Daemon & Sunny: Prequel

The door opened in the middle of their second day, the constant, low-level rumble of distant stardrive engines silenced, replaced with the quiet of a starship in orbit. Light brighter than the dim amount they’d become used to poured in, making both women squint, and a silhouetted guard ordered them out. Monrica cowered back with a scream, and the guard did something that made her gasp and dart off the lower bed and out the door. When Sunny lagged, trying to get her unusually sensitive eyes adjusted to the light before moving into it, she found out why the girl had moved so obediently.

Pain seared out from the collar clamped around her throat, a brief but clear warning that disobedience would not be tolerated in any way. Hurrying out, stumbling until her eyes adjusted, she was herded into a shuttle and taken with several dozen other slaves, male and female, familiar and stranger, down to a sprawling city, and from there herded into a transport and taken to a large building. The pirates that had captured them went down the line with the slave traders, culling a few for heated bargaining, tossing out more quickly agreed prices for those deemed of lesser quality.

She was one of the ones glossed over.

“She’s a healthy virgin,” the man who’d captured her offered.

“She’s not pretty,” the richly dressed man he was speaking to scoffed. Stinging her feminine pride. “One hundred credits,” the merchant offered.

The pirate leader laughed. “Two hundred! And that’ll cover the cost of feeding and transporting her!”

“One twenty.”

“One eighty.”

“—Split the difference, one-fifty?”

“Done.” And they moved on.

Her only bright spot was hearing what Saunders sold for. Fifty credits. He was deemed poor labor quality—even the youngest male student digger was deemed better quality, because at least the teenager had kept in shape with the labor required of an archaeological dig, and Saunders hadn’t lifted anything other than a cleaned-off artifact. Roster, with his Archaeology Doctorate, was one of the ones barted over, selling for over four hundred credits, because his knowledge could be used by fencers to more accurately price artifacts and antiquities for his masters.

Her own academic credentials, a thesis paper away from her own doctorate, were deemed less important than her physical credentials, which were judged adequately attractive, if dirty, and valuably virgin. Culled out by a gesture and the painsticks of the slave house guards, she was herded with a dozen other young women, human and even some that were alien, away from the warehouse-like room they had been brought into and up a spiralling ramp to another section on another floor. It wasn’t richly appointed, but it was a definite flight of steps up from the bare metal walls and thin pallet of the pirate ship’s holding cell. Collared, white-clad slaves, all female, ruthlessly removed all of the newcomer’s clothing and herded them through a decontamination arch. Those who resisted were shocked into obedience.

Having had one taste of the pain collar locked around her neck, Sunny cooperated. A slave house was not a place full of good opportunities for a successful escape, anyway. She didn’t know how she would escape, but Sunny preferred to think in optimistic terms.If I don’t, she thought as she was herded naked into a communal shower room and ordered to scrub, I’ll turn into a watering pot like Monrica did…and I’d like to think I have more dignity inside of me than that…

They hadn’t had adequate bathing facilities at the dig site, just whatever they could sponge bath, and an occasional bucket sluice, since the remote site had guaranteed the facilities were primitive, and the water supply limited. When she and her fellow slaves were prodded into a showering room, Sunny, who liked being clean, scrubbed with a willing vengeance, determined to find what pleasure she could in her dismal situation. As the sweat, dust and grime sluiced away with the soap lather, running down her body and trickling down into the drains, she stared down at her skin.

Sunny was barely average in height for a human woman at five and a half feet. Her face was somewhat heart-shaped, her mouth full, her features feminine—her full curves not exactly the fashionable willowiness currently popular—but her hair and eyes had been her best feature. Bright, rich, blue-green eyes that could flash turquoise when she was irritated or aquamarine when she was pleased, and authentic auburn hair, with large curls that fell to her waist, to her hips if stretched out while wet. Her worst feature were her freckles. They had appeared shortly after her birth and had increased as the amount of her skin had increased, robbing her of her naturally fair skin and replacing it with a disaster of cinnamon proportions on whatever parts were consistently exposed to the sun.

Or the tiny, light brown dotshad sprinkled her skin. As if rinsed away along with the soap that came out of dispensers clamped to the multi-headed showering columns, most of her freckles were now gone. Where her arms, exposed in the short-sleeved shirts that had been cool in the heat of the jungle, had been covered in freckles…there was now only a line of them, roughly an inch in ragged width, that curved out from the outside of her arm, looped once around her bicep, then continued down along the outside of her elbow and the edge of her forearm, ending at the outside edge of her wrist, where the freckles scattered out and faded out. Both arms were looped in open, horizontal spirals and long vertical trails As far as she could tell, craning her head and peering at her collarbones, her freckles spilled down in two more lines, dropping down just to the inside of her arms…and they curved around her full breasts, outlining them and curling up to loop over the tops of her aureolas before again fading out. Outlining her nipples prominently. The trail split just to either side of her breasts, continuing down, following the indent of her waist before flaring out down over her hips and dotting their unusual, incredible way down to her ankles, circling the outside of her thighs at midpoint with the same spiral-cuff motiff as her arms, then falling straight down the outside of her knees and calves before petering out at her ankles.

She leaned in under the spray, wiping water from her eyes, and swiped at the smooth metal of the soap dispenser so she could peer at her face. The curved, water-smeared surface distorted her features a little…but her freckles were gone from most of her face. They outlined the slight widow’s peak in the center of her hairline, wavering between a fingerwidth and slightly wider as they followed her hairline around, passed in front of her ears, and fell down the sides of her neck, ducking under the dark metal collar before spreading out to crest her collarbone and drop to circle her breasts. Turning around, she peered over her shoulder. Freckles rose up from the base of her spine and parted at roughly mid-rib to spread up and pass over her deltoids to create the spiral effect down her arms.

The entire effect was exotic, and it caught the attention of the enslaved women around her, both the new ones and the auction house slaves. A couple of the white-clad ones conferred among themselves, then a pair of them came over with scrubbing rags and scrubbed her skin with a special exfoliating crème, rubbing hard enough to make her squirm and gasp in pained protest. When they pushed her under the water to rinse off, her skin was red and tender…and the trail of freckles remained.

Sunny was tugged out of the water and to a corner of the room, where four other women had been segregated. They were more conventional in their beauty, blond and fair, dark and devastating, and two variants between, one strawberry with a faint, normal dusting of freckles, the other golden and almond-eyed. Like them, Sunny was ordered to lie down on one of the leather-padded benches while a muscular woman rubbed crèmes and oils into her skin, soothing it after the harsh treatment given by the exfoliant.

Ohh…I could get used to this. Even though the collar irritated her throat, she had to enjoy the expert massage—Sunny had never been massaged or pampered before. The second oldest of five in a farming family, she’d worked to afford supplementing her education scholarship with room and board at the university of her choice, which had been a quarter of the way around her homeworld from her family’s modest home. Luxuries were research books, and the occasional sweet, not massages or the manicure and pedicure that were being given to her by two more white-clad slaves. Her hair was softened with a salve, rubbed dry and carefully brushed out. She was still being ministered to, taking longer because of the time needed to counter the harsh effects of the exfoliant, when several of the new slave girls, still being put into

skimpy white togas designed to show off their sellable assets, screamed.

The same slave merchant that had bought them had strode into the preparing room, a pair of bodyguards clad in garments almost as rich as his own following behind. A contemptuous glance was all he gave the screaming, half-naked maidens. He conferred with the slave woman who seemed to be in charge, the one with the goldcloth sash angling down over her tunic-clad body, then strode over and examined the five ‘special’ women, brought to their feet still naked by their attendants. Two of them were crying. One looked ready to cry. The other looked angry, and showed it by spitting in the merchant’s face. She choked when he gestured and her collar was activated. Then the slightly plump man was standing in front of Sunny.

He frowned down at her freckled lines, grabbed one of her arms and rubbed at them as if they could come off. She jerked her arm free, disliking his touch. His brown eyes lifted to hers, and she schooled her expression into neutrality. He didn’t gesture for her collar to be activated, but instead smirked.

“One hundred fifty credits…and I think I can sell you fortwentytimes more. For that, I thank you, my rare treasure of a find. But you are stillonly a slave.” Dismissing her with a glance, he turned away, gave orders to the woman in charge, and left the chamber.

Still naked, Sunny was taken to a solitary room, one entirely padded and lacking in even so much as blankets on the bed-shelf. There was nothing in the room, she realized slowly, that could be used to commit suicide with.That worried her. Not that she would—she was as eternal an optimist as her nickname suggested, if a practical one. It was the fact that this level of valuable slave would attempt it so much that the room had to be padded and threat-proofed that suggested the need for suicide; that the people such sex slaves were sold to were extremely unsavory in their sexual practices—so unsavory that some girl in her position would choose death over slavery based simply on her fears.

Sunny wasn’t going to kill herself. Life meant hope, and life meant a future chance to escape. She paced a little while, because she liked the exercise, then lay down. The room was just warm enough, the ventillation just subtle enough, that she was comfortable enough to fall asleep.

…She was the White Dragon, curving around, but she had not yet entwined her Black mate, had not yet caught his tail. She was the next completion of the Circle, the next formation of the Matrix, but she was not yet complete. She had touched, but she had not yet been made. She was that which could not, and was still becoming that which could be. But the Circle was not yet complete, and the White Dragon continued to curve into her patient, sinuous arc. She had Eternity to be complete, after all, and until then, Eternity would continue to strive to Be…

The odd dream vanished when the guard at the door woke her abruptly, rudely, with the order to come out and get bathed and prepared for sale. She was hungry, starving actually, since the stale nutrient bars on the pirate ship had barely been edible, let alone palatable. Sunny was herded still naked back into the preparation room; her nakedness didn’t bother her as much as it did some of the girls dressed in the white ‘sale’ togas, which only covered one breast and shoulder, leaving the other bared. Her homeworld, Craida, had ritual nakedness built into its nature-worshipping religion, where the celebrants on certain warm-weather holydays paraded through their hometown streets clad in nothing but sandals and painted flowers, vines, feathers, scales and other images from nature as they walked their way to the celebration, which was usually held like a giant picnic in some field. Her last time home, two years ago, she’d painted her body in spiderwebs, spiders and the bugs they ate—or rather, she had painted some of her body and some of her sister’s body, who had in turn helped her to finish the intricate festival-drawings—and had first walked that way in her sandals to the town center, then walked back with everyone else to the field of a neighboring farm for the ceremony and celebratoin.

Right now, the only thing she was being painted with was clay, to clear out her pores. Someone did come around with bowls of stew and spoons, and she did get to eat, then was herded back into the showers to wash off the mud, apply a special softening soap, and back out again to the bench to be massaged and oiled again. Clothing was brought for her and the other four, but not the standard togas. Instead, they were girdled with chains low on their hips, and a long swath of white silk was tucked into it to form a barely covering loincloth, the panels in front and back falling almost to the floor. They were also given triangular breast bands, tied behind their backs and their napes. She was given the smallest triangles of white cloth, ones that barely covered half her breasts and barely reached behind her back with its shorter ties. They revealed the curving ‘horns’ of her freckles around the outside of her breasts, the triangles barely supporting her curves and covering her nipples.

Her hair was brushed out until the curls threatened to crackle and frizz, smoothed with a quick gloss of some polishing oil, and she was kept waiting on her massage bench as the women were sorted out by the head preparing slave, and herded off in groups of five, first the barely passable ones, then the modestly pretty ones, then the good-looking ones. Sunny’s lips were glossed, her eyes outlined with kohl, her cheeks dusted with enhancers, and the front edges of her hair rolled and twisted back into a small clip, to expose the exotic outlining of her freckle-edged face.

Then, one by one, the other ‘special’ women were escorted out. Leaving Sunny for last. The gold-sashed woman came over and tipped up her chin as the almond-eyed girl was being herded firmly out.

“How did you get those freckles?”

“Why should I tell you anything?” Sunny returned as calmly as she could. Her belly was a mass of fluttering butterflies. She was determined to get through her sale with dignity, and trembling or cowering was not dignified. Neither was open defiance, either. She imagined she was as regal as Craida’s priestess-queen, whom she’d seen once at a festival, being carried in a gilded walking chair through the streets on Harvest Day. The gold-feathered woman had looked serene, calm and smiling, nodding to the crowd regally.

The older woman answered her. “Because the more you tell us, the better your price will be.”

“Do I get a percentage cut?” Sunny retorted dryly.

The head preparations slave struggled, but her mouth twitched up into a smile for a moment. She marshalled it back down into a firm line. “No. Are they tattoos?”

Sunny lifted her chin slightly. “I havealwayshad freckles.”

Her answer was completely honest. It satisfied the woman a little. “Is the patterning hereditary?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never had children.”

“—Did yourmotherorfatherhave a freckle pattern like this?” the woman asked impatiently.

“No.”

Satisfied in full, the woman straightened, releasing Sunny’s chin.

A few minutes later, she, too, was ushered out of the room, one arm each in the grip of a male guard as soon as she passed out of the preparing hall. They paused in the wings behind a curtain-backed stage. Sunny shook her arms free. When the guards made to grab her again, she gave them her most regal priestess-queen look and faced the ramp waiting for her up to the stage, and the heatedly bargaining audience that could be heard beyond. The bargaining hit its climax, and there was a smattering of applause, most of it disappointed at having lost but still incongruously polite, given that they were applauding the sale of a sentient being. Then she heard the slave merchant’s voice speaking up again, amplified through the hall beyond.

“And now, lords and ladies, gentlebeings all, the last slave of this day’s auction. An exotic ruby for you to peruse, one to become the jewel in someone’s lucky crown. She was found at an archaeological dig, a historian, one perhaps capable of more than just your sensual pleasuring, capable of also the evaluation of your other artworks as well, for I tell you, this woman is a living artwork herself!”

The pirates must’ve found my stellar passport, which has my occupation in it, Sunny guessed. Must be tough, walking the fine line between salesmanship andcraker-shoveling. Her mouth twitched. Sunny sobered quickly enough, though, for the merchant continued, and her guards prodded her forward. She shook off their arms and walked up the ramp under her own power. Shoulders straight, chin level, with all the courtly poise she had learned in her Imperial Etiquette courses at the University of Craida.

“This jewel of the auction is a healthy, twenty-three year old virgin, five feet six inches in height, one hundred forty-five pounds in weight, with measurements of thirty-eight, twenty-five, thirty-eight. Her hair is naturally auburn, her eyes aquamarine, and her freckles, I am told, arenatural. See this exotic beauty and judge for yourself!” he announced as Sunny stepped around the concealing curtain and came into view. “Bidding starts at two thousand!”

She was a pace ahead of her guard escort. It made her look like a queen with bodyguards, however scantily clad, for whatever reason she had appeared. A number of the richly garbed men and women seated among the tiers of tables arranged in an arc around the curved stage drew in sharp, appreciative breaths. Sunny was going to get through this with her dignity intact, no matter how humiliating it was to be sold. Slavery was supposed to be illegal within the boundaries of the Imperium, though there were some independent worlds that still clung to the barbaric trade…but with no Emperor, no Empress to enforce it rigidly, the illegal slavehouses had become more and more prevalent, more and more visible in the past four decades. She surveyed the men and women—mostly men, but a few women—as several of them immediately started heated bidding. Their voices weren’t very loud, but they did contain tightly controlled competition and definite interest.

Three thousand was reached and passed quickly. By the time six thousand credits was exceeded, the bidding was down to five: four men and a woman; they bid soberly, dropping from a hundred credits each raise to fifty, then to twenty-five. The merchant ordered her to turn around for them, to show off her whole body and drive the bidding a little higher. When one of the guards reached for her arm to ignomously haul her around—Sunny quickly and gracefully placed her hand in his, and moved around him, forcing him to turn with her, topromenade, as the stately dancing move was called. When she came back between the two men, she held up her other hand. Startled, the other red-garbed man took her hand, and led her around in a circle the other way, completing the figure-eight and displaying the freckles rising up her spine and parting over her shoulderblades, the way the lines cuffed her upper arms and thighs with a sharp spiral twist.