Calypso Slaves - Ghost Story

"Thank you, sir," Cassie said, and scurried out of the room as fast as her manacled feet could carry her.

She found Lily in their cell, chatting idly with Tanirt. Well, Lily was chatting, Tanirt was just kind of there. "Like, really. You are toned. I can't understand why they wouldn't put you to work first chance they get. You can probably bench like three hundred or something, right?"

"Something like," Tanirt said.

"I mean, I know it's gotta be boring having nothing to do all day and not having your hands is probably not even worth the rest. Like, I don't wanna sound like I think you have it cushy or anything. But man, they don't call it slave labor for nothing. They push us hard in that workshop. I wouldn't mind being in cuffs all day instead, just for one day, you know?"

"Not really," Tanirt said.

"Maybe it's just a 'grass is always greener' thing," Lily said, "I really don't wanna sound like you're having a party or anything. I'm not being a jerk am I? Should I shut up?"

"Doesn't matter," Tanirt said.

Cassie had to admire Lily's persistence. She'd gotten Tanirt up to two word responses. And Cassie was glad someone was talking to Tanirt, because even if she was a terrible conversationalist everyone on the ship needed a friend. Evidently Lily was determined to be that friend.

Hopefully Tanirt had enough conversation for one day, though, because Cassie only had two hours and she needed to start by discussing options with Lily. "Hey, Lily, can I talk to you?" Cassie asked.

"Sure thing!" Lily said, bouncing up from the bed.

Cassie started walking towards the mining bay, mostly because the only other place to walk was the workshop. Her muscles ached just thinking about that place, and from the walking, but the alternative was to talk with Tanirt right there. Or, Cassie supposed, stop in someone else's cell, but it would be kind of awkward if they walked in on them.

"Okay. So, uh..." Somehow this was even more awkward than Cassie pictured. "Look, we're a team, right?"

"Yes," Lily said, clearly worried.

"What I mean is, we need to talk about options. And we need to do it frankly and like adults," Cassie said.

"Okay, so this is a sex thing," Lily said, relieved.

"What? No. I mean, yes, but, what makes you so sure?" Cassie asked.

"I've seen you get whipped, starved, and assaulted by a maniac, and so far the only thing that rattles you like this is sex," Lily said.

"Right. Well, okay, yes. But...I wanna make sure you know in advance that I'm not saying you owe this to me, and, uh, that sounds like I'm asking you to have sex with me, but I'm not. Not that you aren't pretty, but we just have more important things to worry about," Cassie said. The sex thing is part of why she was stumbling over this, sure, but she also really badly didn't want to turn around and do to someone else what'd been done to her. She didn't want to coerce someone into doing something they didn't want to. And Lily was super easy to coerce. Cassie tried to pool information and Lily immediately latched onto her and started taking bullets like they were sisters.

"Cassie, it's okay. Just say it," Lily said, but Cassie hesitated, partly out of ongoing awkwardness but also because she was now passing beneath the watchful eyes of the sensors at the mining bay doors and she didn't know if those had microphones.

Once a good twenty feet past the doors, Cassie took a deep breath and said "okay, you know how we learned about the slave classes and jobs and stuff? We can get a lot done by doing more of that. It's about the only resource we have, except for food, but we can only trade so much of that."

"Please don't," Lily said, "you pass up enough meals already. I'm worried." The way Cassie's stomach went between a distracting pinch and a gnawing hunger certainly agreed.

"Okay, yes. You're right," Cassie said, "don't worry, Lily, I'm just getting used to this place, I'm not skipping them on purpose or anything. We shouldn't trade food. Or not very often at all. I agree. And that leaves..."

"Fucking," Lily said.

"Yes. That. Fucking," Cassie said.

"I don't know about Toluca, but in Tungsten people are pretty okay with having that option available. We get nervous when they threaten to outlaw it," Lily said, "'whore' is not a dream job but it's not that bad. I'm game for it."

"I just...I don't know if I am," Cassie said.

"Ah, so you want to pimp me out is where this is going," Lily said.

"Not like that," Cassie said. Lily sat down and tugged Cassie's arm downward for her to follow suit. She did so, looking around to see whether anyone was coming. Coast seemed clear. "It wouldn't be right for me to ask you to do anything I wouldn't," Cassie said. Lily had leaned forward now and the question was only half-formed in Cassie's mouth when Lily licked up the length of Cassie's slit, her tongue flickering across Cassie's clit briefly. Cassie sucked in a deep breath. Lily licked again, and then she pressed her tongue between Cassie's folds. "Lily, what...Why are you...?"

"You want me to stop?" she asked.

"I...No, but-" she immediately returned her tongue to Cassie's sex, her nimble tongue dancing inside Cassie's tight pink hole, the rest of Cassie's protest was swallowed by the quickening of her breath. Lily placed one hand on Cassie's hip for balance, the other toying with Cassie's clit while she licked. Cassie curled her shackled legs around her as best she could, pulling Lily closer. Something in Cassie wondered if she should, another part wondered back why she should stop her, and that is as far as her thoughts could get with Lily's tongue working inside her, so she forgot about it. Forgot about everything except Lily's tongue licking inside her.

As Cassie's body began to tense up, one of Lily's hands traveled up her naked skin, briefly caressed one of her bared breasts, and then she shoved her fingers into Cassie's mouth, muffling her moan of pleasure as she came. Cassie's chest rattled coming down as Lily licked up the mess.

Cassie's thoughts swam slowly back into place as she lay back on the ground. Lily got up to check on the guard. Sound carried easy in a place as open as the mining bay, but it was pretty big and the guard was across the room. He hadn't heard anything, or at least, not enough to bother investigating. Cassie glanced at Lily, placed a hand on her thigh, and began guiding it gently up towards her sex. Soft and slow. "Let me do you," Cassie said.

Lily stopped her. Her hand sitting atop Cassie's, stopping her from getting any nearer. "Was it good?" Lily asked.

"Yes," Cassie said.

"Then I'm happy," Lily said, "that's all I need."

"Okay, but let me do you," Cassie said.

"Cassie, I don't want this to be a trade," Lily said. "I'm not Giovanna and I don't want to be Giovanna. I want to be someone who makes you happy. That makes me happy. Knowing that your day was easier because of me. And if you're always bean counting favors and tripping over yourself to repay them, I can't have that. If you need a whore, I'm your whore. And if you're not comfortable joining me, then don't worry about it. I know you want me to be happy, too, and I don't care if you aren't doing exactly as much for me as I am for you."

Cassie pulled her hand away, and tried to find words to tell Lily how much she wanted to thank her. But instead she just wrapped her arms around Lily's neck and pressed Lily tight against herself. "Thank you so much," she whispered into Lily's ear.

"You're welcome, Cassie," Lily whispered back.

A few minutes later, while walking back, Cassie told her "listen, don't take this the wrong way, I get what you said back in the mining bay. But I want to help."

"Just so long as you know you don't have to," Lily said, "and promise me you aren't going to count up who's done more."

"I promise," Cassie said, "you'll probably do more than me," Cassie really didn't like saying it, but it was true and Lily wanted it to be true, so there was no reason she should be so reluctant. "I just have to do it once. Now and again. To know what it's like. I don't wanna be someone who lets other people do something for me that I wouldn't do myself."

"I get it," Lily said, "I really wish you'd just relax, though."

"Sorry," Cassie said, "I guess I'm a worrier."

The two of them found Giovanna in the workshop, finishing up a class. They walked with her on the way out and waited for the other slaves in the class to disperse. "So what's up?" Giovanna asked.

"We have a proposal for you," Cassie said.

"'We.' Why are you two so joined at the hip?" Giovanna asked.

"How much are you willing to pay for that information?" Cassie asked.

Giovanna rolled her eyes. "Just give me this proposal of yours."

Cassie decided against making a quip about how much she was willing to pay for the proposal. "Lily and I have had a bit of success getting information for sex. It's a marketable skill. We just can't bring it to market." Well, except to Case, but she only offered them stuff from one deck, and reading between the lines probably only stuff that happened to be easy for her, personally, to get her hands on. They needed a general market. "You know where the market is, or who it is, or whatever. Tell us where, and the first job's for whoever you want. You or anyone you want something from."

"You're both offering yourselves?" she asks.

"Yes," Cassie said, "one client, but she can have...She can have either or both of us." She was still stumbling a bit, but it was easier to talk about it in this kind of detached way. Like it's just a resource she had to give away. It still wasn't how she wanted to think of her sex, but it was easier.

"Just once. But once you know where the black market is, you know forever," Giovanna said.

"One job for one piece of information," Cassie said.

"I don't see why I have to bargain with you," Giovanna said, "I can find other things to trade on the market. You can't find another market."

"What are you asking for?" Cassie asked.

"A permanent deal," Giovanna said.

"No," Cassie said, without even thinking. Her thoughts were a bit more conflicted, but really, she just couldn't. Prostitution was uncomfortable enough, doing it from under someone's thumb would crush her. "You said something about indefinite deals once, right? Not doing that."

"Three jobs, then. You service three clients for me and then I'll give you the information," Giovanna said.

Cassie looked to Lily. Lily shrugged. "Alright, fine," Cassie said. Giovanna extended a hand to shake and Cassie took it.

Only a few minutes later the guard appeared, and Cassie knelt for him while he cuffed her. She still didn't know why they had started doing that. One more mystery to solve. As she lay on her bed, struggling to get comfortable with the chains and the whip marks, she tried to think. She needed a strategy. Some kind of plan to work towards. And much as her head was filled with visions of becoming a cunning black marketeer, overflowing with illicit goods in clever stashes and head stuffed with valuable information, the fact was that insofar as she was a criminal at all, she was a white collar criminal who had no idea how to network or haggle with the real thing and only ever made transactions with and for occult texts and artifacts that couldn't possibly have standard prices. She had no idea how regular markets worked, and she'd be competing with very dangerous people with a lot more skill than her. With a sigh, she resigned herself to trying to impress the overseers and advance in class while drawing as little attention as possible from the guards or the other slaves.

She got cycled through a couple of different jobs over the next week. Using tongs to pull a molten hot template out of a furnace, place it in a press, stamp it into a half-formed tool head, turn it over with the tongs into a different press, stamp it into a fully formed tool head, and then drop it in water. Once she got over her fear of the fire (they gave her gloves while working with the furnace, but no other protective clothing), she did well. Another day she was working a press that stamped molten metal into grates for the floor, pulling the heavy press upwards and then bringing it down on the molten steel. She did less well here, as the press was heavy enough to exhaust her arms by lunch. For most of the days, though, she was making parts for some machine she couldn't identify at all. She guessed they were probably parts either for the ship or for sale, but once she finished stamping them out, they were placed into a crate and wheeled out into some other part of the ship. She never saw them again.

The weight of the presses, the materials fed into mills, all of them wore her arms down, and then her legs would get sore from standing and holding up the heavy weights all day. Some jobs, like the furnace where they made the tools and falling behind ruined the end product which could earn a severe whipping at the quality check at the end of the day, had very little guard oversight, and she walked out of the workshop at the end of the day with only a few whip marks. With the assembly lines that Cassie usually worked on, it depended on luck as much as anything. If there happened to be a guard patrolling that assembly line in particular, she usually wound up whipped by the crop every time they passed by her after the first few hours when her strength began to fail. If the assembly line was under patrolled, then much like the furnace, she was hardly touched.

Unfortunately, she seemed to end up on high priority assembly lines a lot. Although she still often lagged ten to twenty minutes into a lunch break that was only half an hour long to begin with when she wasn't under direct supervision, she'd really rather grab her meal just as they were packing up to go back, wolf it down, maybe have to stick the last half in her waist chain for later (and possibly drop it on the workshop floor and lose it, since God knows she couldn't interrupt her work to pick it up and it'd be filthy by the time the shift was done, even if the chained feet of a dozen slaves working the line hasn't shuffled it to some dark corner where she'd never find it), rather than suffer under the whip. It wasn't the sting that hurt so much as the humiliation of knowing that it worked. Each day she was determined not to draw the guards' attention, and her muscles began to harden up. By the end of the week, she was at least getting whipped less.

She also managed to avoid anything but the crop, as opposed to the cane and bullwhip used to punish direct disobedience or chronic failure. Once every two or three days, one of the girls wasn't quite so lucky. Lily was the victim the first time Cassie saw it happen. Pulled out of the line at the end of the day, she was hitched up to a whipping post in the middle of the workshop floor. The hitch had a set of special manacles attached to a pulley that could be pulled back so that the slave attached was always standing on her tiptoes when the whipping starts. After hitching up Lily, Lt. Mira shouted out "slaves, what was today's quota?"

"Four sheets, ma'am," they all replied. They'd been shaping sheets of metal to attach to a pair of some kind of atmospheric wing. Cassie didn't know what for, but probably transcontinental transit. Or, hey, maybe an ICBM, you never know.

"And how many sheets did you shape today, slave?" Mira asked Lily.

"Three and a half, ma'am," Lily said.

Mira spat on Lily's face. "Don't hedge on me, cunt. Do you think our buyers are going to put a half-shaped sheet of metal on their aircraft?"

"No ma'am," Lily said.

"So how many sheets did you shape today?"

"Three, ma'am," Lily said.

"And how many yesterday?" she asked.

"Two, ma'am," Lily said.

"But you still produced two wings a day, didn't you?" Mira asked, turning back to the gathered slaves.

"Yes, ma'am," they all said in unison. Even if it took Cassie, personally, her entire lunch break to stay on quota the first day. Lily had worked through lunch that day, too. Lily hadn't told Cassie she was still behind. Maybe Cassie could've given her an extra sheet or something? But there's no way she could've switched a sheet from her own line to Lily's without anyone noticing. And besides, she could barely make four. Even skipping lunch she wouldn't have made it to five.

"You work together," Mira said, pointing out to the gathered slaves, "and when one of you slacks off, someone else has to pick up that slack." Mira uncoiled her bullwhip and snapped it an inch away from the soles of Lily's feet, and she yelped in fear. "And what do they get? They don't get to leave early, not when there's still work to do." Mira turned back to Lily, though still speaking loud enough for the gathered slaves to hear. "You are not going to shove your work onto other slaves. You are going to keep quota. Understood, bitch?"

"Yes, ma'am," Lily said.

Mira cracked the whip across Lily's back, and she yelped now from pain instead of fear. Cassie winced and remembered the whip across her own skin her first day. "One, ma'am," Lily said. The whip cracked across Lily again. It left bright, angry red marks behind immediately, without the slow pinking-to-red of the skin that the crop brought. "Two, ma'am," Lily said. Cassie wasn't sure if it would be better to turn away and not be part of the spectacle Mira was making of this or to be there for Lily in spirit, but she couldn't pull her eyes away regardless. Another lash cracked across Lily's back, and she whimpered out "three, ma'am." She was struggling to stay on balance on her tiptoes, and the fourth lash made her legs shake and nearly buckle. "Four, ma'am!" she shouted through the pain, clutching the chains on her wrists for support. Another lash fell across her back. "Five, ma'am!" she said. Mira cracked the whip in the air near Lily's head one more time, and Lily yelped and said "six, ma'am!"

"Just five, slut," Mira said, stepping closer to undo Lily's manacles, "and if you don't improve your performance it's going to be ten next time."

"Yes, ma'am," Lily said, leaning against the post for support after her wrists were freed from the shackles.

"Dismissed," Mira said, and the slaves all shuffled off towards dinner. They'd already had a few minutes shaved off by the display and they weren't eager to wait any longer.

Cassie went to Lily as fast as her shackled feet could manage. "Are you okay?" she asked, helping her to her feet.

"I'm fine," Lily said, and then winced as her back twisted in just the wrong way to agitate the whip marks, "I mean, I will be. You were whipped just as bad last week and you're all healed, right? It's not that bad."

"How does that salve work? The one you used on me? We still have most of the tube in our cell," Cassie said, helping Lily walk out of the workshop and towards the dinner line.

"Yeah, it's...It's not that hard, I'll tell you how when we get there. Let's get dinner first," Lily said.

After returning to their cell from dinner, Lily showed Cassie how to apply the salve. Apparently you had to avoid using it anywhere where the skin is broken but you wanted to get it on as much of the agitated skin as possible. Breaking skin open tends to agitate it, so Cassie very carefully applied the salve to Lily's back. It took Cassie longer than it took Lily, but Lily said that from what she could feel, Cassie did it right.

It was only a few minutes later when a crowd of a half-dozen or so of those slaves with serpentine tattoos snaking up their arms gathered at the entrance to their cell. No one else was inside but Cassie, Lily, and Tanirt, Tanirt still in her cuffs. Giovanna was off doing something mysterious, and Andraste was...Cassie hadn't seen her in days. She didn't really care that much, but she made a mental note to investigate that once she pared down the list of mysteries.