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.
Her arms were glued to her sides, quite literally. The tar-baby material had been instructed to fuse all the way down to her wrists. Her captors could change that in a second if they found a use for her arms. She had one or two herself but Satin doubted the pirates cared for her intentions.
Her hands flexed and clenched with each assault, fingers scrabbled ineffectually against the slick black of her thighs. Her legs were wrapped around the bunk. Tied, somehow. Satin tested the bonds. No good. She couldn't even throw off the rhythm of that girl's relentless tongue.
Concentrate on something else. Satin recognized the deep thrum of a U999 class Reich starship. A 'U-boat': old and discontinued but popular enough among pirates and traders that favored speed over cargo. At a quarter klick in length the U999 was about the smallest starship ever made. Starship. That meant there had to be a Displacer lurking on board somewhere, a Displacer psyker. Satin shivered.
Other than the two girls working on her, Satin could see one or two others watching, a couple sprawled together in sleep and one reading a comic in a overhead bunk. Some girl was muttering somewhere. Satin tried to ignore her tormentors enough to catch the words:
"She wants you to space the fucker. Pop Satin in the head and Flush the fucker out the airlock. She wants you to bind her up in Satin's place and lick her instead. She wants you to mess with her with ice cubes and stuff. She wants.."
The mutter sounded deranged. Satin twisted her head to see the source. The girl was sitting on a bunk between two others, and watching her distrustfully. Her shirt was half off and a pair of crew-girls were touching and stroking her. The girl was a pure-breed; Aryan with bleached short curls adding to the effect.
"She doesn't like Satin looking at her," the Aryan girl said, speaking of herself in the third person, apparently.
The two crew-girls ignored her mutter; nor did the center of their attention seem very ashamed by it. Some sort of affliction, Satin guessed. Then gasped as that damned tongue almost got to her again. Her tormentors were not distracted from their goal either.
The crew must all be used to the Aryan girls' condition. Maybe that was why she permitted their molestations. Back home she'd be spayed if the condition were genetic, a breeder if it was head trauma. Perhaps she preferred to be ships pet to a tribe of psykers.
Any sympathy Satin had for the pathetic girl died quickly at that thought. "Tell her from me," Satin hissed at the girl, "that when your precious psyker crew slip up and I get free, I'll choke that stinking race traitor on her own blood."
One of the two playing with the slave girl, a redhead with no obvious deformity, huffed in annoyance. "Anna Jane follow," she instructed, pulling the Aryan girl away by her shirttails. With obvious effort Anna quelled her inane mutter long enough to turn to Satin and speak a few laborious words.
"You've one solid redeeming feature, 'Satin'. You're a crazy fucked up psychotic bitch."
The redhead laughed as the three departed. "Your speech is getting better, Anna. Now we are going to take you back to my cabin and give you singing lessons."
Anna was saying "Fucking bitch fucking bitch," violently as if she had spent all her control with that one sentence; but she was looking at the redhead coyly and her shoulders were relaxed as they stepped out of view. And Anna labeled Satin fucked up?
The face of the black-tongued girl intruded. "Don't mind Anna," she said. "We did that to her. Then we decided to keep her. You wouldn't be here with us if it weren't for her. So really you should be grateful."
