Pam-Ann (17 page)

The saloon was quiet. Many
passengers were in their cabins packing, and others were still in
the forward observation lounge waiting to catch a first sight of
landfall. Pam went to one of the windows as the airship turned to
starboard, and found herself looking at a familiar
coastline
. They were approaching it from the
southeast. New York Harbour lay to port, its outline and islands so
familiar she could almost have been back in her own world, and
around its shores was a city as big and sprawling as the one she
had known. They began losing height, flying in a
wide arc
over the city as the
Empire’s Triumph
manoeuvred for
landing. A great pall of smoke, pouring from a million chimneys,
hung over New York. There were skyscrapers but not as
tall
as the ones Pam was used to, and huge chimneys of
grey or red brick that towered high above everything else. Pam
blinked.
There was no Statue of Liberty on Liberty
Island.

The airship began losing height.
They were approaching a large field in what Pam
thought would have been South Brooklyn in her reality, moving ever
more slowly and sinking lower all the time. To her left was
Governor’s Island but what caught her attention were the six great
vessels, almost identical to the
Empire’s
Triumph
, that were tethered by their noses
to enormous concrete and steel towers at the far edge of the field.
Two massive tractors carrying a huge cable reel between them
puffed clouds of steam and smoke as they made their way towards the
approaching vessel. Pam’s view was cut off as the airship turned
and drifted until it almost touched the ground. There were several
clunks and thuds and then they began moving more purposefully
towards the other moored airships, towed, she guessed, by the
tractors.

A hand closed on Pam’s bare
shoulder.

“Come on, Miss Peake wants you,”
Eve said.

“But we’ve almost landed.”

The bodyguard shrugged. “You’d
better come, lover. But she’s pleased about something. I don’t
think she means to flog you.”

Not reassured, Pam followed her
to Persephone’s cabin. As Eve opened the door Drake appeared from
forward, leading the docking crew back from securing the airship to
its mooring tower. He turned aside.

“What’s going on? She’s due to
go to the pens with the others.”

Pam felt a surge of relief. The
pens were where the girls were kept between flights. “Then I
am
staying aboard. Oh, thank God! Now if the blackness would
only come....”

“What did you say?” Drake’s
fingers sank
deep
into the flesh of her
left shoulder. “What did you say?” he demanded again. The intensity
of his stare frightened Pam.

Persephone appeared in the
doorway of her cabin, wearing nothing but her make-up and a
self-satisfied grin. “You can’t have her, darling. She’s mine.”

Chapter Eight

Persephone held out a piece of
paper. “The Commodore’s written permission. She’s under my control
until we’re ready to fly again.” She turned her grin on Pam. “Three
nights in New York, Ann. We’re going to have such fun.”

Pam’s gut lurched. Drake read
the paper and stared at her with the same intensity as before. She
saw him regain control, and his usual imperturbable expression
return as he handed back the sheet. “That’s in order, if unusual. I
want her back in a fit state to do her duties.”

The blonde laughed. “She will
be, darling, providing she behaves herself.” She gave him her sly
look, provocative and feline. “Perhaps you’d like to come too? You
can keep an eye on us both and make sure we don’t do anything
naughty.”

Drake bared his teeth. “Why,
thank you, Miss Peake. Since I’m now off duty for the next
forty-eight hours, I believe I’ll accept your kind invitation.”

Persephone quickly mastered her
arching eyebrows and hid her surprise behind a thin smile. “My,
this slave girl really has got under your skin, hasn’t she?” She
struck a pose that Pam had to admit looked very seductive, and
spoke low and breathily. “I hope you’ll find time for me too,
Rafael. You know you’re the only man who ever managed to tempt me
away from my girls.”

Drake laughed softly and kept
his gaze on her face, as if she was not standing nude with her
nipples pointing stiffly in his direction and the lips of her sex
puffy and pink. “You can count on it. I’ll see you in Customs in
thirty minutes.” He looked at Pam as he spoke, turned on his heel,
and once more she was alone and in Persephone’s clutches. The
blonde mistress
drew her into the cabin. A
suitcase lay open on the bed and a tall travelling trunk rested on
the floor. Beside it stood Milly and Tania. Pam stared.

“Milly, your clit is sticking
out again,” Persephone said. “I swear it takes nothing at all to
get you panting, does it? Help Tania get Ann ready while I
dress.”

The girls gleamed with gold.
They were dressed in identical corsets made from plates of the
metal, laced tightly back and front with black leather thongs. The
corsets nipped their waists tight and accentuated the round swells
of exposed hips and breasts. Around their necks were three-inch
deep collars, also gold, and edged at top and bottom with thin,
black enamel bands. At the front of the collars a ring hung down
over the hollow of each girl’s throat and attached above it was a
white satin bow tie. Slim golden shackles encircled the slaves’
wrists and ankles and from the rear of the latter a short chain was
clipped to rings at the backs of the white, open-toed high heels
they wore. Their breasts and sexes were bare. Pam’s stomach
fluttered. Almost bare, for their nipples and the clefts of their
vulvas were rouged a bright, glossy red.

She dared not back away as the
two girls advanced on her holding a similar corset. It was leather
lined, stiff and unyielding when they wrapped it around her, and
they laced it so tight she thought her ribs would crack.
It extended upwards to just below her breasts, and
tightly cinched her waist before curving downwards over each of her
hips while still contriving to expose her abdomen almost to her
navel. It was weighty, horribly constrictive and – Pam
shivered
as the thought entered her head – very sensual.
Knowing Persephone’s wealth, it was bound to be real gold.

So were the bracelets and
anklets, and the collar that made her heart pound when they locked
it around her neck. Pam had worn one for Rick, but that had been
leather. She had worn it as a symbol of her love. This one was much
heavier, and it was a symbol of her slavery. Pam’s spirit rebelled
and she had to fight hard to summon the control she had worked so
long to develop. It came less easily since she had arrived in hell,
but she would be flogged if she resisted. Pam turned her head aside
as Milly appeared in front of her holding a pot of rouge and a
brush.

Persephone finished dressing in
a flared, pleated, calf-length skirt of pale yellow satin, white
high heels and a white silk blouse that somehow contrived to cover
both shoulders and her midriff but left her small and pointed right
tit exposed. She added a sapphire clip to its nipple and watched
Milly finish brushing bright-red rouge along the outer edges of
Pam’s slit. It tickled. Her nipples had already responded to the
brush by standing stiffly on the peaks of her breasts.

“Delicious, darling.”
Persephone’s smile was predatory. “Now, what have I forgotten? No,
we won’t trouble with the jewellery for now.” The nervous looks
Tania and Milly were giving her turned to ones of relief. “Ah, yes,
the butt-plugs!” She produced three from the suitcase, black
rubber, fashioned like a series of balls joined together and
gradually increasing in thickness, about five inches long, with a
narrower neck close to one end and beyond that a screw thread.

Pam’s buttocks ached when she
bent over and pulled them apart. Her sphincter stung as the blonde
mistress forced the oily plug home and her little rear muscle
tightened around its narrow section. Persephone screwed small gold
caps decorated with fluffy little feathers to the threads on the
protruding end of each slave’s plug, green and white for Milly,
blue and white for Tania and red and white for Pam. They looked as
ridiculous as the bow ties on the collars and felt equally
humiliating, and Pam knew hers would draw even more attention to
the raised purple ridges criss-crossing her rear cheeks. Worse was
to come. Not only did she suddenly realise that none of them were
going to be permitted any covering for their sexes, but Persephone
took three thin leather leashes like those used for lap dogs,
clipped one to the ring on each girl’s collar and looped them over
her wrist.

In awful, cringing
embarrassment, Pam allowed herself to be pulled along like a pet
puppy as the blonde made her way to the airship’s port-side exit,
down the boarding ramp and towards the building beyond. The airport
terminal was big but still dwarfed by the seven huge vessels
hovering thirty feet above the ground in front of it. Pam looked
back as the doors closed behind them and saw the
Spirit of
Liberty
sinking slowly towards a landing, its funnels still
belching smoke. A jerk on her leash dragged her in Persephone’s
wake.

Drake was already waiting in
Customs. He waved a sheaf of papers. “Ann’s paperwork’s complete.”
He drew them back and slipped them into his pocket as Persephone
reached out. He was not wearing his uniform but a lightweight
civilian suit of similar cut. His long, light grey coat narrowed at
the waist, drawing Pam’s attention to his broad chest and
shoulders. She lowered her gaze, aching with embarrassment at how
she must look in his eyes. Around her were other girls, most of
them collared and leashed, some dressed in a similar gaudy and
revealing way, others nearly naked. Though many wore loincloths,
not one she could see had any covering for her breasts. It seemed
there were no laws about public nudity here, except perhaps that it
was compulsory for slaves. Pam shuddered.

Customs cleared Persephone in
less than five minutes. A tug on Pam’s collar had her tottering on
her high heels with the butt-plug shifting within her as she was
led onto a railway station platform where a small locomotive stood,
chuffing steam. There were
two cars.
Persephone boarded the first, let go of the leashes and went to the
seats in the rear. In front were only rows of metal bars on either
side of the central aisle. Tania and Milly knelt on the floor and
closed their hands around the bar in front of them. Pam did the
same.

The train filled quickly. More
slaves knelt at the bars and their owners took seats further back.
In front of her, Pam saw a girl wearing a silver hair band with
fake rabbit ears attached and a short, furry tail peeping from
between her buttocks. The slave beside her wore nothing but a
broad, red leather belt around her waist, joined to a narrow one
cinched tightly enough between her legs to separate the rouged
swells of her labia. There were at least twenty other slaves in the
car
, some even completely naked.

Pam clung to the bar as the
train began to move and quickly left the landing field
behind
. As they passed through the New York City
suburbs, which were not so very different to those back home, she
wondered at Drake’s reaction to her mentioning the blackness.
Clearly, it had been that which had provoked his fierce grip on her
shoulder and his quickly suppressed excitement. If he had been
ready to listen to her at any time since she had first arrived,
instead of silencing her with stern words or
that forbidding glance of his, Pam would have willingly told
him everything she knew about the eerie phenomenon that had brought
her to his awful world. Her satisfaction at the realisation that
for once she had him at a disadvantage was fleeting, as she
remembered the pain and humiliations she had suffered because of
Drake. A quiver tickled her pussy and clamped her anus around her
butt-plug when she remembered other things. Pam forced the memories
from her thoughts and closed her eyes to shut out the sight of the
exotically and bizarrely dressed slave girls in front of
her.

A minute later
she opened them again as the train
crossed a bridge with
another directly alongside it, crowded with odd-looking
automobiles, buses and trucks
, all half-shrouded
in steam
and with puffing smoke stacks. The internal
combustion engine was clearly unknown here. A street sign flashed
past
– Chrystie Street. They had just crossed into
Manhattan over what would have been the Manhattan Bridge in
Pam’s reality. Shortly afterwards, the train stopped at the Thirty
Sixth Street station. Half of the passengers got off, including
Drake and Persephone, who collected the slave girls along the
way.

“Hey, Alex, it’s not like you to
go into town,” Pam heard Drake say, and saw the chief engineer from
the airship had also been on the train. “We usually can’t pry you
away from your engines”

“There’s only a few loose seals
and gaskets to take care of. My deputy can see to it.” The Chief
tapped a finger on the large, brown envelope he held. “I’ve got
business downtown with the US Patent Office. I’ll tell you later if
it works out.” He grinned and disappeared into the crowd.

Although there were steam-taxis
outside the station, all closer in size to a van than a sedan,
Persephone chose to walk. Plenty of others were doing the same in
the warm, sunny weather, many leading leashed slave girls and, to
Pam’s shock and embarrassment, not all by their neck collars. Many
of the slaves were dressed and decorated as garishly as Pam and her
companions and attracted as many stares. Aching with
self-consciousness and with the butt-plug doing alarming things as
it rubbed the delicate tissues in her rectum at every step, she
kept her eyes lowered as they walked the two blocks along Fifth
Avenue to the corner of
West
Thirty Fourth
Street. The
Empire State Building
was not there. Where it
should have been was a building no more than twenty stories high at
most. Above its door a sign read
Astoria Hotel
.