by Harry F Rey
“Citanium,” he told me. “One of the strongest elements in existence. It responds only to my touch. Only I can open and close it at will.”
“What’s it for?”
He smiled. “It protects you.”
He gently slipped the device into my hands like an exotic insect that might run away. It was surprisingly light and very thin and the metal warm to touch. It had a slit at the tip, which, I assumed, things came out of.
“When you’re relaxed, it’ll conform a little to your body. You shouldn’t feel it too much when you’re asleep, or if you have to run.”
“But…I don’t understand. What does it do?”
Turo didn’t answer; just left me to toy with it as he undid his own trousers and pulled out his already-hard cock and stroked it.
“When you have the device on, you can’t touch yourself, or have anyone else touch you,” he said, his breathing becoming faster. “It’ll restrict your erections. I’m your master. I decide when and if you get to come. The more you wear it and the more times I have you and you don’t touch yourself, the more intense the end will be. You’ve got to learn that your only sexual pleasure comes from serving me. Understand?”
I nodded and stood in front of Turo as he continued stroking himself, watching me fiddle with the device. I grew semihard, so it wasn’t easy to try to push my cock inside. Fully hard, I was at least four times the size and twice as thick as the device, but the whole concept excited me more than it worried me. I closed my eyes and imagined myself in another place. Slowly, I shrank to normal size.
Finally, I got my cock all the way in and it clipped into place. My balls still hung low and loose, now with a little added weight around my dick. In an instant, though, I grew bigger again, pushing against the metal. I wanted to scream against the metal. I was desperate to come. The end of every blood vessel enraged and on fire, like having the oxygen sucked from my very lungs. My whole body was under siege. Maybe I’d saved Jansen, but I’d submitted to Turo’s siege weapon instead.
“Ow, ooh.” I lifted my metal dick and let it flop back again, smacking me in the balls. “Ahh.”
Turo reached out and stroked my metal shaft. His touch was warm through the citanium. His fingers caressed the head of my dick through the metal. I swear in another second, I could have exploded.
“Now it’s time,” he said, standing up, his dick in one hand, his other pushing me face-first onto the bed. He spit, and a big blob of it landed right onto my hole. Within a second, he pushed inside me. The ferocity of it saved since the last time I had stopped it before we got to this point. That didn’t seem like an option anymore.
I’d no time to adjust, but didn’t need any. My body, my self was entirely open to him. I moaned in indescribable pleasure and pain as he pushed all the way in, until small black hairs rubbed against my ass cheeks.
He hiked one boot onto the bed, then on top of my leg, holding me down as he fucked me. The metal cage slapped against my balls and his, and I wondered if even the strongest metal in the universe could contain my dick. He grunted and grunted, so different from the times before. Fast, entirely for his pleasure. I was nothing, a hole on four legs…and I loved it.
He pulled out as quickly as he went in and sat on the bed.
“Get back on,” he demanded, spitting on his shimmering dick. I had no choice but to obey. Facing him, I lifted one leg across and, holding my caged cock in one hand and his dick in the other, lowered myself onto him.
He moaned in pleasure as I slid all the way to the hilt. It raised me to another level. It was indescribable, the inability to touch myself but the overwhelming desire to do so. Ten thousand vials of Kri could not compare. I could only ride him harder and harder, in the hope of gaining my satisfaction. I guess he was right: a true servant should gain pleasure only from his master.
His blue gaze locked onto mine. Both hands grasped my ass, like he was manually piloting a ship through an asteroid cluster. He pounded me as much as I dived onto him. The cage squeezed against my growing dick; perhaps it even shrank. Instead of being hard in moments like these, I chafed against newfound constraints.
Turo lifted his hands to my chest and pulled and clawed at my nipples as I yelled, “Harder, harder” at him. Crouched, my legs bent, he withdrew his dick almost to the tip and slammed in again, over and over. I kept coming ever closer to the edge, but never quite got there. The metal encased around me like a barrier I could not leap across. The horizon point kept escaping from my grasp.
I told him harder, told him more. My hands shot out for something to grab. I found his shoulder and bit down on it, and he moaned even louder. Electricity shot through my body, flowing into my veins, the edge of ecstasy pumping into every single cell.
Finally, he cried out loud, then louder, then screamed as he buried his dick deep into my ass. As far as it would go. No farther. Shot after shot of him lodged inside me, and he pulled on my nipples with each and every spasm.
“Please let me come,” I begged him as he pulsated inside me. “Please please, for infinity, let me come,” I dug my hands into his chest. He shook his head.
As Turo thrust his hips and the last shot from his cock moved inside me, the wave of orgasm I’d been so close to catching for days finally broke. I yelled louder than if I’d been shot in the arm. An energy electrified my body unlike anything I could have imagined. The cock cage spasmed by itself, and from the slit in the metal’s tip, I shot my load straight at him. Waves hit him all across his face as I crumpled onto his chest. He laughed as all remaining energy drained from my body.
“Well, that was unexpected,” he said, wiping it away with an already-stained tunic. He took a finger and ran it down the middle of the cock cage, releasing me. “I think let’s learn to walk before we fly, okay?”
“That’s worth whatever you tell me to do,” I said, falling onto my back. He got up, put his cock away inside buttoned-up trousers but peeled off the stained tunic. His taut, muscled body even more perfect covered in a thin film of sweat.
“Get some rest,” he told me. “You’ve had a long, hard day.” He threw his tunic at me to clean myself with, then leaned in to kiss me on the forehead. The scar under his bottom lip loomed large as he moved toward me. It was so deep, almost a groove in his very face. The image of a young, scared boy being chased by a terrifying green-skinned monster, then sharp, fanged teeth ripping his lip in two flashed in my head. I don’t know if it was my memory, or his. But the picture stayed with me. “And a long, hard life.”
All our lives are hard in so many ways. He moved away from me, his posture deflated, a quietness left in its wake. The door slid open, and he stepped out, touching a pad on the wall to kill the light. All of a sudden, the bed was like lying on the softest gas cloud. Shards of light from the moons of Jansen dripped through the window. Surrounded by a fleet that I now commanded, while being tucked away in the back room of the private cabin of my master, made me feel safer than a child in his father’s arms.
I cuddled into my pillow, staying conscious long enough to utter my nightly ritual. Maybe this time, for the first time, the words were almost real.
“I believe in the continuity of existence, in the eternity of our people. That the glory of our past will never be forgotten and the greatness of our future will always be remembered. Oh victorious one, conqueror of the universe, restore us, your faithful army. Oh merciful one, mother of all, deliver us from exile. May your people grow strong and numerous, as in the days before. May we sweep across the stars, and may tomorrow herald the coming of your dominion over all worlds.”
Chapter Thirteen
SIX MONTHS LATER.
I’d ended up back where I’d started, staring out into the extragalactic void with Jansen to my back. I sat in the captain’s chair in the spacious control room of the Loukas II, a key command ship of the Union fleet. I recrossed my legs from one to the other and readjusted myself. The cage had been on me for the last three weeks, the longest stint yet by far. I was g
etting fucked dozens of times a week but had only been able to come twice since it last went on. Instead of controlling my desires, the result was I always craved more.
Turo had given me command. For the last three days, he’d been flying around the Jansen system inspecting the galinium mines the Union now controlled. It was my responsibility to prepare the experiment. The anxiety oozed through me with every breath. If it didn’t work, he’d promised me another month in the cage. I didn’t know what I would do locked away even for another day, or who I might do.
“Commander, the test ship is in position,” Fallan, the hetero officer, told me. Theirs was a bulky apelike species, bodies covered in smooth black hair but with nimble fingers perfect for rapid use of control systems, and they could pack a mean punch. They didn’t have a biological sex, or engage in physical sex, as each individual could self-reproduce two or three times in their life. I wondered for a moment what life would be like with no sex. Certainly less complicated for sure.
The Loukas II had a crew of thirty, and nearly half were heteros of all varieties, thanks to me. Early on, after the victory at Jansen, the worlds of the Outer Verge hadn’t trusted the Union. Many still didn’t. They tried to fight against the dissolution of the Trades Council and its replacement with the Union, blacklisting our ships as pirates, locking us out of systems, and even threatening our access to the slipstream.
I forged an alliance with a few of the majority hetero systems in the Verge and some of the corporations and stations they controlled. Although native to only a dozen worlds, their peoples were spread throughout the Verge and often confined to the menial jobs of spaceport workers and the physical grunt work of handling goods and repairing ships.
It worked out perfectly for us. The alliance gave the heteros a seat at the table, we hired their best ship hands, and the orders that came down from our enemies not to host our fleet or service our trades were summarily ignored by their hetero workers. The worlds who were distrustful of us soon came around, those at the top threatened with a rebellion from those below who kept the engines of trade running.
Since then, with some creative persuasion, not all of which I was entirely comfortable with, over half the sovereign entities in the Outer Verge had officially allied themselves to the Union. Our fleet had grown exponentially. I’d never known how many trade crews and gangs in the Verge were crying out to put on a uniform and join a formal alliance. We forgave the past crimes of anyone who joined, and although Union jurisdiction didn’t yet extend across the entire Verge, most could see it would become inevitable.
Turo was named one of ten admirals, and although considered by many as reckless, he was very much seen by the leadership as the best. Thanks in great part to the peaceful victory at Jansen and our control of what was probably the only source of galinium in the entire galaxy. That was why the experiment had been given to us. More specifically, it had been given to me.
“The Teva is preparing to exit the cargo hold,” another officer told me, this time a homo. Something about this, the different races of the Verge working together in pursuit of discovery made me feel good. As did our brand-new explorer, an unmanned ship I’d named Teva.
“Well done,” I said. “I want a final check on everything before we are a go.”
“Hey,” someone whispered in my ear. He’d come up behind me. Who the infinity let him on the bridge? “I need to talk to you.”
“Ukko,” I whispered, “what are you still doing here? He’ll kill you when he comes back.”
“Relax. My team are giving him an escort from one of the far moons. I’ll know exactly when he’ll be back.”
“Tell me when the checks are complete,” I told my crew and led Ukko into a side storage room where we could be alone.
After the attack, I hadn’t seen or heard from him in months. He’d been placed in biological stasis for weeks to regenerate his internal organs. I’d visited him, at first, before my duties with Turo led or dragged me away. But since the incident on Targuline where he’d saved my ass, we’d kept crossing paths, or more accurately, he had kept tracking me down. He always was hard to resist.
“Ales, I need you.” He grabbed me by the shoulders and pressed his body into mine. “I have to be inside you again.”
“Ukko, no. No, get off me. We can’t do this anymore. I belong to Turo. You know that. You’ve known it for a long time.” He grew angry.
“Only because you say so. Because you agree to it. Ales, you’re ten times smarter than him. He’s a thug in a uniform, wanting to go around and blow things up. Who negotiated the treaty with the heteros? Who secured the peace on Targuline and stopped a war in its tracks? You did. I don’t even know what you see in him and that thin, pasty body. Wouldn’t you rather have this?”
He flexed his biceps and put my hand onto his abs. Without a doubt, he had the best body in the fleet.
“Ukko, stop. You didn’t want me. You had your chance. I waited for you on Baldomar back then. All night, I waited for you. And you couldn’t even be bothered to say you were sorry.” I pushed him away, angry at the memory of being abandoned by him on the space station in the middle of nowhere. “You only want me now I’m something. Turo wanted me even when I was nothing. That’s the difference.”
“Ales. Ales, please…”
“Lieutenant Ukko.” A voice on his communications unit cut him off. “Admiral Turo’s party is ready to disembark. We are sending an escort now.”
“Received. Thank you.” He cut the comms off as quick as he could.
“Ales, I love you.”
A stab of empathy struck me deep in the heart. Six months ago, I’d felt like he did. Caught in a solar storm of change I didn’t really understand. Wanting something I couldn’t have.
“Lieutenant, you’re dismissed.”
WITH THE EXPERIMENT underway and at least six hours to wait till the Teva might show any signs of life, I headed to our cabin. The admiral’s quarters were bare, to say the least, but spacious, which counted for everything on a ship. A large bed, a desk, a couch, a long window, and separate viewing screen—more than enough for us. My old room off to the side had been quietly converted into more of an activity room for us, as most nights I slept beside him, curled under his arm. On occasion, I might find myself restrained to the wall in my off hours, but not when there was a fleet to command.
I stripped off and inspected myself in the mirror. I’d grown accustomed to the cage. The shiny citanium looked good against the darkness of my skin. Ukko hadn’t understood it the first time he’d seen it, but he’d grown to like it as well. It gave him an extra thrill to know he was taking advantage of someone else’s locked property, his commander’s property.
In the early days, during my first full week of being caged, I’d gone crazy. I couldn’t handle it. My independence, even something as fundamental as when I came, locked away and controlled. During a particularly testy round of negotiations with the older, more resistant remnants of the Trades Council, I’d gone off to a dingy sex palace, one I used to frequent. In the dark of the place, my mind under a haze of hastily injected Kri, I took man after man inside me. Fifteen, maybe twenty, but not once did I even stretch against my cage. Those anonymous encounters no longer did it for me. That’s when I knew I’d truly been chained.
Afterward, I’d crawled back to Turo and told him what had happened. He hugged me and then punished me, hard. In some ways, the experience of running off and the consequences of it with Turo made things even more exciting. I could feel the difference when he fucked me jealously, and I liked it even more. I knew he did too. It didn’t matter to Turo the numbers of men who came through me, as long as he owned me.
I crawled into our bed and strained against my cage. I couldn’t sleep, not while Ukko still prowled the ship and Turo remained absent. I picked up my wrist-tech and searched for him. As a commander of the fleet, I had access to the data of everyone attached to it. Although I knew exactly where Ukko would be without needing it confirmed.
I’d come to realize that was the thing about life. I got used to it being one way—a set of feelings, ideas, constraints that I would never dream to go beyond. Then, all of a sudden, without any warning, it all changed. Then I got used to those changes, and it became the new normal. I tried not to dwell too much on the bigger picture. It still scared me to infinity. My aim, day in, day out was to please Turo in everything I did. Although sneaking off to the training room to meet Ukko probably wasn’t his idea of being pleased.
I found him alone inside the training room, a not very big space of all-body exercise equipment. He’d set the temperature to freezing, but I didn’t move toward him yet. I wanted him to notice me. He lay on a bench, facing away from me, sound pods in his ears and a grav-bar across his chest. Every time he lifted it up, the gravity increased and he strained harder and harder. I could see the veins popping around his bulky arms, the sweat dripping off his forehead. Of course he worked out shirtless, and his abs crunched with every grunt.
By the time he’d finished his reps, I had my legs locked inside a running simulator, suspended off the ground and connecting with hilly terrain that wasn’t really there.
“Hey, when did you get here?” He came up behind me.
“A while ago.” I increased the speed and resistance and breathed harder. He stepped right into my view. His arm muscles thicker than ever, almost pulsating. His chest completely drenched in sweat. His nipples agonizingly erect from the cold in the room.