections, looking for a way out.

Her chest started to hurt, and still she ran. Her legs… her legs… .

Dammit!! She wanted Mommy!

She ran, and, in the end, when she could run no farther, Rosalie collapsed in a raw heap, unable to run, unable to move, unable to think, her breath coming in strained, painful gulps. She vomited, choked, turned over and vomited again, remembering the bright flash and the way it had burned her eyes, the way it seemed to pass through her like an X-ray.

Rosalie Pitzler lay like a dead thing for many, many minutes.

After what seemed like forever, she tried to think rationally. She tried to collect her scattered thoughts. Something had happened to her back there. That man had been the same man who had grabbed her in the hospital parking lot. He had touched her with something then. She hadn’t been able to move. The next part was a blur… or almost a blur. Rosalie remembered feeling something like love or lust for that evil man. He questioned her. He questioned her about her mother. Then he told her to do things, and she had obeyed, blindly, feeling love, no, feeling such a powerful lust she shuddered in memory of the feeling. Rosalie remembered the calls she had made. She remembered packing her and her mom’s things. She remembered leaving a note saying they were going to be gone. She had closed all ties.

He was going to kidnap me, too, Rosalie thought, finally, clearly, pushing herself up with her hands. Her legs still felt like they were made of cookie dough, but at least she could breathe again. Think again. She had never run so far or so fast in her life. Kidnap me, she thought. And I was helping him. I was setting up my mom’s disappearance too.

The bastard had put something on her forehead. There must have been some kind of drug in it, or something. It had totally controlled her. But what about the warehouse, and the flashing light?

Rosalie trembled again, unable to think of a rational explanation for what happened to her. She couldn’t. Anyway, she didn’t have time! She had to find a way out of there! She had to find a policeman! She had to find a goddamned phone!

The teenager staggered to her feet and slowly began walking down the hallway.

When she felt like she was able, she jogged lightly. She didn’t think she could manage another sprint, but moving again was helpful. As she went, she noticed things a bit more clearly than she had before. The walls really were made of plastic. So was the floor. It was a bit rougher than the utterly smooth surfaces above and to her sides were, for better traction, she thought, but clearly it was the same stuff.

Rosalie had never heard of anyone using plastic like this before—or so damn much of it, miles of it easily—and the sterile coldness made her feel like she was underground.

It was perfectly silent, too, except… except for in front of her, where dimly she began to hear the wind.

Outside! There’s a way outside, she thought, and she tried to put on more speed. She leaned against the cool, slick wall for support. There’s gotta be someone outside who can help me!

The hallway branched two ways again. The blowing wind sounds came from the right.

Rosalie came to the corner and tottered around it… and immediately let out a bloodcurdling scream.

The hallway ended in an open archway. It did indeed lead outside to an open space with bare rock walls to either side and a densely star-packed sky above. But what Rosalie had mistaken for the sound of the wind came instead from the nightmarish creature sitting beyond where the white plastic corridor stopped. If the teenager had wanted, she could have reached out and petted the thing, it was so close.

Rosalie screamed and screamed again loudly.

The creature was like something out of a nightmare. The closest thing Rosalie could think of in order to describe it, if she had wanted to try and describe it, would be to compare it to a pile of giant maggots. The thing squirmed and fluttered beneath the night sky like a dozen white, pulpy, and huge sausage casings would if they had been filled with pus and hooked to a rotating fan. The thing gibbered. It quivered. A red, baseball-sized pustule broke open in one swollen tube, and Rosalie recognized the organ that came out as a kind of eye. It was looking at her. It was looking right at her, and it mewled something in a wet and soggy belch that blew a noisome stench directly into her face.

It moved forward toward her in a half-lurch, half-jump.

Somehow, despite her utter exhaustion, the teenager found the strength to run again.

She in fact flew down the other open hallway with a speed she could scarcely before have imagined. She heard a deeper mewling from the beast behind her, and somehow she ran even faster. She ran not merely because the thing outside was an indescribable monster, a thing no movie special effects person could ever have put together and make seem as real as that thing had been real, but because she knew—knew deep down in her heart—that whatever that thing was, it had tried to say something to her.

It had tried to talk to her!

Rosalie ran, lost in an atavistic, primordial terror of the unknown.

The endless corridor split again, and Rosalie raced left, away from the alien thing. Abruptly she found herself outside again in an another open clearing of rock. She looked up and saw a dazzling array of stars, like an astronomer’s picture of a dense globular cluster. The corridor she had come out of terminated like the opening of a cave.

Walls of natural stone stretched up and outward to either side of her for several hundred feet. Nestled between them the teenager saw a sight which her exhausted and terror-stricken mind could at first only register as the Gunsmoke town of Dodge City, from the reruns her mom had gotten her addicted to watching on late-night TV. The “town” in front of her looked like the Gunsmoke town—like all those stereotypical Western towns looked like on TV—because, like them, it was divided down the middle with those same huge, flattened building fronts to either side.

Rosalie blinked, and she saw the “town” for what it really looked like.

The buildings—made of plastic and metal, she saw, not wood—were to either side of her. Their back walls must have been flush with the bare rock. The town was built in a pocket of natural stone and formed a perfect valley, the open side of which led out into what looked like a dry desert. The other end, where Rosalie stood, lead into what had to be a mountain and the plastic-cave entrance she had come out of. Rosalie blinked again and felt another scream building in her throat. No alien monsters inhabited this town—the people she saw in it were clearly human beings—but they seemed like monsters to her nevertheless.

To her right, a man in black latex from head to foot raised a glowing metal staff, the end of which shone brightly blue. Before him a crowd of naked people knelt. Some squirmed, others coupled wildly, men and women, the women plump and oversexed, like living blowup dolls, the men with organs the size of a donkey’s, all with wanton and needy eyes.

To her left, a pair of thin, supermodel-gorgeous women in suggestive leather were talking to a man with yellow skin—really yellow skin, fluorescently yellow skin—and laughing in syrupy syllables the teenager thought sounded familiar.

Before her, Rosalie saw a settlement that looked like a cross between a circus sideshow and what she imagined the inside of an adult bookstore looked like. Some of the people looked normal, she saw. That was the truly awful part. They looked perfectly normal, like people she saw everyday in Chicago, dressed a little weirdly, but understandably people… and yet, at the same time, all around them, other people were fucking in the street, getting whipped and tied up in chains—God, that man over there’s naked! she thought. Tattooed!—and they acted as if it were all perfectly ordinary!

Rosalie saw a pair of things that at first she thought were dogs… and then she noticed they didn’t have any heads, just a pair of dangling, ropy tentacles where their heads should have been.

The woman standing on the corner looked like a zebra. Her skin was bright white with black stripes designed in curls and straight lines. She wore a collar around her throat.

Another man down the street was hovering in mid-air, floating like a Thanksgiving Day float.

Rosalie opened her mouth to scream… and for a second time she felt something cold press against her skin and render her paralyzed. The yell died in her throat. She fell over backwards bonelessly, unable to move, directly into the arms of the man who had kidnapped her mother.

The man who had kidnapped her and taken her to this horrible place.

No! she thought. Not again! Not again!!

Silently, apparently not wanting to draw any more attention to themselves, the kidnapper picked Rosalie up and carried her back into the plastic hallway. He breathed with a deep, pained grunting noise and walked in a semi-hunched over position. The teenager thought she must have really hurt him. She was glad. She tried to will her muscles to move and could not. After several minutes she stopped trying.

It was just like before at the hospital. She was totally frozen.

If he put that thing on her forehead again, Rosalie knew she would go crazy.

She had never hated anyone with as much passion as she hated the man holding her now.

He carried her through a bewildering array of corridors like before, though after a while these plastic hallways grew nowhere nearly as brightly lit. He was obviously taking her away from the town and that monster, an action which in at least one part of her mind Rosalie was profoundly grateful.

She had never seen such debauchery in her life.

Those were slaves, she thought, picturing the crowd of naked people near the entrance. No, worse than that. Those creatures weren’t even human. She tried to shiver and failed. They used to be human, the thought came to her. What kind of place was this?

After several minutes the two of them came to a small chamber with an open window revealing a desertlike landscape. The brief glance Rosalie had of the scenery was enough to confirm what she had already begun to suspect. She was on another planet. Somehow, in some way she could not fathom, she had been abducted by aliens from outer space, like in some cheap science fiction movie. A pornographic science fiction movie, she amended. Rosalie’s kidnapper put her down on the floor. There was no furniture. The room was as bare as a monk’s cell.

The man limped back and clutched at himself, groaning in pain. He stood by the window and drew cool air over his splotchy face. It was beet red in a strange mosaic pattern from his eyes down to his lips. It looked painful, and Rosalie liked that. You son of a bitch, she thought. Where’s my mother? What are you doing to us?

She would kill this man if she got the chance.

He might know where Mom is, though, she thought. She would torture him first, then, if she had to.

She wondered if she could. She wondered if she would.

As much as she wanted answers, Rosalie could admit to herself that part of her didn’t want to know. She felt like she was losing her mind. Her capacity for surprise had reached its limit, it felt like. She felt numb, and not just as a result of her paralysis. She felt like she was on the edge of some great abyss and was dancing along it carelessly, feeling the wind blowing across her face. All it would take to send her screaming over the edge was one little push.

Rosalie’s kidnapper turned and looked at her. He began to speak.

“My name is Martin Gordon,” he said. “I’m an attorney with the firm of Frank, Bennet, Weschler, and Marx. I’m an Associate.” Rosalie could hear the capital letter in the way he spoke.

He sounded absurd. They were on an alien planet… and she almost expected him to hand her his business card! She tried to inch away, but she remained frozen, paralyzed. The man held out the cigarette-lighter device he had used on her.

“In a moment, I’m going to free you. Please, please don’t do anything. I’m in no condition to fight you, but if I have to, I’ll immobilize you, over and over until we get it right.” He paused, as if waiting for an answer. Then, “Okay. I hope you understand.” He laughed shortly. “Believe it or not, but I want to help you and your mom.”

He smiled, then grimaced as if this change of expression increased the pain in his face.

Rosalie didn’t believe the man at all, but she was hardly in a position to do anything about it.

The man—Gordon—limped over to her and briefly touched her ankle with the device. Suddenly she could move.

And speak.

“You monster, you son of a bitch!” Rosalie screamed. She scrambled away and felt her back press up against the wall until she couldn’t go any further. “What’s going on?! Where’s my Mommy? Why am I here?!”

Tears fell in a rush.

“You’re here because I need your help.” The man raised his hands in a warding gesture and knelt down on the floor in front of Rosalie. “You have to listen to me. We haven’t got a lot of time, and if you ever want to see your mom again, or go home, you’re going to have to pay attention. You got that?”

He looked at her earnestly. “Have you got that?”

Rosalie nodded. “Yes,” she said, drawing her legs up and wrapping her arms around them as if she were a small child. “You’re a lawyer. You want to talk. So talk.” She sniffed sharply. “Tell me where my mother is. You did something to her, like you did to me in the garage.”

The Associate—Gordon—shook his head.

“Not me,” he said. “People connected with my firm grabbed your mom.” Pause. “They turned her into a slave.”

“No!” Rosalie sprang up and rushed at him. “You bastard!!”

Gordon leaned back when she tried to hit him and grabbed her wrists. He held her as she struggled. He was losing the fight. “Stop it!” he yelled at her. “Stop it!” He managed to push her back, obviously in pain yet holding his paralyzing tool in front of him. “Don’t try that again! All I have to do is touch you with this.” He raised the device warningly in her face.

Rosalie backed away again and realized only afterwards that she had put herself further away from the entrance. She would have to run past Gordon to get away—the window was far too small to climb through—and there was no way she could do that without being touched by him. So she stood there, shivering, waiting for an opportunity.

“Okay, then” Gordon said shortly, softly. “Okay then.”

He took a deep breath and coughed. “Let’s talk. Let’s talk about what you saw. Those things back out there.” He smiled. “You know, even if you did get past me, you’d only run into one of them again. Or something worse.”

“They’re aliens,” Rosalie said, softly too. “We’re on another planet.” Then she cried. “I want to go home!”

She tensed when the Associate seemed about to approach, to comfort her maybe. She quickly sniffed up her tears. “I want to go home,” she repeated, quietly but with greater sternness.

“That’s not going to happen, not yet anyway. I need your help. Your mom needs your help.”

Rosalie sniffed again. “Why are you dressed like that?” He still had on his red-and-blue spandex costume. “Where’s my mom? What has all this got to do with us?”

She felt the tears in her eyes again and tried to control them.

“Well, it all has to do with aliens, like you said,” Rosalie’s kidnapper said. “Aliens. Yeah, aliens.”

He coughed again and made an obvious effort to gather his thoughts. “Okay. Okay, my law firm represents aliens. Special aliens. We call them the Clients.”

Rosalie wiped her face.

“The Clients are aliens, like that Tuber Beast you saw outside.” With an effort, Gordon got up and went over by the window. He looked out across that weird and terrible landscape. Rosalie estimated her chances of getting away and didn’t think they were very good. “Different breed, though. I’ve never actually seen a Client. Few people have.”

He was silent for a long moment, thinking. Rosalie watched him plan what he was going to say.

Finally, he turned back to her.

“Okay. They’re telepathic. The Clients are telepathic. Not in that Uri Geller or John Edward shit way on TV, but neurally telepathic. The Clients have highly acute senses and the brains to match ‘em. They can sense the electrical impulses in a human brain and tell what they mean, translating the signals into thoughts, feelings, and emotions. At huge distances, too, and all at once, from everywhere.”

He saw the look on Rosalie’s face and tried again. “What I mean is, everybody’s brain puts out electrical signals. We can detect these through EKGs, but the Clients, they not only can do that at a distance, they can tell what those brainwaves mean. They can read people’s minds everywhere all at once… a whole planet of minds at once.”

“I don’t understand,” Rosalie said, fright and confusion in her eyes. “I don’t understand what this has to do…” Gordon waved his hand at her, interrupting her.

“I’m trying to explain,” he said. “Reading EKGs, brainwaves. That’s what the Clients do for entertainment. To them it’s like watching TV. A billion voices in their heads—if they have heads—and they get… get high on it or something.”

He paused for a moment. “The Clients look at people like us as property. No, less than that. We’re like pixels.”

Gordon stepped a little closer. “Those little points of light on a computer screen, you know? One at a time, they’re nothing, but together they make up pictures and words and everything else, and it’s the same way with the Clients. Each individual human mind—what it feels, what it thinks, what it experiences—helps make up a pattern only the Clients see, and they enjoy it. It’s what they do, day in and day out, watching us all the time.”

“They’re voyeurs,” Rosalie said, tears streaming down her face.

“Yes! That’s it exactly,” the Associate said, slamming a fist into his palm. Rosalie jumped.

“They’re voyeurs,” he went on. “The greatest voyeurs in the whole frickin’ universe.” He laughed again. “You see, it’s all about sex with them, too. When we have sex… no, I don’t mean you and me, I mean everybody, in general… the Clients experience it too. And they get the whole package: every orgasm, every touch, every moan, everywhere, over an entire planet’s population, simultaneously. Sex is everything to them, which is ironic, apparently, because from what I’ve heard they don’t get any themselves. They’re all neuters… genderless.”

He stepped up closer. “They study us. They live vicariously through us. They get to experience something they can’t do themselves. And that’s why it’s all like this, this planet, this… this costume,” he said, pointing down at himself, the tight spandex outlining his body’s physique perfectly. “Earth is a sex toy for the Client who owns it, the same one my firm represents. So is this planet for the Client who owns it, and so on, everywhere, all across the universe.”

Rosalie stood up slowly.

“That’s… that’s obscene,” she said. “That’s sick. That… that everything we do, everything we say isn’t private, that’s it… it’s…” She couldn’t go on. The concept was mind-numbing.

It was an offense to everything Rosalie had ever heard of.

“You’re saying they’re gods, aren’t you? They’re sex gods, lording over the whole fucking universe.”

“They’re not gods,” Gordon said. He approached Rosalie again, and she backed away from him again.

He tried to put his hands in his pockets, realized he didn’t have any pockets, nor that if he had would he have been able to use them, the latex being so tight and binding and everything, and, for lack of anything else, folded his arms across his chest. “They’re just aliens. They’re more advanced than we are… more advanced than any race I know of… but they need us too. My firm, other firms on other worlds, we take care of things for them. Make sure we don’t have nuclear wars or shit and ruin their reception.” The arm-folding felt unnatural, so Gordon tried putting them behind his back.

“It helps knowing the Clients don’t care about ninety-nine perfect of what we do or say, or wouldn’t understand it even if they did. They’re aliens. All they care about is sex.”

“And where does my mother come into this, you sick bastard?” Rosalie asked, anger and indignation rising to match her fear and confusion. She believed Gordon. She had seen too much already not to believe him. “She wouldn’t have anything to do with your sick masters.”

Gordon laughed shortly, humorlessly. “You’d be surprised at what she’d do now.”

Rosalie stiffened, and he raised his hands. “Hey… hey, I’m just sayin’ it like it is. You see, the Clients are like us in at least one other way too. They like variety.”

Gordon clenched his teeth, trying to say something in a way so it wouldn’t offend. He had no chance whatsoever.

“My firm’s Client, it’s a pretty vanilla sort, I guess. It’s content with the way things are, by which I mean to say is pretty normal sex. Other Clients, though, they’re into other things.” He began counting out on his fingers. “Bondage. Male dominance. Female dominance. Kinky stuff… you name it. Leather. Plaster. Dripping wax… I mean, everything.”

He began pacing. “To each their own, and they all have their own places for it, their own worlds somewhere with their own populations, which they telepathically dip into and experience.”

Rosalie stared at him. He surely didn’t sound like any attorney she knew.

Gordon shrugged. “Yeah, I agree. It’s pretty fuckin’ weird, but there it is.”

He took a deep breath without coughing finally. “Sometimes the Clients trade. Or, rather, they allow a certain amount of trade between their worlds, for variety’s sake. That’s where your mom comes into this, Rosalie.” He hesitated, then plunged forward. “You see… some of the Clients prefer… that is, they’re into… sexual slavery.”

Rosalie’s eyes widened in horror as he spoke. “Some Clients get off on feeling all the dominants in a world take charge. Or maybe they like experiencing the slaves’ perspective. I don’t know. Maybe both. In any case,” he went on, “there’s a huge, huge amount of slaving going on between the worlds. The slavers use mind-altering technologies. They abduct people, and then they make them like having been abducted. They make them like being slaves.” He lifted his chin. “You remember what happened in the garage? What that device I put on you made you feel? Well, it’s like that, only permanent, more intensive. My firm… my Partnership, one of the main things we do, aside from caretaking, is making sure the slavers don’t disrupt our Client’s Property World. Earth.”

“My mom… Mom is here?” Rosalie remembered the whores—the slaves—she had seen outside.

She remembered what she had felt in the garage. “She’s… you turned her into one of them?”

She felt sick. She was so full of rage, so full of fear, she couldn’t think straight.

She didn’t know how to react. She wanted to scream. She wanted to rip Gordon’s testicles off.

She wanted to plead with him to take her home. She wanted to forget everything!

“The bitch who owns—owns—your mother now is called Celestra.” Rosalie looked up at him again.

“She’s the one who grabbed your mother and converted her. She’s planning to do the same to other people, too, all over Chicago. That’s why I need your help. We’re the only ones who can stop her.”

He waited expectantly for the teenager to reply, but all Rosalie could do was stare at him.

All she could do was stare at the strange man, stare at him as if she were still paralyzed.

* * *

Celestra strode into the large, austere audience chamber as if she owned it, high walls, tapered ceiling, and occupants combined. The Base’s Governors, seated in a semi-circle behind a long, curving table across from the door, shifted nervously. Clio and another leather-and-latex-clad officer bitch took up positions of attention behind their leader.

“Mistress,” the leader Governor opened, standing. “Welcome, and may I say…”

“You called. I came,” Celestra interrupted. “State your business.”

The Governor sat down again, deflated. He looked to his colleagues for support, four on each side. They were a handsome-looking group: young and athletic, with bronzed muscles tanned and smoothly flexing beneath slick plastic robes. Their teeth and hair glittered with health and surgical perfection. They looked like a group of twentysomething, California beach boys, Celestra observed, meeting the faces of each as she ran her eyes over them.

California beach boys in white raincoats, she amended mentally and grunted disdainfully. How dreadfully pathetic they were. Though all three women had been disarmed before being allowed in, it was clear to them how scared these puny men were.

Celestra’s eyes gleamed.

“Very well, mistress,” another of them said, taking over. “It has come to our attention you plan on acquiring en masse several hundred slaves from the Property World named, er… Dirt.” He folded his hands in front of him. “Perhaps several thousand slaves, even, and all at once.”

“Tens of thousands, to be accurate,” the blond Amazon said, nodding and tapping a shiny boot on the floor. The sound was obscenely loud in the nearly empty room. “From one of their cities. Chicago, it’s called.”

There was a rustle of hastily whispered comments among the robed men.

“How?” one of them asked, and the Governor who spoke last glared at him.

Celestra shrugged and made a motion toward Clio.

The red-haired lieutenant said, “The city is wrapped in a net of reality-softening tachyons. Our generators are beaming power to bolster the local projector relay there. We’ve modified that onsite relay too with inductive equipment.”

“None of that matters,” the other Governor said, cutting off the explanation. “What does matter is this… this Dirt’s Client. It’s not going to like having tens of thousands of its subjects taken away. Nor will its Agency there.”

“Earth,” Celestra corrected patiently. “The planet is called Earth.”

“It doesn’t matter!” the Governor shouted, getting to his feet. Clio and the other officer tensed, but Celestra made another gesture, a small one that was too fast for the men to see. The women relaxed again, marginally.

“And what will our Client do?” the official went on. “You can’t steal that many slaves from another Client and expect nothing to happen. There’ll be complaints, actions taken… credits withdrawn…”

“All of which you will take care of,” Celestra said calmly, stopping the man in mid-diatribe. “As you always knew you would,” she continued, stepping forward, her boots falling heavily. “Don’t insult me further by claiming you had no knowledge of my plans.” She glared at the young, studly brotherhood. “I came to you years ago for permission to build my complex here and use your projection relay in my operations. I’ve contributed more credits—slaves—into your pockets than any other, more legitimate operator… and you’ve gone along, complicity, with your Client fully aware of my activities.” She stood arrogantly. “Your Client either approves of me already, or, more likely, doesn’t care.

“You, on the other hand, want to jack up your percentage, and that’s not going to happen.”

“We control the relay here,” a Governor said. “We can cut you off…”

“Linn,” Celestra said quietly, addressing her second officer. The bitch raised her hands and pressed her fingertips together in a complex motion, activating the cybernetic equipment implanted in one of her arms. Many of Celestra’s soldiers possessed such body modifications, whether genetic, electronic, or other, in emulation of their powerful leader.

The lights dimmed. The invisible but protective force screen preventing the trio of dominatrixes from approaching any further than the desk collapsed with a weary, humbled noise. The holographic display it generated went with it, thereby revealing the Governors’ true appearances in all their spectacular lack of glory. They were, for the most part, older men in their fifties or sixties. None were anywhere near as young as they had appeared to be but moments earlier. Two were quite large, the one on the furthest right exceeding three or four hundred Earth pounds. Another was totally bald and had bad teeth. Another had a bluish complexion, no doubt the result of some carefully cultivated and exotic nonterrestrial disorder. There was a prejudice among members of their Colonist class for most genetic and/or bodysculpting technologies, particularly those that altered or improved appearance. In their minds, only slaves were so enhanced. Too much physical perfection, to them, was a hallmark of slavehood. It was an indicator that their bodies too could be sold and adapted at a whim.

Celestra didn’t hold with this notion at all.

Casually, not hurrying, she came to the table, reached over it with one leather-gloved arm, and pulled the complaining Governor toward her. She lifted him as easily as she would a plush toy. His eyes widened with pheromone shock. The man blubbered and became sexually excited at the same time.

“Listen,” Celestra said. “I control the largest armed force on this entire planet. If I wanted to, I could reduce your Base to rubble and its citizens to slaves. What you’re going to do to convince me not to do this is what you’ve always done in the past. You’ll intervene with the Clients. You’ll smooth any ruffled feathers.” The Governor frowned, not understanding the colloquialism, and Celestra said again, “Ease any hurt feelings. Arrange compensations. Do whatever you need to do. And when I’m done I’ll deliver you one million new slaves, encoded and ready for processing.”

Single-handedly, then, literally, she flung the Governor back into his seat.

“And that’s the deal,” she said. She then turned and with her lieutenants stalked off. On their way out, the Governors heard Celestra say something that sounded like, “See, subtlety,” to her lieutenant.

No one tried to stop them. No one dared. It was a long time before the committee could even speak again.

It didn’t matter. None of them needed to discuss Celestra’s deal further anyway.