Chapter 4
Chapter 4.
Casey had his arm locked around my neck; he was dragging me backwards while Ash walked toward us, holding a clear orb in each paw, blood dripped from them. I tried to scream, but thick straps were locked around my muzzle, something was squirming inside my mouth, and I couldn't swallow it. The chair had me again, thick maglocks snapped shut around my limbs with deafening cracks. Ash was welding them into place so that they could never open again. I saw Zim standing in the corner, watching me, laughing. "All of your freedom is mine, now!"
I woke with a howl cut short, still echoing in my room, then silence. A soft humming in the center of my chest, cushy memory foam accepted all my bodyweight in an earth standard artificial gravity. A hell of a nightmare, but it wasn't real. My heart pounded, I kept repeating that in my mind: not real, not real.
The collar snug around my neck sent flickers of green light against the wall nearest me. I didn't need to squeeze my sheath to know what was still inside. Normally, a nightmare fades into the calm realization that everything was ok. This one faded into the horror of what I was in the middle of. I dreaded where I was, what still lay ahead, so much unknown. Was this what being owned felt like? Was this the rest of my life?
I lay there contemplating my situation. Something about the collar felt... different. Like I had the barest memory of once wearing one, for fun. Which was crazy, I had never done that. Rhenthar do not wear collars. But it ate at me, like the edges of a memory I just couldn't bring forth.
I spent the morning briefing with the rest of my team. I hadn't yet completed a full mission with them, but they were all old friends. A dozen years prior, what started out as simple subcontract work progressively became less professional and more personal. Initially, I was only their datarat of choice, performing quick hacks into local infrastructure. Gradually, my fees went up, and relations became more personal as I was entrusted with more sensitive details. Just a couple of weeks prior were some of the best days of my life, when they had offered me a full time position. Room, board, and lots of credits. Guilt weighed on me heavily, that so quickly they had had to rescue me.
The conference room aboard The Hahkota didn't look like a room at all. Forest stretched out in every direction, a heavy canopy of branches and leaves loomed from above, with warm sunlight filtering through limbs gently swaying in the breeze. We sat around a giant polished oak stump, growing right up out of the ground. It was the only thing real, it and the dirt under our toes. The rest was virtual, the scents merely an applet running in the background of our wetware. The sounds of the forest around us, a stream trickled nearby. I could turn it all off, but why? It felt real, and this was my favorite area aboard The Hahkota. I spent as much time in it as I could.
Across from me lounged Cane and Russel, the muscle of our force. Both partial-quad Rhenthar, like me, but with Rottweiler ancestors. They looked like littermates to me. Ex-special ops, ex because the military doesn't pay as well as we do. They worked well together, so much so, they often finished each other's sentences. I found it terribly endearing, and I made a bad mistake, once. I suggested they just get married, and get it over with. The comment was apparently never forgotten, I scented smug satisfaction the first time I caught them staring at what was locked around my neck. Still, they were both fiercely loyal to our objectives, I couldn't be in safer paws.
The instructions given to my team featured delivery coordinates on a semi-habitable moon, for a handoff. It was unclear if my new owner would be present. If he wasn't, my team would turn me over and follow us, cloaked. If he was there, well, my team would do what they did best. Justice would be brutal and swift, but not before my collar was unlocked. Ash figured my fur would grow back in a month or two.
By the end of the briefing, I was avoiding everyone's eye contact. My beta was present, an ornery grizzled old wolf called Zero. As in, zero disobedience, zero incompetence, zero tolerance making fun of his name. He kept staring at me with a strange look, like I smelled odd. In preparation for the mission, I wasn't allowed to shower. But I couldn't smell anything amiss in my fur.
"Ash, do you have any questions?" Zero was wrapping things up.
"Can you forward me the data packet you intercepted, the one heading to the original team before we..." Blew them out of the sky and transmitted our own response, "stepped in?"
Zero raked his claws on the stump, "there's nothing more to be gained from it, just basic coordinates and time."
"There might be something in the header. I might be able to identify what kind of hardware transmitted it. Could be groundside equipment," Ash cocked her head sideways, "or shipborn."
Hmm. Why didn't I think of that? I should have, but my mind just wasn't in it- "I'll uh, check that out with you, Ash. I've got a new ident list somewhere, upstairs." Slang, for primary wetware storage.
Ash's German Shepherd lineage made her easy going, but driven, she needed tasks to perform and would work them to death. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the data headers would be irrelevant, my owner could have used a relay. But I needed to show Zero that I was still competent. It was something for me to do.
"Casey." Zero had noticed his eyes were shut. He was probably deep in his wetware, no way would he actually sleep in one of Zero's meetings. Casey's eyes snapped open and focused, he stared at Zero, "yeah?"
"Check on the cloak system, our neutron emissions were high last time, lit up the whole damn range, remember?"
Casey nodded, "it's decaying. I'll get ahead of it." He was my age, our engineering chief, hired straight out of dry dock while he was the strategic designer for The Hahkota's fabrication. We stole him, basically, and all of her secrets were now safe in his head. No copy of her blueprints existed, outside of what was on-board, he made sure of that when he left Magnavox. What was publically available about The Hahkota was an entirely different layout, she identified as a Mitsubishi-Erikson design, someone would have to get in and look around in order to figure out the discrepancy.
"Keman, I want Ash to take you into the ship's autodoc and have injuries put on your body." Zero contemplated, "bruises, some missing fur, nothing broken, but I want you to look like we had to rough you up. The boys that pick you up won't know you're a wuss, now you get to act like you put up a fight and got knocked around trying to escape. It'll scan well."
My ears splayed, "yes sir."
"Should we dope him?" Russ, grinning.
Zero shot Russ a look that withered his eagerness to drug me, "not unless you want to look like that's the only way you could handle Keman."
Russ and Cane stared at each other, "we'll handle him." Hurf, would you? That'll be tonight's fantasy...
Zero heaved himself to his feet and circled a paw in the air, "I'll talk this over with Zeek, gentlemen," he stared at Ash, "lady. You know the rest, sixteen hours we touchdown, planetside. I want this over, so we can go back to making credits, instead of spending them." He spoke the last words pointedly at me, and then bared his throat to us all. We matched it and he walked out.
I spent the rest of the time catching up on sleep. I had all new aches and pains, though Ash had been gentle with the autodoc's programming. Bruises around my wrists and ankles, fur missing from my head where straps from a muzzle had apparently rubbed raw. A couple of broken claws on my hands, and some heavy bruises on my torso. While she was able to pick areas containing the least amount of nerve endings, keeping pain to a minimum, my body still felt like it was healing, and it was.
I was very horny, that night, and wanted release. Russ and Cane would handle me, eh? Time to eat up all my promises I had made, about never having sex again, about never wanting to feel another orgasm. Funny how that goes.
I was lying in bed, trying as hard as I could to build up enough friction behind my knot, just something... anything. I squeezed as hard as I could, behind the parasite itself, but the solid area ended too far back, I had no real nerve endings there. Not the kind I wanted. I gripped my knot and tugged, it swelled up some, with all my thoughts. I was hard as hell, and it didn't seem to mind or prevent that in any way. My mouth watered with the need to tip over the edge. I pulled and tugged, all my usual techniques learned from a lifetime of masturbation.
But all along, in the back of my head, I knew. The one critical area I needed to pinch, to squeeze. The one which told my body I was all the way inside someone. I couldn't reach it; this was an effort in futility.
Inside a drawer under my bed, I pulled out a canine shaped vibrator. One of my favorites. I checked the charge, it was full. On it went, then I pushed it against the area behind my knot, yes... this will work! The parasite woke up, all pissed off, I rolled to my side, clutching my abdomen in pain as cramps wracked my body in a region I knew I could never build a tolerance to. I could hardly draw a breath, I lay there horny, angry, and now in pain. Oh, stupid, don't do that again. Please, stop. It was like a red hot poker shoved up my urethra. My erection faded quickly.
Someone did their homework, and I really hated whoever he was. I went to sleep angry and thoughtful. I would build a machine, similar to what I was hooked up to, just to get some relief. But it wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't put me under Cane's tail while Russ was on top of me. That was the final fantasy before sleep took me.