Solfleet: Beyond the Call

by Glenn Smith

  “No.”

  “That’s right, she ain’t. She’s one o’ my little bar bitches, so I’ll treat her any way I want. Hey, it’s all part o’ her job,” he pointed out as though that made it all right. And then, with a crooked, semi-toothless grin, he added, “Just think of it as part o’ the club’s atmosphere.”

  “Atmosphere?” Dylan asked. “The place is made up to look like a dungeon.”

  “Exactly. The Devil’s Dungeon, like the sign says.”

  Dylan looked the girl over as she poured his drinks. As reluctant as he was to do so, he had to admit, if only to himself, that he was at least a little intrigued by that atmosphere, and that concerned him. He’d always found the whole sexual bondage thing to be completely repulsive, so why wasn’t he completely repulsed now? Why hadn’t he just turned around and walked out as soon as he saw what kind of place this bar was? He sighed. Mind scans. Memory edits. No doubt they were to blame. He was experiencing some kind of side effects. What the hell had Hansen and Royer done to him? He looked at the bartender again and pointed out, “She can’t possibly be old enough to work in a place like this. Especially like that.”

  “What old enough?” the bartender asked. “Shit, friend! Where the hell you think you are, Olympus City? There ain’t no friggin’ age enforcement out here in the boonies. People gotta work where they can find work. She knew what takin’ this job meant when she asked for it.”

  Dylan gazed at the poor girl again. “She asked for this?” he asked, not so sure that he believed it.

  “More or less. She came in here lookin’ for work. I explained the job I had open and what it required and then offered it to her. She accepted, no questions asked.”

  Dylan still wasn’t sure he believed it, but if it was true, if she really had known from the beginning what she was getting herself into, then maybe her being naked and in chains wasn’t such a terrible thing after all. Yes, she was very young, much too young to be doing that kind of work in the eyes of the law, but at least she was earning wages and only pretending to be a sex slave... assuming the bartender was telling the truth. She was also kind of pretty in a fresh and innocent sort of way, Dylan realized as he looked her over again. Not to mention... No. He drew a deep breath and exhaled sharply, then looked back at the bartender. What the hell was going on? What was wrong with him? This wasn’t him. He wasn’t the kind of man who... He had to maintain his self-control. He had to hold onto what he knew was moral and right. Back home on Cirra—jeez, that seemed like a lifetime ago—he’d taken to spending some of the more idle hours of his convalescence spying on the young woman who lived across the courtyard from him, and that had led to some very embarrassing moments with Hansen and Royer. But at least she’d been an adult!

  “I’ll tell you a big secret though, just ‘tween you and me,” the bartender added. “She only looks like a kid. She’s really nineteen.”

  Dylan wasn’t sure he believed that, either. On second thought, yes he was. He didn’t. Not a word of it. But he decided to drop the issue before things got out of hand. “You could at least give the poor girl some clothes to wear,” he commented. “The temperature in this place isn’t exactly tropical you know.”

  “Course it ain’t. I gotta keep it cool or all my customers will make it too hot. Besides, we all like it nice and cool in here.”

  “But isn’t this supposed to be the devil’s dungeon?” Dylan countered. “Last I heard, hell was supposed to be hot.”

  The bartender rolled his beady little eyes and then laid his hands on the edge off the bar. “Listen, friend,” he said. “My customers come in from all over—here on Mars, Earth, sometimes even from the outer colonies—but they all have one thing in common. They all work really hard, all day, every day, keepin’ their ships or their warehouses or their loaders in good workin’ order, transportin’ cargo from one place to another, or whatever the hell else they gotta do. They get hot and sweaty, hungry and thirsty, and they usually stay that way all friggin’ day. Then they come in here where they can relax and cool down, have a drink or six, let loose, and get comfortable... or get laid if that’s what they want. Besides,” he continued as he leaned in closer, an elbow on the bar, grinning his ugly grin, “the cooler air keeps all my girls’ nipples good and stiff, just the way we like them. Ain’t that a beautiful thing?” He looked over at ‘Nikki’ again, who was just standing there holding a scotch in each hand, waiting, and his grin faded. “I just wish this one here would hurry up and grow some bigger titties.”

  Apparently seeing that as permission to finally approach them, she stepped up to the bar and set Dylan’s drinks down in front of him, and he couldn’t help but look down at her breasts and notice that her nipples truly were, in fact, ‘good and stiff.’ No way was she nineteen years old. Then again, maybe.

  “My tits are nice and firm,” she told him, looking at him with a wickedly playful smile on her lips—she’d probably caught him gazing at them—“and they’re not done growing yet.”

  The bartender looked suddenly incensed. “Why you little whore!” he bellowed angrily, jerking back on her chain and then grabbing her by the back of her hair and forcing her to look up at him. “How many times I gotta tell you not to talk to the customers?”

  “Hey, relax!” Dylan interjected. “It’s all right!”

  “I’m sorry, master!” she cried out fearfully, her eyes tearing. “Please forgive me! I’ll do anything you require! I beg you!”

  If that was all part of the act, she was a damn good actress.

  “Bein’ sorry and beggin’ forgiveness ain’t good enough, you worthless little bar-bitch,” the bartender shouted at her, “and you damn well know it!” He reached out to a small control panel next to the storeroom door and pressed a button. He let go of her hair, but then grabbed her by the waist and lifted her none too gently up onto the bar, nearly sitting her down right on top of Dylan’s drinks, which Dylan fortunately had the presence of mind to brush aside before she got hurt. Then the bartender lifted up her legs, turned her sideways on the bar, and pushed on her chest, forcing her to lie back.

  “Please don’t hurt me, master!” she pleaded, tears flowing from the corners of her eyes. It was all Dylan could do not to interfere.

  “Bitch whippin’!” someone in the crowd yelled. Everyone’s turned their attention toward the bar, and when the bartender reached high up over the bar and pulled down on whatever kind of mechanical contraption it was that had just descended from the ceiling, their excitement began to grow. Grabbing the girl first by one leg and then the other, he bent her knees over one padded bar near one end of the device and then strapped her ankles to the underside of another one at least a meter apart so that she couldn’t close her legs.

  Unable to sit by and watch any longer, Dylan leapt to his feet and grabbed the bartender by the wrist. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he angrily inquired.

  Ignoring him completely, the bartender twisted his arm free easily and grabbed the girl’s shackle chain, lifted it up and over a hook at the other end of what was now obviously some kind of sexual torture device, then slipped a wide leather support strap under her back and fastened it tightly in place. Finally, he pulled a padded, cigar-shaped object out from under the bar, stuffed it widthwise into her mouth so that she could bite down on it if she wanted to, not that it gave her much choice, and then strapped it in place around the back of her head.

  “There’s no need for any of this!” Dylan insisted.

  “Relax!” the bartender shouted. “I told you, it’s all part o’ her job!” He reached back to the panel and pressed another button. The device began rising back up toward the ceiling, lifting the poor girl up off the bar until she hung a couple of feet above it, high enough for everyone to see but still well within the bartender’s reach, and then stopped and started slowly rotating.

  Dylan found the whole thing utterly revolting. One way or another, he was going to stop it. He started climbing over the bar, but the bouncers
appeared suddenly on both sides, seemingly out of nowhere, and pulled him back down.

  “Can I have her when you’re done?” someone in the crowd shouted.

  “Let me have some of that!” another added.

  The bartender raised his hands to quiet the crowd, then proclaimed for all to hear, “For speakin’ out o’ turn to a customer, I sentence little Nikki here to five open-hand smacks on her smooth, lily-white bare ass, to be followed immediately by one complete, full-neck bottle-fuck!” The crowd whistled and cheered at the top of their lungs but then quickly silenced themselves, and when Nikki’s rotation brought her bottom in line with the bartender’s right-handed swing, he drew his beefy hand back and smacked her hard across both cheeks, eliciting a short but very loud yelp.

  “One!” the crowd hollered in unison.

  Dylan couldn’t be a hundred percent sure, of course, especially after the bartender had assured him of the contrary, but if anyone had asked him he would have sworn that the fear in the girl’s eyes was genuine. Her tears certainly were. Regardless, he wanted nothing more right now than to stop that fat semi-toothless pig from striking her again, but the bouncers still had a hold of him and as soon her rotation brought her bottom back into position, the bartender hauled off and smacked her again, eliciting another, louder yelp.

  “Two!” the crowd counted. Damn every last one of them. This disgrace was obviously a popular event in The Devil’s Dungeon, and they were enjoying it thoroughly.

  The third rotation brought or reddening bottom into line again. This time he smacked her across one cheek instead of both, but seemingly twice as hard, and she jumped as she cried out.

  “Three!”

  The fourth rotation, and his target was once again one cheek—the other cheek this time. Another jump and another, even louder cry. More like a scream, actually. She was crying, and it didn’t look to Dylan at all like acting.

  “Four!”

  One more to go. As her reddened, welted bottom rotated back into line, she squeezed her eyes shut in anticipation of the last stinging smack to come. When it did it was the hardest slap yet, across both cheeks again, and she cried out louder than she had yet, mascara-blackened tears flowing freely down her face.

  “Five!” the crowd cried, applauding and cheering.

  “All right!” Dylan exclaimed angrily. “That’s five! Now let her down!”

  Once again, the bartender raised his hands and waited for the crowd to quiet down. When they finally did, he dropped his arms to his sides and announced, “Someone has pleaded for little Nikki’s immediate release,” then asked, “Is there a second?” The room suddenly fell so quiet that Dylan could hear the torches’ hissing. The bartender waited for several seconds, but no one so much as whispered, and when he’d apparently decided that he’d waited long enough, he spun the girl around so that he could look her in the eye and said to her, “Well, my little bar-bitch. Looks like you’re about to get bottle-fucked.”

  The crowd roared, cheering and screaming, yelling obscenities, whistling.

  The girl screamed behind her gag and shook her head vigorously, still crying, pleading for him not to go through with it. But all he did was gaze at her and laugh.

  “Let her down you sick son-of-a-bitch!” Dylan shouted, trying and failing to break free of the bouncers’ vice-like grip. They had both of his arms locked and he couldn’t get any leverage against them.

  The girl started flailing, rocking back and forth, swinging her arms and twisting her body as far as she could in an apparent and obviously futile attempt to break free of the device. If all of this was part of her job and she was just acting, then Dylan was the emperor of the universe! No way was it an act! That poor girl was about to be violated and humiliated in the worst possible way, and she and everyone else in the bar knew it.

  The bartender selected a brand new bottle with a long, narrow neck from among those lined up on the shelves behind the bar and held it aloft for the crowd’s approval, which came in the form of even more rambunctious cheers and applause. He popped the cork and emptied the contents into a row of glasses that had apparently been set up for that specific purpose, catching the last little trickle with a clean rag which he then used to wipe down the bottleneck. Then he turned the girl so that her bottom faced the crowd and gently touched the bottle’s mouth to the soft folds of flesh between her legs.

  “Push it in!” someone yelled.

  “Then push me in!” another added.

  “I wanna take her home!”

  The bartender rotated the bottle slowly, first one way and then the other, back and forth, back and forth, sliding it gently up and down until her flesh finally relaxed and invited the bottle to have its way with her.

  “Don’t you do it, you sick son-of-a-bitch!” Dylan warned him, shouting so the bartender would hear him over the din.

  The bartender looked at Dylan and grinned, then pushed the bottle in, just a little bit—just enough to get a mild reaction from the girl.

  “Stop it!” Dylan shouted angrily.

  The bartender laughed and then looked back to what he was doing. Slowly, carefully, and much to the crowd’s delight, he pushed the bottle deep inside her, snickering as she tensed, all the way to the base of its neck.

  “You fat ugly toothless psychotic son-of-a-bitch!” Dylan roared, completely filled with rage. He raised his right leg and then kicked back and downward as hard as he could against the knee of the bouncer on his right, but the blow surprisingly had no effect. Dylan looked up at him, not knowing what to think, and the human gorilla looked back at him through smoke-gray eyes and just smiled. Smoke-gray eyes. He was a cyberclone! Most likely a former soldier. Probably had high-tensile strength knees.

  The bartender pulled the bottle partway out of the girl and then pushed it back in again. In and out, in and out, slowly at first until it became apparent that her discomfort had turned to pleasure, then faster and deeper, in and out, in and out, until her whole body suddenly tensed and she screamed and quivered with the rapture of orgasm.

  He let go of the bottle, leaving it inside her, and then waved the bouncers forward with their burden. “All right, that’s it!” he shouted to the crowd. “The sentence has been carried out! Nikki’s punishment is over!” As the crowd returned to whatever they had been doing, he said to Dylan, “Relax, friend. Even all this is just part o’ the show. It’s part o’ what she gets paid to do. Besides, ain’t it obvious she enjoys it?”

  “That’s bullshit!” Dylan angrily replied. “No way in hell did she enjoy what you just did to her!”

  “No?” the bartender asked.

  “No!” Dylan answered.

  “Okay,” the bartender said, shrugging his shoulders. “Let’s ask her.” He unfastened and removed her gag, then asked her, “What about that, Nikki? Do you like it when I spank your ass and give you the bottle? You do, don’t you, Nikki?”

  “Yes, master,” she answered, short of breath, her voice shaky and weak.

  “You’re coercing her!” Dylan shouted.

  “Then tell me what I like to hear,” the bartender insisted, ignoring Dylan’s accusation.

  “Yes, master. I like being naked for you. I like it when you punish me for misbehaving. I like it when you spank my bare ass with your big, strong hands, and I love it when you push the bottle deep inside me and give me an orgasm.”

  “That’s my good little bar-bitch. You gonna behave now, if I let you down?”

  “Yes, master. I’ll behave. I want to behave.”

  He looked at Dylan. “Hey, friend. Pull that bottle outta there so I can let her down.”

  “What?” Dylan asked him, not wanting to believe his ears. “Me?”

  Rather than answer him, the bartender turned to the girl. “Go ahead, Nikki. Ask the nice paying customer to please pull out the bottle.”

  Nikki raised her head as best she could and looked at Dylan, desperation evident in her tear-filled eyes, and obediently asked him, “Would you please pull the bott
le out of me, sir?”

  Dylan tried to answer, but no words came to him.

  “Would you rather I pushed it the rest o’ the way inside her?” the bartender then asked him. When Dylan didn’t answer, he said to the girl, “Ask him again, Nikki. If he don’t do it I’m gonna push it the rest o’ the way in.”

  “Please, sir?” the girl pleaded more urgently. “Please pull the bottle out of me. If you do I’ll do anything for you that you ask.”

  “Anything?” Dylan asked her.

  “Yes, sir. Anything,” she promised. “Anything at all.”

  Dylan pulled his arms free of the bouncers’ grasp and approached her. He took the bottle in both hands and then slowly, gently, pulled it out of her. As soon as it came free he wound up and threw it as hard as he could into the storeroom. Whatever it hit, it hit with an exploding crash, but the bartender didn’t complain. He just snickered and thumbed the button on the panel that lowered the girl back down to the bar. Then he released her from that foul contraption and lifted her down to the floor.

  “Are you sore, Nikki?” he asked her.

  “A little, master,” she replied, gazing down between them at the floor as before.

  “Too bad. You promised the customer you’d do anything for him he wants.”

  She looked at Dylan, the question in her eyes.

  “Go home to your parents,” Dylan told her. “That’s got to be better than this.”

  She looked back at the bartender, who then told her, “Back into the storeroom with you now. And if you’re good the rest o’ the night, maybe I’ll let you sleep with some o’ the other girls tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, master,” she said. Then she disappeared into the storeroom from where she had come.

  The bartender poured Dylan a double scotch to replace the two that he’d spilled when he brushed them aside and set it down on the bar in front of the stool where he’d been sitting. Dylan wasn’t much a drinker, but right at that moment he needed a stiff one. So, without any further conversation, he sat back down and tossed it back.