“Yes, Sir,” she said, wincing, and for the first time since entering Drake’s office looked away from his level gaze and through the big window behind him. “My God, we’re flying!” Pam rushed to the glass, almost forgetting the pain of breasts and back and buttocks in her astonishment at the clouds drifting past outside. Far below them lay the grey-blue ocean.
“No, Christine.” Drake rose to his feet. The alarming tingle his hand on Pam’s arm caused made her pull away in time to see the Englishwoman lower her upraised cane. “What else do you expect us to do?” He looked at a sepia-tinted photograph on the wall. The image was of a cigar-shaped object with tall fins at one end, which appeared to be hovering close to the ground above a large crowd of ants.
Pam looked more closely. The ants were people and the object was huge. “It’s an airship!”
His eyes narrowed. “Don’t start that again. If you tell me you didn’t notice when you sneaked on board I’ll take a switch to you, sore backside or not.”
“But it’s enormous. And it’s powered by steam?” Her thoughts raced. “It must use helium. Hydrogen would be too dangerous with fire aboard. What about the weight? All that steel and coal. Doesn’t it defy the laws of physics?”
The look he returned her was surprised, puzzled and suspicious all at the same time. “What do you know about the laws of physics, girl?”
Pam flinched from his tone. “Only what I learned in high school.” It was enough. Maybe even the laws of nature were different in this crazy world. She had been flying and so had the airship, and somehow the blackness had plucked her from one and set her down on the other. At least it made more sense than her ending up on a ship. Pam’s belly flipped. None of it made any sense, but if the blackness had brought her here maybe it could take her back, if only she could get the chance to find it.
“In position,” Drake ordered. “Let’s get back to the matter of your duties.”
Pam swallowed hard. The Englishwoman had made it starkly and horribly clear what she was to be - a waitress. And a prostitute! Even after the cruelty she had already endured, Pam could not quite believe they meant it, did not want to believe they meant it.
Drake sat and placed his hands on the desk. The fearful flutter in Pam’s stomach was joined by an alarming tickle beneath the obscenely small scrap of cloth they had given her to wear as she remembered the touch of those long fingers. What the hell was in the drug that Persephone had forced into her? She raised her head, but looking into his deep-brown eyes only made her pulse quicken further.
“You know the penalties if you don’t fully please the passengers? No allowances will be made because you’re new. You’ll be punished like any other slave girl if you aren’t satisfactory in every way.”
“Yes, Sir.” Her shudder at the fateful words ‘slave girl’ heightened the dull throbbing of the welts the whip had raised. The Englishwoman had had one of the other girls put a soothing ointment on them the night before but they still hurt with every movement Pam made.
“If you want to remain on the Empire’s Triumph you had better make sure your service this trip is exemplary,” Drake continued. “Otherwise you can forget about making another. We’ll be watching you closely. Make the grade or you’ll be sent to the pool and sold off.”
Pam gulped. Her only hope of ever returning to her own world, desperately slim though it might be, was to find the black phenomenon. As far as she knew it was somewhere out over the Atlantic. Remaining on the airship was the only chance she would ever have of encountering it again. Yet what they were demanding she do was utterly abhorrent. Even so, it had to be better than being sent to whatever the pool was and sold like an object. Drake was looking at her with one eyebrow lifted impatiently. “Yes, Sir,” she said grudgingly, shuddering at the enormity of what she was committing herself to.
“You don’t seem very enthusiastic for one of That Kind.”
“I don’t know what That Kind are,” Pam said. “But I guarantee I’m not one of them.”
“Is that a fact?” The corners of his mouth lifted. “Wait outside, Christine.” The moment she had gone he crooked a finger at Pam. “Here.”
Acutely conscious of him looking at her bare breasts she walked hesitantly around the desk. Drake leaned back and she saw his gaze slowly explore her body. Pam remembered all of the times that Rick had given her the same long, searching scrutiny, and what had come after it. An involuntary shiver ran through her. Damn Rick and his kinky games! For once she felt anger at the memories instead of pain.
Drake smiled thinly. “Getting excited, Ann?”
She resisted the urge to glare at him. “No, Sir.”
“Miss Peake wasn’t gentle with you.”
Pam had seen several girls whose breasts bore purpling lines similar to the ones that marked her own. She had the frightening suspicion that such evidence of abuse was only likely to attract more.
“Your nipples seem pretty hard for a girl who’s not excited, yet I don’t think it’s cold in here.” He reached out as he spoke. Pam leapt back. “Now that’s the sort of thing that will get you punished. Come here.”
She could not afford to anger the airship’s first lieutenant. Pam obeyed and gritted her teeth as he lifted the little semi-circle of white cloth suspended from a cord around her hips. She had slapped Captain Todd’s hand indignantly from her ass and dearly wished she could do the same to the one Drake slid over the fronts of her thighs, inches from her bare sex.
“No sign of much excitement down there. It’s expected, you know. You’re always to be ready to accommodate any of the passengers who want you.”
Pam flinched at the bald statement that so cruelly summed up her future. How could he be so matter-of-fact about it? But then he was not the one doomed to a life of slavery. Unless she could find the unearthly blackness again and get home.
“You’d better show me what you can do,” Drake said.
She stared in alarm as he began loosening the buttons on his trousers.
Chapter Four
What the hell was he doing? He never used any of the slave girls. His fellow officers could laugh behind his back if they wished but he had a reputation to uphold, and that did not include using Company property to satisfy his lust, even if there was nothing in the rulebook that forbade it. He was not going to give head office the slimmest reason to criticise or disapprove of his conduct. His captaincy could not be far off now and with it would come the freedom of action he had been working for for the past twelve years, the freedom to begin his search.
The thought did not stop Drake from taking his achingly hard cock from his pants and aiming it in the girl’s direction. She gave a squeak of mingled outrage and alarm.
“We can’t have an unwilling girl serving the passengers,” he said as casually as he could, meeting her anxious gaze. “Of course, she’d earn herself a caning if she proved unsatisfactory.” He nodded towards the floor at his feet. “Kneel.”
Still wearing her look of horror she sank down before him.
“The Chief was right, you are a beauty, especially made-up and with your hair done like that.” He seemed to be seeing her properly for the first time and she was absolutely stunning, from the fair hair piled on top of her head to her red-painted toenails. There was something irresistibly appealing about a girl kneeling naked before him. There was also something very engaging about the bemused, hunted doe expression this one wore on her face most of the time. Perhaps, at least in part, it was that which had drawn him back to watch her flogging. The main reason, however, remained a mystery. It had certainly not been to watch the water spraying from the wet cords lashing into Ann’s jerking buttocks, or to savour their swish and splat against her skin and her anguished cries. Yet he had known that if she had betrayed the merest hint she was enjoying it, he would have been wishing it was he who had been laying the strokes across her defenceless flesh and making her writhe helplessly in her tight bonds.
Drake blinked. Her eyes seemed to have grown brigh
ter and the rise and fall of her darkly wealed breasts a little faster. When she ran the tip of her tongue nervously over her lips he could resist no longer. Silently consigning his self-imposed golden rule to hell, he gave in to his need. “Well, get on with it. I haven’t got all day.”
She reached out a shaking hand and his cock shivered as her fingers curled around his thickened flesh. Her sharply indrawn breath came at the same moment as his own. Her hand was dry and warm and smooth. His straining shaft felt as if it was pulsing as Ann tightened her grip. Slowly, she began manipulating it. He watched her movements for long seconds, savouring the sensations she was creating before looking at her face. Her head was lowered.
“Look at me,” he said, and she raised her gaze to his. Her eyes were bright yet misty, clouded by some emotion. Shame, humiliation? Unlikely from one of That Kind… arousal then, excitement, pure lust. She would be wet now, though there was no dribble of moisture on the floor beneath her or telltale glistening on her firmly muscled thighs, as he had seen with some. God, what thighs! The need to be between them rose abruptly and Drake fought it off, leaned further back in his chair and acknowledged what he really wanted.
“In your mouth,” he said, surprised by the catch in his voice. He had meant his tone to show he expected instant compliance. Instead it had half-sounded like a plea. He cleared his throat, breathing hard, eyes narrowing as he watched her bow her head, part her jaws and guide his shaft between her lips. Drake caught his breath again as Ann drew on his tingling cockhead. She pressed the flat of her tongue to its tip until wriggles of pleasure were running the length of his shaft, and it was all he could do to resist the need to grasp her by the hair and thrust deep into her mouth.
His gasps became increasingly rapid as the girl bobbed her head, tonguing and sucking his hard flesh until it seemed to be pulsing. All too soon for his liking, the inevitable happened. He came with a long groaning growl and quivering, exultant spasms of pleasure. Too afraid or too gripped by her own passions, Ann did not pull back as his semen surged into her mouth. Her hand continued moving rapidly for several seconds before she lifted her head. She kept her lips parted and he could see the come pooled in her mouth and a dribble that had overflowed and was sliding slowly towards her chin. A long string of it stretched from the end of his cock to her mouth, parting the instant he noticed it to hang in a thin thread from her lower lip. She blinked, looked around, down at the floor and then up at his face, eyes still bright but pleading. For a moment he stared into their blue depths, acutely conscious of them staring into his. What did she want? He was huffing and panting and struggling to regain control of his arching eyebrows and wipe the lopsided grin from his face. The intensity of his satisfaction was a complete surprise. He had never used one of That Kind before and had been unprepared for the effect.
The girl gave a shudder, a reflexive gag and then screwed up her face as she swallowed. Drake chuckled as he realised what had been bothering her. She would need to get used to come swallowing. It came with the job.
“Well I guess we both know you’ve done that before,” he said when he had got his breath back, unfolded his handkerchief and wiped his slackening cock. “Keep still.” Drake used the handkerchief to dab her lips and wipe the smear of semen from her chin, then pointed to his exposed penis. “Put it away. The passengers expect that too.”
As she buttoned him up she gave him a resentful glance he guessed she thought he would not notice, but he was more interested in studying her face than in reprimanding her. He had seen and used many beautiful slave girls, so many he had forgotten most of them, yet for some unaccountable reason he had the feeling Ann Estemay would be one he would remember.
“Stand.” He lifted her tiny covering again. “Still no sign of anything,” he said dryly. “I expected more from you. Aren’t you even a little excited?”
Her cheeks turned a deeper red.
“I guess I’ll have to find out for myself.”
She leapt backwards as he reached between her thighs. “Yes, I’m excited,” she snapped, and he hid a smile at the silent ‘damn you’ he knew she longed to say aloud.
“Then off to work. You’re five minutes late already.” So was he and he could not think of a better reason for it. There was a smear of her lipstick on the semen-stained handkerchief he picked up from his desk. Drake sighed his satisfaction and laughed softly as he tossed it into the wastebasket.
*
Pam instantly regretted the haste with which she had fled as she came face to face with the woman waiting outside and the daunting prospect of what she was about to do.
“You lucky cow,” Christine said. “I’ve been four years with Drake, on this ship and others, and he’s never once touched a girl before. If he’s taken a fancy to you, you’ll have it made compared to the rest of us. Hell, he might even buy you. You’d be getting a good one there. He’s a stickler for duty but he’s not cruel like some are.”
Pam only half-heard as a tap of the woman’s cane to her aching backside drove her forward through the airship’s corridors. She had not wanted to suck Drake’s cock, but if she wanted to stay aboard, and she did desperately want to stay aboard, she had no choice but to obey orders. His cock had seemed to shiver under her touch and as she had moved her hand up and down she had not been able to avoid noticing that it was also quite generously proportioned, impressively so, in fact. She felt a warm tickle low in her belly.
Oddly, when he had come it had not made her stomach heave or left her feeling half as disgusted as she expected. But she had felt cringing humiliation when she had dared to look up and, with her mouth overflowing with his semen, seen the smouldering lust that had still been in his eyes. The salty-flavoured come had pooled in her throat. She had known instinctively what she had to do and she had done it. Pam could accept she had had no choice. What she could not accept was that she had been excited while doing it. Those days were gone. They had ended along with her affair with Rick and she did not want them, or anything like them, to ever return. She was done with it. It had never been her true nature and she had locked it away where it could do no further harm. And she was through with men. She had sworn that the day she had learned how the bastards could lie and cheat and break her heart. Her gut went tight. They had hurt her much more since she had arrived in this horrible caricature of reality. Unlike her own world, saying no would not work here.
She learned how true that was minutes after Christine reported her present for duty to the crewman in charge in the saloon and left her to her task. Serving drinks and snacks, fluffing cushions and tidying magazines were familiar enough to Pam from her days as a stewardess. Being stared at while almost naked and groped by nearly everyone she served was not. Even some of the women wanted to lift the obscenely brief semi-circle of material covering her buttocks and look at the welts the flogging had inflicted.
“I’ve never been this close to one of That Kind before,” one of them said to the man beside her as she let Pam’s loincloth fall back into place. She was about forty and rather thick-waisted but Pam remembered she had still worn one of the revealing dresses the night before. “Is it true they’re juicing all the time?”
“Let’s see,” the man replied, turned Pam and lifted her front covering. She clenched her fists, forcing them to stay at her sides as the couple stared at her bald sex. Others were also watching, none of them showing any self-consciousness or embarrassment. Only Pam felt that. Not only the laws of nature but the moral standards too were different in this awful place. She gritted her teeth as the man slid a fingertip over her slit and pushed it between her damp pussy-lips.
“Yes, she’s juicing a bit. Her clit’s not as swollen as I expected, though. I’d heard they get so hard they’re near to bursting most of the time.” He laughed.
Pam cringed inwardly as the tingling, which had never fully subsided after her encounter with Drake, increased. How long were the effects of that damned drug going to last?
“You should try her out,” the
woman said, horrifyingly casual.
The man smiled. “I’d rather have you, my dear.”
The woman smiled back. “Have us both. You know I like that.”
“Perhaps I will later.” His finger slipped free. “More coffee, girl.” He did not look at Pam’s face as he gave the order.
She hurried away, not at all relieved by what could only be a temporary reprieve. They had discussed her like an object, like an animal, not a human being, as if her thoughts and wants and feelings were of no importance. Her belly fluttered. That was exactly the way it was. Yet they were not unfeeling. They obviously had affection for one another. Their empathy just did not extend to slaves, especially not to whatever slaves of That Kind might be. And everyone thought she was one of them. Would Christine explain if she asked, or would she hit her again?
Having served the coffee, endured the man’s exploration of one of her sore breasts and the woman commenting on how red her persistently stiff nipples were, Pam returned to the place she had been told to stand, amid the tables in the saloon that were her responsibility. She watched the passengers seated around them like the trained stewardess she was, anticipating their needs and dealing with them instantly. No one was going to fault her performance. She did not want another beating, and even more importantly she did not want to be forced to leave the airship and her only chance to get home, however remote it might be.
The wall clocks showing London, ship and New York time told Pam she had two hours of her shift remaining when Persephone Peake came into the saloon, accompanied by her bodyguard Eve and the slave girl Tania. As Pam had been sure she would, she sat at one of her tables. Tania knelt on the floor beside her. Persephone ordered coffee.
“Yes, Mistress.” Pam spoke the hated, humiliating words, and when she returned with the tray had to endure a knowing smile from the young woman who had drugged and abused her the night before.
“Are your tits hurting, darling?” she asked as Pam poured coffee.
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