The Women of Hill 499

[Servus Venandi]

This is my first attempt at posting content here. Hopefully I won't do anything out of bounds or otherwise screw it up.

I recently read the terrific story "The Object Lesson" by @Sexitus Bacilus. For lack of a better approach, I'm going to borrow that method of posting in sections. If you'd rather get the whole story at once, it's available in PDF format on DeviantArt.

And away we go....

 

[Servus Venandi]

The Women of Hill 499
A Mia Zhang Adventure

by Servus Venandi

Copyright © Servus Venandi.
This document is a work of adult fiction. You can re-post it as long as you don't do any of the following: 1) change it, 2) make money with it, 3) lie about who wrote it, or 4) display it in an illegal manner. I would also appreciate you linking to my DeviantArt page if you post anything of mine elsewhere. Please attribute my work to "Servus Venandi" or "Syndicate Wars."

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I. ​

"Everybody settle down and shut up," Mia instructed. "We're in a time-crunch here, and I don't wanna say this twice."

A hush fell over the small ten-seat meeting room of the Yawning Dagger. Tank-like Barnes and redheaded firecracker Nuke faced forward in the front row, while Smudge and a freshly-showered Ghost looked on from behind. To Mia's left knelt Sikra, the nude, ebony-skinned slave trainee from Meridian being entrusted with her first mission briefing.

"We're in low-orbit over Terra Nova," Mia explained, "and I expect you know what that means."

"Croooooooooo-cifixion!" Barnes exclaimed.

"And a Gold Rush in the making," Nuke added.

Mia nodded and switched on the wall-mounted holoprojector. A full-color family photo appeared—a slender, attractive middle-aged man with his tall, long-legged, crimson-haired wife, plus a younger version of the woman who was almost certainly their daughter. It was a happy shot with a backdrop of Terra Novian sand and artificially verdant plant life, perhaps a wealthy estate of some sort.

"This one comes straight from Messenger. The beautiful grinning fools you see here are the Calisca'rigo family. From left to right: Andre, Lydia and Maddy. If the surname is familiar to anybody, yes, Andre is the renowned chemist who built the Calisca'rigo pharmaceutical empire from the ground up. He's also served for several years in the Terra Nova senate, though only for about half as long as his abolitionist father Naru.

"Roughly an e-year ago, Andre's renowned R-and-D team, CP-Nova One, shat out a brand new submission drug called Serum HS-eleven. It supposedly granted a handler temporary brainchip-level control over a non-chipped subject, with a ninety-percent reduction in side-effects compared to the industry standard Surrenderol manufactured by Andor Syndicate. Naturally, this was going to be a big boom for the company and Terra Nova as a whole. And also naturally, the abolitionist minority—including Naru Calisca'rigo—vowed to fight it.

"Long story short, the political process unfolded, and things got nasty between the self-styled Calisca'rigo patriarchs. Naru was in the minority, but he wasn't dumb, and he went out of his way to dig up every piece of dirt on his son that would fit on a shovel. Corruption, underhanded back-room deals, extortion, illegal experimentation.... The old man quickly became a pain in the ass.

"Then he turned up dead one morning. Face-planted in his breakfast and never woke up. His abolitionist allies were quick with the conspiracy theories. Turns out they were kinda right. An investigation implicated Andre's wife and daughter in the murder. Seems that Maddy paid a visit to dear old granddad on the evening before his breakfast dive. While she was there, she carefully spiced up his canister of Bollorian coffee with a dash of Ferdiphal's Dust—colorless, odorless, tasteless, and lethal to humans within seconds, even in tiny doses. Lydia confessed first to procuring the substance and tasking her daughter with the delivery, and Maddy eventually confessed as well under the belief that she would be given leniency. Oops. They were both sentenced to a public flogging and crucifixion—not the pretty tie-you-to-the-cross-and-teach-you-a-lesson kind, but the actual nail-you-to-beams-and-let-you-die kind. These ladies are to spend their forty-eight hours in bloody agony. If they're unlucky enough to survive, they'll get flogged again and probably brain-wiped."

"What about the dude?" Nuke asked. "He totally got out of this?"

Mia shook her head. "No, no, no. Nothing implicated Andre directly, but he's been held these last two weeks on circumstantial evidence. Local reports seem to suggest he's going to be enslaved, but for now he gets to sit in prison and watch his wife and only child dance in the desert."

"How shitty."

"Yeah, but here's the twist. Naru Calisca'rigo was wearing a dead switch. The instant that geezer pitched over into his food, a device on his body automatically transmitted a sum of several million syns to Messenger's organization in some prearranged contingency plan. Either Naru knew his family was coming after him, or he just got that paranoid after playing politics for so long. In either case, we—by way of Messenger—are to be the old fuck's instrument of justice and mercy. Never mind the irony of an abolitionist's last wish being to enslave someone—he wants to punish his son but also keep the treasured Calisca'rigo ladies alive, even if they deserve the complimentary wrist spikes. I have to admire his hubris and foresight, frankly."

Mia change the holo to a projection of the western Gasping Plains, the expansive execution grounds surrounding Terra Nova's planetary capital Gorburg. The Plains were an arid, acrid hell of rolling sand dunes and poisonous geothermal vents, and survival rates for people crucified out there were absurdly low, even for prisoners not actually sentenced to death.

She waved her hand across the display and zoomed in on Hill 499. "This is our area of operation. There will be resistance from pirates and rival bounty hunters, and so our first order of business will be a risky and hopefully stealthy orbital mine drop prior to the crucifixions being carried out. We'll arm the gizmos remotely once we get our bodies planetside, and the first fuckers to get blown up should create enough chaos for us to get our girls. I want to pull this off as bad as any other job, but Mia Zhang and crew aren't running headlong in Gold Rushes anymore. Let the other bastards test the water."

Barnes, Nuke, Smudge and Ghost nodded.

Mia changed the holo again, this time to the unsmiling yearbook photo of a cute, round-faced teenager.

"This is Jade Zellich, our optional secondary objective. She was recently convicted of murdering her abusive father, who just so happened to be a Gorburg cop and youth minister at a local religious organization. Reports say she stabbed the asshole to death when he came out of the bathroom—eighty-six times. Temporary insanity might have gotten her off, except for the fact that she had packed a bag ahead of time and eluded police for three days before being caught on public transit on the other side of the planet. She was denied slavery and recently exhausted her final appeal, and now she's scheduled to die on Hill Four-nine-nine. While we're there, we're picking her up. She isn't part of the contract, so I'll decide what to do with her later."

"You should expand the brig," Barnes said. "Gettin' crowded down there."

"A crowded brig means we're successfully completing jobs and hopefully not dying in the process. Besides, I like my prisoners all sweaty and pressed in close.

"Understood, ma'am."

"We don't have a lot of time. Any questions? No? Great. Smudge, correct our orbit and get us in position for the mine drop. Everybody else, suit up and rendezvous at the shuttle bay in thirty. Dismissed."

---

 

[Servus Venandi]

II.​

If the desert planet Meridian was the gateway to Hell, then Terra Nova was Hell's basement. A terraforming effort was ongoing across the polar regions with the goal of creating a more substantial planetary water cycle, but almost the entire rock remained a scorched desert. The old Earth-based Red Nova Corporation (nowadays known as Red Nova Syndicate) had settled T-Nova in the early days of galactic colonization. Habitable exoplanets had still been few and far between at the time, and so a miserable ball of sand floating in space had been hailed as invaluable due to little more than a somewhat breathable atmosphere. To their credit, Red Nova had thrown up a handful of megacities over a span of just fifty e-years, such that the mostly barren world today was productive by way of those few urban centers.

Mia hated the place, but there was an upside. Customs procedures worldwide were about as lax as customs procedures could get and still be called procedures. Pretty much anybody who wasn't a wanted terrorist could dock at an outlying spaceport and have free run of the planet. Even Gold Rushes, though not officially sanctioned, were tacitly allowed, providing nobody violated a very short list of sensible rules.

As such, after landing a shuttle at Dock 19 of the Outer Gorburg Space Center, it was a simple matter to push through the crowd, rent an all-wheel-drive sand runner, and tear across the sun-cooked wilderness at a 150 kilometers per hour. Nuke had the wheel, with Barnes riding shotgun and Mia clinging to the backseat safety bar with Ghost.

The Gasping Plains were divided into clusters of barren hills called sectors, and each sector had an associated staging zone for torturing prisoners publicly prior to marching them across the hot sand to their respective crucifixions. It was all derived from an ancient system of punishment on Earth, a Roman staple made immortal by Christianity. While crucifixion was popular across the galaxy, usually in its nonlethal form, the raw barbarism of Red Nova justice made it a tourism juggernaut.

Hill 499 was in Sector Gamma, and the staging zone sat about five kilometers from the execution site. Mia and Ghost exited the sand runner at a cliff's edge about a klick outside the small arena, while Nuke and Barnes continued onward to conduct recon and check the status of the orbital mines. Splitting the team up, as usual, was a coin toss. It provided superior operational awareness for everyone, but it made the smaller units that much more vulnerable to anyone looking to thin out the competition.

After sorting her gear and ensuring that her helmet was filtering properly, Mia dropped to one knee and pulled up her binoculars. Rival bounty hunters occupied other high points around the arena, most poorly outfitted and dependent on budget gas masks that would clog in thirty minutes. A few looked formidable, and Mia recognized the crew of Gabe Athelor scattered across a hilltop at nine o'clock. Their heavy armor and Andorian weapons were impossible to miss, and Gabe himself never went anywhere without his pair of female slave bodyguards, indistinguishable from the other troops except for huge tits and the gold collars gleaming around their necks.

Mia's interaction with Gabe had been minimal over the years, which was good since he was a ruthless bastard who tended to fuck up everything and everyone he touched. The Yawning Dagger's only actual space combat engagement had occurred during a slave ship raid wherein Mia and Gabe had been contracted by competing agencies to rescue the same Terran diplomat from some free-wheeling Free Zone abolitionists. Gabe had arrived first by moments and opened fire on the abolitionists' ship as soon as the Yawning Dagger entered sensor range, immediately taking out life support and warning of more collateral damage to come if Mia didn't withdraw. Instead, she'd ordered Smudge to target Gabe's weapon systems and propulsion, and this had sparked a zero-G dogfight. Ultimately, it had ended in a standoff with Gabe's team extracting the diplomat and jumping out of range. By the time Mia boarded the abolitionist ship, she'd found only a handful of survivors huddling in the engine room.

"I hope he steps on a mine," Ghost said.

Mia sighed. "If only I could call him stupid. The festivities are starting."

Swinging her binoculars over to the staging zone, Mia watched in high-def as a Red Nova bureaucrat strutted onto a platform at one end and addressed the crowd. She couldn't hear him, but she didn't need to. Mugshots of the Calisca'rigo women and Jade Zellich filled large, strategically placed screens, along with all their personal information and convictions. The buildup carried on for several minutes, likely an impassioned attempt to justify the murder about to be handed down. It was technically PR, but nobody really cared. Red Nova could execute people by random lottery, and folks would still come out to cheer at the carnage. Justification was merely a footnote for keeping civil rights activists at bay.

When the prattling concluded, a big gate swung open at the north end of the zone, and a happy roar rose from the crowd.

Three naked women staggered into the brutal daylight. No fancy smartcuffs or shiny shackles were on display here. Each prisoner was secured with thin brown fiber—wrists behind her back and attached to a crotch rope, breasts bound and dark and swollen, ankles tied so close as to limit movement to tiny, awkward steps, and a mouth stuffed with panties and sealed with a thick, dirty strip of cloth. They all wore nipple clamps.

Lydia led the way, long pale limbs trembling as she shuffled behind a leash held by a guard in a yellow hazmat suit. Long red hair flashed the color of fire as she moved, some hanging over her left shoulder and the rest falling behind. The crotch rope cleaving her vulva was linked to that of her daughter Maddy, who trailed in a near identical predicament, fearful and compliant, and seemed but a younger version of her mother, with almost the same build apart from a firmer abdomen.

Behind Maddy, Jade Zellich was likewise attached via crotch rope, but she had earned a guard at each elbow as she struggled fiercely en route to the whipping posts. She was a short girl with brown jaw-length hair, soft in the middle, small breasts already marked up from a previous round of punishment.

The prisoners were taken into the middle of the arena, unlinked and briefly unbound. After being forced up against separate whipping posts—the mother and daughter going calmly while Jade fought every step of the way—their hands were retied above their heads, and their big toes were lashed together with twine and secured to metal loops in the ground. Pulley systems were then engaged, and each woman was hoisted up against her post until the soles of her feet were turned out by the toe bondage. Jade thrashed about futilely while the Calisca'rigos hung by their wrists in submissive silence.

Mia's earpiece beeped.

"Commander?" Smudge said.

"Copy," she replied. "Go ahead."

"We just got hailed on a standard radio channel by Gabe fucking Athelor. He says he's looking right at you and wants to chat."

"Is that so? I wonder what ultimatum he’ll try to scare me off with this time."

"I suspect as much. Want me to hang up on him?"

"Nah, put him through. This could be amusing."

"If you insist, Commander. Setting up the link."

While Smudge checked security protocols and patched Gabe in, a shirtless hunk in a leather hood landed the first bullwhip strike on Lydia's pale ass. The forty-something woman tensed in her bondage and tossed her head back in a cry of pain that Mia couldn't hear, though she clearly heard the approval of the crowd. A beating commenced—left cheek, right cheek, kidneys, thighs, shoulders. There was no pattern, just a wild and savage attempt to inflict as much pain as possible while not impairing the victim's ability to hoof the five kilometers to her crucifixion site.

"Enjoying the show?" Gabe asked, his thick Andorian accent seductive even through radio static.

"The visuals are captivating, at least," Mia answered. "If you've got something to say, better say it fast. I'm not in the mood for bullshit."

"You never are. God, I love it when you talk tough. When you're finally my property, I might even let you go without a gag when I whip you, just so I can still hear that sexy defiance in all its glory."

"Aw, Gabe, you poor man. Business must really be down if you can't even afford your Help-Me-I'm-Deluded-As-Fuck pills anymore."

"Uh-huh. Well, as much as I enjoy trading insults with a future slave, there is indeed a more pressing matter at the moment. I've got a proposal. Well … not really a proposal. It's more of a demand. But hear me out."

"You've got ten seconds."

"More than enough! Basically, you're soft. You're good at you're job, but you aren't willing to make a mess when it counts, and this is why you'll always be second-rate."

"Thank you for your opinion. I’ll file it with our customer service department, but numerous satisfied clients and a top-notch success rate make your complaint quite the anomaly."

"Because you take the clean jobs! Look, let me put it to you straight. You're here for the Calisca'rigos, yeah? So is everybody else, but we both know it's gonna come down to my guys versus yours, and the rest of these fuckers are gonna lose. We also both know that I'm better at this, so I'm giving you one chance to walk. If you press on, then I'm gonna put a bullet in that kid as soon as her body weight settles against the spikes. She dies because you're a stubborn cunt, and I still return to orbit for the big payday. So let's just save each other the hassle and settle this one over the radio. What say you, Commander Zhang?"

Down in the staging area, the lead executioner had turned Lydia Calisca'rigo's back half into a red mess while expertly avoiding skin breakage. The woman had stopped struggling, but she still trembled in anticipation of further strikes. Now it was time to move on. The guard took a swig from a canteen, shook the burn out of his shoulder, and then went to work on the daughter.

Mia said, "Your willingness to put a bullet in Zellich just to keep me off your targets is why you suck at this job, Gabe. That kid is a legal adult, and I've got a three-million-syn contract to get her out of here alive. That's in addition to the Calisca'rigos. You're pretty stupid, but not even you are stupid enough to shoot three million syns between the eyes."

Gabe said nothing for a moment, then guessed, "You're lying. She cute, but she's plain and crazy and unbroken. Nobody would pay even half that, not even if she's a confirmed virgin."

"Somebody's willing to, obviously, but do what you gotta. If you're still alive in a couple of weeks, I'll send you a copy of the sign-off once I turn her over."

"Better watch your back out there today, Zhang."

"Shut up, Gabe." She clicked off and reopened a channel to the Yawning Dagger. "Smudge, mute the son of a bitch before I take a potshot at him."

Smudge replied, "Done, Commander. You gonna have trouble down there?"

"Probably. Change your orbit and go silent. I don't want Gabe's ship fucking with mine again."

"Copy loud and clear. Be careful down there, ma'am."

Maddy fought harder than her mother, but she still went limp about halfway through the beating, flinching with each strike but otherwise finding submission easier than resistance. The crowd disapproved. They disapproved even louder when the executioner moved down to Jade, and the girl went stiff as a board, taking the first strike on her ass with hardly a squirm and refusing to budge thereafter. This had a visible effect on the guard as he hit her steadily harder with each act of contempt, but nothing he did made her show him even a hint of pain, not even when he made her butt bleed. When it was all over, the agitated man stomped up to the bound girl, wrenched her head back and voiced his displeasure for her poor showing, certainly making reference to the spikes he would soon propel through her small wrists. It was hard to tell through the gag and panties in her mouth, but it seemed that Jade's response was to simply smile.

Mia smiled too. The girl was tough as hell.

"We should move, Mistress," Ghost said.

Jerking her binoculars back over to Gabe, Mia watched as his busty bodyguards sat to either side of him in the backseat of his sandrunner. So they were going to run ahead instead of following the death march. Fair enough.

At the whipping posts, guards took the prisoners down and bound them for travel—hands behind backs, tits cinched, crotches linked, just enough slack between feet to achieve a decent gait.

Mia switched to the team's comm channel. "Barnes."

"Here, Commander," he answered.

"Gabe Athelor is planetside. He's moving ahead with his crew."

"Well, that changes things."

"It changes nothing, but we can't afford any mistakes now."

"We're in position already, Commander, and we've got a microdrone in the air. We're ready."

"Good. We're moving out on foot."

"Copy that, ma'am. See you at Four-nine-nine."

"Acknowledged. Don't let Athelor get the drop on you, because he's going to try."

---

 

[Servus Venandi]

III.​

Terra Nova did its thing as the procession wandered into the Gasping Plains. The naked, bound prisoners staggered along a well-worn sun-cooked path, and thousands of onlookers followed to either side. Some were journalists covering the high-profile mass execution, but most were tourists or local onlookers. The first kilometer got rid of about half the crowd, and about half again gave up by kilometer two. Thinning of the herd allowed Mia to better take stock of the situation, and she identified nineteen probable Gold Rush teams. This number increased to thirty at kilometer three, when pretty much the only people left were guards and anybody possessing the necessary survival equipment for venturing this far from Gorburg—bounty hunters and journalists, basically.

Lydia, Maddy and Jade were running out of strength. Their boobs, hands and feet were dark from the tight bondage, and they were coughing and wheezing in the poisonous atmosphere. Oxygen-deprived muscles failed at random intervals, tossing the affected woman into the sand, sometimes dragging down one or both of the others. Lydia collapsed at one point in kilometer four and couldn't get herself up, forcing a guard to rush in and inject a stimulant into her bruised ass. After beating her with a small flogger for a few moments, he finally convinced the slender redhead to climb back onto her feet.

At the base of Hill 499, all rushers split off and moved away. It was against the unofficial rules to be within five hundred meters of the execution site until all condemned persons had been affixed to crosses and suspended, and all Red Nova personnel had evacuated the area. Some hunters were picked up by team members with sandrunners, but Mia and Ghost lugged their soaked, aching bodies and increasingly burdensome gear to the rendezvous point a klick away.

Barnes and Nuke had abandoned the runner in a crevasse filled with toxic green fumes, then positioned themselves along the cliff's edge above, overlooking the crux hill directly to the north. By the time Mia and Ghost reached them, the kilometer-distant prisoners had just reached the end of their grueling march.

Mia settled beside Barnes, sucked water from the straw mounted inside her helmet, then raised her binoculars once again. The girls were all kneeling in the sand, surrounded by guards and having their bonds cut in preparation for the execution. Before them, three rusty T-shaped crosses lay on the ground, ready to receive the victims.

"Gabe's crew headed west before we lost sight of 'em," Nuke said. "So far our flanks and six have stayed secure. All mines burrowed in nicely, ready to be armed on your say-so."

Mia nodded.

On the hill, three separate groups of guards took all the girls at once. Lydia and Maddy responded obediently to commands to lie down on their crosses. The mother settled back as if about to take a weekend nap, cooperatively stretching her arms across the upper beam and allowing temporary leather straps to be cinched over her shoulders, elbows, forearms and palms. To her left, Maddy had to be hit with a flogger several times before she unfolded her arms and allowed herself to be tied.

Jade was physically spent, but she used whatever remained of her energy reserves to kick, claw and punch her handlers. Even after they had wrestled her down and secured her arms to the beam, she continued bucking so hard against the bonds that the guards were compelled to place straps on her chest, belly and thighs. A spare length of severed twine was used to tie her ankles. Only once completely bound did she surrender.

With the condemned properly helpless, the hazmat-suited executioner climbed out of his sandrunner and walked toward the supine women. In his right hand he carried a massive gun-shaped power tool, and a heavy canvas bag hung from his left shoulder. As he approached, camera operators and journalists jostled for position along the press barrier at the hill's eastern edge.

"Poor bitches," Ghost said quietly.

"At least two of them probably asked for it," Mia replied.

"If they deserve to die, put them on their knees and shoot them in the face."

"Quick, clean headshots—the bane of advertisers and tourism boards. And I suspect most viewers consider globs of flying brain matter less sexy than naked prisoners on a metal T."

"At least you get a chance at becoming Gold Rush material when they spike your ass to a cross," Nuke said. "I'd suck it up for a chance to keep living a little longer."

Barnes chortled. "Nuke, you'd sooner eat the barrel of a gun yourself before letting a slave runner put hands on you."

"Maybe. When you've got a chance to keep kicking, even if it puts you in a bad situation, it's hard to say you wouldn't take it."

Mia kept silent not for lack of an opinion, but because the subject was a little raw right after Gabe's bluster about enslaving her.

"There are far worse fates than slavery," Ghost agreed. She nodded toward Hill 499. "Dying like that....."

"Not if we can help it," Mia said.

The executioner went to Lydia first. Straddling her left arm, he reached into his bag and withdrew a thirty-centimeter metal spike, which he chambered into his tool like a giant rifle round. Leaning forward, he jammed the barrel against the sobbing prisoner's wrist, checked to ensure he was between the ulna and radius, and then pulled the trigger.

A crack audible a kilometer away was followed by a shrill, gag-muffled scream. Lydia's entire body seized, arms straining against leather straps while veins bulged beneath the pale flesh of her neck. There was little blood at first, but a thick crimson pool oozed around the spike after a few seconds.

Lydia's right arm suffered the same fate as her left, and then the executioner enlisted help in bending her legs until the soles were flat against the vertical beam. A guard lashed a leather strap about her ankles, and then braced her legs as the hooded man drove a spike through each foot. Blood gushed down the sides of the metal crux, and the woman shivered as though she lay naked in a deep freeze rather than under the merciless broiler of a T-Novian afternoon.

"Probably regretting that murder right about now," Barnes muttered.

"No shit," Nuke agreed.

Maddy was literally scared stiff as attention turned to her. She shook like her mother, almost as if she wanted to fight, but her body wouldn't obey. Still, as a similar sequence unfolded, she screamed into her gag and made a good show of bleeding for the cameras.

Two down.

Already bound too tightly to mount any serious resistance, Jade closed her eyes as the executioner settled over her right arm. Breathing hard and fast in the poisonous air, her small tits heaving under nipple clamps, she flinched when the spike went in but otherwise gave her captors nothing.

"You now how to pick 'em, Mistress," Ghost said. "Solid as a rock. Wouldn't know it by looking at her."

"The fucker she killed had it coming," Mia replied. "She knows she was right, and she knows this is wrong. She also knows there's nothing she can do about it now. The only power she has left is the power to not admit how much they're hurting her."

Jade's left arm and feet did little to break her shell of defiance. She accepted her fate as calmly as humanly possible and didn't even react when the frustrated executioner slapped her breasts and gave her a quick choke.

With all three prisoners nailed down, a handful of guards moved from girl to girl, leaving ankles bound but removing all other straps. Crude cleave gags were replaced with shiny black ballgags, and nipple clamps were double-checked. At the same time, a trio of sandrunners rolled into the area and parked in front of the crosses. The crew ran heavy chains from the ends of each crossbeam and attached them to towing bars along the back of the corresponding vehicle. Metal grates in the sand were ripped out to expose large holes where the execution devices would stand until the condemned either died or vanished in the Gold Rush.

"The Calisca'rigo mother is bleeding heavily," Nuke observed, "and struggling is just making it worse. She's gonna go into shock if this doesn't go down in a hurry."

"Keep an eye on her," Mia said. "If we get hung up and you can get a shot, tranq her. It might buy us a few minutes."

"Yes, ma'am."

The executioner gave the signal, and the runners spun their tires before rumbling forward. Chains drew taut, and the trio of crosses rose from the scorched sands of Hill 499. Seconds later the rusty bases thumped into the holes, jarring the victims and drawing cheers from the guards and press gallery. Suspended by nothing but the spikes in their wrists, Lydia, Maddy and Jade danced the squirming, side to side dance of the newly crucified, shoving their asses one way and then the other in a futile bid to relieve the pressure. Every single crucifixion Mia remembered had played out this way, men and women alike undertaking eerily similar movements, and she hoped to never have the phenomenon explained through firsthand experience.

Everybody lingered awhile—cameras soaking in the suffering, reporters jabbering, guards snapping pictures of one another in front of the crosses, cheesing and goofing around while naked, dying women struggled overhead. After a quarter hour or so, the executioner and Red Nova troops finally loaded into sandrunners and left the prisoners to their fate. Some news crews stayed behind as always, hoping to catch some dramatic footage of the Gold Rush, but most of them would duck and run when the gunfire started.

Mia looked at Barnes. "Arm the mines. Time to earn our money."

---

 

[Servus Venandi]

IV.​

The first move came from a group of screaming idiots in forest camo and budget gas masks. Having concealed themselves in a rock formation half a klick northeast of the execution site, they tore across an open stretch of desert in their sandrunner at a hundred and sixty kilometers an hour. A guy in back stood on the seat with a light machine gun balanced on the roll cage, bouncing up and down like a slave ordered to go cowboy on his master's dick, firing shots into the sky as if he actually thought someone might be impressed.

Nuke moaned. "We're gonna blow our load on a pile of a desperate newbies."

"Only one load," Mia corrected, "and nobody'll know it was ours. If nothing else, this gives everybody else something to think about."

"It's gonna make everybody hold back on charging, and those girls are gonna bleed out before we can get to 'em."

Apparently in possession of no scanning equipment whatsoever, the water testers rolled over a mine right at the base of Hill 499. The sandrunner went airborne in a sphere of flames, losing a front wheel on the way up and ejecting bodies. Most notably, the gunner's torso and legs went in different directions. Everybody else remained intact, but the fiery wreckage came down on top of the driver, and others hit the ground so hard that they were almost certainly either dead or too injured to continue.

Radio chatter lit up Mia's vision overlay, mostly less experienced crews wondering what the hell had just happened.

"All right," she said, "keep it tight. We're moving up. Weapons free. Keep everything in front, and for fuck's sake, let me know the second our bird gets a fix on Gabe's goons."

"Solid copy, Commander," Barnes said. "The bird's in my ear, and we're right with you."

The crew slid down the rocky face and into the bone-dry, vent-covered clearing leading up to the hill. Plumes of sand rose in all directions as other groups prepared to fight for the bleeding prizes. Distant gunfire broke out to the left, and a second mine exploded on the north side of the hill. Another crew in a truck roared in from the west and did a better job of avoiding death, and the gunner in the back threw wild bursts of automatic fire in a wide arc behind the vehicle while masked people inside sprayed rifles through open windows. Bullets pelted the sand a few dozen meters ahead, and more streaked overhead, but none really came close.

"Keep moving!" Mia cried.

Hunched over, the group followed her in a slow jog.

The truck made it to the hill and pitched up for the climb, but the driver failed to compensate for a sideways drift that snowballed into a spin. Not secured in any way, the gunner was instantly ejected, and everyone else got tossed around inside the cab before coming to a sudden halt. Every crew within range immediately unloaded on the motionless vehicle, and it burned under a barrage of incendiary and plasma rounds. Amazingly, four people managed to crawl out intact and return fire.

"Circle around to the east," Mia said. "Use the smoke from the first wreck as cover, then ascend behind the press box."

With nearly every other crew caught up in trading bullets with the second group of wreck survivors, slipping away for a back door ascent proved uncomfortably easy. Crossing through the fiery mess left by the first mine, Mia knelt in the sand twice to turn bodies over, hoping for signs of life but finding only disappointment. It was hard to say with the burns and mangled gear, but both victims looked rather young, and it never failed to turn her stomach a bit when she had a hand in knocking off competition who, in some jurisdictions, might barely qualify to buy beer. Still, slavery and youthful delusions of immortality notwithstanding, they chose to be out here like everybody else, and no ammunition cared about the age of the person delivering or receiving it.

One mine tripped was usually one problem eliminated.

Mia guided her squad up the hillside and past the news crews jammed into the press box. About half seemed overjoyed to have rushers passing this close, and the other half looked terrified. Despite the professionalism on which she prided her crew, it was a struggle to not give the assembled throng a double-barrel blast of middle fingers.

“Bird has contact with Athelor,” Barnes announced. “He’s inbound from the north-northwest on a skyboard, flanked by his bodyguards.”

Mia grumbled, “Aircraft. He knew he couldn’t win playing by the rules.”

“Must be a career day for him,” Ghost added, “since he’s willing to get banned from Terra Nova for it.”

“He’s going all-in, probably with his balls on the chopping block. Stay frosty.”

With eyes to the sky, Mia sprinted away from the pressbox and toward the trio of crosses two hundred meters away. Gabe and crew swooped into firing range before she covered even half the distance. Standing upright on their illegal skyboards, he and his blond slaves sprayed the ground with automatic weapons, kicking up clouds of sand and rock. Nuke took one in the thigh, but the small caliber failed to penetrate her armor, and she collected herself after a string of profanity. As Mia’s squad closed on the prisoners, the assault predictably tapered off, lest a stray round cut the potential payout.

“Suppress aerial targets!” she cried, ducking behind the center cross just below the blood-drenched toes of Maddy Calisca’rigo. “Keep ‘em the fuck back for sixty!”

“Suppressing!” Barnes acknowledged.

Return fire exploded to all sides. In a triangle formation around the peak of Hill 499, Barnes, Nuke and Ghost chased flitting skyboards with streams of bullets.

Mia ripped a handful of diamond razor bands from her belt and ran from cross to cross, cinching one around each of the four nails holding the Calisca’rigo women’s feet and letting them chew through the solid metal. Legs freed, the victims’ weight now settled against their wrists. Maddy scrambled in vain to grip the vertical post with her slick soles. Lydia, while conscious enough to offer token resistance, seemed on the verge of slipping away.

“Barnes! Boost!”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Barnes lowered his weapon and hustled over. In a crouch, he offered his wide shoulders to Mia, and she planted her boots to either side of his neck.

“Up, up, up!”

He stood, elevating her to roughly eye-level with Maddy. Though gagged and in excruciating pain, the girl lifted her gaze and spared a few breaths for muffled pleas.

More diamond razors went on the wrist spikes, and Mia triggered them simultaneously. Still, the right hand dropped a split second before the left, and Maddy collapsed sideways. She hit the sand hard with her butt and rolled face-down, trembling with seizure-like intensity.

Needing no further instructions, Barnes shuffled over to Lydia. Mia had the next set of diamonds ready to go, but something slammed her upper back with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Knocked forward, she caught herself on the crossbeam while her momentum dragged Barnes head-first into the vertical post. He popped right up, but not in time to keep her legs from swinging free in space.

Engine noise manifested just behind the gunfire, and she craned her neck as a sandrunner tore around the perimeter while three occupants fired wildly from the backseat with old rifles.

More rookies.

Bringing anything short of a heavy tank to ground zero of a gold rush was pure suicide, but you could always count on a few would-be heroes to fancy themselves exceptions to the rule. On Terra Nova, this was usually a mistake you only made once.

Finding it hard to breathe and quite sure multiple ribs were broken, Mia dragged herself onto the cross and straddled the weathered beam above Lydia’s pale, slender left arm. Unable to sit up or effectively twist, she nearly fell while applying a diamond band to the first wrist spike.

More bullets slammed the back of Lydia’s cross, perilously close to the fading woman. Always gifted at making bad shit even worse, Gabe chose this moment to dive straight toward Mia. His skyboard passed close enough to wash her in exhaust, and then he pulled a u-turn and hovered just ten meters out, a pistol leveled at her head.

“Submit, Zhang!”

She flipped him off.

He pulled the trigger, but she bailed and gave herself to gravity. The bullet intended for her gray matter found rusty steel instead.

Decoupled from the beam, courtesy of diamond razors, Lydia fell and crumpled on the sand almost in unison with Mia.

Ghost shot Gabe in the gut. It didn’t defeat his armor, but it knocked him off-balance, and his skyboard dipped sideways into the path of the rampaging sandrunner. Somehow he threw himself off just before the left wing crashed through the windshield, taking off the driver’s head and ejecting passengers in the subsequent roll-over.

Mia unslung her weapon and came up with every intention of finishing Athelor off, but his bodyguards zoomed in with guns blazing before she could squeeze off a single round. Ducking behind Lydia’s cross, she checked the woman’s pulse and found a weak one.

“Turn ‘em over, Zhang!” Gabe shouted. “If I don’t leave here with that meat in my custody, I’ll make sure nobody does! Mark my fucking words!”

Mia fired blindly around the side of the cross, figuring he would interpret the response well enough.

He countered, “Fine, then. I think it’s time our rivalry met its logical end, Zhang.”

He climbed onto the skyboard of one of his slaves, and two women flew their master out of danger. No sooner had they disappeared over a rise to the east, a flash to the north briefly overpowered even the vicious Terra Nova sun, and Mia buried her helmet visor in the crook of her arm, but too late. Her eyes were saturated and blind.

It harked back to her days in the Earth Authority, running special operations on alien worlds, and one operation in particular that had ended in a similar flash set off not by her unit, but by a sect of abolitionist extremists applying death-before-dishonor machismo to slavery. Even at the time, prior to developing her rather jaded view of the galaxy, Mia had seen no inherent evil in going out with a bang. However, most of the slaves on that frozen dwarf planet had never consented to being there. Rather, they were “rescued” and then used as political hostages. When everything went south for the abolitionists, they “liberated” everyone in thermonuclear fashion.

It was another one of those things Mia had regretted ever since. Now, as the flash abated and her vision returned to an orb-infested but functional state, she took in a white mushroom cloud against the northern horizon and an onrushing wall of air and sand, and a new regret piled atop all the old ones.

“Dagger,” she said, but communications were down in the sudden burst of electromagnetism. The HUD over her helmet visor was dead, too. “This is some shit, people.”

“The fuck did he do?” Nuke wondered.

“A tribute to your namesake, genius. Barnes, did our bird get a range on that blast before cooking?”

“Should have,” Barnes replied, “but everything is offline. No data. Best guess—we’re out of fireball range.”

“Comforting. Scoop up our girls and....”

The ground shifted under her boots. Instinctively, she threw herself over Lydia to shield the naked woman. Barnes, Ghost and Nuke likewise huddled around Maddy. Poor Jade remained on her cross and bore the full force of the shockwave, though Mia convinced herself it wasn’t so bad since nobody on the ground got rag-dolled in the apocalyptic wind. Not only did this place Hill 499 well outside any significant thermal radiation, but it called into question what Gabe hoped to achieve through nuclear terrorism. The career-tanking hit to his reputation would span far beyond Terra Nova.

Unfortunately, as the wind died down, the rumbling underfoot intensified. The three execution devices rattled like wheat stalks in a Manitoba gale, which in turn jostled Jade against her spikes and drew cries of pain from behind her ballgag. All at once, the ground rose a full meter and the fell again, as if made of whitewater rather than sand. Mia tried to compensate, but the movement slammed her against Lydia’s cross and then sent her tumbling to the right. She snagged the base of the next cross over—Jade’s—and avoided a headlong dive toward the rapidly emptying press box.

Mixed deep within the cataclysmic tumult, the unmistakable whine of skyboards crescendoed once again. Far below peak efficiency with broken ribs and cooked eyeballs, Mia fumbled bringing her weapon around.

“Contact!” Barnes cried an instant before taking two in the chest.

The impact knocked him off his feet and planted his shoulders in the sand. Quality plating stopped any kinetic penetration, but chemical rounds splattered corrosive goo all across his torso.

“Fuck, they’re shooting chemies!” Nuke screamed, and she dove toward Barnes before Mia could command otherwise.

Risking her own safety, the redheaded bulldozer yanked her comrade up by the collar and ripped off the upper half of his armor. Rivulets of melted fiber splattered the sand and popped like grease in an iron skillet. Nuke punted the ruined attire out of the way, grenades and all, and then dragged Barnes to the foot of Jade’s cross.

Mia finally got her firearm situated and brought it bear just as Gabe’s bodyguards screamed overhead with only a meter to spare. She hit the trigger and caught one of the blond bitches in the thigh, but it was a graze and insufficient to knock her over. When the mag ran dry, Mia leaned over to swap and face-planted into the surging earth.

“Fall back!” she shouted. “We’re done! Get the fuck out!”

“Manned aircraft, an atomic bomb, and chemies!” Nuke roared as she and Ghost worked Barnes onto his feet. “I will castrate the motherfucker with a spoon!”

While her team staggered toward the press box, Mia glanced up at Jade’s filthy naked body. The girl looked back, somehow still conscious while her small clamped tits shook in time with the shifting ground. Her lips moved around the ballgag, but whatever she was saying never broke through the noise.

Ghost turned around and hesitated, but Mia waved her on.

“Exfil! Now!”

The i-slave shook her head but kept moving.

The blond duo spun around for another pass. Having long ago exited Gold Rush mode and adopted a full-on skirmish mindset with no rules, Mia weighed the first three options that crossed her brain and went with the second one.

She staggered over to Maddy Calisca’rigo and brought the slender girl up with one arm across her chest. Lifting her sidearm with her free hand, Mia placed it against the girl’s head and turned toward the bodyguards.

Gabe’s busty goons got the hint and veered off to the side, holding fire as they strafed back and forth just above the hilltop.

Using the bloody Calisca’rigo daughter as a human shield, not terribly proud of it but low on options, Mia eased forward on rumbling earth until within fifteen meters of the attackers. Lowering the pistol, she pointed at one of the bodyguards, held up one finger to ensure they wouldn’t both bum rush her, and then gestured at the prisoner. The airborne women exchanged a glance, and then the one to Mia’s left surged forward until close enough to spit upon. Skyboard engines billowed sand three hundred and sixty degrees, and the muscular, well-armored specimen aboard them waited.

Against her every instinct, Mia stepped forward and offered Maddy. The bodyguard seized the girl by the hair and dragged her up onto the platform.

“Don’t move,” the woman warned.

Mia stepped back, raised her hands, and again lost her balance in the ongoing quake. She caught herself, raised up on her knees, and decided to stay on them. It was a fitting end to the encounter.

“I hope Gabe plans to retire and disappear after this,” she said, “because he’ll be on a cross himself if Red Nova has anything to say about it.”

The blond stared back through her black visor and said nothing. Gabe had always trained his slaves like machines. The second minion guided her skyboard over to the crosses and, using a long strand of smart binding wire, lassoed the inert Lydia Calisca’rigo and dragged the woman up with snakelike black tendrils cinching around her breasts.

With the two targets in custody, the bodyguards spun the boards without a word and flew west.

Exhausted, nearly falling over in pain with every breath, Mia dragged herself upright and staggered like an inebriated person toward Jade, who still clung to consciousness. It would be better if she just gave up. For all Mia’s own discomfort, she couldn’t fathom being nailed up there and having her naked body sandblasted by a nuclear bomb.

Finding a few more razors on her belt, she started to free Jade’s feet but then realized she needed the spike.

“Sorry, kid,” she shouted. “It’s the only way down.”

Without waiting for acknowledgment, she lifted one leg and wedged the toe of her boot on the nailed head protruding from the girl’s left foot. Then, using Jade’s body for leverage, Mia hauled herself into a one-legged standing position.

Jade screamed like a wounded animal and nearly choked on her own spit. The outburst shredded Mia’s eardrums and soul alike, and she pressed her helmet close to the girl’s face.

“I know, baby. I know. Just a few seconds, okay?”

Jade managed a tiny nod, and Mia leaned sideways to wrap a diamond razor band around the spike in her left wrist. She dropped the first one when the cross lurched up and down, nearly throwing her off, but attempt two found the mark.

Switching sides, she got a single loop around the second spike when another surge pitched the cross sideways and then back again. The cycle repeated twice, and she threw both arms around Jade and the beam just before her toe slipped off the lower nail.

“Shit!”

Chancing a glance down to get her bearings, Mia’s flash-burned eyes enlarged as a crack opened in the sand below, like an unthinking maw reacting the presence of food.

“No, no, no, no, no....”

Her brain offered another series of quick-fire options, and all of them lost relevance as the fissure grew wider and wider. The concrete base of the cross split. To her left, the empty apparatuses that had held the Calisca’rigo women twisted and collapsed into a hell of sand and rock.

The concrete exploded as if saying, “Fuck this, I wanna be sand again.”

Jade’s cross fell backward into the pit. Broken ribs screaming under her armor as she hyperventilated, Mia searched for an out, somewhere to jump or something to grab. But there was nowhere and nothing but a sheer drop into swirling geologic chaos. Mercifully, the first impact twelve meters down saw her head into the crossbeam above Jade’s left shoulder, and she lost consciousness as Terra Nova swallowed her whole.

---

 

[Sexitus Bacilus]

This is my first attempt at posting content here. Hopefully I won't do anything out of bounds or otherwise screw it up.

I recently read the terrific story "The Object Lesson" by @Sexitus Bacilus. For lack of a better approach, I'm going to borrow that method of posting in sections. If you'd rather get the whole story at once, it's available in PDF format on DeviantArt.

And away we go....

View attachment 767210

Thank you for the kind complement! I look forward to viewing your contributions!

 

[DarkSide808]

Great story!

 

[Servus Venandi]

V.​

Songbirds, she thought at first. How many times do I have to ask Amy not to open the fucking window while I’m asleep? After I ship out, she can have the room to herself and leave it open all day, every day. But let me sleep, dammit.

Amy had always loved a shot of sunrise air on competition days, and Mia smiled at the thought of her younger sister racing down the ski slopes, deftly clipping flags as she pressed for an extra millisecond.

It didn’t last, though. The image shifted, this time to her sister’s tear-stained face as masked men stamped with Earth Authority symbolism marched her out of the house in the middle of dinner, wrists and elbows cuffed behind her back, and the straps of her tank top pulled over her shoulders to expose small breasts and the shiny steel clamps now hanging from them. Performance-enhancing drugs, they would later inform the Zhangs. The next time Mia saw her sister was in a courtroom. Amy was completely naked, chained up like a wild beast, but cowed like a dog that knew only abuse. They were already breaking her. No trial. She’d pleaded guilty and gotten her collar. Simple as that. Mother and Father cried. Amy seemed beyond crying, spent from the inside out, ruled by terror and just ready for it to be over.

Mia found herself mired in cognitive dissonance. Amy was a slave on Earth, had been for the last fifteen years. Barring some physics-bending twist of fate, there was no way reality had reversed itself to that quaint bedroom in the Zhangs’ Zone 10 residence, so that morning songbirds and stiff slope competition were as bad as it got, rather than evening police raids and sisters in slave collars.

“I need you to wake up!” crooned a songbird.

Mia twitched, and her eyelids fluttered. It was dark, save for a few cracks of gray light hanging some unknown distance in front of her.

“Miss?”

She took a breath, coughed, and the resulting pain almost put her under again.

“Hey! Stay with me!”

Something clicked in the gloom, and a light washed over the battered face of Jade Zellich.

“Can you hear me?”

Mia grunted. “Yeah, I hear you.”

“I thought you were going to die.”

“Makes two of us. Might die yet. Can barely ... breathe.”

Jade inched forward, shivering, clearly not in great shape herself. “I think your arm is broken. Nothing but gauze, blood clotter, antibiotic and morphine in your pack, so I took some for myself.”

She held up her crudely bandaged forearms, dried red blobs visible on the fabric.

“How’d you get loose?” Mia wondered.

“I bent my hands enough to get a couple fingertips on your explosive thingies. Tried to look around a bit after, but I get dizzy when I stand.”

“You lost a lot of blood. Just stay down.”

“No need to tell me twice.”

Mia tried to sit up, only to realize that her left forearm was, indeed, almost certainly broken. A pained gasp escaped her lips, and she settled back into a supine position.

“My team,” she said. “My team is out there. If they survived, they’ll be looking.”

Jade bit her lower lip and nodded. “I was hoping you’d say that. It’s a little hope, at least.”

Using her good hand, Mia touched her face and realized her helmet was gone.

“The glass was cracked,” Jade explained, “and the breather was smashed in. I was afraid you might suffocate in there.”

With a crooked smirk in spite of herself, Mia replied, “I was thinking you’d make a good slave. But if we get outta here, I’ll take you to the Free Zone of your choosing and let you go. You have my word. How’s that for motivation?”

The girl managed a thin smile of her own. “And here I was willing to offer myself if you get me outta here.”

“Well, shit. That’ll teach me to be nice too soon.”

Jade set the light down on a jagged rock, and the beam cut across her nude form, revealing her bandaged wounds as well as the ballgag still resting around her neck.

“The hell happened up there?” she asked.

“A cheater cut his own throat,” Mia said. “Only problem is he used a thermonuclear device to do it. The two women sharing your hill were worth a lot of money.”

“I figured as much about the time you people started blowing each other up to get to them. Or us, I mean, though I guess I wasn’t worth much by myself.”

“Be glad for it.”

“I suppose now you’ll tell me that getting enslaved by that other guy would have been way worse than getting enslaved by you.”

“I didn’t flog you. Didn’t nail you to a cross. Didn’t hit you with a nuclear bomb.”

“Fair point, I guess.”

“But skepticism is smart. I’m no guardian angel.”

“Closest thing I’ve got.”

Mia sighed and felt around her battered tactical getup. Aside from the ribs, left arm, a probable concussion and a body-wide bruising epidemic, everything seemed in one piece.

“Okay,” she said. “Help me up. We need to move before gas or aftershocks finish us off. How long was I out?”

“I was out myself,” Jade answered as she slipped forward. “Been awake maybe an hour, spent most of it trying to get free and not bleed to death. Like I said, I haven’t done well on two feet.”

The girl crawled behind Mia and rose onto her knees.

“I can’t hold onto you,” she explained, “but I can help push if you can get your head off the ground.”

“Works for me,” Mia said. “If I scream and/or cuss, just keep going.”

Gritting her teeth and clamping down on a hard breath, she put everything she had into her abs and good elbow. It felt like a crowbar to the mid-section, but she’d expected a jackhammer, and Jade did her part in providing sufficient leverage. Once vertical, Mia rode the momentum onto her knees and then into a precarious standing position.

Cradling her left arm against her broken ribs, she closed her eyes for a moment of self-centering, but it didn’t work. The pain sucked hard.

“Hand me that flash if you can,” she said.

Jade crawled forward, scooped up the small L-shaped tactical light, and then offered it up in shaky, bloodstained hands.

Mia received it. “You gonna be okay in the dark for a few?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s just Mia.”

“Mia. I’m Jade. But you know that already.”

Aiming her flash at the cracks she’d spotted upon first opening her eyes, she was pleased when it highlighted jagged shards of rock lingering amid clouds of fine sand. There was still some daylight, and they had access to the surface. Unfortunately, the openings were at least a hundred meters away and ten meters up. Mia wasn’t sure she could make the climb, but she was positive she couldn’t move enough air to call for help. Made the decision easy, at least.

“Be careful,” Jade said, “and don’t fall.”

“I’m not a real guardian angel, remember? No wings, no guarantees against falling, but we’re guaranteed to die if we don’t get out.”

“I understand.”

“Just pass the time thinking about what you’ll do once you get to that Free Zone.”

“Buy a drink, probably, and a basket of fried cheese sticks.”

“Careful. Make me fall in love with you, and I might slap a collar on that pretty neck after all.”

“Still better than any other recent prospects.”

Mia frowned. “Sit tight for me, hon.”

Keeping the light beam directed a meter to her front, she eased across geologic rubble and did her best to stay upright. Every cautious step was like getting clubbed, stabbed and burned in a hundred places at once, and her ribcage rebelled at anything beyond the shallowest of breaths.

It took half an hour to pick her way across the chasm. Only once right beneath the overhead breaks in the rock did she realize the path had carried her up an incline, and a crawlspace that led outside lay almost within reach. If she could get Jade walking, they might have a chance.

Setting her jaw, Mia took in as much air as she could manage.

“Hey, anybody up there!” she called, but the noise that came out was little more than a sandpaper whisper. A few aircraft engines whined from a distance, but she received no other response.

Frustrated, she retraced her steps for another half hour, and found Jade curled on her side, unconscious. A gentle nudge from a boot brought her around.

“I’m up,” the girl said, struggling onto her knees. “Sorry.”

“You’re gonna have to walk. I think we have a way out.”

Biting her dry, cracked lower lip, Jade nodded once. “All right. I’ll try. I’ll go on all fours if I have to.”

“Good girl. Let’s hold each other up the best we can. Didn’t happen to find my rifle, did you?”

“I looked, trust me. Thought I might need it. But no.”

“Still got my sidearm. Let’s just move.”

Mia shouldered her pack and then offered her good arm. Jade couldn’t grab it, but she hooked the crook of each elbow around the limb and, with help, powered herself into a quivery but stable standing position.

“Tiny steps,” Mia said, “one at a time.”

“Guards always said the same thing after tying my feet. I got this.”

They walked.

Frequent rests and several tumbles made the journey miserable on both. What had been a half-hour hike for Mia doubled in the presence of her recently-crucified companion, and they reached the top of the incline to find the gray slits of light having turned to deep purple. Aircraft sounds continued far away, but no ground vehicles or voices broke though what was otherwise a lot of windy nothing.

Trembling, Jade glanced once at the nearest opening, just a tiny split in the earth about a meter overhead. With a weary sigh, she sank to her knees.

Mia one-handed her pack open and scrounged for her canteen, which was still half full. Uncapping, she held it to the girl’s lips and managed to get a few swallows down her. After taking a swig herself, she handed over the entire container along with her backpack, keeping only her light, pistol and spare magazines.

“I’m going out,” Mia said. “Stay quiet, don’t move. As soon as I find help or some other way to haul you up, I’ll be back. I promise. Okay?”

Jade nodded. “I trust you.”

Mia squeezed her shoulder and then faced the wall. With a less damaged body, she could just run the vertical face and snag the ledge, but there would be no parkour antics today.

Clipping the flash to her tactical vest, she tucked her left arm against her body, established initial holds for her feet and good hand, and then dragged herself up. Everything shook, and her chest went into outright spasms that spread pain as efficiently as Gabe Athelor spread ionizing radiation.

Fortunately, the earthquake had snapped the land apart in a manner that left sharp, shelf-like outcroppings of shredded rock. Falling on them obviously wasn’t healthy, but they facilitated climbing better than, say, a sheer wall blasted to smooth perfection by a million years of wind-driven sand.

Mia threw her arm over the ledge five minutes after starting the ascent, and she expended another two minutes wrestling the rest of her broken form up into the stony crawlspace. It was just a fortuitous collision of ground fragments that had folded over one another without collapsing, and the resultant tunnel offered a treacherous but passable exit to the surface.

She pressed on, avoiding the worst of the sharp stones and emerging into a dusky glow, with the last hints of sunlight fading toward the western horizon and the soaring towers of Gorburg rising to the east. Nothing around Hill 499 was recognizable. It wasn’t even clear whether the hill still existed. If any signs of the pressbox and crucifixion site remained in the area, she couldn’t make them out in the gloom.

Staggering away from the fissure, she doubled over as a whiff of poison gas forced its way through her nasal passages and down her throat. She retched once, nearly puked up her entire ribcage behind the surge of bile, and then spent five minutes dry-heaving for good measure.

When it was over, Mia almost convinced herself to lie down and close her eyes, but she couldn’t think of just herself right now.

 

[Servus Venandi]

(Continued from above)​

Back on her feet, still being poisoned but nausea-free, she unclipped her light, switched on strobe mode, and balanced her right forearm on top of her head with the flash in her grasp. Bright pulses turned the nearby landscape a ghostly gray, like something out of a black-and-white photo from Earth’s distant past.

Her gaze softened against the city glow, and she held her position for ten, twenty, thirty minutes. She was near the point of giving up for a rest when a sharp shout behind her broke the creeping listlessness.

“Got it! Down there! Just one, a female!”

Female.

That mattered for only one reason.

“Fuck,” Mia muttered, wondering what she’d done to the universe to deserve this, while the likes of Gabe flew off to a massive payday.

She clicked off the light and let it fall. Dropping her hand to her sidearm, she started to duck back into the tunnel. But no.... If she went in there, they would follow, and they would find Jade.

Mia lurched in the general direction of Gorburg, dragging her boots in the sand along a serpentine path.

“She’s hurt! She’s trying to run!”

A gunshot cracked right about the time the round caught her left shoulder. No chance of staying up even if her armor held—a good ol’ 5.56, she figured—and she tumbled headlong into the desert. After performing no less than a quadruple roll, she slid to a stop face-down, sand invading her mouth and nose and eyes, a fresh scream of agony caught in her throat from the new injury.

No harm done, she told herself. That side was already broke.

Knowing she needed to stand, knowing she couldn’t, Mia split the difference and wallowed ineffectively until the thunder of several boots rolled toward her in a rush, then fell silent to all sides.

“Stop moving,” a man said. “No need to get hurt anymore, all right? We can take care of you.”

It was an entirely reasonable point, and Mia had used it herself on captures many times. Having been on this side of the equation a few times as well, she understood with full confidence that, at the end of the line, it was usually to the captive’s benefit to just stop fighting and cooperate. Proper preparation included capture and rescue protocols, but none of those could be enacted if she got herself killed in hopeless resistance, to say nothing of sentencing Jade to a death arguably worse than the one she faced before.

Mia spat sand. “Okay. I give up.”

“Good,” the guy replied. “You got any weapons?”

“A pistol. My arm is broken. Left arm. The gun’s in my other hand, I think, wedged against my stomach.”

“All right. I got five boys here with weapons of their own, and they’re a nervous bunch. I’m gonna roll you to the right, and you’re gonna let go of the gun. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t try anything.”

“I won’t. I know when I’m beat.”

“Smart girl. You’ll live longer, though I guess that’s not always a good thing. Your Gold Rush turned to rank shit, didn’t it?”

“It did not go as planned,” she acknowledged.

“Where’s you crew?”

“Extracted. I fell behind in the quake.”

“Hmm.”

As promised, the man knelt and eased her up onto her right side, taking some care to support the broken arm. When her weight came off the pistol, she entertained a brief thought of blowing him away, but she would never take out everybody before being turned into Swiss cheese. Reluctantly, she left her gun in the sand, and a second man swooped in to collect it.

“All right,” the talker said, “I think we can all relax a bit with that out of the way. I’m Kirby. And you?”

“Suzie,” Mia said.

“Go any ID?”

“I was on a Gold Rush, so fuck no, and it’s gonna take more than your field equipment to crack my brain chip.”

“Fair enough. We’ll go with Suzie for now. Got to handcuff you, Suzie. Stay friendly.”

“I’ll be a regular pal, but no need to handcuff a broken arm. Come on.”

“You wearing a skinsuit under that bashed-up armor?”

“Yeah....”

He looked up at his boys. “Get this off. Make sure she’s clean. Dig around and see if you can find something to immobilize this arm.”

Gritting sand between her teeth, Mia limply assisted while no less than three pairs of hands unlatched her tactical vest, protectors and belt. They moved quickly but with some consideration for her condition, making her think she looked even worse than she felt. When they finished picking her not-quite-a-corpse clean, she was left in nothing but boots, combat pants, and the sleeveless top of her skinsuit.

Kirby whistled. “You weren’t lying about the arm, and the number we did on you farther up isn’t pretty, either. Sorry about that.” He looked around at this group. “Anybody packing morphine for the poor lady?”

“In the truck,” someone answered.

“I don’t need morphine,” Mia protested, wincing all the while.

Kirby chuckled. “Don’t be ridiculous. I told you we’d take care of you, and pain management was part of the deal. No extra charge, as they say.”

He winked and ran gloved fingers through her filthy black hair. The discomfort cost associated with pulling away was more than she felt like paying, but she found his eyes and silently told him she was onto the game. Behind his clear gas mask, caution flashed across his bloodshot eyes.

It was hard to know what would benefit her more in the long run—to make them afraid of her, or to lure them into a false sense of security. In the short term, at least, making them think twice before lining up for a gang-bang seemed an advantageous strategy. Since they’d been relatively gentle so far, she assumed they were slavers, and so the gang-bang might be verboten anyway, though a wasteland fondling wasn’t all that appealing, either.

Unless Ghost was involved. Or Sage.

God, I miss Sage.

Why am I suddenly thinking about Sage?

The brushes with death, surely. Sage had effectively become the galaxy’s angel of death—about as far from a guardian angel as Mia herself—so it made a certain sense.

Something cracked near her head. Mia flinched and opened her eyes to Kirby slapping his hands together.

“Hey, hey, Suzie. Stay with us now.”

Shaking the fog from her head, she realized they’d strapped a half-mask over her face. No eye protection, but she could breathe filtered air now. In a less encouraging development, she tried to move and found her wrists cuffed behind her back, the left forearm encased in some manner of makeshift splint. When she dropped her chin in frustration, her naked tits greeted her, hanging about the remains of her cut skinsuit and adorned with a rusty set of clamps linked by an equally oxidized chain.

The natural inclination was to fight, or to at least erupt with a string of profane insults, but Mia had been around the block too many times to believe in the efficacy of natural inclinations.

Crouching in front of her, Kirby reached forward and gave the chain a playful tug.

“Just to keep you cooperative,” he said. “I’ll take it off when we get to camp, and there won’t be any slavery stuff until you’ve healed up a bit. You know that’s what this is, yeah?”

Still looking down, Mia replied, “Yeah.”

“Shittiest Gold Rush ever, I bet. Anyway, I give you my word. About letting you heal, I mean. Injured merch is worth less. Injured merch doesn’t train as well. That’s the bulk of it right there. But believe it or not, I don’t like watching people hurt, either. Best to secure your compliance early so it never comes to that.”

“I get it.”

“I’m sure you do. Let’s go.”

He seized the chain between her breasts. Between the mammary encouragement and a helping hand on her right arm, she rose onto her feet, grateful to still be wearing her pants and boots.

Having no need to watch her captors since she could just follow the tug of the nipple clamps, Mia dropped her gaze and hobbled away from the small rocky gap. Somewhere below, Jade huddled in the darkness, waiting for a rescue that might never come. It was hard not to look, but Mia didn’t want to give any indication of significance to that nondescript split in the ground.

They led her ... southwest, she guessed. Her back was to Gorburg most of the way, but she caught glimpses of the distant lights in her peripheral vision. Time didn’t mean much as she put one foot in front of the other, but the trek lasted long enough to see dusk transition into night. The desert grew cold, and Mia began to shiver in addition to all her other problems.

When they reached the slavers’ truck—a long bed with oversized sand tires and a single mounted machine gun—all five of Kirby’s boys jumped aboard and set to work preparing to leave. Mia picked out two battered cases of 12.7mm ammunition and an assortment of cargo and medical containers. A collection of shackles, chains and well-used leather straps also failed to escape her notice. The apparent absence of smart binding wire, and a reliance on restraint implements that hurt and left bruises, amounted to classic T-Novian hospitality.

“Are you a slaver by trade,” Kirby wondered, “or just here for the money? Or both?”

“Money,” Mia answered.

“You don’t have to worry about money anymore.”

“Depends. You could wind up selling me to an accountant who prizes my financial brilliance.”

He laughed. “Maybe so.”

Metal clanged at the back of the truck, and someone shouted, “All set, Kirb! Send her up!”

Again leading her by the clamps, Kirby guided her up to misshapen aluminum ladder. He gestured at it with his head.

A hollow sensation settling in her stomach, Mia put her boot on the first rung and then climbed while her captor supported her from behind. At the top, two other men dragged her over into the truck and eased her onto her stomach. She anticipated the removal of her pants and boots, but the cold air on her ass and legs forced her to squeal anyway. Her reaction was worse than what had caused it.

“That thing is tight,” someone said. “Really tight. Holy shit....”

“Strap her down and keep your hands off,” Kirby warned.

Putting all of her energy toward not showing weakness, despite feeling almost as weak as she had the day they took Amy away, Mia lay with her breasts pressed against the cold metallic floor and waited for them to bind her ankles and knees with some of the leather straps. An additional strap went around her waist, and they connected it to her ankles, cinching her into an effective hogtie without torturing her broken arm.

As slave captures were concerned, the gesture was quite kind, and she almost said thanks before one of the “boys” started tickling her feet.

Laughing with a fractured thoracic cage appealed to her even less than rusty nipple clamps, and she summoned just enough breath to say, “If your tickling fascination results in my broken ribs breaking through the flesh of my torso, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Leave her alone,” Kirby concurred.

“Yes, sir,” the humbled tickler replied.

To round out her bondage, the slavers fitted crank-style cargo tie-downs across her body—one across her back and wedged under her arms, one over her butt, and a third across the backs of her thighs. Despite it having the side-effect of making the restraint even more secure, she had to acknowledge the humane logic of anchoring a bound subject during a wild ride across the post-earthquake desert.

“Are you able to breathe?” Kirby asked, leaning down so she could look at him.

“Yes,” she answered, even though she doubted the truth of her own statement.

“I’m giving you morphine for pain, a sedating dose. When you wake, your new life with have begun.”

“I need antibiotic and hydration. I don’t want morphine.”

“This will be easier if you sleep. I don’t want to hurt you or see you hurt yourself.”

“You can’t....”

“I can. It’s for the best.”

She tensed against her bonds, and immediately her left arm screamed in rebuke. Kirby took her second of distraction to stab her right forearm. While he injected her, she bitterly wondered how many others had been stuck with the same needle, and for how long the medication had been expired.

“Sorry, Suzie. You’ll feel better soon.”

Mia let her head fall to the bed of the truck.

I’m so sorry, Jade.

“Package secure?” someone hollered from the front of the vehicle.

“Package secure,” Kirby replied. “All hands accounted for. Let’s take her home.”

Mia braced for the inevitable engine vibration, but it never came. As seconds stretched into an uncomfortable silence, Kirby, seated somewhere to her left, banged on metal.

“And? What’s the hold up?”

After another delay, the response: “Won’t start! Not even a click!”

“Son of a holy fuck,” Kirby muttered. “All right! Pop the hood!”

Multiple people bailed out. Mia couldn’t be certain she was alone, but she couldn’t make out any masked breathing noises other than her own. All the clattering and voices had migrated to the front.

A sandrunner engine blew up the night, and a blinding spotlight flooded the area around the truck. Kirby’s men cried out in alarm.

“Get on the fucking ground!” boomed a familiar voice.

Barnes.

The amazing fuckers found me.

“Get. On. The. Fucking. Ground! Or we will open fire on your motherfucking faces!”

The indecision lasted no more than three seconds, and Kirby finally responded, “Okay! Don’t shoot!”

“Down! All o’ you!”

“Understood! We’re going!”

More boots rushed in. It took a minute, but someone finally climbed into the truck and rushed to Mia’s side. A weapon clattered nearby, and gloved hands touched her shoulder.

“Mistress,” Ghost said. “Oh, shit. Mistress, can you hear me?”

Mia tried to twist around, but the bondage and pain proved equally unrelenting.

“I’m drugged,” she said, her tongue thick and gritty in her mouth. “I need you to listen to me before I go out.”

Fumbling with the cargo straps, Ghost answered, “I’m listening, Mistress.”

“Stop untying and listen, goddammit!”

Ghost stopped and leaned forward. “Okay, Mistress. I’m listening.”

Mia winced. Her head was getting heavy. She didn’t have long.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean.... Just.... The girl. Jade.”

Ghost nodded. “She’s alive?”

“About ... half hour’s walk. You’ll wanna go ... northeast. I think. Small break in the ground, kind of a ... like a folded place. Runs down about ten meters, drops at a small wall. Jade’s waiting there. Was alive when I left her. Find her. She doesn’t deserve this. She is priority, even over me.”

Ghost swallowed hard behind her mask. “As you command. We’ll find her. Can I untie you now?”

Mia nodded, and the effort left her head back on the floor. She didn’t have the strength to lift it again.

“Yeah, you can ... untie me now. For all the ... good it’ll do.”

Back to work, Ghost released the cargo straps in short order, but consciousness faded into the cold desert night before Mia could take pleasure in the sweet release.

---

 

[old slave]

Songbirds, she thought at first. How many times do I have to ask Amy not to open the fucking window while I’m asleep? After I ship out, she can have the room to herself and leave it open all day, every day. But let me sleep, dammit.

Beautiful little semi-conscious mind wandering episode, and a small touch of wry humour in the rest of the story adds to the characters.

 

[Servus Venandi]

Beautiful little semi-conscious mind wandering episode, and a small touch of wry humour in the rest of the story adds to the characters.

Thank you very much. Whatever the end goal, I try to write interesting characters first and foremost.

 

[Servus Venandi]

VI.​

It felt like teleportation. Mia had drifted off in the filthy truck, and then immediately awakened in a dim infirmary room—a cast on her left arm, an IV in her right, and an assortment of bandages and such scattered across the rest of her body. She wasn’t handcuffed to the bed, so hopefully she was still in good standing with Red Nova Syndicate.

“Been a whole day,” Ghost said. “You’ve been mumbling a lot, but this is the first time you’ve actually looked around.”

Mia turned her head to the left and found the i-slave hovering just centimeters away.

“Jade.”

“She was hypothermic and barely conscious by the time we found the place, but we got her in time. Red Nova has officially credited you with the capture. She’s in custody here, just waiting to leave when you do.”

Mia had no explanation for the relief that fell on her, but it was powerful enough to squeeze a few tears from her eyes.

“She’s safe now, Mistress, and so are you.”

“I’m not some fucking damsel,” Mia snapped. She took a deep breath, immediately regretted it. “Happy enough to be saved like one, though. So thanks. I’m in serious debt to my crew, and will probably be the butt of jokes for months.”

“Years, Mistress. Years.”

“Fuck. And the word on Gabe Athelor?”

Ghost chuckled. “Red Nova is ... displeased.”

“How did he do it? Why?”

“The syndicate is tight-lipped. It’s almost like thermonuclear explosions near urban centers make them nervous or something. Nobody is saying how he smuggled a nuke onto T-Nova, but he apparently had a lot of help in calculating the effects of the blast with high precision. He centered it on a known major fault a couple hundred kilometers north of the crux hill, which kept the AO free of the worst radiation and let the quake fuck us up. You know how it ended.”

“Is Red Nova going after him?”

“Of course, but you know he’s almost—almost—as good as you.”

“No need to sugarcoat. He’s made off with my targets twice now. There’s no almost about it.”

“Because he cheats. Anyway, he’ll be on Devon or Hell’s Divide before the Red Nova spec ops can zip their pants. Assassination is on the table, but I wouldn’t bet on anybody catching him. Unless....”

“Don’t tempt me with that. I’ll pop off this bed faster than you can fish out the restraints.”

“Just saying, Mistress. There’s a sudden demand on Terra Nova for professional counterterrorism services. A certain Red Nova general might be wanting to speak with you before we return to orbit.”

Mia squinted. “A certain commander of the Yawning Dagger might be willing to listen. Have you got anything for me on the Calisca’rigos? What about them drove Gabe to nuclear terrorism?”

Ghost shrugged. “Unknown. I’ve heard literally nothing about it. Smudge, as usual, tried to pump Messenger for information. Messenger, as usual, ain’t talking to anybody but you. Some ball was dropped somewhere by somebody, and it wasn’t us, but everything else is a question mark.”

Mia sighed. “What a mess.”

With a smirk, Ghost leaned forward and pressed her lips against Mia’s. Tongues met, saliva commingled, and Mia laughed at her own sudden surge of desire, condition be damned.

“I’d fuck you,” Ghost said, “but the local nurses have been pretty vigilant.”

“Save it for orbit. All our required gear is on the Dagger anyway.”

“I’m never shy about improvising.”

Ghost licked the tip of Mia’s nose and then stuck out her tongue.

“Saucy slave will be punished,” Mia mumbled.

“Mmm, and have you asked yourself whether this is precisely why the slave is saucy?”

“You hurt my brain.”

“Your concussion count is piling up. No wonder.”

“And my heart.”

“That’s just your ribs. Your broken, professionally-taped ribs. You’re gonna check outta this place with a novel’s worth of dos and don’ts from fifty different doctors.”

“I never read that crap.”

“No, I do, so I can make sure you don’t immediately kill yourself.”

“And I’m grateful, even if I don’t always act like it.”

“You’re good at heart, Mistress. Mostly. Sometimes.”

Mia smiled and closed her eyes. A soft kiss from Ghost found her forehead, and then the slave settled back in her reclining chair.

“What happened to my ... hosts?” Mia asked.

“Barnes told them how to fix the truck we sabotaged, and then we let ‘em go. You’ve always said those black marketeers are like cockroaches, and the new ones tend to be meaner than the old timers. Despite you being the victim this time, we tried to stay objective.”

Pleased, Mia nodded. “The old timer—the one in charge, anyway—he’s the only thing keeping that group from being a pack of horny jackals. Even in its relative kindness as slave-nabs go, I was still hurt and humiliated. I’ve been taken prisoner before, but that’s as far down the road to slavery I’ve ever traveled, at least on that end of the leash. I knew you guys were out there, and you’d tear the desert apart to find me. Without that hope.... I don’t know how I would have reacted. I’ve been hopeless before, too. I don’t handle it well.”

She paused and chewed her lip. “But what I do know is.... Every single negative I just listed about those slavers—they all apply to me, too. You can’t do slavery without being cruel sometimes, and sometimes you have to hurt and humiliate your slaves, even slaves you deeply love. I guess I’m kinder than most on average. Between you and Sikra and Dawg and Alicia—I don’t really treat any of my slaves like slaves. Except Thomas. I treat Thomas like a dirty slave, because he fuckin’ earned it. But I’m a shitty slaver, a hack. I’m soft. Gabe was right on that count. One bad encounter with real slavery, and I’m second-guessing my entire career. They didn’t even whip me, and here I am sounding half broken. I’m so broken, I don’t even know where I was going with this.”

Ghost leaned forward again, grinning. “Do you want to be a real slaver?”

“Fuck no. I’m just ranting.”

“Then stuff a ballgag in all this whining. You’re a freelancer. You dabble in slavery, because it’s a feature of the universe you work in, just like you dabble in a thousand other things. You are an exceptionally kind mistress, relatively speaking. That’s not a weakness.”

Mia opened one eye and looked sideways. “Spoken like a good slave. Curiously so. I’m suspicious.”

“You want me to go full saucy again?”

“I hope you never stop, darling.”

***




That's all of this one. Thanks for reading, and for all the likes and comments.​

 

[DarkSide808]

Woulda been interesting if she ended up Gabes slave XD

 

[Servus Venandi]

Woulda been interesting if she ended up Gabes slave XD

It's an enticing thought, but I couldn't have done it justice here. If Mia ever gets collared, it'll have to be its own story.

In the first draft, I almost had her waste Gabe after his skyboard crash, but decided he was a good antagonist to keep in reserve.

 

[Servus Venandi]

Thread moved two years after the fact. Okay....