by Maren Smith
She gave her skin a hardness greater than that of granite.
If Bob had brought his hand down as hard as he had certainly meant to do, he would probably have broken several bones in it, but clearly his darksense could detect what Susan had done. Whether because he couldn’t stop his motion completely or just out of symbolism, he slapped Susan’s now-stony bottom-cheeks the way a man might hit a rock-face he meant to scale. She felt it as a tap, but no more.
Nightprince spoke in a slow, but very stern voice, then. “Make your little bottom ready for spanking, Susan. I’m not going to tolerate your refusal, where your special kind of training is concerned. You heard me. It’s the potty, for you. Not the bathroom. And you have more spanking coming, so that you understand I mean business.”
Chapter 6
Bob frankly didn’t know what would happen, now that affairs had reached their most dangerous point. Ultragirl might very well rip him apart—from what he could tell she could do it as easily as she could snap her fingers.
Thankfully, into the silence that followed his instruction to her to take away whatever transformation she had applied to her skin that made it as hard as diamond came the sound of his communicator.
“Bob,” said Sally’s voice, sounding a little troubled, “I think Vic is down.”
“Shit,” Bob said, starting to raise Susan off his knee. She finished getting up, and backed away from him, a wide-eyed look of alarm in her eyes and her hands instinctively in front of her pussy to keep him from seeing it. For an instant he thought he saw red in her cheeks before it disappeared under a Zaxian transformation. As he raised his wrist towards his mouth to reply to Sally, he said, “You may raise your pants,” in as dominant-mentorish a voice as he could muster, “we’re not done, though, princess.”
Then he said, to his wrist, “What happened?” He got up from the chair as he listened to Tigerwoman’s response, and walked around his desk to get at his screen and keyboard.
“Vital signs are stable, but they’re steady, so he’s not fighting. And he’s moving in a straight line right towards the bay.”
Uh-oh. “How straight?” Bob pulled up the readout on his screen and saw for himself just as Sally answered.
“Dead straight. Like…”
“Like he would on an airborne flamecycle,” Bob finished. He turned to Ultragirl. “Go grab a suit.” Then, raising his eyes unnecessarily to the ceiling—since the supercomputer that ran the building didn’t exist above them in any literal way—he said, “CPE Prime, show Ultragirl the way to the suits.”
A line of light appeared on the floor underneath Susan’s feet. Bob addressed her again, “You’ll see that fit isn’t a problem, but obviously it’ll be a standard CPE purple suit. Good for impacts, fire, and electro, but not optimized for your powers.”
Susan looked back at him with her mouth hanging open. When he paused, she shut it, her brows knitting. Then she said, shaking her head as she spoke, “You’re taking me out on a mission?”
“You think I’d leave you here to rip the place apart if you decide to top yourself off with another orgasm?” He saw on her face that his deadpan had been a little too dead. She gave him a resentful look back, almost angry but also, rather to Bob’s distress, incredibly cute. “Joking!” he said. “You could very well be the most powerful one of the team. Just do as you’re told, please?”
“Please?!”
Bob laughed. “Yes, please. You may be my naughty princess when it comes to teaching you to draw your power, but as of this moment you’re also a colleague.”
They left Clearstream to call in the backup watch: CPE regulations said that no fewer than three supers could be on duty at the tower at any one time, except in an emergency—and in an emergency one super had to stay behind to summon more. The CPE’s near-annihilation the previous year at the hand of the League of Terror had resulted from the whole watch leaving the building to stop an asteroid that turned out to be a decoy for LOT’s real attack. So Nightprince, Tigerwoman, and Ultragirl would figure out what was happening and then decide whether to call a full team of supers, while Clearstream waited for Swiftarrow and Captain Wonder to come in from their lair in the suburbs. The logistics of running a federation of supernaturally powerful beings could prove taxing, but Bob held to the opinion that the CPE had saved humanity a sufficient number of times to make its existence worth a few headaches.
He met Ultragirl on the launch deck, already striding across it to the electrojets like she owned the place. Bob had to admit she had a right to preen a little: she obviously had some kind of molecular-manipulation ability that could transform even the very sophisticated nano-fiber of which the standard CPE suit was made, for the suit she had on now bore only the slightest resemblance to the one she had put on.
She had kept a few purple accents from the unicolored standard suit, and she had kept the white CPE logo, but the logo had shrunk to fit on a small purple shield inside the curve of the extremely aerodynamic-looking white U that occupied most of her chest, somehow subtly emphasizing both the presence of her breasts and the relative smallness of those little hills—a characteristic Bob had to admit he found very enticing. The overall color scheme was dominated by an electric blue that said alien warrior in a kind of lowkey way.
“Nice,” he said as she joined him next to his jet. She smiled up at him and Bob’s insides—usually a pretty solid place—seemed to quiver despite his being sure Ultragirl hadn’t just messed with his molecules. “Hop in.”
“You don’t want me to fly? I can, now.”
Bob laughed. “I bet, and I want to hear about how it works, but for now we’re taking the electrojet. It gives us more options. Sally’s already on board, in the back.”
Susan nodded. “Okay.” She eyed the door. “You want me in the back, too?”
“No,” he answered. “Copilot’s seat to talk to the autopilot if I have to drop in somewhere with Sally.”
Another nod. “Okay…” The smile flashed again. “Sir.”
Susan was the first to spot Charlatan’s flamecycle, now two miles out over the bay.
“Oh gods,” she said. “He’s got Virtueman dangling from a chain below the chopper. It looks like he’s unconscious.”
“Alright,” Bob said, “add farvision to Ultragirl’s list. I’m seeing a red speck in the distance.” He spoke to the jet. “Electrojet, locate and enlarge.”
“Working,” the jet’s feminine voice answered.
Then on the monitor just below the windshield the image sprang to life, exactly as Susan had described: Vic hung suspended five hundred feet over the gray waves and whitecaps of San Felipe Bay. Above him rode Charlatan, trailing flame not just from his nightmarish motorcycle but also from his Hell-born body (well, if the CPE’s theories about the supervillain were accurate, not really Hell but somewhere deep in the Earth’s fiery mantle).
“Oh, Vic,” Bob said, “goddammit.”
“What?” asked Susan from the copilot’s seat, clearly detecting the note of reproach in Bob’s voice. “It’s not his fault, right? I mean Charlatan is kind of a badass, isn’t he?”
“Yeah,” Bob replied. “He is. Which is why Vic shouldn’t have pulled the He’s my nemesis shit he pulled.” Bob deepened his voice into a reasonable impression of Virtueman’s self-righteous bass, which really bore much too close a resemblance to Dudley Do-Right’s for Bob to hold a straight face, much of the time when listening to Vic. “He’s my nemesis, and I must face him alone.”
That made Susan giggle rather distractingly, so Bob turned to look at Sally, who had fixed her eyes on the screen from her seat on the bench in the jet’s hold. “What do you think?” he asked. “If I drop you off from above, can you grab him and break that chain?”
Tigerwoman thought for a moment, then nodded.
“Wait,” Susan put in. “I fly, remember? And I can break that chain with, like, a thought.”
“Thanks,” Sally replied, “but I’ve got it.”
The jet had gott
en close enough to Charlatan’s flamecycle now that Bob could see Vic dangling there with his naked eye. He turned to Susan to see how she had taken Sally’s refusal of her help, and to his dismay he saw a rebellious expression forming in her eyes even as he watched—as if seeing Bob look over at her, obviously to make sure she would follow the wishes of her more experienced colleague and wouldn’t violate her pledge to do as she was told, had awakened an inherent quality that really only had one name, if an undignified one for the last survivor of an alien warrior race: brattiness.
Even as Bob wondered whether it might be fair to characterize the entirety of the female sex of the Zaxian race as bratty, Ultragirl had started to open the door on her side of the cockpit.
“Dammit, Susan,” he said. “Even if you don’t kill yourself you know what’s going to happen when we get back.”
Ultragirl had the door open now, and had pushed it far enough open despite the enormous force of the air rushing around the jet that she would be able to jump out. She turned to look back at him with an expression of defiance, to which he replied with his most daddy-promises-you-a-bare-bottom-lesson-ish face. Then she was gone, backwards no less, through the door.
“Shit,” Sally said. “She’s got power, though, right?”
“Yup,” Bob answered. “We made sure she’s fully supplied. Let’s just hope she knows how to use it, and keep it.”
“Can’t let her disobey orders like that, though.” Sally gave him the patented Tigerwoman raised-eyebrows, dark-irised look that said, This cat is here to make sure civilization doesn’t descend into the law of the jungle.
“Nope,” Bob replied, returning her penetrating gaze with Nightprince brings darkness where light fears to go. He did it with his cheekbones, mostly. “I think Susan is testing some limits I gave her just before we left. Those limits will be coming back with appropriate force when this is over.”
Sally laughed at that. “Thought she might be a little, just from looking at her. Is her power in her pussy? Is that what the earthquake was about when she was in the bathroom?”
Bob nodded. “Yup.”
The sight of Ultragirl streaking through the air towards Charlatan brought the conversation to a quick halt, or Bob would have told Sally about the spanking. Nightprince and Tigerwoman had shared responsibility for another little, Miss Nightshade, a few years before. Although Miss Nightshade had gone on a mission to another dimension the previous summer, Bob and Sally remained close, and shared notes about their adventures in dominance just as freely as they did concerning their adventures in promoting truth and justice.
Bob tilted the joystick to follow Susan down towards the flamecycle, whose image rapidly increased in size on the monitor.
“He’s not doing anywhere near his max,” Bob told Sally. “That thing goes at least Mach 1 when he puts the pedal down. We’re faster, but not by anywhere near this much.”
“Wants us to catch him,” Sally said grimly. “Dare I say, it’s a trap?”
Ultragirl had more speed than either the electrojet or the flamecycle, it now became very clear. As Bob and Sally watched, she flew straight through the chain holding Virtueman by his ankles, then stopped and performed a maneuver that most closely resembled a swimmer’s racing turn. Vic’s momentum carried him straight into Susan’s arms, his absurd white suit seeming to swallow up her blue one entirely behind his inverted, bulky form. Then Ultragirl was flying Virtueman back towards the jet, one hand holding his chain below her midriff and the other aerodynamically at her side.
What happened next invoked Nightprince’s trained ability to speed up his cognitive processes in such a way as to slow down his perception of time’s passage to a figurative crawl.
First, the flamecycle, with the flaming supervillain atop it like a vision from Dante transferred to the highway to heaven, plus chrome, went into a nose-, or perhaps a front-wheel-, dive towards the bay.
Second, Bob noticed that Vic had woken up a little, and that he seemed to be shaking his head as Susan conveyed him through the air towards the electrojet.
Third, Virtueman’s body suddenly changed its position in the air in an impossible way, straightening despite the wind resistance.
Fourth, Ultragirl’s hand was pulled downward, with Vic, and an expression of panic appeared on her face. She clearly couldn’t let go of the chain, which must now be stuck to her hand with some supernormal adhesion, and the force with which Virtueman was being pulled towards Charlatan as the flamecycle dove overcame her considerable strength with seeming ease.
Fifth, Charlatan, flamecycle, Virtueman, and Ultragirl all disappeared beneath the waves in a cloud of steam.
Chapter 7
Don’t panic! Susan thought desperately to herself, or rather her Zaxian DNA memory screamed at the rest of her. Several thousand years of carefully encoded Zaxian training had at their fulcrum the universal idea that an organism of practically any species, anywhere in any galaxy, utterly fucked itself by succumbing to the fight-or-flight instinct programmed by evolution into practically everything—up to and including races that considered themselves the universe’s alpha-predators, like the Zaxians.
He’Vopra’Mertuq, however, had Susan Corday to contend with. The warrior side of Ultragirl wasted precious microseconds on finding and shaping the elements of her brain-chemistry that Susan’s life on Earth had developed, especially in the pathing of her neurons. She couldn’t modify that part too much, because it would destroy her personality, so her inner Zaxian had to find time-consuming ways to reduce the activity in her amygdala. By the time Ultragirl, now being pulled much too swiftly towards the bottom of the bay, where a strange, literally unearthly glow now presented itself to her eyes, had gotten the panic under control, two full seconds had elapsed, precious time that she could never get back.
Not that it seemed likely Susan would have much time to regret the loss of those seconds, since whatever was in the chain that would not come unstuck from her hand was draining her power, too. She would soon have to hold her breath like a human, to remain alive underwater, and after that Susan would, of course, drown.
On her first day as a super.
At least the work she had done to curb her fight-or-flight instinct made her face the prospect with relative calm. She just felt really pissed off at herself that Bob and Sally had been right. It had just seemed so obvious that Ultragirl would do the job best, and dammit she had wanted to fly—to see how fast she could grab poor Virtueman and get back to the electrojet. And, dammit, she had been really, really fast. Nightprince could spank her for it if he wanted—if she decided to comply with his request to allow her backside to undergo discipline at all. Bob wouldn’t be able to deny, though, that Ultragirl had what it took to join the top tier of the CPE roster.
What the fuck was going on with this chain? It hadn’t fused itself visibly to the flesh of her hand—the invulnerable flesh of her hand. But trying to rip her hand away from it felt like trying to rip her hand off her body: if she did do it, she’d undergo molecular disruption: there would be a several megaton underwater explosion that would probably kill Virtueman and maybe Bob and Sally too. If Susan took away her body’s invulnerability, in the hope of sacrificing the hand, she wouldn’t have the strength to do it, nor the pain-deadening capacity to allow an impromptu un-anesthetized amputation even if she did.
As she hurtled through the water with the dim shape of Virtueman in front, pulled inexorably towards the increasingly bright light of what could be some kind of submarine, she became dimly aware of something above her, pushing the water around her. She turned to see the electrojet, wings folded in, gaining on her as it dove right behind.
Is Charlatan pulling them, too, somehow? Susan wondered with dismay.
No, she saw immediately, the jet must be under its own power, because it vectored off to her left as it came on. Then, as she had to concentrate on keeping her mouth closed despite the urge to utter a cry of alarm and surprise, she saw Nightprince start to climb out of the cock
pit, if the swimming motion with which he did it could be called “climbing.”
At that moment, her power ran out, and she let go of the chain, something like six hundred feet down. Before she lost consciousness, she had time to think, Huh. If I’d dampened my own powers, I could probably have just dropped the thing, couldn’t I?
She also had time to feel Nightprince’s arms around her.
Susan woke up on the electrojet just as it touched down on the CPE launch deck. She was lying on her back on the bench in the jet’s hold, and as she turned her head she could see that Sally sat in the pilot’s seat while Bob, his hair damp but otherwise looking entirely dry sat on the other side of the cockpit, his seat swiveled so that he could look at Susan.
“I…” she started when her eyes met his.
The left side of Nightprince’s mouth crooked into a sardonic smile.
“I’m sorry,” Susan croaked, wishing she had enough power even to dry her hair and arrange it in some becoming style. The suit had shed all the saltwater on its own, she guessed—as Bob’s must have, too—but she still felt entirely water-logged.
“It’s alright,” Bob replied.
“Alright?” Susan felt her eyes go wide.
Bob bent his head towards her a full two inches, and raised his eyebrows slightly. “It’s alright because we’re going to have a long talk about what you did in my office, when you’ve recovered a bit and we’ve locked down the League of Terror situation enough to let us think about disciplining wayward supergirls.”
Susan bit her lip and looked at Sally. Tigerwoman, who had just brought the jet down for a soft landing, turned to her with a sidelong feline glance and said, “Don’t worry, honey. You’re not the first girl who’s gone over Nightprince’s knee—though I have to say I can’t imagine any other young woman who deserves a spanking from her super daddy as much as you do right now.”