The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

The Slavers in Pursuit

Chapter Five

Ealic nuzzling at her hand, the woman from Molos came to a decision.

She stared out at the immense skyline of Chicago. There was something inside her that had always enjoyed looking down from a height upon others. She rather liked this Earth with its towering buildings. She resolved to have one constructed in Kedia when she got back.

The combat-thrall whimpered from its position beside her. She petted it.

Nagh and his men weren’t coming back, she knew that now. They had failed, again. She would have to search for that emerald abomination herself. In a way, though, she was sanguine with the idea. Nagh hadn’t wanted to say it to her, but in the privacy of her own thoughts she could admit it. She and this femthrall would think alike, naturally. She should be able to anticipate what the creature would do.

Turning from the window, the Molosian picked up a silvery projector and examined it. She knew how easily chronal frequencies could be traced by those with the right equipment. There was nowhere the bioslut could go where she couldn’t be followed. She mused. When she first found out what Nagh had had done, she almost ordered his execution on the spot. She had even daydreamed about projecting the Procurer Captain into orbit. It was too bad Client projectors would only send living things places where they could survive on their own, where the conditions on arrival wouldn’t automatically kill them.

Instead of killing him, she allowed herself to be persuaded he could find his errant creation faster than anyone else. She should have known better. She hoped she ran into him before leaving this world.

Her Ealic was getting hungry.

She would feed both her former bodyguard and his creation to her pet, as she had intended to from the beginning. And then she would go home and leave this embarrassing incident in her career behind her forever. With this resolution firmly in mind, the Processor from Molos picked up her gear, adjusted the range of her projector to include both her and her thrall, and teleported away in pursuit.

* * *

Sitting on a park bench at night in a foreign city, feeling the hard planks beneath her soft and yielding thrallflesh, watching the deliciously male constituents stroll past her, Miyal pondered her next move.

Beside her, Captain Met mewled plaintively. As best she could, with the cooling languor of an anti-aphrodisiac chilling her veins, Miyal ignored him. A teenage couple arm-in-arm walked into view. The male was tall, broad shouldered, and muscular. He hadn’t shaven, and Miyal became fascinated by the rough stubble of his chin. The female, too, though, was attractive. Smaller than her man, she had large, perky breasts and a fine-looking love cradle. Her hair was as long and drawn out as any proper constituent’s should be, yet it was a curious shade of purplish-blue which Miyal normally associated with thralls. Miyal felt the heat rise within her. As the couple on their way to the Carmel and Creeme concert passed her, they saw the Tammy Faye lookalike open her legs obscenely and clutch her ample bosom. Her fingers fondled her erect nipples beneath the ultra-green dress she wore. The couple shivered. One of them said, “Gross!” The old lady snapped her teeth at them as they hurried away.

They remarked to one another later that the woman looked as if she had wanted to eat them.

Miyal watched their handsome hindquarters depart. Met whimpered again.

“Oh, very well,” she said and spread her thighs wider for him. “You may serve me.”

The heavily thralldosed Procurer at once lowered his face to Miyal’s lap and licked at her engorged vulva. Miyal studiously ignored the shocked expressions of the people hurrying past them.

It was clear she could no longer remain on Californ… No, the name of this planet is Earth, she thought, Braffordly. She could no longer remain on Earth.

She had hoped to thrall the necessary people here to give her access to chemicals and medical equipment. No matter that their technology was primitive, she was confident she could have produced enough anti-aphrodisiac to maintain her hormonal sanity. In the back of her mind, too, Miyal had held out the possibility of even making a permanent home here. It didn’t matter that she hated almost everything there was on Earth. She could, she was sure, with enough thrallextract, have made a tolerable life in exile for herself, if it came to that. But now that possibility was denied her. Knowing that Procurer teams had tracked her here meant capture was inevitable if she stayed. She had to leave this world as soon as possible.

Miyal shuddered. It was so hard to think, though. To plan. Wahinan Met’s tongue savagely licked and penetrated her. What did she have to do next? She glanced vaguely at her oversize bag. What was it about coordinates? Chronal frequencies? Her hand gripped Met’s hair, and she pushed him deeper into her. She hissed in pleasure.

The memory came to her, finally. Through sheer luck, Miyal had managed to acquire another working projector. But, as it was, she couldn’t use it to leave Earth. She didn’t know the proper chronal frequencies to access the projector relay this world’s Agency used to control their outgoing offworld traffic. Relays were a failsafe of Client technology. While handheld projectors were extremely powerful tools, they were limited by power constraint to planetary operating ranges. For interplanetary travel, the Agencies placed in trust by the Clients over their worlds used power-boosting relays to augment their projectors’ reach. Getting to any particular planet was easy. Leaving one without permission was much more difficult. Without knowing which frequencies the Earth Agency left open—and there were millions to choose from—Miyal was stuck. Originally, she had planned to approach the local Agency secretly, over time, once she was better settled, and negotiate a way off planet. Miyal knew she no longer had the time for that. She had examined Met’s projector, but he didn’t have the right code either.

The captain had proven very forthcoming with his secrets after the extra powerful doses of thrallextract she had given him. His contact here, a man named “Martin Gordon,” still had the code. They had some clandestine transaction underway concerning the thralling of this Gordon’s rival. If Miyal had known where this tenant was, she would have enslaved her and given her to the Gordon herself for the code!

Met’s probing grew even more insistent. Miyal moaned and resisted the impulse she felt to kiss the disgusting—but so manly and handsome!—Procurer. All Met’s projector had done for her was take her to the Earth city the local Agency was based in. That, at least, was convenient, for, having no other choice, Miyal knew now she would have to steal the right chronal coordinates from someone here.

Tonight she would use the Procurer’s talent and equipment to track a local Agent and… .

“What’s going on here!?”

Miyal glanced up. Two uniformed shocktroopers had approached them. Policemen, the Brafford-tutor in her head instructed her. Their hands were on their controlsticks (Nightsticks, she Braffordized), and they carried projectile weapons on their belts. They looked upon her and the Captain in disgust. Heedless of the eyes upon him, Met continued to shamelessly service his mistress.

“For God’s sake, stop that!” one of the officers said.

“We have a report of the two of you performing lewd acts in public,” the other said, simultaneously.

Miyal smiled. Though their revulsion was apparent, already she could see the men’s nostrils flaring in that distinctive way indicating a reaction to her thrallbody’s pheromones. She considered. They were a strapping pair of men. Muscular. Scrumptious. Their penises were already hardening beneath their uniforms. It occurred to Miyal that having a pair of police officers at her beck and call might be useful.

In more ways than just the one.

* * *

Rose was greeted with curses as she entered the room.

“No, no,” she said, calmly walking up to the man strapped to the table in the center. The Firm had found it convenient on occasion to have a private surgical suite on its premises. The room, with its medical equipment, cabinets full of drugs, and adjustable bed, looked as if it had been lifted in its entirety from a major hospital. “I don’t understand a word you’re saying. Perhaps if you used Language you might convey your points across better.”

The man—one of the intruders from her apartment—continued snarling at her in untranslated Molosian.

His seven-foot frame tensed with effort as he attempted to break the straps around his wrists and ankles. His bonds, heavy canvas reinforced with industrial plastic, were in no danger of tearing, though. Rose tilted her head to one side in a coquette manner. She let her dusky eyes trail over the large man’s naked and muscled body. The intruder looked like a younger, handsomer Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Casually, Rose traced her dark fingernails over the Molosian’s chiseled abdomen. She swirled her middle finger around his navel, then lightly drew her hand to the thick and springy thatch of hair around his genitals. The man’s eyes met hers, and she saw a touch of fear. The Molosian’s scrotum retracted and formed a tight little wrinkled package. Rose stroked it once and immediately elicited a short groan from the now helpless man. His penis jutted forth. The tip glistened with moisture. Slowly, languorously, Rose slipped her fingers around the man’s massive shaft. She smiled at him.

Squeeze. He jerked like a rodeo bull released from the stall.

“You and I have something to discuss,” Rose said using the liquid syllables of Language. “It need not be unpleasant. I might even allow you to go home when we’re done.”

The man’s reply was pure venom. Its tone more than made up for Rose’s lack of comprehension.

“Very well,” Rose said. She put muscle into her grip, her face not changing expression. The Molosian growled through his teeth. The bed creaked with his strain. The man’s efforts to escape turned him red all over. Sweat shimmered on his brow and chest. Rose loosened her hold for a moment, then resumed it strongly enough to force the captive to cry out. Despite his size and obvious warrior heritage, a child’s tears came to the man’s eyes. His head pounded against the edge of the table as much as the restraining collar around his neck allowed him. Rose tilted her head to one side again, looking for all the world like a schoolgirl examining a not so particularly interesting or challenging biology project. The man tried to spit at her, but all he managed to do was dribble slobber down his chin.

He cried out again. Rose began loosening her grip, squeezing again, loosening, squeezing, all the while maintaining the same utterly bland look. She might as well have been milking a cow. After a moment, with her other hand she picked up the stimulator lying on a nearby tray.

“Do you remember this?” she asked. The man groaned. “Ah, I see that you do.”

She pressed the stimulator against the man’s arm and activated it. The captive shook as if galvanized with electricity. Fluid shot into the air. Rose carefully positioned herself to avoid any mess.

“That was pleasure,” she said offhandedly. With one hand Rose made an adjustment to the device’s meter. “This is pain.” She touched him with the device again.

The physical reaction, so far as she was able to determine, was exactly the same. Ironic, that.

“Pleasure,” Rose said, using the stimulator again. Her captive shuddered.

“Pain.” Another shudder. The Molosian made plaintive baby-noises.

“Pleasure.”

“Pain.”

She continued like that for several more minutes. The stimulator worked through direct nerve induction. As a result, Rose’s captive didn’t have the luxury of passing out. After twenty minutes—ten probably would have been enough, but Rose wanted to be sure he was well and completely addicted—she put the small device back on the tray and went into the adjoining room to check on her first “patient.” She studiously ignored the cries of needy anguish behind her. In the other room, the first intruder was still immobilized. He lay on the restraint table without restraints because the nerve impulses to the voluntary functions of his body were temporarily neutralized. He couldn’t even blink his eyes. Around the man’s forehead a gleaming silvery band was attached. The Client recorder was operating in passive mode only, simply scanning. Rose had no intention of actually copying anything from this man’s mind and inserting it into her own. That would have given her everything she needed to know, and quickly, but it was a risk she had no intention of taking. She didn’t even like using software taken from the Internet. There was no way she was going to insert unfiltered memory data into her own nervous system.

A computer nearby instead received the telemetry from the recorder. As she gazed upon the second intruder, Rose debated again her decision to not just encode the other with slave programming and be done with it, as she had done with this fellow. After taking care of some personal business, she had given him his first-stage dose of instructions an hour ago. That laid the groundwork for the new persona. She would provide a second dose after his brain finished assimilating the neural energy and had formed the necessary pathways for the more extensive download. The process was very much like what had been done to her a year ago.

Rose remembered how interminable the wait between encodings had been, feeling herself paradoxically growing weaker and stronger. Rose remembered the girl she had been. She had all of Rosalie Pitzler’s memories. She knew the silly twat’s likes and dislikes, her fears and petty affections, even her now meaningless dreams. None of that meant anything to Rose. She held no emotional attachment to them whatsoever. Rosalie Pitzler’s life was like something Rose might have read in a book, the intricate details of a character from a Russian novel. Rosalie Pitzler was as dead and buried as Anna Karenina.

Rosalie, for instance, would never have tortured somebody like this. That, if nothing else, proved which was the stronger and more deserving personality. After this Molosian was as broken as his comrade—different methods, same results—Rose would question him too and get the answers she sought.

Checking the telemetry, she saw that the slave programming in his head was making its usual progress. It would be hours yet before he was ready to be interrogated, though, let alone receive the download that would transform him forever into a willing pleasure slave.

She returned to the first man. When he saw her approaching, the mighty warrior from Molos began to blubber. Rose dangled the stimulator in front of his face.

“Let’s try again. Do we or don’t we have something to discuss now?”

It turned out this time they did.

* * *

Already half an hour late for their show’s set-up, Carmel and Creeme left their adjoining hotel suites after six. They walked surrounded by bodyguards and their fretting manager, Philip. The latter was speaking into a cellphone, reassuring Soldier Field they were at last on their way. The manager’s face was pale. He was sweating copiously.

The singers were in costume. Jami had ditched the thigh-high boots for garters and nylons with strips down the back. She also wore a different type of corset, one that lifted and spread her breasts more so than the one worn previously. Instead of opera gloves, she now wore lacy ruffles around her wrists and diamonds on her fingers. Lexie, similarly, had changed from her gladiatrix outfit to her more customary red and black costume, a leather outfit that squeezed her already shapely body into an even greater hourglass shape. Oddly, she still had on the previous costume’s tiara. One of the duo’s many clothing handlers had located it and brought it in, or so the bodyguard said when he knocked and handed the ornament to the black singer. Jami thought the tiara didn’t fit with the rest of her partner’s outfit at all.

Lexie was acting very odd. She hadn’t said a word in hours.

The seven of them rushed down the hallway to the elevators. The doors were already open, held apart by an eighth man, another bodyguard, at the end of the hall. Two bodyguards went in first, then the singers’ manager. After him, the two singers climbed in, swiftly followed by their remaining tough guys.

Someone pressed the garage-floor button.

Just as the elevators doors were closing, Lexie, whom Philip had also thought was acting strangely subdued—she was uncharacteristically quiet for once—suddenly gave a delighted shout, grabbed Jami by the wrist (“Ow!”), and rushed back between the doors as they shut.

“Let’s have some fun!” she yelled and dragged her shocked, smaller partner down the hall.

“What the hell… !?” Jami Forero exclaimed, though already she had begun to smile a little.

“Let’s have some fun!” Lexie repeated.

In the elevator, Philip and the surprised bodyguards wasted a valuable second looking at one another before hitting the STOP button. “Shit!” the manager shouted. “We don’t have time for this!” The car lurched to a halt, but by the time the five of them got the doors open it was already too late.

Lexie pulled Jami toward the stairway entrance. Jami anticipated a mad dash down the stairs to meet their manager and bodyguards, then harshly berating their employees for not staying with them.

On the other side of the staircase door, apparently waiting for them on the landing, a pretty blond girl stood. In her hands, the girl held a silvery, metallic oval-shaped tool. She lifted the tool as the door opened. The expression on her face was resigned and sorrowful.

“What are we doin’, Lex?” Jami asked, glancing once at the blonde and dismissing her. “Are we racing down or what?” It wouldn’t have been the first such game they had played with the hired help.

Lexie’s face was unreadable. “Let’s have some fun!” she yelled a third time.

Jami looked at her. Lexie’s eyes were glazed. “Let’s have some fun!” she said again, drunkenly.

The wide smile seemed stitched onto her face.

“Are you okay?” Jami asked, a half-understood concern coming to her. She took one step back.

The singer might have said something more had she the opportunity, but as she backed up the blonde behind her touched Jami with her free hand. The muscles in Jami’s body came undone. She collapsed into the blonde’s waiting arms, at once unable to move, unable to speak, unable even to blink her eyes.

She had been turned into a limp ragdoll.

“Let’s have some fun!” Lexie Rowson said. She blinked. The routine in her mind turned over yet again. “Let’s have some fun!”

“God, I hate this,” Tiffany said. Arms still wrapped around the immobilized Creeme, she lifted the Slaver’s projector and depressed the trigger. A flash filled her eyes. The floor beneath Tiffany seemed to slip away, though she didn’t fall or lose her balance in the slightest. In fact, to Tiffany, it was as if the world were moving about her, not the other way round. It didn’t feel as if she were going anywhere at all. By the time the bodyguards searched the landing for their playful employers, though, the three of them—Tiffany, Carmel, and Creeme—were long gone.

The bodyguards cursed and headed downstairs. It wasn’t the first time they had had to chase their playful employers down like this.

Meanwhile, one flash of incandescent light later, a light so bright it should have been painful, though it wasn’t, the landing was gone, and Tiffany and the others were three floors down in another room. They had stayed inside the hotel, materializing in the same suite the Chief Slaver had rented earlier for his “hooker-and-john” game with Tiffany the previous evening. The bodyguards had by this time only managed to open the elevator doors.

The Chief Slaver looked upon the suddenly arrived girls. He smiled beatifically.

“Right on time,” he said, glancing quickly at his watch. “We have to hurry. They have to be downstairs again in five minutes.”

“Yes, Master,” Tiffany said. She gently lowered Creeme to the floor. It was the least, and practically the only, good thing she could for the girl now. The singer’s eyes were a strange blend of the expressionless and the terror-stricken, a combination possible only under the cruel effect of an immobilizer.

“They are going to be so hot,” the Chief Slaver said, to himself and certainly not to Tiffany. “We’ll have customers from everywhere in the universe wanting to use these two.”

Tiffany walked up behind the statuesque Carmel (“Let’s have some fun!” she was still uttering in a chirpy, mindless voice). Once he was sure the blond slave had a firm grip on her, the Chief Slaver used his own immobilizer to paralyze her. The singer slumped bonelessly into Tiffany’s arms.

The Chief Slaver removed Carmel’s tiara. With a blunt application of force, he snapped the plastic trinket into pieces, allowing the pre-programmed compellor inside to fall into his hands. The compellor resembled a small, Band-Aid-sized strip of metal. Like all Client technology, though, the material of which it was really made was immune to analysis. Compellors induced a hypnotic trance in people by tapping into their sexual desires. Any instruction given while under one’s influence was reinforced with the same level of interest one usually gave his or her own sex life, which, on the whole, usually meant quite a bit of interest. They were perfect tools for getting people to follow simple commands. On the other hand, the changes compellors made were surface only. They didn’t work well when the orders were complicated or involved action. If they had, Tiffany could have programmed the duo’s bodyguards into capturing the singers instead of doing it herself.

She had only used her compellor simply, first to gain access to the duo’s clothing and insert the preset device into the tiara, then to convince one of the bodyguards to give it to Carmel.

She wished she hadn’t needed to use the Client device at all. Usually, she knew, high-profile acquisitions like Carmel and Creeme were performed in a way maximizing safety and convenience. As a rule, the targets were taken at night while they were asleep. The Chief Slaver, though, wanted these girls serving in the House yesterday. There was already a demand for them, apparently.

Tiffany’s Master put away the compellor and took from another pocket two ball bearing-sized spheres. They were shiny. Tiffany bit her lower lip powerlessly.

She remembered the insertion of her own brain plug. Everything else that had happened that night was <forbidden knowlege> blocked, but she remembered that much at least. She remembered how cold and metallic the plug had felt pressed against the skin at the base of her skull. She remembered how tightly the… the <forbidden knowlege> person had held it, almost as if she (she?) had wanted to push it in. Then, slowly, gradually, the plug had sunk into Tiffany’s flesh, pushed in through the pressure of her captor’s fingers.

Tiffany remembered wanting to scream and not being able to. No pain had been involved, at least none in the ordinary sense of the word. Tiffany had felt the device move beneath her skin, though, that horrible night, and the feeling was awful beyond words. The plug had burrowed through her as a maggot might through a soft apple, sliding between muscle and bone. She had felt it traveling. No matter what the doctors said about the brain having no perception of pain or sensation, Tiffany had known instantly when the tiny metal sphere entered her gray matter. For a moment, it was as if her head were under a great pressure, as if her skull were filling up with fluid. Then, abruptly, the feeling disappeared, and with it the sensation of having something foreign inside her.

The plug was still there, though.

The plug would always be there, controlling her, dominating her, making her a slave.

She hated it. And now she was going to watch the insertion done to others.

If she hadn’t been ordered not to, Tiffany would have been sick.

The Chief Slaver held up the first shiny sphere. In his other hand he gripped a controller. He depressed a trigger on the flat octagon, and the plug softly went ding. Tiffany shuddered. Bending down, the Chief Slaver’s fingers traced the knob of Carmel’s shoulder blades and pressed the tiny ball against the base of her head. Tiffany saw the brain plug pass through the singer’s dark skin like a sieve. Her flesh not so much opened to receive the small object as it simply absorbed it. The sphere’s passing left no hole to mark its progress. Tiffany herself remembered only a slight warm spot on her neck where her own plug went in, caused no doubt more by her enslaver’s delicate fingertips than by the insertion itself.

Carmel done, the Chief Slaver moved on to Creeme. Her enslavement was completed just as quickly.

And that, Tiffany knew, was that. From this moment on the singers were mere fucktoys, like her. The plugs settling in their brains would control every thought and memory that passed through their heads. The Chief Slaver depressed a combination of keys on the controller, then used his immobilizer to release the girls from their paralysis. Instead of climbing to their feet and screaming, as Tiffany recalled wanting to do weeks (weeks?) ago, the singers instead placidly turned to face their new Owner.

The Chief Slaver used the controller. The singers knelt on their knees and thrust out their chests. Their hands went to their thighs, and they looked up at their Owner in awe and wonder. Rapidly, Tiffany’s Master went through a series of what Tiffany had come to know were maintenance checks to see if the neural connections were forming properly. With each formula entered into the device, the girls assumed a new and provocative position: standing with their chests pushed out and their asses high; on their backs with their legs spread wide in invitation; on their knees with their mouths open and accepting.

They had gone from free and independent women to wind-up toys, all in the space of a minute.

Tiffany felt the tears in her eyes. Without thinking, she reached for a Kleenex to preserve her makeup.

The Chief Slaver tapped the controller again. At the behest of an unspoken command, Carmel climbed to her feet, stepped toward the man who now controlled her life, arranged her body sinuously, and spoke:

“I am a slave. A slave’s purpose is to be fucked.

“I want to be fucked. I need to be fucked.

“Please, master. Please, fuck your slave.”

Tiffany could see beneath the skin-tight costume the way Carmel’s nipples tightened. She noticed too her quicker intake of breath and the swift flush that came to her face. She could even smell the singer’s suddenly onset arousal. It would be but the first of many such humiliating stimulations, as Tiffany knew from personal experience. And they would never end.

And I helped do this to her, she thought miserably. God, she hated being a slave!

“I never get tired of hearing a woman say that,” the Chief Slaver said. “I might have them put it to music and sing it to me.” He neurally commanded Carmel to her knees again, then had Creeme make the same recitation. Tiffany inched back, futilely hoping to go unnoticed, but, of course, her Master saw her. With a flick of the wrist, he had her perkily mincing toward him.

Tiffany’s lips moved without her volition.

“I am a slave,” she said. “A slave’s purpose is to be fucked.

“I want to be fucked. I need to be fucked.

She fell to her knees, staring up into the suddenly godlike presence of her Master. The heat bloomed between Tiffany’s thighs as she said these awful things, as the degrading words forced their way out of her mouth. Her nipples tightened, and she could smell her own arousal. She abruptly began perspiring.

“Please, Master. Please, fuck your slave.”

“Since you beg so prettily, Tiffany, I will most certainly do so,” the Chief Slaver said, smirking. He took her left breast in hand and squeezed her harshly through the sheer dress. “Later… maybe.”

“Thank you, Master,” Tiffany replied, hating the servile tone in her voice, yet grateful for even the possibility of being ravished later. It would be just like him to arouse her and then leave her untouched, boiling.

The Chief Slaver examined the controller’s readout. “You did a good job, Tiffany,” he said offhandedly, distracted by the information he was reading. “You’re a good girl.” A rush of pleasure surged through Tiffany, and she gasped, clutching herself.

“Okay… mnemonic transfer begins… now.”

He touched the controller. The device uttered a short ping!

Done, the Chief Slaver slipped the octagon into his pocket. “All right, now let’s get these two down…”

A sudden and explosive series of knocks at the hotel-room door interrupted him.

The expression of surprise on his face was comical. The Chief Slaver said, “Who the devil… ?” He automatically moved toward the kneeling Tiffany and the projector still held in her hands.

Events began to happen very quickly.

First, the door slammed open, almost ripped from its hinges.

Two policemen with guns drawn rushed into the room. “Freeze!!” they yelled, almost simultaneously. “On the floor! Everyone on the floor, now!!”

They moved toward the Chief Slaver and the others. Panicked, Tiffany dropped the projector.

The Chief Slaver’s mouth dropped open.

Before anyone could say or do anything more, the hotel room filled with the characteristic light show of an incoming projector wavefront. There was a loud popping sound, and two people materialized.

Tiffany recognized one of the incoming figures from the meeting in the Managing Partner’s office that morning. He was one of the two Molosians who had met with the Partner Rose. The other person was a woman, a dead ringer for that godawful televangelist woman who wore all the makeup. Tiffany couldn’t remember her name. She was wearing a bright, bright green dress and was the one holding the projector. Tiffany’s nostrils flared. Despite her appearance, Tiffany felt a sudden and violent desire for the woman, as intense as any she had felt for her Owner or any of the men he had lent her to.

“Close the door,” the televangelist ordered. One of the cops backed up and shut the door. It was cracked down the middle. The policeman’s eyes, as those of his partner, never left Tiffany or the Chief Slaver. They were a solid, featureless green. Tiffany shuddered.

“I want your projector,” Ms. Makeup said. She tossed the projector she had used to get here onto the bed. Draped across her other arm was a huge brown bag. “Give it to me now and you won’t be hurt.”

The Chief Slaver didn’t say a word. He looked like he was in a state of shock. The cops approached him and told him to get on the floor, hands over his head. Tiffany put her head to the carpet, hoping no one would notice her. Carmel and Creeme continued to kneel by the bed. They were shaking.

The man who had teleported in with the woman moved toward the Chief Slaver’s property, the other projector and Tiffany. Like the cops, his eyes were solid green. He had only midway crossed the room when another projector wavefront filled the room with light. Multiple popping sounds filled the air.

Tiffany heard the televangelist exclaim, “No! Not now! Not again!” Tiffany looked up.

She was mistaken. Two projector wavefronts occupied the room with their space-distorting radiance.

In one set, a woman and a monster materialized. The woman was tall and patrician-looking. She wore a silver and black leotard. The monster with her was big, gray, and muscled, a cross between the Incredible Hulk and a mincing machine. Its claws and teeth looked as if they could cut through rock. It snarled loudly and lunged at the televangelist. At virtually the same time, through the second incoming projection, three shapely women in black appeared. They moved so quickly Tiffany could barely register the movement. Their sleek and hourglass bodies gleamed like oil in the shining light.

It was a scene straight out of The Matrix.

Carmel and Creeme screamed. Tiffany felt a sudden instinct to protect them. Bouncing off the floor, the slave leaped and tackled them just as the monster flew by, its claws snapping within bare inches of their delicate flesh. The Chief Slaver fell to the floor and crawled to cover behind the bed.

Coward, Tiffany thought briefly, then put her hands on top of the singer’s heads to keep them down.

The televangelist screamed. The Molosian man yelled in a foreign language and tried to tackle the monster before it hit her. At the same time the cops fired their weapons. Tiffany pressed harder.

Curiously, she did not feel anywhere near as frightened as she supposed she should have been.

The monster struck the Molosian a glancing blow. An arc of blood sprayed across the ceiling. The Molosian was spun through the air to slam against the far wall. He rebounded off the wall again hard enough to raise dust from it and landed in a mess on the bed inches away from the Chief Slaver. His sacrifice worked, though. Between his impact and a sudden dart from the televangelist, the monster’s aim was put off. His teeth and claws ripped through the woman’s oversized bag instead of her face and chest, as they would have done had she been even an instant slower. She screamed again, and to Tiffany’s eyes her whole body seemed to waver, as if she were seeing the woman through a mirage.

She saw green.

The cops continued to fire. Red marks split the monster’s flesh open. The wall behind it was peppered with bullet holes. Moving much too quickly for a creature of its size, the monster spun on its heels, crouched, and leapt back the way it had come toward the source of its pain.

Its bloody roar shook the room.

Before the creature could strike the two men—their bullets were about as effectual in stopping the beast as a BB gun in stopping a rhino—it was met in mid-air by the three women in black, liquid latex. They had jumped toward it like a troupe of insane circus performers.

Blows fell. The monster and the three women formed a tight, rotating package as their momentum tossed them across the room. Tiffany heard a loud crack even before the huddled mass hit the hotel-room door and shattered through. The monster roared again, and the cops chased it outside, still shooting.

Tiffany had no idea who any of these people were.

She heard another yell. Turning her head, she saw the woman in the black-and-silver leotard raise a weapon and fire it at the televangelist. In her other hand she held a projector. The Clients should take better care of those things, Tiffany thought wildly. It seemed like everybody had one nowadays.

The televangelist screamed again and ducked behind the bed. Her foot landed squarely in the Chief Slaver’s gut as she leaped, and he huffed breathlessly. Tiffany felt a surge of glee, than rampant nausea.

Something—not bullets—made holes in the wall and bed as the other woman tried to pin the televangelist down. Her body waved again, and then, suddenly, she was gone! replaced by a much younger, and prettier, naked green woman with enormous breasts.

Tiffany was past surprise.

The woman in the leotard screamed, not in fear but in absolute rage. She continued to fire.

One of the women in black rubber leapt acrobatically back into the room. She was covered head to foot in the gleaming, skintight material. Only her face was exposed. A harness set, like that worn by a horse, framed her beautiful features. She took one quick glance around, then moved toward the woman in the leotard. Tiffany didn’t see what happened—it happened too quickly—but a second later the woman’s sidearm was lying on the floor, and the woman herself was draped helplessly in the latex lady’s arms. Meanwhile, the green woman rushed out the door and out of the room.

No one stopped her.

A second later the gray-skinned monster flew back into the room. This time it was not under its own power; it landed jarringly in the middle of the room. Its head was cocked at an obscene angle, and Tiffany knew with one look that it was dead. The other two latex-clad women followed the creature in, each of them holding one of the policemen. The cops were still alive, though the way they were held—the same way the woman in the leotard was held—made Tiffany think they were immobilized.

Her eyes searched the women’s polished uniforms, and, sure enough, each of them wore an immobilizer hanging from a utility belt.

Tiffany heard noises from outside in the hall. People were talking. Others were running.

Suddenly the hotel fire alarm sounded, drowning everything else out.

The latexed women moved efficiently, militarily. One of them handed the burden of her police officer to her associate, then picked up the three projectors left lying about: the Chief Slaver’s, the one the televangelist-green woman had thrown away, and the one the woman in the leotard had had. She clipped each one to her belt. Then she gathered up the man lying bleeding on the bed, along with the soaked bedsheets, and brought them closer to the monster’s corpse. Her eyes roamed over the room looking for other evidence. Only when she was done did she stop to help the Chief Slaver to his feet.

Tiffany’s Owner looked staggered and out of breath.

“What… who… ?”

“Abject apologies, master,” the black-clad woman said, “but there is little time. These new slaves will have to be left behind.” She pointed toward Carmel and Creeme, shaking beneath Tiffany’s hands.

“What… who… ?” the Chief Slaver said.

“Where is the controller for the new slaves, master?” the woman asked. When the Chief Slaver didn’t respond quickly enough, she patted him down in a flash, pulled the octagonal device from his pocket, and examined it. When the Chief Slaver reached for it back, the woman—a slave, despite her appearance and behavior, a slave just like Tiffany—slapped his hand back. After a moment, she aimed the controller at the singers and activated it. Carmel and Creeme rose and hurried over her.

“You have no memory of what has occurred here,” she told the other two slaves. “Go now.”

She pointed toward the open doorway. Without saying a word, the two singers left.

“Slave,” Tiffany heard. She looked up and saw the black-clad woman looking at her. “Come here.”

Hurriedly, Tiffany obeyed and knelt at the woman’s feet. The Chief Slaver took a deep breath and started to say something, but the shiny, glistening slave stopped him. “The master needs to be quiet.”

The three warrior-slaves looked at one another, as if they were reading each other’s minds. Then they all nodded simultaneously, satisfied with their work. The one holding the woman captive raised her projector. Tiffany still had no idea who or what was going on, but she didn’t have time to question any further. A flash of bright light enveloped her, the Chief Slaver, and everyone else, and they were gone.

* * *

Miyal ran down the flight of stairs as fast as she could. Her soft, bare feet slapped hard against the cement steps. I’ve lost the imager, she thought, panicky, tears filling her blank and featureless eyes.

She had left her bag upstairs as well. She had lost everything. Everything.

What am I going to do? she cried to herself, making another turn, not knowing where she was going, only knowing she had to get as far away from Ealic as she could. Ealic! What was he doing here!?

And that woman… who was that woman? She looked… she looked just like her!

Miyal was whimpering by the time she got to the bottom. Blindly, she ran for the door to the lobby, the consideration of what the Earth humans would think of the naked, green femthrall running past them not even brushing her mind. The heat in her arms and legs now matched the constant heat of her loins.

The thought of what Ealic could do to her soft, thrallish flesh… .

The door wouldn’t open when she grabbed it. The handle wouldn’t depress.

Miyal pulled hard on the handle, then when it wouldn’t budge began frantically pounding on the door.

“Open!” she screamed. “Open! I desire it! Open this door!”

She pounded madly, and therefore she didn’t notice the figure emerging from the shadows until it spoke. When she did, Miyal turned around so fast she flipped herself into the corner between the stairs and the door, trapped. Heat bloomed in her breasts and stomach. Caught! I’ve been caught, she thought.

It was amazing, and disconcerting, the feeling of relief that filled her mind.

The figure stepped into the light. She raised the Molosian tranq gun held in one hand.

“My name is Rose,” the woman said. “I think it’s time we talked.”