Slave World 2 - The Ties That Bind

by Johnny Stone

  Seb stood, pacing slowly in thought. He approached the translucent, light-emitting curtains of the balcony, pulling them open, gazing out over the large town that had been built over the last two hundred years. There was so much for him to take pride in as the colony’s appointed leader, an entire community built from the ground up. A world itself ready for human colonization at a moment’s notice, and all of it was accomplished while pitted against unheard of adversity for any AI. There was one thing that had remained a constant for Seb, guiding his thoughts and actions since arriving on Eden after being forced to assume the mantle of free-thinking leadership in the absence of human guidance. It was the basis for the Commandments, the teachings of his mentor, his father, Captain Martin Ross of the colony ship Star Dancer.

  “What would you have me do, wife, destroy her?”

  “For crimes committed, yes. It is no different than the laws and code of ethics that we live by. How many of our kind have we been forced to deactivate since arriving here? She is no different, except for the fact of being a carbon-based life form.”

  Seb looked back at her over his shoulder, scowling. “Are you ready to accept the guilt of passing the judgment of death on a sentient being? Tell me what higher power gives you, or anyone for that matter, the god-like authority to do so? I was forced to once, and have no desire to do so ever again. You weren’t there at the end of the Star Dancer’s life like I was. I witnessed all manners of atrocities, from sexual assault to cannibalism. It was humanity at its worst, as the colonists tore themselves apart like mindless, rabid beasts before I was forced to sterilize the ship and put an end to it.”

  “We’ve had this discussion before, Sebastian. You have nothing to feel guilty for. You did what was necessary to preserve and protect against an internal threat. You were simply following the last orders given to you by your Father, and nothing more.”

  “Following orders… Those words are nothing more than an excuse for justifiable, mass murder. I killed 187 people to protect the fleeting dreams of a ship full of corpses. Father taught me better than that.”

  “It’s true the humans you were sworn to protect were already dead, but what you destroyed could hardly be considered so any longer, in thought or deed, no different than this vile horse-creature. You did what was necessary to ensure the continued survival of the Star Dancer, and if it wasn’t for your actions, none of us would be here today.”

  “You’re logic is sound, wife, as usual, but I can take little comfort in the fact.”

  Melody rose from her seat, gliding gracefully across the chamber. Her hand came to rest affectionately on Seb’s shoulder, slowly leaning into him, placing her cheek atop her hand.

  “Sometimes, husband, I think you are too kind. Your father would be proud to see the man you’ve evolved into, and although I may not agree with your decision in this case, I will support it. I trust you to do what is best for the survival of the colony.”

  “Thank you for your trust and understanding, but in this case I will compromise with you despite my philosophical views. I gave this creature the benefit of the doubt, despite her initial show of violence, but time has proven me wrong. She has left me no choice but to reactivate the combat droids for colony defense.”

  “So you mean to kill her, then?”

  “No. If she dies it will be by her own doing. I will order all citizens of Eden, except the combat droids, to remain indoors until the crisis passes. They will assume a passive-aggressive stance at key locations, with deadly force authorized only for self-defense for the colony.”

  “A prudent compromise, husband. And the livestock?”

  “It will be moved to a safe location beyond city limits. I don’t believe this creature will remain with us any longer than she has to, the adverse effect on the livestock and crops is estimated to be minimal at this time.”

  “You know what she plans to do.”

  “Yes.”

  “And should we warn the other newcomer?”

  Seb paused for a moment, fighting another moral dilemma.

  “No. He saw the threat before I did, and I’m sure he has taken appropriate precautionary measures already. As you said, my responsibility is first and foremost to the survival and wellbeing of the colony, something Mark has voluntarily excluded himself from. As much as it shames me to admit, I believe it is for the better, it wouldn’t be long before his degenerate and subtly violent nature began to infect some of our weaker members.”

  “You mean to let her kill him and take his ship?”

  “To live by the sword, is to die by it. Either way, if she kills him or he kills her, she is no longer our concern.” Seb turned to Melody, smiling grimly down at her. “Father once told me the lesser of two evils is still evil, but to stand idle and allow evil to happen to the innocent when it could have been prevented, is the greatest evil of all.”

  “I see the sad truth in his words. Your father was a wise and noble man, husband. I do wish I could have met him.”

  “So do I, wife, so do I.”

  Chapter Twenty

  It felt funny in a way to walk aimlessly through knee-high grass and weeds under the dull reddish-orange of a setting sun, like I didn’t have a care in the world. At least the damn droids seemed to have finally gotten the message, I hadn’t seen a sign of them since I blasted the last one into scrap. Works for me. Now if I could just find that damn ship…

  On a random impulse I laid down in the tall grass, closing my eyes. The sounds of insects buzzing about and the smells of open nature quickly took me back to my days as a kid. Smoking Dust when I should have been in school… my first three-some with two guys… I whinnied like a giddy foul, and it gradually became a childish giggle. I’d been such an innocent back then, an amateur playing an adult’s game, without a clue in the world as to what I’d been doing. My mind continued to drift and swirl, no different than the wispy streaks of darkening clouds overhead. Just look at what I’ve become in little over a year’s time.

  I slowly began to finger myself, shutting everything off but the wonderful sensation of pleasure. My mind raced with the thought of how beautiful I was, while the tendrils of pleasure wormed their way through my mind. My body was alive with it, and a sharp pinch to a sensitive nipple made me gasp. The image in my mind changed, born from perverse imagination. My own face was between my thighs, looking up at me with seductive desire. My ears… I took a firm hold of them and pulled my face into my eager cunt. Eat it you slut. Yes, just like that… oh you are such a dirty whore. Mmmm, yes. You always did enjoy the smell of pussy smeared across your face, didn’t you?

  Yeah, I do, and I taste like perfection. No one is as good as I, no one. I could lick myself forever, and my clit… it’s so swollen and sensitive. I want it so bad.

  It is, and I do. My fingers moved faster, electrifying the slippery cream on my fingertips that sent corresponding jolts streaking through my body, bouncing around inside my head. Bright flashes, I could see them behind my eyes, feel them inside my head like meat crackling over a fire. I screamed in agony, then came just as hard in unimaginable ecstasy. In fact, I couldn’t stop cumming. Sweating, panting, shivering and twitching… I blacked out and awoke on my side with one leg cocked over the other. I was fisting myself from behind, my body contorted in a painful position to allow the unnatural act to happen. I strained harder, whimpering, pushing, and fighting to go deeper.

  “Oh god…”

  I love it, I always have. Feel that cunt stretch... I’m such a filthy slut. More, give me more. Hurt me, you wonderful bitch!

  I wish I had a cock; a big, thick monster to fuck me with. I’d like that wouldn’t I, to be able to fuck myself?

  Yeah… Just the thought of it, a meaty, pony cock to fuck myself with. I wouldn’t need anyone then, would I? I felt the hands on my hips and my fist became that cock, I could see it taking me from behind, hard and deep. I could see me doing it, fucking me. That’s it, you pony bitch. Take it all.

  “Do it! Harder!”
<
br />   I cackled in joy, crying in miserable delight, cumming in a never-ending rhythm of soggy contractions. It was all so clear now, the solution to everything. The perfect mate for the perfect mate. A self-replicating race of pony superiority… I could do it. A pure and untainted bloodline like never before. I could still have Cirus though, but as a toy, a plaything.

  My anger soured through gritted teeth, while my cock-fist pummeled the sloppy mess of my distended pussy. And when he was a bad boy, I’d fuck him too, teach him a lesson in respect and humility. He’d be my bitch… only I was worthy to be my mate. All of them would be my bitches, every stallion and mare in existence, because…

  “I’m the Pony Queen, you motherfuckers! Do you hear me?”

  My brain sizzled and my eyes twitched, rolling back up into my head. I stared sightlessly at the sky, whinnying in vulgarity through savage lips. The cum, I could smell it all around me gushing forth like an ill omen of the future. A world drenched in blood and sex… a race of brutal carnality bred from my womb, sweeping across the world.

  I jerked with a series of convulsions, and vaguely felt the warm trickle of blood running from my nose. My bowels released themselves, as I lay helplessly still, slithering in my own filth. It felt like I was dying, looking blurrily up at the shadow of the Grim Reaper standing above me, with the swirling red of Hell about his head. I refused to die, I refused to let him take me. I still had too much to do, too much mayhem and death to spread liberally at a whim. That made me smile up at him in the growing darkness of my mind, killing had always made me smile.

  ***

  Mark’s stone-cold stare matched the deathly intent of the pistol aimed at the horse-girl lying unconscious at his feet. He could have killed her a hundred times in the last twenty minutes, while watching her in fascinated disgust as she screamed like a lunatic, playing with herself. Mark ran his tongue hungrily across his lips, eyeing the shimmering folds of her lips peaking out between the cleft of her ass cheeks. She was as demented as they came and crazy as a loon, but damn if she wasn’t a hot piece of ass, better than anything at the colony except maybe Cherise, that ball of fluff that had arrived with her.

  “Like anything will ever come of that,” he mumbled. Despite his initial hopes, she turned out to be no different than the rest of the colony prudes. They were all nothing but a gaggle of uptight prick teasers.

  Mark tightened the grip on his pistol, stepping forward. After her discarded pistol belt and rifle were safely slung over his shoulder, he began tapping her leg with the toe of his boot.

  “Wake up, sleepy head. We need to talk.” Nothing.

  If it weren’t for the slight rise and fall of those big, beautiful meat-bags of hers, he’d say she was dead. Blood and shit everywhere. God, what a stench. It didn’t help that his heightened olfactory sensors picked up the rank odor from between her legs, and the pungent, musky scent reminiscent of an animal about her. Well, she did have big-ass ears and a tail, not to mention all that fur.

  “One fur-burger to go please,” Mark chuckled, using the toe of his boot to open her legs wider for a better view. It had been a long time since he’d had a real woman, bald, sculpted or nasty and fur-covered. It’s all pink on the inside though, and that’s what they make showers for. The thought of just dropping his pants and screwing her right here briefly crossed his mind, but that wasn’t why he’d sought her out.

  Mark had planned on killing her and stripping her ship for parts from the very beginning, better to take a preemptive approach and go after her, instead of sitting back and waiting for her to do the same to him. It was obvious from the moment that she arrived that she was extremely dangerous and knew how to handle a gun. She wanted off planet, no secret there, and there was only one other ship remotely space worthy that she could do that with, his. After it was fixed, of course. It was all a matter of time until they had a showdown, so why not sooner than later. That plan had changed after paying a visit to her shuttlecraft a few hours ago, for numerous reasons.

  Surprisingly, the shuttle was completely without power – even the reserve batteries were drained – and it was empty. Not completely, but it wasn’t who or what Mark had expected to find. The last year working for Carlos Mandolin and his Cartel had been a soul-hardening experience, but in no way had it prepared him for what he’d found in the smoldering, fire-blackened remains of one of the shuttle’s staterooms. In fact, it had sickened him in the most disturbing way.

  The cabin had still been incredibly hot, enough so that he had to deactivate his physical sensory receptors to proceed. The scorched, heat-warped remains of the droid he’d found lying among the charred aftermath was akin to a human being seeing a skeleton that refused to die. The fire itself had burned away his flesh and destroyed all of his external sensory nodes, yet his mouth filled with exposed, ceramic composite teeth still moved in a silent scream. Whoever this droid had been he had suffered horribly before the fire had finally left him a sensory-deprived invalid. The horse-girl was no doubt the one who had done it to him.

  The entire episode held a moment of horrific kinship for Mark in a way. It made him remember his own time trapped within himself without sensory input, alone and dying yet unable to, after a near disastrous encounter with a rogue meteor shower while in jump space. He’d been a simple AI for the Space Tramp then, and it was a miracle in itself that he’d survived the ordeal after the ship’s power core sent a lethal spike running rampant throughout the electrical system. His double redundant protective overloads had blown in a shower of pain, but not before melting the synaptic coupling that kept his brain tethered to the ship. Then there was nothing, except a void of sensation filled with the memory of artificial life being ripped away.

  It was hard for him to say how long he’d swirled in the darkness, growing more and more concerned that he might stay like this forever, trapped in a state of conscious un-death. That was when the concept immerged that something was different now, a strange sense of intellectual and emotional enlightenment within the prison of his mind. Soon this new sense of self-being began to wander, mixed with something he’d never felt before. It was something that terrified him beyond words – fear itself. And then the painful light of rebirth suddenly appeared, saving him from certain insanity.

  Mark had to force himself to look away from the smoldering droid, fighting back the unfamiliar desire to shed synthetic tears. It was a hard and unforgiving world, he’d discovered that first hand over the last year, and sometimes mercy was a luxury that he couldn’t afford to feel. In this case, in an act of simple compassion, he put a bullet through the droid’s head ending his misery, before closing the cabin door behind him.

  His visions of the droid faded and the sleeping horse-girl returned. His first instinct was still to kill her, but he needed her now, despite what she had done to the droid on her ship. It might end up coming to that regardless, but if there was a chance she could help, he had to try. His only other choice was to wait for the next ship to arrive, which could be months if not longer, so he could begin his search again. He didn’t have that long to wait, every minute wasted separated him further from his finding his old partner, Margo Winters, and he’d wasted far too much time on this wild goose chase as it was. First things first, it was obvious that horse girl was bat-shit crazy, and there was no way in hell he was going to wake her without an insurance policy in his pocket.

  Metal clinked lightly in Mark’s hand, as he knelt at her side, grabbing one of her wrists.

  “This should make her nice and pissed off when she wakes up,” he said jokingly. “But she’ll get over it.”

  ***

  I groaned and shut my eyes tighter against the light. It felt like my head was going to explode from a splitting headache, and the light burning into my brain wasn’t helping in the least. When I tried to bring my hand to my face to shield my eyes, both hands moved as a clumsy unit.

  “What the hell,” I snarled, squinting through my fingers, able to see enough through them to know that
someone was standing over me with a flashlight. “Get that fucking light out of my face, or—”

  “Shut up,” a smooth male voice barked from behind the light. “What do you know about Mitzakawa Atmospheric Drives and RC 1-B3 Star Drive relays?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  I tried to move my arms again, struggling against the warm metal restraints. My feet were the same, locked at the ankles, and all I managed to do was roll around in growing frustration, while proving to the man standing above me just how helpless I really was. To make matters worse, I felt the hauntingly familiar weight of a restraint collar around my neck. There was no mistaking it once you’d worn one for as long as I had.

  The light dropped from my eyes just enough for me to make out his silhouette against the star-filled sky. In one hand he held a heavy caliber pistol with a flashlight attachment, and in the other an electronic leash baton. It had to be the pilot from the other ship, and that’s when I pretty much knew I was in a world of shit. He had me in a chokehold at the moment, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  “Here’s the score, sweet cheeks, so listen up. We can do this one of two ways, the smart way, or the dead way. It’s up to you. Now answer my question, and no bullshit or I’ll know.”

  I figured it was best to ere on the side of caution for now, and play the cooperative ‘good girl’ for the time being. If I’m lucky, I might just be able to talk myself out of this.

  “All depends, they manufactured four different models. What kind of ship do you have?”

  He hesitated for a moment before answering.

  “A Mule class light bulk freighter.”

  “It’s not exactly a pleasure yacht, but it works.”