21

**The conclusion of the story. Nothing else particularly erotic in these chapters. Here for completeness, only.**

17. Shibari

Roku awoke upside down, the blood rushing to her head. Her arms were somehow restrained behind her and there was an agonizing ache in her shoulders. Roku tried desperately to get a sense of which way was up, but wherever she was, it was pitch black. She tried to move her legs, lift her hips, but they seemed to be as equity immobile as Roku's arms. Perhaps it was still the drugs – whatever the Head Matron had injected Roku with. Oh, by the Holy Matron, Pelli! Roku's body spasmed in panic. No, she had full use of her body again, should could move her hands, she was somehow tied down. Hogtied. As her eyes began to adjust the the darkness around her and she started to make out the stone walls that were the confines of the room. Then she began to realize how wrong she was...

...She wasn't tied down, she was tied up.

She was suspended in the air, facing the floor, her arms behind her, with her weight held up by them. If she hadn't been a Hatchette, if her muscles weren't artificially enhanced, the load would have been excruciating. As it was, it still was no picnic. Roku moved her head to examine the ropes that crisscrossed her body – an intricate pattern of laced white cord, stretching all the way down to her feet. She was still wearing her knee-high socks and her small, schoolgirl skirt, but her shirt was gone. The ropes wrapped around her breasts, squeezing them into upright, uncomfortable knots. She was aware of a ball gag in her mouth. She bit down on it, sinking her metal-cored teeth into the rubber. She tried to lift herself solely by her shoulders – to level herself.

Even for a girl of Roku's strength, that was going to happen.

Roku collapsed forward, letting out a soft grunt. It was then that Roku became aware of the presence in the room. She turned her head and vaguely identified a dark figure sitting off some distance.

A light flicked on.

A single exposed florescent bulb sitting on a small wooden table. In the chair next to it sat the Ober Guard Commander Roku had first met back in the Sento Room. Anders, Roku remember Lady Le-En saying her name was. The woman so quick with the truncheon.

She was dressed in her leather uniform, with the leather great coat, and the mirrored shades still on, despite the darkness. The light illuminated the bleakness of the room around them. A dungeon – there was no other word for it. Stone, masoned walls; stone, masoned floors; and a large steel, angry looking door locking Roku and the Guard Commander in the room together. Anders sat crossed-legged in her chair, Roku suspended, almost naked, from the ceiling.

Without a word, Anders rose to her feet. She slide the leather great coat off her shoulders and draped it over the back of the chair. A weapons belt, with a holder for a burner, she removed and placed by the lamp on the table. The leather top to her uniform she unzipped and pulled off. Underneath she wore a sleeveless white shirt that showed the bulge of her muscles. She dropped the jacket on the seat and stepped towards Roku. She flexed her fingers and made them crack at the knuckles.

She punched Roku powerfully in the side of the face.

This sent Roku spinning on her axis, away from Anders. Anders placed a hand on the ropes and pulled Roku back into position. A second blow came down on the bridge of Roku's nose and the room echoed with the crack of the bone. A steam of blood gushed out over the ball gag and slopped onto the floor.

Anders swung a third punch, but it was a mostly timid one, to the right eye socket, but enough to swell the eye shut. The pugilism seemed to suddenly bore Anders and she stepped away, walking in her jackboots across the stones to a rack of implements that had, until that moment, escaped Roku's attention. Anders chose a cat o nine tails off the rack, and felt its weight in her hand.

From bad to worse, Roku thought as Anders stepped back across the cell. Anders vanished back out of Roku's sighed and Roku could feel the back of her skirt come up away from her buttocks. There was a crack of a whip and the cat o nine tails came down across Roku's ass. Roku's body shook with the might of the blow. Again the flailed whip came down and Roku twisted her head the best she could to see. All she could catch a glimpse of was Anders' boots. And the whip came down again.

Anders' feet shuffled impatiently. Obviously, Roku was meant to be screaming in pain. The lashings hurt, assuredly, but Roku had been conditioned to block out such impulses. Roku hated to think what a bloody mess her backside was being turned into, but she could take the lashing as long as Anders had the strength to hand them out. Anders stepped forward and whipped the cat o nine tails up against Roku's dangling breasts. Again, Roku's body spasmed from the blow, but she did not yell out.

Anders muttered someunintelligible curses under her breath. Frustrated, she turned the whip around in her hand. A free hand grabbed at Roku's helpless, tortured ass and pulled apart her ass checks. Roku couldn't see but there was a sudden, violent pressure against her anus. Anders was going to sodomize her with the thick hilt of the whip's handle...

Then there was the sound of grinding in the lock of the large steel door. Roku was facing the wrong way, but if she lowered her head she could just make out the door's base. It creaked open like a steel trap, and feet entered. More jackboots and a pair of high heeled, mustered colored pumps with diamond encrusted T-Straps.

"That will do," a voice said with command, "for now."

Lady Aru! Irrationally and only for a split second, Roku's heart jumped. She almost let herself believe that Lady Aru was there to save her. But then Roku remembered what had happened at St. Juliet's and what the Matron's had said when they'd thought she was unconscious...

The pressure against Roku's asshole vanished and Anders tossed the whips aside onto the table with the single bulb. An Ober Guard came around into Roku's field of vision and cleared Anders clothes off the chair. The Guard picked up the chair and placed it squarely in front of Roku's dangling face. Lady Aru then appeared, dressed in an a strapless, flowing, mustered colored chiffon gown. She paused at the pool of blood Roku's broken nose had produced, tentatively stepping around it, to place herself in the chair.

"Hatchette," she said when she'd made herself comfortable. Roku didn't know if it was a question or a statement. Roku's teeth were still biting into a centimeter of rubber ball gag. She just stared at Lady Aru. "The Hatchette Project," Lady Aru continued, "twelve genetically enhanced professional assassins. All chosen from a stock of girls aged twelve to fifteen, the project being five years old, making the oldest Hatchette potentially no older than twenty..."

She paused. Blood was dripping down from Roku's nose and out around the ball gag. Lady Aru was looking on in horror. She made a motion with a hand to a Guard, and a hand was unbuckling the gag behind Roku's head. It came free with a torrent of blood and saliva that Roku spit on the floor. Lady Aru's feet jumped back, tucking up against herself, trying to keep of shoes clean.

"Where's Pelli?" Roku asked though bloody teeth – coughing and spitting.

Lady Aru continued, "Twelve assassins, now aged seventeen to twenty, placed close to prominent Commissariat dignitaries, ready to be activated upon the death of the First Commissar..."

"Fuck you!" Roku spat, "Hatchettes hunt and kill Dicks, we're not assassins..."

"Yes," Lady Aru stood up and pushed her chair a little back, letting herself sit alittle more comfortably out of the range of Roku's fluids. "I understand that's what you were all told. Perhaps even those who told you it believed it – I just became aware of this all yesterday, you understand... I don't yet have all the details... Before, I didn't have clearance, you see...

"To clear the budget," Lady Aru went on, "To explain your existence to the Commissariat at large – the Hatchettes were presented as an elite Anti-terrorist unit. Sleeper agents to hunt down and destroy all those sleeper cells of transsexual men that were setting off bombs all over the planet..." Lady Aru snorted, "but all of that was just a ruse... That the Hatchettes themselves didn't know the truth, I'm not at all surprised. We maintain the fiction of Dick Terrorism well into highest echelons of the Commissariat. I can't accuse anyone of being hopelessly naive... You were lied to, Roku, that can hardly be considered your fault...

"But it is all a lie, my sweet little Roku..." Lady Aru was speaking with what sounded like genuine affection. Roku could do nothing but hang there and listen. "A very damaging lie that you so seriously believed... No one actually expected to to find any men, Roku, no less find a whole harem and exterminate them. But that's what you did, wasn't it Roku? Sweet, sweet Roku... It was you that murdered everyone in Moll Flanders, was it not?"

"Yes," Roku said, not understanding, "They were Dicks. Terrorists. It was my duty to destroy them..."

"I believe you Roku," Lady Aru continued, "That you genuinely believe that to be your duty, I mean... But it's not true. It's all a lie, Roku, you have to understand that... There are no Dick Terrorists..."

Roku shook her head, "Fuck you!" Roku's neck was getting tired. She let it loll forward.

"Roku," Lady Aru said calmly, then commanded, "Roku! Look at me!"

Roku raised her head. Slowly, wearily.

"There are no Dick Terrorists because there are no Dicks anymore." Aru said slowly, like she was talking to a child. "We killed them all – all the men – in the war."

"No, no..." Roku shook her head. "On the earth, perhaps, but on other planets – asteroid bases – they've survived..."

"Like in the vidcasts?" Lady Aru smiled, but her eyes still looked at Roku sadly, "That's all that is, Roku, the stuff of Saturday afternoon vidcasts... A fiction... But a convenient fiction. That the Great Society has enemies – that its constantly under attack – that the Commissariat is the bulwark between civilization and male aggression... It made the populus more plyable – more willing to accept the necessary austerity measures, with the shift to a command economy... But it's only a lie, Roku. There's no more colonies on the outer planets or asteroids. Not since the Dick and Jane War. All those colonies required water from earth to sustain themselves and no tanker rockets have left earth for two hundred years. There all dead, Roku, all of them... Every last motherfucking male..."

But... Moll Flanders... The Nanpa Girls..." Roku protested, panicked, terrified by what she was hearing.

"Those weren't men..." Lady Aru leaned back in her chair, resting a bare arm over the back. "Not really. That's the other great secret, Roku, that the Commissariat tells no one: The ex-utero banks are insufficient to sustain the Earth's population."

"I-I-" Roku's head was spinning, "I don't understand..."

"When ex-utero fertilization was perfected, women felt that they had finally freed themselves from the bonds of male domination. It was one of the seminal events of the Great Society. With the three million standardized templates, we were ready for the future. With so much genetic material, there'd be no more need for sexual reproduction... But after the war, the Commissariat began to realize that they'd made a mistake...

"We're clones, Roku. Basically. You and I. And every new life that's born in the ex-utero bank is a clone. Sometimes a clone of a clone. And that's where the system begins to break down. There's a degenerative effect – cloning an clone. Nothing showed up for the first few generations, but it quickly became apparent that the stock of genetic material we had would be insufficient to sustain the female population indefinitely. We'd need infuse the templates with new genetic sources... That was the biological problem the scientist could never solve: the creation of life. We could stop life in its earliest stages, clone it, direct it, produce the product were most desired, but we'd never learned how to create life outside of sexual reproduction. For that, womankind would need men.

"But we'd worked so hard to irradiate that disease... Did we want to go back to the bad old daysunder male oppression? No, we had all fought to hard and for to long for out liberation to let that happen. We couldn't let all we'd worked for be destroyed by an accident of biological function...

"So, we recreated male species... It's a easy enough trick to control the final sex of a fetus in the early stages – we do it all the time to assure a female. So why not create a man? But not totally a man... A source of sperm, yes, but with all the aggression and violence bread out of it. Made them more like women, civilized... And our scientist stumbled upon the Z chromosome... The shemale... And that's who you've been hunting, Roku, not Dicks. The men that the ex-utero banks spawned, as a source of genetic material, not terrorist from out some outer space male empire...

"I have to say they're a headstrong lot, still more man than women. We're still working on it – it's a work in progress... And if the general public ever found out, there'd be a panic... So, the Commissariat keeps them in harems, away from good, honest women... But there's some mixing, for those in the know... As you discovered..."

"Why are you bothering to lie to me?" Roku asked, swinging gently in her ropes. "Why not just kill me?"

"I want you to understand now what you would have known back then. What you would have known if the purpose of the Hatchettes had actually been to hunt and kill males. I think I owe you that. But that was never your purpose, Roku. You were created as a highly trained, weapon of political assassination. Twelve assassins for twelve High Commissariat Officials and Ministers. And you were my assassin, Roku, assigned to murder me."

Roku looked up into the eyes of Lady Aru. The sincerity there told Roku she believe what she was saying... But Roku couldn't... She could have never killed Lady Aru, even if she'd been ordered to. Lady Aru must understand that.

"It was a power play, by the First Commissar herself!" Lady Aru said with disgust. "To assure succession – to make sure the people she favored acquired power after her death and continued her programs and policies. It seems that the First Commissar – the Holy Matron protect her soul – felt that I was unfit for office... I was on her list of those Commissars who, upon her death, were to be quietly disposed of," Lady Aru spit the words out. "Of the twelve Hatchettes, eleven were activated. Seven succeeded in their mission. Four were killed attempting to eliminate their target. That just leaves you, Roku. Why you weren't activated, I don't entirely understand, but thank the Holy Matron that you weren't. It's been a hairy twenty four hours, and the last thing I'd have needed was you trying to kill me. But I've succeed in the attempt to ascend to my rightful place as First Commissar of the Great Society of Earth... " Lady Aru paused for affect. "Feel free to congratulate me..."

Roku remembered the visit she'd received, yesterday, from Lt. Zee – that look of terror in her eyes. She must have come to give Roku her orders. But her nerve had failed her... Instead of sending Roku off to her death, she fucked Roku instead... Now Roku was captured and Lady Aru was First Commissar...

Roku's shoulders ached.

Lady Aru climbed to her feet and brushed off her mustard, chiffon gown. She stepped gingerly around the blood pool underneath Roku and took a few steps for the door.

"I'm so sorry for this, Roku," she said, pausing, "If there was any way things could have turned out different..." She held out a hand and touched Roku's bruised, bloodied cheek.

"But First Commissars have an image to maintain..." Roku said snidely, trying to pull her cheek away from Lady Aru's touch.

"Always young, always infallible," Lady Aru shrugged, "if it ever got out that an assassin had gotten so close..." The soft touch of Lady Aru's hand spoke simultaneously of true affection and total, cold sadism. Lady Aru pulled back her hand and started quickly for the door.

"What about Pelli?" Roku ask after, yelling at the wall.

"The girl?" Lady Aru paused again. "The Matron's will keep her, make them one of their own. It's a harsh initiation of sexual humiliation and physically torture that the Matron's subject acolytes to... It's true what everyone says, they're all totally insane... But your friend won't be a danger to me, not once the Matron's are through with her."

Again, Roku's body spasmed with anger. If she could just get free... She could heer the door closing behind her and she knew that Lady Aru was gone. The jackboots on the floor told her that Anders was still in the room; ready for fun and games to begin again...

18. Anders

Anders picked the cat o nine tails up of the table and came around to the front of Roku. She held the flails in one hand and the hilt of the whip in the other. It was like she was weighting it, deciding which end to strike Roku with. Eventually she decided, lowering the whip to her side and striking Roku in the face with a balled fist.

The blow sent Roku rocking. With all her might Roku strained again with her shoulders, this time not against the ropes, but with them – forcing her arms in, back farther behind her back. The ropes slackened, if she could only apply enough force...

The sound of popping, ripping tendons filled the room. Anders stepped back from Roku, unsure of what had just happened. Roku had simultaneously dislocated both of her shoulders. The ropes hung loose around her arms. With a couple of excruciating shrugs, a loop of the rope fell away from her hands. This now gave her plenty of slack. she bent at the hips and shifted her weight back. With all her strength she shrugged her shoulders forward and they snapped loudly back into their sockets.

Anders had been watching, horrified, stupefied by what she saw. But she didn't pause long. All at one, she realized what Roku had accompanied. Her arms were almost free. Anders jump forward and struck Roku hard against the left ear. This sent Roku spinning wildly, bringing her bound legs around, smashing into Anders. Roku was working fast. Anders pushed hard on Roku's feet, to bring her head back around; but by the time Roku was facing back towards Anders, her arms were free of the ropes.

With the momentum of the swing, and all the strength in Roku's arm, she slammed her fist in to Anders stomach. Anders let out a low grunt and stagged back a couple paces. Remembering the cat o nine tails still in her left hand, Anders whipped out with it, trying to catch Roku in the face. But Roku was away, spinning with the reaction of her punch. The flails of the whip snapped again Roku's side, tangling up in the vertical ropes. Not seriously, but it was enough that Roku could grab at the tails of the whip and hang on. Anders kept hold of the handle and Roku pulled her off balance. They were both suddenly grappling for the whip, Anders hanging from the still suspended Roku – spinning together around and around. Fists flew and teeth bit as they wrestled over cat o nine tails. Roku had Anders hanger under her, she reached back and coiled up a length of free rope. Before Anders could react, Roku had the rope around Anders' neck and began pulling. Suddenly, Anders had forgotten about the whip and her fingers shot to her throat.

Anders' feet dropped to the floor and she pushed herself up to a vertical, picking Roku up on her back. Roku was steadily increasing the pressure on the loop of cord she had around Anders neck. Anders' fingers dug desperately at the garrote. Roku was still bond for her toes to her tits, but she hung on tight. A few more second and...