Slave World 2 - The Ties That Bind (37 page)

“Michael.”

His name oozed from her lips like a vile curse. Donna wished she could kill him a hundred times over, but it still wouldn’t be enough to erase the enduring hatred she felt for him, or the humiliation that she’d suffered by his hands. The beatings… the sexual and psychological abuse… the pornographic vids of her and that pony freak… Sixteen years of her life gone forever, and now this…

Soon she would even have to deal with a corporate crony walking in and taking permanent control of ‘her’ ranch, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to stop it. Donna hoped in the darkest places of her heart that her brother would make an appearance with the new administrator when the new facility, its purpose still unknown to her, became operational.

Donna shivered with an illicit chill, smiling with a deathly gleam in her eyes. One day there would be a reckoning, and no one, not even her omnipotent brother would be safe from her vengeance. Nothing says a woman’s wrath like a hole in his head, but Donovan was too smart for that, insulating himself from her vengeance behind an impenetrable wall of illusionary safety. She knew first hand that no one is as safe as they think, and the safer they feel, the more careless and comfortable they eventually become. She’d made that mistake once and it had cost her dearly.

Sixteen years ago…

Donna fidgeted in the front passenger seat of the armored limo shuttle with a carbine rifle in her lap, staring blankly out the window at the clouds passing peacefully below at two hundred miles per hour. She shook her head slowly, they weren’t going to make it in time.

“Faster,” she said harshly to the driver beside her.

“Ma’am, I’m already exceeding the posted limit and—”

“I don’t care about the speed limit, and neither should you. If we don’t reach my parents in time, they won’t be the only ones dying today.”

Donna repositioned the rifle so the tip of the barrel was only inches from the driver’s side, giving her a dark, sidelong glance. The threat was quite clear, and the driver swallowed nervously, pushing the limo to its maximum air speed of three hundred and twenty miles per hour.

Donna had received word less than an hour ago of an impending assassination attempt on her parent’s lives. The news had come as a shock nearly as much as she had expected it. Talking in vague riddles and subtle innuendoes of greed for years is one thing, but to think that Donovan actually had the balls to order their deaths… He’d never been able to face the fact that Nathan, despite being the youngest and least financially experienced, was the one chosen to replace their father as the CEO of Burke Industries after he was gone. Blood might be thicker than water, but Donovan’s had changed from red to slippery green long ago – once her parents were safe, the greedy bastard would pay.

“Five minutes,” the driver said interrupting Donna’s thoughts. She looked at her wrist-com, then opened an encrypted communication channel.

“ETA five minutes, mark. Have them standing by on the rooftop grid at T-minus ten seconds, over.”

“Wilco,” A deep male voice responded slightly out of breath. In the background, Donna could her mother speaking in an unintelligibly, yet terrified manner.

This wasn’t the first time an attempt on her life had to be thwarted. As an member of the Besiney Royal family, she had turned her back on her people and genetically pure heritage, dishonoring her entire planet by not only eloping, but bearing the offspring of a ‘common human’ of inferior standing. Her choice of love over preordained destiny had forced her into hiding, living in fear of her life for nearly thirty years. That fear had finally ended after Donna decided enough was enough, infiltrating her mother’s Homeworld to conduct a personal war of bloodline genocide. As far as she was concerned, you’re either with us or against us, and when you cross a Burke, you might as well take the easy way out and put the barrel of a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger yourself.

Over the course of two bloody years she destroyed the high-security vaults housing the caches of fertilized embryos, sperm, and genetic material in cryo stasis. The entire royal family had been ‘liquidated’ without remorse – thirty-seven men, women and children except for two. One, a frail old man who had negotiated a fragile peace with her while a pistol was aimed at his head. The other was an uncommon token of mercy on Donna’s part and nothing more, to ensure the survival of the royal bloodline itself. Her identity had never been revealed, not even to Donna’s mother.

The Limo passed through a blanket of fluffy, pink clouds, separating the clear sky from the industrial-based city of New Pittsburgh below, beginning its descent. Donna activated the shuttle’s early warning and ECM suit and removed the safety from her rifle, changing the firing selector from single shot to automatic. The time for precision and calculated finesse would quickly fall to the wayside if something happened during the brief transfer period, while brute force and merciless cruelty stepped to the forefront. The choice between life and death didn’t leave much room for anything else.

The homing beacon went active and the landing grid’s flashing red lights began to pulse atop the fifty story corporate branch of Burke Industries – 30 seconds to touchdown.

“As soon as they’re loaded, lift off, I don’t want to be a stationary target any longer than necessary. If we’re going to get hit, it’s going to be then.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

The limo banked sharply on its final approach and began to decrease speed. Donna activated the side door controls and it slid smoothly open with a howl of turbulent air. The landing grid rushed upwards to greet her in the final moments before touchdown, and the rooftop access door flew open with Hector, a tall and relatively thin man of mixed blood and one of her parent’s personal bodyguards leading the way with pistol drawn. Ronda would be bringing up the rear. Both were reliable and highly trained, chosen personally by Donna for such a sensitive and important task.

Donna jumped from the door in the last few feet, rifle at the ready, waving her parents onward with an air of confident haste.

“Let’s go!”

Hector arrived at the limo first and extended his hand to the elder Burkes to help them board, while Ronda, looking nervous and on guard in her three-piece suit, provided over watch with her compact, sub-machine gun.

“Donna, dear, what’s happening,” Sharri Burke asked with the voice of a fearfully bewildered angel, while Hector helped her board the limo. “Please, someone tell me what’s happening! It’s not my family again, is it?”

The sight of her mother’s resurfaced fear after so many years of relative normalcy sent a renewed surge of protective rage flashing through Donna’s veins. Her mother, a regally tall debutante of absolute femininity, was an undeniable object of high society and generations of bloodline purification. She was grace and poise in its truest form meant to sparkle beside the king of a world, not thrust into harsh and dirty realities of the world, unlike Donna who had learned to embrace it as easily as a filthy lover. She was so much more than just the matriarch of one of the most powerful families in the Federation, and to think that someone, anyone for that matter, wanted to erase her from the world forever was nothing short of blind lunacy.

Donna briefly met her father’s dark, piercing gaze in passing, as always he was calm and radiated an air of quiet authority and easy control. Nathan had grown into a taller, rougher, carbon copy of the silver-haired Andrew Burke, and they were alike in just as many ways as they were complete opposites. He was a man who commanded respect among his peers and underlings without speaking a single word, and people gravitated to him for numerous reasons, many simply hoping to be swept up in his dream by experiencing just a slice of the immense power at his fingertips. Nothing was impossible in her father’s world, he was a living proof of it, having started with nothing but a few thousand credits, his sharp wit, and sheer determination, to build an unshakable empire from the ground up. How long he continued to remain alive was now in Donna’s hands.

“I’ll brief you when we’re in the air!”

Andrew Burke simply nodded, declined Hector’s aid as he climbed into the passenger compartment with Donna close behind.

“God’s speed, Mr. and Mrs. Burke,” Hector said solemnly, leaning into the passenger compartment as the door slid closed in his face.

He watched the limo lift off with a hard expression, as it quickly blurred into the distance. No one noticed him attach a palm-sized, magnetic disrupter charge to the limo’s roof when he’d said his goodbye.

“Well, it’s out of our hands, now,” Ronda said from behind Hector. “I’m sure they’ll make it off planet without a hitch.”

“No, they won’t.”

Hector turned and raised his pistol in her face. The last thing she saw was an impossibly large maw of darkness followed by a blinding flash of light, milliseconds before a 10-mm high velocity round took the top of her head off in a spray of crimson gray matter.

“Nothing personal.”

Hector holstered his pistol, stepping over Ronda’s cooling body, raising his wrist-com to his mouth.

“It’s done.”

“Thank you, Hector,” Donovan replied, jovially. “It’s comforting to know that I’ll have someone of your reliability at my side for many years to come. There’s still much to be done, so let’s get started, shall we?”

In three minutes the limo would reach its optimum cruising height and air speed, and a localized EMP pulse would detonate, robbing it of all power. The occupants would be well beyond the safe limits of survival at this point, despite the limo’s state of the art crash suppression system. They would never reach the secured landing grid, or the shuttle waiting to take them off planet.

Donovan had always believed that the best way to trap your prey was to flush it from its place of safety and let it run. Everyone had their strengths and weaknesses, and in this case he’d relied on his sister’s predictable reaction to the intentionally leaked information she’d received. Sometimes, predictability could be just as deadly as a pistol round to the head, as they both well knew. It was a shame she didn’t follow her own advice this time. Donovan would have very much liked to have her at his side as he began creating the most powerful, privately owned business entity to exist in the history of mankind.

***

“Your tea, Mistress.”

Donna turned with a scowl, with her hate of the world boiling outward in a penetrating gaze. One of the Ranch’s most recent acquisitions, a little house slave that Donna had named Stefani, stood respectfully motionless in the doorway with eyes lowered and serving tray extended. She was the one thing remaining in Donna’s ongoing life of misery that she could say was truly hers, and even Donovan’s goon squad couldn’t dispute the legality of her ownership.

An old friend in Port City, Mady Larson, had contacted her out of the blue and told her about the upcoming sale, that it was a unique slave girl that she would be sure to want. Intensely captivating were the first words that came to Donna when she saw Stefani, via live video feed, standing on the auction block. Her long wavy hair was such a vibrant shade of magenta that Donna assumed at first glance that it was artificial in nature. To the contrary, it was in fact very natural. The innate allure of her eyes, deep aqua swimming in a pool of porcelain white, only magnified her odd shade of hair while enhancing the sexuality that seemed to radiate from within an outwardly quiet and reserved demeanor. There was something about her that Donna was instantly drawn to, some sort of familiarity that she couldn’t put into words. It had to be the eyes… she’d seen the like before, but never in a slave – dangerous, fathomless and unreadable, with an inner strength harder than carbon-steel. Donna had begun to touch herself while staring into those eyes, visualizing them between her thighs, staring upward with the desire to please. Her growing excitement began to fade when she saw the price of her object of desire, the bewitching little slave girl was selling for much cheaper than she should have been. This would be the fourth time she had been put up for sale in a little over a year.

Some of it might have been due to the fact that Stefani had no belly button. Her stomach was smooth and unmarred except for the light rippling of underlying muscle, openly declaring that she was either a clone or had been an In Vitro birth. Some owners could be squeamish about such minor flaws in a slave, but not Donna. From the moment she had first seen Stefani, she knew her friend had been correct, she had to have her. Her poor history with the other owners was also a matter of little concern, because there wasn’t an unruly slave alive that she couldn’t break. In the end, this had proved much easier than Donna had expected.

Unlike many of the slaves Donna had owned in the past, Stefani genuinely seemed to enjoy the strict discipline imposed upon her on some deep, unspoken level. It was if she had an incessant hunger for more, not wanting it, but needing it along with the depravity and humiliation heaped upon her on a continual basis. Initial traits like that had come as a welcome surprise to Donna, along with Stefani’s incredible tolerance for pain. Just the prospect of receiving a ruthlessly administered disciplining, seemed to put her in a highly receptive state of quietly reserved arousal. It took less than a day for Donna to understand why her other owners had failed with her, it takes strength to break strength, and that was exactly what this little pain-slut needed to keep her in line. It was shortly after that, that Donna removed her traditional collar, replacing it with something more suited a slave like Stefani.