Deborah Teramis Christian returns to science fiction with a rousing stand-alone sequel to fan favorite Mainline.
One of the many charms of planet Lyndir is the Between-World, home to the licensed entertainers of the Sa'adani Empire. There, at a palatial house of domination called Tryst, professional dominatrix Kes has become a celebrity attraction whose fame and exclusivity draws a rarified clientele.
Her most devoted client is Janus, a major crime boss on Lyndir and elsewhere. But when a high-powered imperial authority decides she wants Janus out of the way, she identifies Kes as his greatest vulnerability. The seductive domina would never betray a client's trust, but a mortal threat to her Between-World sisters forces her cooperation with Janus's enemy.
Altered against her will, she is turned into a brutal weapon by Splintegrate cloning technology. It will take help from some unlikely avenues and an enormous triumph of will for Kes to survive the government's machinations. . . and pursue the independence she's craved her entire life.
Other Books Kar Kalim Mainline Truthsayer’s Apprentice
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Release date:
December 31, 2019
Publisher:
Tom Doherty Associates
Print pages:
464
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Polished black plassteel façade, muted reflection of hot red neon glowbars marking sign and playhouse door. Shimmerscreen across that portal, hologhosts moving in shadow-embrace within it, hinting at the fantasies that lay beyond. A high-end ride in the closed world of the Enclave of Port Oswin.
Tryst was the draw leader for erotic entertainment in the pleasure districts. Not simply because it was a house of domination—there were other, older playhouses in the Enclave—but for the talented dominas within. And for one in particular, embodying control and sex and fetish, archetype raised to high art and turned into marketing tool.
Believe the verts, the Winter Goddess made her home at Tryst. You could see her on the feelie channels, cold cyberwind ruffling her long mane of snow-white hair, arch your back as her sharp claws scratched your chest. Catch a whiff of her perfume—or were those pheromones?—a musky spicy scent wafting on the ether of the net. She was the avatar of Pain, direct from the realm of ancient Calyx legends, the Sa’adani tales every child grew up with. The beautiful but harsh goddess who brought proud men and women down and kept them in her torturous, icy grip forever.
See the vert and ask yourself: Could you dance with the Queen of Winter and leave her domain after?
Would you want to if you could?
Many came to find out for themselves.
* * *
A MAN KNELT before the Goddess in a small reception room inside the playhouse. They were alone in an octagonal bubble of contrived reality within the fantasy land that was Tryst. Black marplast walls melted seamlessly into an expanse of red-and-black striated marble flagstones, smooth and cold—and in its center, Janus, naked but for his codpiece. His arms were bound behind him with rough hachach rope, his head bowed, eyes studying the toes of the domina’s white spike-heeled boots before his bended knees.
Fashions came and went across the worlds; clients’ fetishes echoed the variety of the many cultures spanned by the Sa’adani Empire. But some preferences spoke strongly to archetype, and those were the tools that Kes, as Winter Goddess, preferred to work with. When the client’s mind was human, a certain length and shape of heel would always signal “phallus,” “power,” “command”: a resonance she well knew how to use.
She set the ball of her foot on the man’s thigh, pointed toe near his groin, stiletto heel pressing a whitening indentation into his skin. She leaned forward, just so. The heel dug deeper as her toe brushed against the leather codpiece. The scrap of garment moved, nudged by his swelling flesh within.
“You are leaving Lyndir for a while,” she remarked coolly. “You come to serve me one last time before you go.” She shifted her toe so that it pressed more firmly against the codpiece. “It doesn’t please me that you go, slave. I won’t have you around to toy with for far too long.”
Her voice, that practiced instrument, went hard and low—a foreboding emphasis with a dash of regal petulance. She punctuated the sentence with pressure from her boot: heel taking more of her weight, toe pressing against leather and the flesh beneath. Janus twitched reflexively, breath hissing inward. Yes. That caught his balls, a discomforting threat. There was a fine sheen of nervous sweat on his smooth skin. The white-haired domina smiled to herself.
“What have you to say for yourself?”
The question rapped out sharply. It was a measure of Janus’s nonplussed state that he stuttered before answering.
He could not be recognized in that moment as one of the triumvirs of the Red Hand cartel, former boss of the Maze Rats derevin, an ambitious street gang. He was a man of wily cunning and far-reaching power—though now, he was nothing but her toy. Oh, true: a toy that paid well for the privilege of being there at her feet, collared and bound, eager to serve the Winter Goddess for the evening on a rainforest planet innocent of any season of cold. It was the illusion he savored, the pretense of being stripped of control, reduced to the erotic reality of the moment as he trembled beneath her searing gaze. For if it had been other than mutual pretense—had he truly lived the life of a slave of the House, or elsewhere in the Sa’adani Empire—well, he was the stubborn type, who would resist his fate until his spirit was crushed or he died trying for freedom.
But for a time, in this playhouse fantasy of suspended disbelief, he surrendered and did her bidding, and Kes took her pleasure in commanding him in ways that were very real in that moment.
“B-business calls me away, Goddess,” he stammered. “If I could stay, I would.”
“How long will you be gone for?”
“Perhaps twelve weeks, if it pleases you.”
He spoke in the submissive protocol she had trained him to and sounded guilty while he did it. His averted gaze did not catch the downturn of her ruby-painted lips.
“It most assuredly does not please me.” And those months of absence would not please Helda, mistress of the House, either. Janus paid well to reserve sessions with the Goddess five times a month, a far more expensive proposition than most clients could ever afford to contemplate. He had been a regular for the last year, ever since his business had brought him to Port Oswin, the sector capital, and he had dared to enter Kes’s lair, the hottest attraction in the Enclave. It was a lucrative booking as predictable as the Ward Commissioner’s monthly “donation” shakedowns, and a bonus Kes had grown accustomed to tucking away in her outworld investment funds.
Though, to be honest with herself, she would miss a bit more than Janus’s money. He had his own small redeeming qualities, as clients went. There were reasons why he returned again and again to this particular woman among all the professional entertainers in Port Oswin’s licensed quarter. Only the Winter Goddess read him so well, and took such personal pleasure in the torments she inflicted upon him. There was a chemistry between them that transcended his usual experience of common houses, and her experience of common clients. He engaged a sincerity in her dominant nature that few clients could elicit, and they danced the dance of pleasure and pain, command and compliance, unusually well together.
He knew that as well as she did. It was evident in his eyes as they sought hers, brows furrowed with discomfort as he dared to glance up without permission.
“I’ll count every day, Goddess, until I can serve you again.”
A common avowal, from clients aroused and anticipating the session that stretched ahead of them, but with Janus it meant something more. His enthusiasm, she knew, did not wane when the session was over. At least, it hadn’t so far.
Yet she let displeasure show in her expression. “Then I shall have to use you thoroughly while I have you, won’t I? Before you are gone for so unseemly long.”
There. The right note of unhappiness, so he would strive harder to please her; the right threat of erotic torments to come, to titillate him. On some level it was true: she wanted to use him hard before he left. Let her inner Beast loose, and play with him as she would play with a partner in her personal life. No more consideration for the professional niceties that constrained her: the need to craft a session that was part theater, part psychodrama, that kept her clients enthralled but never pushed them too dramatically beyond the limits of their own comfort zones.
She wanted, for once, to bite until she drew blood; to spank him so his behind would be marked for days, not merely hours; to use the instruments of torture that only the most hardy masochists could endure, and Janus no masochist.…
But, no … that was not how the game was played. Clients were clients, and had to be treated differently.
If Janus knew how she played in her private life, he would run screaming from the room. And that would be bad for business.
So instead of continuing the pressure at his groin in a way that would double him over in pain, she withdrew her foot and set it deliberately on the floor. “Kiss it,” she ordered coldly, and her slender captive bent over obediently, pressing his lips to the toe of her boot. He straightened up, eyes again diverted downward.
Kes stepped back, the white shimmersilk robe diaphanous about her form, revealing cleavage, a hint of thigh, the silver-and-white leather of her halter. She turned arrogantly on one heel and strode to the side door, an open portal cloaked with hanging silken veils. “Follow,” she commanded, tossing the word over her shoulder, certain that she would be obeyed.
Janus clambered awkwardly to his feet, without the use of his arms for balance, and stumbled quickly in the wake of the Winter Goddess.
* * *
HELDA SAT IN the twilight confines of the control room that was the electronic nerve center of Tryst. From the external lighting of neon glowbars to the clandestine recording of intimate encounters, it was all observable from right there. Spyeyes and house AI and neural systems interwove the structure of Tryst, turning it into a nearly living interactive sphere of involvement.
Her personal slave, Pol, the supervising stimtech, ran Control on this shift, assisted by two other house slaves who were also technically qualified. They had given no special acknowledgment to Helda when she entered Control, for protocol was suspended in certain working environments even for owners and dominas. But they quickly made room for her at the console, and Pol vacated the command seat so his Domna could take advantage of its strategic systems.
Like most shigasu, Helda eschewed obvious cyberware, but a Dosan needed certain capacities to interact with systems of the establishment for which she was housemother. The rigger jack at the base of her neck was concealed beneath her collar-length brown hair. Now a lead trailed from it into the headrest of the command chair that cushioned her body with morphfoam.
The monitor bank shifted displays, nudged by her thoughts and inquiries: guest count at the door; duration of stay; moment-by-moment cost/profit ratio at the Mix bar where clients ordered designer drugs and drinks to go with their evening’s entertainment. House slaves and stimtechs working behind the scenes in the fantasy house were tracked as they maintained the ambiance of the club, as were the shigasu working the floor and those whom they escorted—for, unlike holodens and sense parlors, no client moved unattended through a playhouse.
In this rarefied environment, erotic fantasies were crafted for the client or client group. For that was the specialized art of the shigasue, the entertainer class of Sa’adani tradition. Whether providing dinner conversation at a banquet hall, serving raffik in a classic tea house, or directing ecstatic exploration of the senses in modern sensoria, the shigasue crafted scenes that appeared spontaneous, yet followed basic dramatic elements of proven effectiveness. A skilled entertainer established rapport, created and built tension, brought that energy to a climax that dissolved in resolution.
It was a classic, simple formula that lent itself to endless variation, from the witty repartee of a tea recital that dissolved in laughter over punning humor to the psychosexual drama of sensation play, domination, and stylized submission that Tryst specialized in.
There, in the elegant, ominous torture chamber of the Winter Goddess, Kes approached the dais, setting the stage for the more intense encounter that was about to unfold. Helda smiled and leaned into the monitor screen. It was nearly as great a pleasure to watch Kes work as it was to be the subject of her personal attentions. She was a master of her craft, thoroughly wasted under her former contract to the Icechromers. Helda congratulated herself again for scoring such a prize for the House, and turned her rigged attention to the scene before her.
* * *
KES SWEPT VEILS aside and strode, white heels clicking, across a black marble floor. She took her seat on a throne-like chair of ice-blue steeloy and glittering chrome. She was lit from above and below by electric-neon gels that gave an unearthly cast to her features. The domina was a study in light and shadows with the merest hint of color: pale skin; snow-white hair; white halter, thong, robe, and boots; full red lips, red nails, and dusk-shadowed eyes. The refined planes of her face changed in the shifting blacklight that turned shimmersilk luminescent and lips black, then red again.
A subliminal vert flickered in the air, lost in the interplay of light around her: the glimmer of the throne, the sheen of silken draperies billowing softly behind it. The vert was a subtle holoprojection with no purpose other than to underscore her presence. Her own considerable aura took on layered meaning in the observer’s eye in this way: a significance Tryst’s housemother had carefully crafted into their virtual campaign two years before, when Helda first decided Kes should be a presence to be reckoned with.
“The Avatar of Pain,” one of Helda’s more popular sensie-verts had portrayed her. With sublims of lust and compliance, it was designed to snag the attention of the submissively or masochistically inclined. That message danced now at the subconscious edge of Janus’s perception, evoking Sa’adani mythology about one archetypal ruler of the icy Underrealms. The programmed illusion veiled, yet revealed, the flesh-and-blood Kes much as the shimmersilk did her body. It was a media construct, yes, a packaged impression, but also something more. It was an aspect of herself that would sell, forming the believable seed of reality tucked within the layers of subtle suggestion.
That was one of Helda’s gifts, recognizing attributes worth working with. She had nurtured that seed, then plucked it, packaged it, and sold it and Kes together, bundled as one. Now world-class masochists came routinely from five subsectors to avail themselves of the Winter Goddess. But pain was not the only tool in her repertoire. Far more often, clients sought from her that intangible quality that few shigasu really offered: command. The sense of a woman in control, a woman who owned her power, whose unshakable authority could reduce them to a quaking, uncertain shadow of themselves with a word, a look, a tone of voice—and then use them, erotically or otherwise. Clients imagined, in that fleeting moment, that she desired them like they desired her.
It was unlikely, of course—Kes’s genetic orientation was towards women—but a client pays to believe that he is wanted, that he is the coveted prey of the Goddess incarnate. And what kind of a House entertainer would she be if she could not foster and maintain that illusion? It was easy to help people believe what they wanted to believe. What they paid a thousand credits an hour to believe.
She beckoned Janus to her, pointed him to kneel on the step below. She leaned forward, then, and traced one long, scarlet fingernail around the dataport on his temple, protected by a small button, gleaming as red as the lacquer on her nails. “There,” she said softly, resting one finger atop the port. “I want inside your head. Into your deepest, darkest fantasies. What do you share with no other, Janus? I want you to share it with me.”
He tensed at her whispered suggestion, drew back a fraction of an inch. Her nail traced down his cheek. “More intimate than sex, isn’t it?” she murmured. “Letting someone into your mind.…”
His brow furrowed; his lips parted. Kes laid a finger upon them, stilling his protest before he could voice it. “Think about it. Think about how you want to be possessed by me.” Her voice hardened. “I want all of you, slave: all that I can have. Your body. Your heart. Your imagination. Mine. Think about being taken by me, there.” She tapped his brow.
His expression changed then, minutely; so small a shift that a less attuned observer would have missed it. Kes read the energy in his stance, how he leaned into her once again. A smile quirked her lips. He was doing it to himself, arguing, persuading, his imagination following the seeds of suggestion she had planted. He wanted to be possessed—or to have the illusion, at least, that she possessed his innermost thoughts and being.
Not that she ever would; no man chipped and rigged like Janus would dare let her into sensitive areas of his brain. But he also had the wherewithal to create a safe playspace in his neural circuitry, a portico where their thoughts could mingle and the rest of his guarded knowledge would remain behind unbreachable barriers—if he trusted her enough to let her in at all.
It was about the trust. Would he go there with her? Their play required it. Did he want to trust her more? Obviously. Would he make himself more vulnerable in consequence? In time, he would. Kes smiled at the certainty of that process. This sort of dynamic she could predict very well: push here, get that result there.
“That is for next time.” She granted him a slight reprieve. “I expect you to come prepared to be … explored.”
She straightened; then her hand slipped down to the medallion around his neck, the double-twined dragons of the Cho-sen sect. That a cartel boss should have religious leanings amused her, especially towards a sect she despised. It made it more piquant that he wore the medallion always; there were so many levels to play on when her whipping boy also embodied things she scorned. She gave the chain a half twist around his neck; drew him closer to her. “But for now … I think something more immediately pleasing to my senses, yes?”
She stood, drawing him to his feet by the chain, her boot-heeled height putting her eye to eye with the tall man. She strode to the static field against one of the hexagonal walls, feeling him stumble to match her pace. She turned Janus’s back to the wall and pushed him against it with one flat hand. He stuck, captured wherever he touched it by the energy field that ran across its surface. Instant bondage, far quicker than all the other ways she had at hand to restrain a client.
Janus stood, torso at an awkward angle from the way his bound arms were pinned behind him. It forced his back to arch, chest shoved forward. She traced her nails across his skin as her other hand gestured skyward. A snap of her fingers—along with an invisible trigger on a neural cyber relay—and a panel descended from the ceiling. She spared it no glance, its contents memorized, but saw Janus’s eyes widen as he took in the implements of torment and pleasure that hung upon it. She reached directly to her side and took a powerwand from its holder, violet sparks of static electricity shimmering about its tip. She stepped forward, letting the sparks dance lightly over her subject’s breast. He gasped.
“Now,” she said. “Let us begin.”
* * *
HELDA SCOWLED IN the dim twilight of Control.
Kes’s client now huddled at her feet blinking away tears. A catharsis had been reached, the conclusion of the drama the shigasa had orchestrated for him. Long minutes later, he stood, she dismissed him, they parted ways.
The Dosan watched his slender form pass through the iris door in real time as she rapidly scanned back through the spyeye log of this session. She noted again how Kes had escalated tension with her client. She paused playback, frowning. Dangerous tactic. One she wasn’t sure she approved of at all.
Helda unplugged the lead in her rigger jack and stood, pausing a moment to reorient as her senses focused on her physical surroundings. She left the control room to Pol, ignoring his bow as she departed, and turned her footsteps to the shigasa’s changing room.
Kes was at her dressing table when she opened the door.
“Not smart.” Helda pronounced judgment from the doorway, leaning against the jamb, her long, quilted azure robe softening her wiry form and nearly concealing the tension in her body.
Kes caught the housemother’s eyes in the mirror on the wall before her. She continued to remove her makeup with precise strokes of a cleanwand. Ions loosened and particulates lifted from skin, consumed by the device’s self-fueling energy field. The post-session routine was habit, no concentration required. She kept her gaze on her Dosan in the doorway.
“Are you in one of those moods again? Second-guessing how I work a client?”
Helda shook her head impatiently. “Work them how you like. But there are some places you shouldn’t go.”
“Oh?” One white eyebrow arched, just so. Kes bridled any time Helda tried to direct her domination of paying clients. Let the Dosan spit it out, whatever nit she wanted to pick today.
“You know it. Asking a client to let you in his head? What were you thinking?”
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