Chapter 2: The Tar-Baby
Little black Satin Heart wasn't named for her skin. Satin's skin was white as snow. Her eyes were wells of black that sucked you in like gravity.
And everywhere that Satin went mayhem was sure to ensue. She had promised herself that. Satin enjoyed killing people; but only bad people; only psykers; wolves in human skins. It was her job. Right at that instant Satin was enjoying being dead.
It's peaceful, she thought, unconsciously grinding her pelvis into that lapping warmth, that lashing tongue whose implications had not yet dawned on her.
If I am dead, why does this feel so heavenly sweet? Satin Heart had never expected heaven. She hoped for blackness, nothing more.
Why am I so sure I am dead?
The end: Actinic fire blossoming at the needle tips of a dozen charge-guns pointed at her chest; fault of the psyker-scum pirates that had burst into her cabin as she clawed herself out of sleep, scrabbling for her gun; fault of the proximity alarm that she had ignored long seconds in her slumber; fault of the tedious off-world errand that had absolutely no opportunity of action, danger or death; never knowing that this was the time the Wolf would get her.
But had he finished with her? Could death be that easy? Was death far enough?
The weapons might have been set to stun. Then she would be alive, wouldn't she? That thought terrified her. She clung to her delusion a few desperate breaths longer.
Satin woke with a gasp in a darkened bunk-space. She couldn't move. She struggled against her bondage, had been even before she woke, bare skin against that strange slickness that touched every part of her; a sensation she could not yet place. It caressed her face too, everywhere but her lips and eyes.
Her eyes traveled down her shiny black-clad sides to where the strange material opened once more, and there was a psyker-girl licking Satin's baby bare cunt with a tar-black tongue.
Satin tried to scream but it all became tangled in a breathy moan. Breathe in then scream, girl! That simple plan was beyond her. The tar-black tongue would not stop. The sensation was cresting now, poised above her like a curling wave. She gained her voice just as she was crushed beneath its fury, and the lungful of air was spent announcing just how thoroughly she had been despoiled by the psyker girl.
Shuddering to silence.
Satin fixed her assailant with those eyes that had watched many a psyker die, waiting for her breath to calm enough for speech. "There is going to be an axe-man at the end of this tale", she told the psyker. "I bet your life on it."
The psyker girl blew some damp brown strands from her face, rolled her eyes as if she had heard it all before. She twisted to shout over a pale naked shoulder: "Hey ev-rybodeee, sheeeee's baaaack…"
A new shape leant over her, Dark carmel skin. Spikey black hair. Second in command, according to her collar studs. "And glad to be back, by the sound of it."
Satin's mind was in turmoil, but she had the wits to bite her tongue and keep silent. She would get a chance to kill them, or she would not. If not… Precisely as her mind took that turning, she felt a hand placed on her trembling belly. "Name's Quill," said the second-in-command.
That was too much. "You don't talk to me!"
"We talk to you honey, you just don't listen." Quill said.
Laughter echoed back to her. Several women had gathered.
For a moment the proximity of all those psykers and half-breeds almost drove Satin to hysteria, but she contained it by retreating within herself. The strange black material helped somehow. She felt insulated by it.
It clung to her like a second skin, Glossy black but too smooth to be latex. Smooth as wet tar but it wasn't wet.. Metal studs she recognized as CPUs dotted faint seams. Smart-cloth?
Satin recognized the material with a start. They had bound her in a tar-baby!
Reich Police used tar-babies to bind psykers. Satin had restrained a few that way herself, although she avoided the missions that involved bringing back a target alive. Perhaps the psykers thought this would shake her, some sort of psychological trick: treating her like this. They were wrong. Just as it kept psyker minds in, it could also keep psyker minds out. Satin often wore a jacket and mask of a similar material to keep them out of her head. When she was on missions. When she slept. That was part of the reason they called her 'Little Black'.
Behind her mask, Satin smirked. Score one to me, she thought. Cocooned in that material she felt irrationally safe. The illusion was enough for now. It let her think, and plan, surveying the outside world and sorting its' sensations into data dispassionately.
"Keep her warmed up." Said Quill. "I will inform the captain that our sleeping beauty has awoken."
"My tongue's tired," the girl with the tar black tongue complained once Quill had left. Another girl took her place, touching the tar-baby material around Satin's crotch briefly to instruct it to retreat further. Then the new girl began to kiss and lick. The long hair of her Mohawk brushed against Satin's newly naked belly.
It doesn't matter, Satin told herself desperately at this new assault. That's the dirtiest part of me. It's distant. It's right down there. They're not inside my mind and that's what matters. Satin preserved her distance. Even when the girl with the black tongue recovered enough to instruct the tar-baby to surrender one white breast to the cool air, and began to tease the nipple with her lips and teeth. The nipple puckered and hardened but she was still safe, observing from a remote place the strange things that people do.
