Description
by Cmdr James Bondage
When Rupert Caine heard that Colonel Jo Langstrom had been charged with offenses under the army’s strict moral code, dismissed from the army, convicted and sentenced to a lifetime of servitude, he was – of course – keen to obtain this unique possession. Apart from her outstanding good looks, Jo Langstrom was unique: one of the first women ever permitted to enter the National Military Academy, a major celebrity following her exploits in the war in Neuvo Catalonia, becoming a full Colonel at the age of just 25, and had been likely to become the army’s youngest ever General.
Quentin Scales was less confident that this was likely to be a success. Although Rupert Caine had never yet failed to “train” young women to serve him the way he desired, this particular woman was tough, dangerous, driven by an unswerving sense of duty and, worst of all, she was, apparently, not the least interested in any sort of physical relationship with men. Her former lover, also a beautiful young woman, was sentenced likewise and also available for Caine to purchase, but seeing the former colonel at auction fully manacled and handled only from a distance with extreme nervousness did nothing to increase Quentin’s confidence. Would Caine have finally met his match?
58,500 words
Normally, the Federal Government conducted its own auctions of everything from real estate to farm equipment to surplus office supplies. But, as it rarely had occasion to sell high-quality female flesh, it followed the example of most of the states, sending the business out to private firms with expertise in this particular area. This was why Quentin found himself once again in the familiar precincts of Celestial County Auction, which was the preeminent seller in the eastern half of the country of beautiful women classified as “legal for all purposes” (i.e. over the age of eighteen, and therefore available to be used as sex slaves). Not surprisingly, the W.P. government used Celestial County as its agent for all such sales, and had done so for many years.
Quentin, of course, had fond memories of these auctions from the days when he had been a freelancer before becoming Caine’s partner, making many of his most profitable purchases there, in particular that of Elenora Reilly, which had changed his life forever. He appeared to be watching the girls being led one-by-one down the glass enclosed runway to be displayed for the thousand or so prospective buyers, but his mind was largely elsewhere, lost in reminiscence. He was waiting for two items, and for the most part he hardly noticed the parade of superb female flesh on the stage just above him, their bodies trembling in fear or blushing in humiliation, as their nude forms, white under the spotlights, were mercilessly exposed to the crowd.
There was one girl who drew his attention, a raven-haired eighteen-year-old beauty pageant winner with a face of angelic innocence and the body of a film sex symbol. Inspecting the auction catalogue, he discovered that she had been enslaved after being convicted of murdering her stepfather. Reading between the lines of the summary on her catalogue page, Quentin decided that the girl had probably been defending herself from a sexual assault by her guardian, and had simply been unlucky enough to kill him in the process. Certainly, there was nothing in the girl’s innocent, blushing, tearful face, as she turned to show her soft curves and astonishingly large breasts to the audience, to indicate any hint of criminality. Quentin briefly considered bidding on her, as Caine did not at present own any outstandingly buxom slaves, and he thought the older man would derive considerable pleasure from whipping this girl’s large and probably sensitive mammaries. In the end, he passed on her, deciding that, as firm as they appeared to be when the handler lifted and bounced them with his control rod for the crowd, the girl’s huge breasts would probably become soft and less desirable over time, and more likely sooner than later.
Quentin became instantly alert when Item Number 23 in the auction was announced: Robyn Brand. Sitting next to him, a freelance slave agent named Harley Jackson, a friend of Quentin’s from the old days, noticed. “So you’re going after the soldier girl?” he asked. When Quentin failed to deny it, he went on, “Well, if you’re here for her, I’ll bet Caine sent you down for her old boss, too.”
Quentin smiled. “No bet. I hope for your sake you aren’t holding a commission to buy them, because whoever hired you is going to be disappointed.”
The agent nodded ruefully. “It so happens I am on a commission, and if I had any idea that Caine was interested in Brand and Langstrom, I would have told the client not to bother retaining me, because he wasn’t going to get either one, no matter how high he was willing to go.”
They ignored the amplified voice of the auctioneer booming from the speakers as he summarized the girl’s history for those who were not familiar with it.
“If it’s not confidential, would you mind telling me who your principal is?” Quentin asked.
“It’s not, and I don’t mind at all,” Harley answered. He paused for a moment, and the two men turned their full attention to the stage, as the knotted string which kept the neck of Robyn Brand’s display robe closed was untied, and the garment slid to the ground to expose her nudity. “It was General Halvor Jorgensen, Commandant of the NMA.”
“Interesting,” Quentin murmured to himself. “I wonder why he wanted them?”
Robyn Brand raised her hands over her head and rotated slowly in place, as the auctioneer announced her age, 25, although she looked considerably younger. Robyn was slender and sinewy, her jutting, girlish breasts crowned by pink-brown rosettes and virginal nipples. These tits were not likely to lose the almost rubbery firmness they displayed when the handler lifted and released them with his control rod, Quentin thought, not for many years. The remainder of Robyn’s body was tight as well. Her midsection, buttocks and legs had the muscle tone of a young athlete in her prime, and altogether she was as desirable as the photograph in the WP News and World Reporter had suggested.
He also noted something that the auctioneer had not said. He had not claimed that Robyn Brand was a virgin, which indicated to Quentin that, if she preferred a woman as a sexual partner at present, it was quite possible that she had not always done so.
Her lightly freckled face was fresh and youthful, with a pert, upturned nose, big blue eyes and kissable red lips. Even though her face was set in impassive lines, her true feelings were betrayed by the tear that wended its slow way down one cheek as she was shown on the stage. Miss Brand was clearly not nearly as mentally tough as Quentin feared she would be. He wondered if that was true of her lover, Colonel Langstrom, as well.
“Who will open the bidding on this stunning soldier-girl? Which of you gentlemen will be issuing her marching orders in your bedroom tonight?” the auctioneer demanded. “Let me have 15 thousand crowns to start it off; who will give me 15 thousand?”
The bidding for Robyn Brand was brisk. Her price rose to 25 thousand, then 30, before the auctioneer had to ask more than once for a bid. Harley was the high bidder at 40 thousand when Quentin said, “Sorry, my friend,” and raised his bidder’s card, a cardboard placard with the number “17” printed on one side.
The auctioneer spotted him, pointed and called, “Forty-one thousand over here from Number Seventeen. Nice to see you back with us, Mr. Scales,” he added. Quentin was both well known and well liked in the small professional slave agent community. He nodded amiably in response.
The auctioneer now attempted to use Quentin’s reputation to stir up the bidding. “Folks, Number Seventeen is Mister Quentin Scales, a legend in this business, and if he thinks this girl is worth buying, you know she’s something special.” He winked at Quentin. “Do I hear forty-two thousand?”
“Thanks a lot, Knut. You just cost me an extra ten thousand crowns,” Quentin said, suppressing a laugh.
But in spite of the auctioneer’s cleverness, no one but Harley Jackson was willing to bid on against Quentin. Robyn was an attractive woman certainly, but there were others equally as attractive in the sale, and these were not being bid on by a man representing Rupert Caine and backed by his vast fortune. Harley, who felt obligated to at least make an attempt to justify his fee, bid twice more, before throwing in the towel when Quentin went to 45 thousand crowns.
After the auctioneer banged down his hammer and shouted “Sold!”, and Quentin had resumed his seat, Harley, momentarily unable to keep his resentment at what he saw as Quentin’s unfair advantage out of his voice, asked, “So how does it feel to be able to buy any girl you want, and not have to think about the price?”
“Actually…” Quentin began to say that all his purchases were for his senior partner, and that he had not bought a single slave for himself since coming to work for Caine on a permanent basis. Then he reconsidered, and went on blandly, “It’s not bad, not bad at all, Harley. As a matter of fact, it feels pretty good.”
The slave agent looked at him sourly for a moment, then grinned, chuckled and clapped his hand on Quentin’s shoulder. “I’ll bet it does. I don’t know of anybody who deserves it more than you, my friend,” he said, then after a momentary pause, added. “Except me, of course.”
After buying Robyn Brand, Quentin had no duties until Jo Langstrom went on the block, which would not be until near the end of the sale. He passed the time chatting with Harley, comparing their estimates of the value of the various lots.
The slave agent, now resigned to the fact that he was not going to be able to fulfill his commission from General Jorgensen, bid on several lots on his own account, picking up a pair of twenty-year-old twin sisters with plain faces but spectacular bodies. “They’ll be perfect for this whorehouse in Stavenberg I know of that caters to the Talanese community. I don’t know how familiar you are with them, but…” Harley explained.
“The Talanese believe that if a man doesn’t see the girl’s face when he’s having sex her, it’s as if it never happened,” Quentin said. “Their married men will only go to houses where the girls are masked, so they can have their fun without being unfaithful to their wives.”
“So, these girls’ faces won’t matter to the guy who runs the place, but their tits will knock his eyes out,” Harley said, nodding. “The Morning Herald is running a series about a Talanese gang in Kingsport that snatches young girls off the street, then puts masks on them before they…” he stopped abruptly and looked up when the loudspeakers blared to life with the announcement they had been waiting for.
“Item Number 64 in your auction catalogue, Miss Jo Langstrom,” the auctioneer said. The door from the waiting area opened, and a small woman with short, golden-blonde hair and an exaggerated upright posture appeared, with a black-clad handler close at her side. “Miss Langstrom comes to us courtesy of the W.P. Army, where until her recent court martial, she held the rank of Colonel,” the auctioneer continued as Jo and her handler walked slowly down the runway to the circular stage at the end. “Miss Langstrom is 25 years old, and in excellent health. In addition, she is a virgin, and that is backed, as always, by Celestial County Auction House’s money-back guarantee.”
The blonde and her handler stopped on the stage, directly in front of Quentin, a few feet away from his front-row seat. He studied her closely, trying to form some idea of the kind of slave Caine could make of this war hero. Her lips were pressed together in a thin, inflexible line, and her gray eyes, as hard as polished stones, stared straight ahead at nothing. Her posture was just as rigid and uncompromising as the expression on her face. Quentin wondered for the first time if he had underestimated the challenge involved in turning this woman into a compliant fuck-slave, and whether the task was more than even Caine could accomplish.
“Gentlemen, Miss Langstrom is a genuine war hero, the only female member of the Legion of Mjolnir in history… and the prettiest one too, for my money,” he added. “She is absolutely unique, a true one-of-a-kind property. I can guarantee you will not see another like her in your lifetime, not if you live to be a hundred. And I’m not just talking about her war record.” He paused, and gestured at the handler who reached out to pull open the bow-knot on the little blonde’s robe.
As it was designed to do, the garment’s neck spread open and the display robe slithered down Jo’s body, leaving her standing inside an irregular circle of white cloth, her small, naked form exposed to a thousand pairs of hungry eyes. Her body was, as the bathing suit picture had suggested, superb. Her breasts were small, but unlike Robyn Brand’s immature-looking cones, round, full and womanly. The taut perfection of her body, without an ounce of fat in evidence anywhere, combined with her diminutive size, made Quentin think of a championship-level gymnast.
But when she was stripped, something besides her naked flesh was revealed, something that set off a rising buzz of disbelief in the crowd. Jo Langstrom was not completely nude under the robe. Encircling her wrists and ankles were metal bracelets, which were attached to each other and to a heavy leather belt around her waist by clinking chains. She was being shown in manacles!
Quentin turned to his friend, and asked, “Harley, have you ever seen a pleasure slave shown in manacles?”
The other man’s face mirrored the incredulity Quentin felt. “I’ve seen especially fractious girls brought out in handcuffs, once or twice. But in thirty years in this business, I never saw anything like this. Have you?” he said.
Quentin shook his head. “Never.” There was a very good reason for this. If the auction house felt it necessary to display a girl in chains, it was admitting that she was so dangerous they could not risk bringing her out without them. With the exception of Caine and a handful of others like him, men in the market for a pleasure slave were not interested in buying a troublemaker; they wanted girls who could be easily tamed and trained for the bedroom.
But the former soldier did not look like a mere troublemaker. From the cautious way the handler moved around her (Quentin had not noticed this until after Jo had been stripped, but it was obvious in retrospect), and the elaborate manacles, she seemed capable of breaking the neck of a careless owner. She suddenly looked less like a good fuck than she did a sudden death.
Someone in the crowd shouted, “Why are you showing her in chains, Knut?” The murmur in the crowd grew louder, punctuated by cries of “Tell us!” and “What’s the matter with her?”
The auctioneer raised his hand, and said, “Take it easy, folks. I’m going to explain everything.” The room quieted in response. “As you might guess from the way we are displaying her, Miss Langstrom has not taken well to her new status, and we’re not going to try to pretend otherwise. She is manacled because she became violent back-stage as we were getting her ready to be shown. We will tell you quite plainly, that at the moment Miss Langstrom is far from ready at this moment to become a submissive servant.”
Looking more closely, Quentin saw little red marks on Jo’s thigh and lower ribcage, which were the tell-tales of a slave-handler’s shock-stick. Evidently, the auction personnel had been obliged to use their control rods backstage, and she had required more than one jolt to subdue her.
“We understand that some of you will be reluctant to bid on this lot under the circumstances, but Mr. Nielsen…” (Finn Nielsen, the owner of Celestial County Auctions) “…has authorized me to say that, for this lot, we are departing from our standard practice. This will be an absolute auction, with no reserve. Now, my friends, Miss Langstrom is a beautiful woman. Certainly, she will require a firm but patient owner to train her for service, but one look will tell you that her lucky owner will be well rewarded for his efforts. Now, who will start the bidding at one thousand crowns for this lovely little virgin?” There was silence, as the bidders sat unmoving.
“All right, one hundred crowns,” the auctioneer said, after a pause, “only one hundred gold crowns for this beautiful young woman. Who will open the bidding?” He looked around expectantly, but did not see a single bidding card raised.
“No?” he asked. “Is it possible that not one of you is man enough to take on the task of training this little ninety-pound woman for his service?”
“Not one of us is man enough to want our balls kicked up around our ears, Knut!” someone in the crowd shouted. This sally was greeted by general laughter. The auctioneer made a sour face, and nodded to acknowledge the dig. Then he began to review Jo’s positive qualities again, in an effort to stir up at least minimal interest in the lot.
Ignoring him, Quentin turned to his companion. “Harley, how high did General Jorgensen authorize you to go for Langstrom?”
“I suppose I can tell you, since you’re going to outbid me anyway,” Harley answered. Normally, agents never revealed their principal’s bidding limit, because of the advantage it would give their competitors. “Sixty thousand. Why do you ask?”
“Because it looks like we’re going to be the only ones interested in this lot,” Quentin answered, “and I don’t see the point in spending more of Mr. Caine’s money than necessary to get her. Suppose I pay you the ten percent commission you would have made if you had bought her for 60 thousand, and you sit on your hands. It’s not as if your client was going to get her, anyway.”
In the background, the bidding had finally opened at one crown, and had worked its painful way up to twelve. Quentin raised his card while waiting for Harley’s answer, and was rewarded by the auctioneer’s cry of “…and thirteen, down in front by Mr. Scales, thirteen crowns, do I hear fourteen…?”
“Well, it might be a little hard to explain to my client…” Harley said, tugging at his lower lip thoughtfully, “…but, what the hell? After all, I can show I went all the way to his limit for Brand, and didn’t get her for the same reason I wasn’t going to get Langstrom. As you say, it’s not like he was going to get her anyway, and he’s not a regular client, so I’m not throwing away any big future commissions. Sure, OK, it’s a deal.”
He reached out to shake hands to seal the arrangement, then crossed his arms and sat quietly as Quentin snapped up Jo Langstrom for the lowest hammer price paid for a lot in thirty years of monthly premium sales at Celestial County Auctions: thirteen crowns. Afterwards, he and Harley rose together and left the auditorium.
“Well, you certainly didn’t spend too much,” Harley observed as Quentin counted out sixty one-hundred crown notes into his hand. “But I’m still not sure you got a bargain. I wish you the best of luck with her, Quentin.”
“Thank you, Harley,” Quentin answered. He left unspoken his thought: Mr. Caine is the one who’s going to need the luck.
