"You know what the future is, Mr. Fawkes?"

Thys van Rooyen was brandishing his dinner fork like a rapier as he held forth. The CEO of Executive Results International Security was a bulldog of a man, short and broad, with a full head of white hair, bushy eyebrows and a mountain-man beard, wearing a tailored Italian suit that didn’t suit him in the least, but almost gleefully oblivious to the incongruity as he stabbed the fork into the duck-liver pâté on his plate and shoveled a helping into his mouth. Max Fawkes sat directly across from him, looking as innocuous as he could, nodding mildly.

"Do tell, Mr. van Rooyen," he said attentively. He refrained from adding "You ridiculous pig." He’d dined with worse men before.

It was dinner-time at The Sands Estate, and they were at a long table in the mansion’s main dining room, an expansive colonial affair with lavish furnishings, waitresses standing off at the sides – the last remaining crew of Lockhart’s Pony Girls on the Estate, their taut young flesh clothed only in swirling patterns of body paint designed to blend flawlessly with the floral-printed silk wallpaper – and a who’s who of Siouxsie’s criminal hierarchy arrayed around the table. Max had never, he realized, dined with them all at the same time: the elegant, sandy-haired beauty Sabrina Lockhart at his left, resplendent in a strapless gold evening gown, "the Hound" Cornelius van Rooyen III at his right, the CEO of ERIS across from him, flanked on either side by big, silent, lethal-looking mustached men who were obviously higher-ups in his own organization. At the head of the table sat Siouxsie Sexcrime, radiantly beautiful in her platinum-blonde cornrows and slightly-sheer blue silk dress, eating the odd forkful of salad and clearly taking everything in with her cool grey eyes. The food was exquisite, as always.

Siouxsie was utterly deadpan, but it was almost painful watching Lockhart and the Hound try to act casual, like people who didn’t think they knew something he didn’t know. Max Power – known to them as "Max Fawkes" – smirked inwardly with cold amusement... I know just how you feel... and even more so at Thys, who wasn’t even trying to hide his smugness, the fact that he thought he was talking with a man who was dead already. Stay confident, all of you, he willed them. Just stay confident. That’s all the space I need.

"The future," Thys van Rooyen went on, gesticulating again with his fork, "is programmable material technology. Take fibres, for instance. Imagine sutures that can knit themselves shut. Ropes that can tie themselves. Cables that can put up a building, no help from a crane. You just zap them with a bit of current and send them a bit of programming, all completely wireless. It’s the first wave of nanotechnology, my friend. The second industrial revolution. Science fictional stuff. And it’s here. Right now."

Your prize from Qin Zhang and the Chinese government, thought Max as he maintained a look of mild interest, taking a swallow of champagne. He remembered Gustavo Caliente – rest in peace – telling him about the weird spectacle of a "rope monster" that had been used against the Kitts during their "mission" at the Soliko Grand Hotel. A great seething mass of rope that had seemed to move at the will of its master. It had been no illusion, it was a sample of a technology they were expecting to acquire from China’s Ministry of State Security. No doubt a jury-rigged technology itself stolen from the drawing board of some unsuspecting company, being released into the wild before its time.

"But Mr. van Rooyen," he said. "You’re in the security business, not the construction business."

The ERIS CEO waved this away grandly. "I’m in all sorts of business, Mr. Fawkes. I make it a point to keep a diversified portfolio. You ought to do the same, you know. And please, call me Thys."

Max smiled without warmth and raised his glass. "Only if you call me Max."

Thys raised his own glass with a barbed smile, draining it swiftly, fondling a delicious buttock of the girl who immediately moved in to refill it.

"Anyway," Max went on. "Not much call for a diversified stock portfolio in the Company, I have to admit. I’ll have to change that now that I’m going into business for myself."

"Really," asked Thys with a twinkle in his eye. "Maybe you’ve got an eye on the flesh business, like our lovely Doctor Lockhart here?" He gestured at Sabrina, who gave a smile at once graceful and mischievous.

"Nanotechnology might be the future, Thys," she said smoothly. "But flesh is always the present. I do wonder what our dear Max has planned," she turned to him now, her eyes twinkling too. "For his Foxxes, once he’s tamed them."

"If he can tame them," put in the Hound shortly on the other side of him.

There was nothing, Max decided, quite as satisfying as the spectacle of people who mistakenly think they have the luxury of enjoying themselves at your expense. He would almost have been tempted to burst out laughing if it weren’t for Siouxsie’s eyes on him, cool and level; Siouxsie who was watching him carefully, clearly scanning for any hint of his next move, Siouxsie who was not quite lulled at having supposedly ferreted out his clandestine "attempt" to contact Washington through the now-deceased Jimmy Beam and Gustavo Caliente. With her, he always had to be careful.

" ‘If,’ Brother Corny?" asked Max with an outward smirk. "You angling for a look at my work?"

"It’s Cornelius," the Hound snapped in irritation, his normally affable face and bald-pated head reddening. "And yes, actually, I’d like to see what you’ve managed."

Max shrugged, put his fingers up to his lips and let out a piercing whistle that made everyone around the table wince. And after a moment, one of the Pony Girls entered the room, a long leather leash trailing from her right hand...

... and at the end of that leash was Raven McCoy.

The tiny teenaged Foxx crawled sinuously on all fours, her voluptuous feminine curves showed off to perfection as her spectacular, upthrust rump wriggled in the air, as her glorious tits – augmented now with the Syndicate’s permanent version of the Foxxes’ breast enhancement serum to thirty-eight inch double-Ds, the same size Summerset O’Neale had once sported naturally – dangled and swayed enticingly. Like the waitresses, she was clad only in body paint; but in her case the paint was patterned like a red fox’s coat, complete with pale belly, and a pair of ridiculous costume fox ears were perched on her head. What was most striking though, were her eyes: glassy, wide and happy, she looked like a pet being called to heel by its master, and in a moment she was sitting on her haunches beside Max’s chair, her winsomely beautiful face looking up at him eagerly and emptily, her beautiful mams rising and falling with evident excitement.

"Say hello, Raven," Max said, gesturing around the table.

Raven craned her head around at the dinner guests, opened her mouth, and let out a series of weird, high-pitched, ululating yips that took some doing for a human throat to produce, sounding almost painful.

There was a silent moment around the table, and then Siouxsie Sexcrime – looking at him with genuine, unalloyed admiration – said: "Fox barks. You actually trained her to speak in fox barks."

Max shrugged modestly. "All it took was a little... negative reinforcement. You’d be surprised what the human body can do given the right motivation."

"How deep does that training go?" asked Sabrina Lockhart, also looking impressed.

"Oh, she can still understand everything that’s being said around the table," said Max. "She knows exactly where she is, who she was, and what she’s been reduced to. Don’t you, Raven?" he asked her, his voice suddenly hard and cold. Her fatuous expression didn’t budge an inch as she nodded with the same eagerness as before... but a single, bright tear could be seen tracing its way down her cheek.

"Ahhhh, truly cruel," said Siouxsie approvingly. "Well done, Max."

There was a note of undisguised regret in her voice, and Max looked up from the enslaved Foxx to meet her eyes. There was a moment of quiet candor between them, and for one of the few times he could remember, there was an identifiable emotion in Siouxsie’s eyes: wistfulness. The road not travelled. She was silently acknowledging their status as enemies... and that she almost wished it could be otherwise.

After a moment, Max gave her a subtle nod of respect, then said to Lockhart: "To answer your question, Sabrina, I’m thinking of keeping them for private use. To entertain my friends at parties, like this one. Would you like to see an example?"

"Oh, yes," the Mistress said with wicked glee.

Max turned back to the Hound, oddly enough the only person in the room who didn’t look admiring of the spectacle Raven presented. He was, in fact, looking down at the girl with a distinct measure of disquiet, a disquiet that only seemed to grow as Max said: "How ‘bout it, Brother Corny? Up for being our Foxx’s first morsel of the night?"

The Hound was opening his mouth to answer, but Max didn’t wait, snapping his fingers at Raven and pointing eloquently to the stocky, balded-headed doctor’s crotch. With an eager nod, she crawled under the table, and in moments Cornelius van Rooyen III’s face was freezing as his zipper came audibly down, and quiet, rhythmic slurping sounds began to emanate from the area between his legs.

"So?" Sabrina asked mischievously. "How is she?"

The Hound’s eyes were glazing over as the slurping sounds started to get more pronounced and aggressive. "Not... not bad..." he said. It was clearly an understatement.

Raven went to her cocksucking work with enthusiasm, the slurps gradually transitioning into graphic gobbles and gulps, the Hound’s eyes starting to roll back as his head lolled. Thys was tucking back into his food, trying not to look distracted by the crude spectacle. Lockhart was openly enjoying it, giving out little chuckles of amusement when a jerk of the Hound’s hips accompanied a sudden gagging sound from underneath the table. Siouxsie was, for a moment, in the serene reverie that indicated she was really enjoying the torment and debasement and degradation of another person.

Just a game, of course... or so they thought. After all, you’re the one really "tamed" her, aren’t you, Hound? mused Max, wryly. You can mould her to your will by speaking a simple phrase... can’t you? Even as the table delighted in witnessing – and in the Hound’s case, feeling – the enforced servility of one of the famous Foxx Force Five, there was that hint of superiority just underneath the surface. Again, successfully avoided only by Siouxsie, whose clinical appreciation of well-crafted cruelty always won out, elaborate mind-control gimmicks or no.

"Do you think the rest of them will break as quickly?" inquired Siouxsie. There was a hopeful note in her voice; someone describing an extravagant luxury that a perfect world would contain.

Before your plan overtakes me, you mean? he thought, but said aloud: "I guarantee it. I take it they’ve gotten their ‘rescue map’ by now?"

"Indeed. Doctor Lockhart’s Kitts will have finished outfitting them about an hour ago."

"Are you set up if they make their attempt early?" asked Thys. "You know you don’t have any of my people around to support you."

"Yes, I know that, thank you Thys," said Max patiently. "We’d be set for all of them whenever they arrive. But they’re Foxxes: they’ll remember their training. They’ll try to find a place to hole up, try to wait for the cover of night before they make their move."

"The fall of the Foxx Force Five," sighed Lockhart. "Or Four, rather. Damn, I wish I had the time to stay and watch it. With a bucket of popcorn!"

"Mmmmmmphhhhlllghhh," came a weird-sounding, cock-stifled moan from under the table... and even Max couldn’t tell if it was a sound of distress or delight.

* * * * *

What a mess, thought Special Agent Evan Danton to himself as he stood over a hospital bed in the Burn Ward of Sidon Hospital, looking down at the man who was supposed to be Max Fawkes. What... a... mess.

The bomb detonating at the house of the Operation Freedom commander that morning might has well have been set off right in the White House, so intense was the fury of activity it had caused. Cell phones all around the capitol had started shrilling at their owners not five minutes after the event had been reported, even as Mayor Sidel’s local people were swooping in desperately to keed a lid on the news. Battle stations! The President’s law-enforcement photo-ops are in jeopardy! Find out what the fuck is happening in Island City... right the hell now!

Frantic phonecalls. Squealing of car tires as G-men everywhere – every single human being in the Washington branch of the Island City Vice Taskforce – rode hell-for-leather for their offices in the Jack Dawe Building. Desperate searches through old e-mails, piles of memos, anything that might give a hint of what could be going on, what might have gone wrong. How had the criminals identified Fawkes? Why didn’t we see it coming? Who else was compromised? Could the damage be controlled? Could the Key Assets (as the Foxx Force Five were officially called) continue, or would they have to be pulled out? Assessments had to be made in minutes, minutes that were constantly interrupted by a barrage of phone-calls from a rotating cast of White House staffers and interns. All Hell breaking loose. Phone-calls to Special Agent John Mosley at the Den were going to voice-mail. Voice-mail! At a time like this, incredible! They had to have heard the news in Island City!

It was Danton who discovered that the man who monitored the emergency communications line had been sending in memos, one every two days, about a single bizarre phone-call he’d intercepted from the Foxxes’ Den. A low-level clerk had evidently been receiving the memos, deemed them too weird and speculative to pass on – probably had been shit-scared to make any waves about the Island City operation – and quietly filed them as low-priority. Ironically enough, that ass-covering clerk’s career in the FBI was surely over as of now... but the damage was done.

Danton had read the memos. The short, weird call had come from none other than Summerset O’Neale, and hadn’t concerned anything of apparent emergency relevance. She had brightly asked her liaison to name a tune, and then sung a creepy, arrhythmic wordless ditty before signing off. The ditty had clearly preyed on the man’s mind, and his first memos had been simply along the lines of "watch out, there’s something very wrong here." But then he’d figured out the puzzle: if you substituted dots for low pitches and dashes for high pitches in the song, you got Morse Code:

Which translated to:

Emergency situation in Island City

Danton’s blood had gone utterly cold on reading the memo that contained the coded message... a message that Summerset had clearly needed to smuggle past watching eyes. Whose? A memo that, thanks to some stupid hack, had sat along with a dozen identical memos in a file marked "Speculative – Low Priority." From well before the Angel Rubinetto bust.

He’d gone straight to the Director with it. Two hours later he was on a plane to Island City, leading one of two FBI advance teams designated to figure out what the hell had happened, trying all the way not to think what the word compromised might mean as applied to tantalizing targets like the Foxxes and their Kitts. Had fought his way with his team of three agents through the City’s murderous traffic to get here, and talk to Max Fawkes.

And it was just getting weirder.

"You’re absolutely sure?" he asked the nurse almost numbly.

"I’ve checked it multiple times. I’m telling you, if there’d been a transfusion problem we definitely would have caught it." Cawt it. Her thick Islander accent was harsh with irritation, and a bit of defensiveness. "He’s O-positive. It was no problem finding blood, not at all."

O-positive. The unburned half of the face of the man unconscious and sedated in front of him looked exactly right... but the man could not be Max Fawkes. Max Fawkes’ service records were all crystal-clear: he had O-negative blood.

What. The. Hell. Danton found himself at a loss. Fortunately, his phone rang before he could reveal any signs of hesitation; almost gratefully, he yanked it out of his jacket and flipped it open. "Danton."

"Fields here," said a tense voice on the other end. "We’ve arrived at the Foxxes’ Den."

Finally, some answers! "Made contact with Mosley?"

"That’s a negative, apparently he’s been gone from the Den for some time. On sick leave."

"Sick leave." Danton’s confusion deepened as he paced out of the room and into the hallway. "And nobody thought to tell Washington."

"That isn’t the half of it. It’s... it’s weird over here, Danton. I think you’d better come and see for yourself."

"Tell me you’ve secured the Foxxes, at least."

His heart plummeted into his stomach as he heard Fields answer: "That’s a negative, there’s no sign of them. No Kitts either."

Danton struggled to keep his voice from rising to a shout. "Fields, that’s impossible. Fucking impossible. Who’s the acting commander there?"

"Nobody. It was Lonnie James, apparently."

Pause. Danton took a slow breath. "Nobody? Was?"

"I’m telling you," Fields insisted, sounding on the edge of controlled hysteria himself. "It’s no good my trying to explain on the phone. You’ve got to get down here. You’ve got to see for yourself."

"I hear you," acknowledged Danton after a moment. "I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Danton out."

He flipped the phone shut and gestured to the rest of his team who’d been waiting in the hallway, watching him. They set out at a furious stride for their car... and then Danton, reluctantly, paused again. Somebody really wanted whoever-that-is in there dead, he thought. We’d better take some precautions here.

As he turned back to flag down the nurse again, another thought was racing across his mind: Goddammit, Foxxes, where are you? Where the hell are you?

* * * * *

Mylène Desanges could feel every last eye in the little bar on her and her fellow Foxxes as they sat hunched around their table, nursing their Shirley Temples and trying their level best to look innocuous.

It was an impossible task, of course. Dressed in their barely-there black halter tops that strained to come halfway down their swollen, aching tits, their tiny black pleated miniskirts so brief they left their asses bare and their see-through thongs exposed, their feet in black knee-socks and high-heeled Chucks, their flesh oiled and glistening provocatively, their hair up in saucy pigtails tied with dark ribbon, their eyes ringed with black eyeshadow and their lips coloured in deep shades of raspberry or plum... the Parisian Foxx knew they must look as though they’d wandered off a porn set. Goth Cheerleader Sluts.

It wasn’t that far from the truth, either. It had barely been a couple of hours since the end of their humiliating, degrading "farewell party" at the Den. Mylène was still squirming, hot, wet, aching with the memory of throbbing, pounding cock, with the helpless desire... the need for more. And more. And more. A need that had been powerfully stoked by the purring of a Futatsu motorbike’s powerful engine pressed between her lithe, slender legs like a massive vibrator as she’d fought, for every metre and every moment of their ride here, to keep that powerful mechanical thrumming from bringing her off.

She’s almost made it, too. It was only at that last traffic light, as they’d been getting ready to turn off and into the parking lot of the Eagle Eye Restaurant & Bar, that she’d had the misfortune of looking to her left and seeing a big, hard-looking black man in a convertible eyeing up her body with lust. She’d lost her concentration, she’d met his cold eyes for a split second... and she’d gone right over the edge, locking gazes with him as she’d unconsciously opened her mouth to gasp hotly: "Ahhhhhhh, ahhhhhhhh, ahhhhhhh, ahhhhhhh," as she licked her lips and squirmed salaciously all over the seat of her bike, rubbing her clit against the pulsing stimulation of the idling engine and squirting, squirting, squirting all over the shiny black leather, the climax sweeping over her like a sudden shower of ecstasy.

It was the sound of a car horn blaring behind her that finally snapped her out of it, made her aware of the alarmed shouts of her fellow Foxxes. Her ears burning, she’d pulled away from the black man’s stunned eyes and never looked back.

She was the only one who’d given in to those feelings on the ride over. Mortifying. Humiliating. Shameful. Disgusting. Weak. It made her want to weep with self-loathing. Or was it frustration? Who could tell the difference anymore? Each stoked the hunger in her pussy just as mercilessly. Each made it just as hard to concentrate. That climax had done nothing to satiate her, it was like a serving of cocktail weenie to a woman who’d been wandering in the desert for weeks and needed to gulp down a pound of sausage. It was hard, so hard to think about anything but being held down and fucked like an animal by a big, long, stiff, black...

"Mylène-chan?" came Keiko’s voice quietly.

The sandy-haired French Foxx snapped out of it abruptly as she realized she was squirming in her seat. The others were looking at her compassionately, like they knew what she was going through. "I am sorry," she said shamefacedly. "I am listening. Please, go on."

They’d come to the Eagle Eye because it was the best-known dyke bar in the sleepy bedroom city of Edlers, on their route to the place where Raven was being held upstate, the so-called Sands Estate. They had needed to get clear of any place with men: with their bodies conditioned to submit and surrender, their skin and clothes permeated with the pheromone-enhancing compound that could turn any man who came within sniffing distance of them into a brutal rapist who they might or might not be able to fend off, they’d become trembling prey animals in a world full of predators. Not that women were entirely safe company either – as their experience at the hands of the Kitts had shown – but then the Kitts seemed to be a special case, somehow. And while women passing nearby here had given them shining looks of lust, they were more looks of I’d love to be your bitch lust than the I’m going to make you my bitch variety. Which was too bad. No wait, what was she thinking, that was good. It was what they needed, a breather, a place to gather themselves. Mylène especially needed it; that orgasmic incident on the road had shattered her focus, amped up her lust to dangerous levels, rendered her more addled than the others.

And now Summerset wanted them each to tell their stories. The stories they’d kept from each other in their pride, the stories that had been hidden from them by the Syndicate’s tampering with their minds until their enemy had chosen to reveal them, the stories that Summerset thought might help them to understand one another and come together as a team when they went to rescue Raven at nightfall. Summerset – who’d showed them it was possible to prevail, if just barely, over the panic-reflex Siouxsie Sexcrime had somehow programmed into them in response to violence –was now clearly grasping for anything that might restore a sense of control, of spirit and camaraderie to her terrified team-mates. And maybe to herself, as well.

The trouble is, thought Mylène, it’s a futile exercise. All it’s going to do is turn us on even more... She listened to Satin Rayne’s story of going under in "Dr. Nielson’s" neurotherapy machine and then being chased, in her mind’s eye, through a vast tunnel system and finally raped by a horrific four-armed demon with a fourteen-inch studded cock. All she could think was: Amazingly. Hot. She rubbed her thighs together as Keiko told of the nightmare the neurotherapist had planted in her subconscious mind – the nightmare of being beaten and raped by her own father – and then told of the humiliating session of bondage and lesbian anal rape she’d been subjected to during the so-called "ambush" on her at the Bolero’s restaurant. So hot.

As it came Mylène’s turn, she’d gamely tried to control her voice and keep herself from wandering into blow-by-blow (so to speak) detail as she told of the group of Bloods fucking her half-senseless during their mission on Hague Island, of how the neurotherapist had planted a ghost of the virile, big-dicked Sun Dogg in her mind to control her. She kept her voice admirably steady, but just recounting it in words made her pussy and her ass throb with more powerful, distracting lust than ever. And her tits were throbbing too, her tits that were bigger and hotter and more sensitive than they’d ever felt even when she’d used the old version of their breast enhancement serum. Aside from Summerset’s new F-cups, they were all sporting double-D racks now... and she found herself watching the other Foxxes’ tits rising and falling, fighting to keep from bringing her own hands up and fondling her own spectacular breast-flesh, it felt... So hot. Incredible.

Finally, it was Summerset’s turn. She had some fascinating revelations, too – her experience had involved a cabin upstate and a group of merciless hunters – but frustratingly she wasn’t talking very much about the sex. She had other revelations on her mind, and Mylène fought gamely to focus on them:

"The so-called Doctor..." she was saying, clearly struggling with the memory: "He finally did break me. Obviously. But not before I managed to do two things. The first was teach myself a song that I embedded as deep in my memory as I could during all my wanderings in his hunting nightmare. I figured that his machine wouldn’t be able to get at procedural memory, so I dedicated that whole experience to creating a single procedural..."

Mylène found herself fading out as someone caught her eye across the bar. A pair of someones: two tiny-titted, exquisitely cute punk rock hotties sporting short blue faux-hawks, one with chocolate skin and the other creamy-delicious, both dressed in tank tops and spiked leather belts and collars and tight denim cutoffs, both watching their table with frank interest... watching Mylène in particular, she was sure of it. She felt her nipples stiffen as they both smiled sweetly and gave her a little wave, and she flushed and turned away, her breath quickening, trying to focus back in on what Summerset was saying.

"... and called it in," the Number One Foxxx was finishing. "That’s one reason I have hope: by now someone in Washington must have figured out the Morse Code pattern. I predict it won’t be long before Feds external to Operation Freedom have worked out the secret message I sent them and are descending on this city."

Feds coming to the rescue? Mylène felt herself finally able to turn some focus away from the liquid sexual heat coursing through her body... because of the sudden, powerful bitterness welling up in her. She just barely refrained from asking where all this help had been until now, if it was so certainly on its way. It would have been awfully nice of them to show up before the enemy did... this... to us...

"And we’re going to need all the help we can get," went on Summerset, very seriously. "Because the second thing I accomplished before he broke me was to learn the identity of the person who betrayed Operation Freedom. It’s almost certainly Siouxsie’s so-called ‘contractor,’ the man we’re going to face right now. And it’s... it was..." her voice falted momentarily, then she took a deep, steadying breath and said: "It was Max. Max betrayed us. Max betrayed Operation Freedom, because the Syndicate promised to give us to him as a prize. As his... uhhh... his sex, uh, slaves..."

She trailed off, biting her lip, and looked around at the other Foxxes as if hoping one of them would point out how obviously mad an idea this was. But the looks of astonishment around the table were already fading into comprehension. Mylène found herself nodding. Of course. It was so obvious... how didn’t we all see it before? Whose orders made all of this possible, the Kitts, the neurotherapist, the smuggled Alethex, everything?

The Parisian Foxx met Keiko Takeda’s lustrous almond-shaped eyes across the table, the two of them sharing a dark look. They’d been the ones to express skepticism about haring off to walk into Siouxsie’s trap, and for Mylène at least the skepticism was far from dead. For all that she still wanted to believe in Summer and in the power of Foxxiness to overcome, the signs were piling up. They were isolated, with no backup, no doubt facing a small army of thugs. The duffel bags under the table, by their feet, had been waiting for them by their bikes and contained the most minimal weaponry they’d ever brought on a raid. They were facing an enemy, it turned out, who had been their mentor and knew them better than they knew themselves. An enemy who’d chosen the ground, the conditions of conflict, everything right down to what little they were wearing. At the same time, they were facing the powerful sexual urges and programmed weaknesses of their own bodies... and even if they managed to prevail over all that, they would still be at the mercy of another, even deadlier enemy who could disable them with nothing but a word. Whose promise to let them vanish into obscurity was surely a lie.

There was a fine line between having hope... and deluding yourself. She saw the same sentiment in Keiko’s eyes. Summerset’s mind was made up, though; there’d be no diverting her, and they couldn’t let her and Satin go off alone.

But Mylène, for one, had no illusions about where all this was going to end. Despair drummed with every heartbeat, and her clit was pulsing anew, the words "sex slaves" vibrating deep inside her, whispering to the dark, vulnerable ache that pervaded her whole being and owned her tingling flesh, her sopping fuckhole. She found herself looking back up and meeting the eyes of the two punk rocker chicks, who cast subtle glances of invitation at her and directed her gaze to the pub’s rear exit. Then, laughing, they both walked out that door themselves, pulling packs of cigarettes out of their pockets.

"We need to plan our attack," Satin was saying, her voice a brittle imitation of her signature brash confidence.

Summerset nodded. "Yes, we do. But we need to take a break first. Agreed?" They all nodded as she added: "Everybody careful not to stray out of earshot. Remember to scream as loud as you can if you need help. Don’t let yourself be cornered alone with anyone. Satin, you want to come out front with me and get some air?" Satin smiled with a sudden telltale shyness and nodded, and Summerset turned to Mylène and Keiko and said: "I suggest you two stay together as well. Let’s reconvene at this table in... half an hour."

As the other two left, Mylène and the Tiger Princess shared another long look.

Keiko said: "I know we should stay together, but... I... I think I... need some time alone..."

To try to tend the fires of lust between your legs, Tiger Princess. I know. We all need to do it. "I need the same thing," said Mylène with gentle understanding. "See you soon."

Keiko hesitated, gave a firm nod, then got up and headed in the direction of the bathrooms. Mylène sat at the table alone for a moment, gathering her courage as she looked at that inviting back exit. One of her hands came up to caress a hot, swollen tit as she thought about the cute asses of the punk chicks swaying in their tight denim, the image consuming her so that she was barely aware of the looks of impotent lust raking across her bare, glistening flesh from all around her. She, too hesitated for a moment more.. then made her decision.

She got up and strutted without further pause out through the back exit, a vision of pure unadulterated sex, a supermodel dressed up like a teen sex fantasy with a forty-inch double-D bust jiggling with every step, straining to burst free from the tiny top that was designed to accommodate the B-cups she’d once sported.

"God almighty," breathed someone in simple awe as the door closed behind her.

* * * * *

The two girls were waiting for her, standing beside a dumpster across the trash-strewn back alleyway, sharing a cigarette and joking about something. They saw her, smiled seductively and beckoned her over.

"Hey, what’s your name?" the white girl said as she stubbed out the cigarette and extended a hand.

"Uhhhh, Lainey," Mylène replied, her voice already husky with desire as she took it.

"Well, Lainey, I’m Deja," the white girl pointed at herself, then at her chocolate-skinned beauty of a friend: "And this is Juno. It’s nice to meet you!"

As she stepped in to take Juno’s proffered, surprisingly strong hand, she realized she was close enough to smell the girls’ cheap perfume. Which meant they were close enough to smell her "pheromone-enhanced" scent, for the Alethex pervading her system to waft up their nostrils.

As she saw them react, Mylène had the first terrified inkling that she’d made a mistake.

The sight of eyes going wild, friendly emotion being replaced with bestial lust and vicious contempt as pupils dilated: it was frighteningly familiar. It had happened to the male Agents of Operation Freedom without exception on being put in a room with the Foxxes during their "farewell party." But out here in the wild, it hadn’t happened to any women they’d encountered yet... until now. She saw Deja and Juno’s relaxed seductiveness alchemize in a split second into sadistic delight, an evil light sparking in their eyes as their looks of naked, raging lust shafted into her body, making her pussy pulse even hotter and needier as her breath caught.

And she was all alone with them in a dirty alleyway, with nobody to look for her or hear her for a full half hour, by her own choice. Ah mon Dieu, you stupid slut... she thought to herself as she felt Deja’s hands tracing up her thighs from behind, willing herself to act as she saw Juno’s hands coming up in slow motion to her chest. Do something... do something, Mylène, you silly trollop...

But she did nothing.

Juno’s hands caught at the front of her halter top. "So you thought you were gonna tease us all with these sweet titties, did you, bitch?" she said viciously. "I don’t think so. I think everybody’s got a right to feast their eyes." She balled up her hands and yanked. RRRRRRRRIP! Mylène froze in panic as the minimal covering on her heaving tits was shredded away, the sensitive globes bouncing free... and she felt Deja unceremoniously stripping her tiny soaked see-through thong down her legs as Juno grabbed a double handful of her vulnerable breasts, mashing them together as she stepped in to claim the Foxx’s mouth in an aggressive, demanding kiss.

"MMMMPHHHHHHHH!" squealed the Foxx as she was forced to suck on the black girl’s hot, probing tongue, the play on her breasts sending waves of hot lust through her shuddering body, her hands impotently caught in indecision between trying to push her erotic assailant away and trying to clutch her closer.

Deja stood up behind her to whisper in her ear: "We knew you were a fucking slut the moment we laid eyes on you, bitch. We saw your eyes begging us to use you. You do wanna be used, don’t you, Lainey?" As she spoke, three of her fingers insinuated themselves into Mylène’s slippery twat, starting to pump wickedly in and out as the Foxx gave a low, helpless moan of desire around the long tongue raping her face.

She gasped as Juno broke off the kiss, sliding down to suck in a mouthful of hot, hard tit. "AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHAHHHH," she moaned loudly as the mouth chewing and biting and sucking her ultra-sensitive breast send bolts of ever-hotter lust through her body and into her finger-stuffed pussy, driving her mercilessly toward her first climax, despair fluting in her voice as she realized she was so close, already, to cumming. Juno’s eagerly slurping mouth switch back and forth from one tit to the other, one to the other, coating them with spit as they began to feel heavier, starting to tingle and swell, a telltale pressure starting to build inside them. "AAAAAHHHAHHHH AHHHHHH NO OHHH YES OHHHHH NOOOOO AHHHHHH UHHHHH YESSSS AHHHH NNOOOOOHHHOOO YEHESSSS...." the Foxx moaned in incoherent delirium, her mind swirling in confusion as she was finger-fucked and titty-sucked into wriggling submission.

"Ohhhh, poor little dumb bitch," whispered Deja cruelly in her ear. "Don’t know whether to shit or go blind, do you? You want it, but you don’t want it, huh? Well, Deja doesn’t give a fuck what you want. If Deja wants to fingerfuck your pussy and your ass at the same time... that’s what’s gonna happen to you." And sure enough, Mylène felt fingers push into both her holes as Deja grabbed her pigtails with her other hand and yanked her head cruelly back, claiming the Foxx’s mouth in a hot kiss and making the bitch suck her tongue and writhe under the dual rifling, holes starting to spasm as she pushed back eagerly against her rapist’s fingers and took the humiliating assault.

"MMMMMHMMMMMMPHHHHHH!" she squealed suddenly as Juno brutally squeezed her tits together and sucked both nipples into her mouth at once, the pressure in her breasts releasing in warm, sweet spurts of milk that sent bolt after bolt of debilitating sensation through her like a multiple orgasm in her chest, going on and on as Juno made delighted noises and sucked and swallowed down the unexpected lactic bounty. The sensation instantly triggered a powerful, squirting climax in the Foxx’s clutching snatch, her body going rigid as the waves of sensation overtook her, powerless to stop herself from giving up one orgasm, then another, then another to Deja’s viciously slam-fucking fingers. "MMMMMMMMMHHHHHMMMMMPHHHHHH! NNNGGGGGHHHHHHMMMPHHHH! MMMMMMPHHHHHH! HMMMMHMMMHMMMMPHHHH!"

Finally she was released from Deja’s kiss, the fingers sliding out of her holes as Juno stood up and reclaimed the Foxx’s mouth with a kiss of her own. "MMMM-HHHMMMMMMMM," Mylène moaned with instantly-renewed arousal as a warm mouthful of her own breast-milk was fed to her, sliding automatically down her throat.

"Wow," said Juno as she broke off the kiss, looking laughingly into Mylène’s eyes as she said: "You really are one hot-to-trot whore, aren’t you? What do you think, Deja? Think we should give her the main course?"

"Fuck yeah," rasped Deja throatily at her ear. "I swear I’m gonna burst if we wait another second."

With that, Mylène could hear the two hotties unbuckling their belts and slipping out off their tight cutoffs as she stood with her eyes closed, her head whirling and her body shuddering in the aftermath of her powerful multiple orgasms. Again she tried to work up the will to do something, to escape somehow... and then Deja and Juno were stepping in close, grabbing her hands and guiding them between their legs...

... and she gasped in astonishment as the remaining shreds of her willpower fled.

"Cuhhh... cocks..." she murmured huskily in thrilled wonder as she opened her eyes and looked down. "Hard... so hard..." They were she-males! She’d come into this alleyway with a pair of hot girls – and now had a double helping of the man-meat her body craved so urgently throbbing in her hands! She couldn’t stop herself from stroking the organs seductively as she admired them. It was impressive meat, too: Deja’s hard-on was seven diamond-hard inches, but Juno’s was truly prodigious, it had to be twelve inches at least! Twelve inches of hard black cock!

"Yeah, they’re cocks," said Deja impatiently. "Now get on your knees and suck."

But Mylène didn’t have to be told. She was already sinking to her knees in the filth and trash of the alleyway, breathing in the odor of rotting garbage and savoring the way it mixed with the distinctive musky, sweaty scent of cock and balls as her mouth watered.

Cock... God help me I’ve wanted it so bad... I need it... need it in me... need to suck it... She opened her lips and wrapped them around Deja’s more manageable fuck-stick first. "Mmmmmpphhhgggllllmmmmphhhh," she moaned as she fed the salty meat into her mouth, starting to bob her head up and down eagerly as she coated the hot dick in spit while she wanked Juno’s massive black shaft. She rolled her tongue over the veiny flesh, licked up and down its length, fed Deja’s cute little balls into her mouth and let them play over her tongue as she stroked the cock... then licked her way back up to the head and starting sucking again, twisting her head and humming whorishly as she did it.

"AHHHhhhhh daaamnn," moaned Deja appreciatively. "This bitch can suck a dick, Juno. Fuck that’s good."

"Oh yeah?" said Juno, grabbed the Foxx’s head and yanking it back, then shoving her throbbing bitch-tamer into the warm, wet, willing mouth as she said: "Show me, bitch."

"MMMMMMmmmHHHHMMMhhhhGGGLLMMMMppphhh," Mylène moaned and gulped appreciatively as the black she-male began to face-fuck her crudely, the throbbing cock pushing deeper and deeper into her mouth as she slackened her jaw to accommodate it, suppressing her gag reflex as her spit ran down the slab of dark meat and the blowjob turned into a throatfuck. "GGGLLCCCKKHHHH! GGLLLCCHHHKKHHH! GGLLLCCHHHKKHHH! GGLLLCCHHHKKHHH! GGLLLCCHHHKKHHH!" Tears were running down her face as her copious spit started dripping on to her heaving tits, as she lost herself in the hedonistic, degrading sensation of having her face raped in a stinking alleyway like a two-dollar whore.

The she-males took turns swapping Mylène’s sweetly sucking mouth and sensually licking tongue from one cock to the other, back and forth, letting her lick and suck their balls and taking turns to drive their meat-sticks into her face, their nuts slapping against her chin as she blew one shaft with abandon while furiously wanking the other. Finally, as Juno’s immense rod was nestled in the Foxx’s throat once again, a panting Deja took Mylène’s hand away from her own anomalous organ, reached down to grab her by the hips and yanked her to her feet, still bent over with Juno’s cock plundering her face-hole as the bitch’s pussy juiced and her body shuddered in anticipation.

"You’re being such a filthy girl, Lainey," said Deja hotly. "You know how a filthy little girl deserves to get fucked?"

"GGLLLCCHHHKKHHH! GGLLLCCHHHKKHHH! GGLLLCCHHHKKHHH!" Her gulping moans grew louder with frantic anticipation as she wriggled her ass invitingly. And sure enough, she felt Deja’s dick press up against her sphincter before sliding easily home in her well-oiled asshole. Her voice skirled up from moans to squeals as she suddenly found herself in the middle of an anal she-male spit-roasting. The cock felt devilishly divine as it pumped into her ass, ramming powerfully as though trying to meet with the head of prick pushing into the back of her throat. Ah mon Dieu... so GOOD... ohhhh sooooo GOOOD... babbled Mylène’s mind as the rough butt-busting recalled the helpless pleasures of being tied up and force-fucked earlier in the day, the plundering of her poop chute sending wild shivers of stimulation through her pulsing, dripping cunt, her hands fluttering, her eyes rolling back in her head.

And then her abusers amped up the game, Juno taking charge of her hands by grabbing her wrists and pinning them at her back, pumping that big black cock even deeper in her throat as she did so, and Deja starting to slap her ass as she reamed it ("Love it up the butt, huh? Bad girl! Bad girl!"). Oh yes... mais oui... that’s it... AHHH MON DIEU THAT’S IT... suddenly the Foxx was everything she needed to be, everything her horny body wanted her to be, a submissive fuck-puppet at the mercy of her puppeteers’ amusement, her flesh and her holes mere tools for their entertainment, completely devoted to serving them, pleasuring them, satisfying them, taking everything they could give her as she writhed deliriously under the punishing smacks and thrusting pricks... she looked up through watering, grateful eyes at Juno, whose pert little tits were jiggling, her face a mask of passion as she raped Mylène’s throat with gusto. And the sight sent her over the edge.

"AUUUGGHHHLLLUUUUCCHHHKKHHH! UGGHHLLLUUUCCHHHKKHHH! GGLLLUUUUCCHHHKKHHH!" she squealed and gagged around the massive tool as she came, and came, and came again, exploding wetly for her new paramours as they tensed up, hollered and drove deep into either end of her, their cocks twitching and spurting and leaving her powerless to do anything but get off again as she felt the familiar sensation of wads of sticky jism coating her bowels and churning into her gullet. "GGLLLUUCCHHHKKHHH! GGLLLUUCCHHKKHH! GGLLL-UUCCHHHKKHHH! GGLLUUCCHHHKKHHH!"

She was dragged back upright by her hair as the last of the convulsive waves of pleasure ebbed, cum dripping down her chin as Juno’s cock popped out of her mouth. But both of the punk-rock she-males were still hard and throbbing, Deja’s cock in her ass far from spent as the "woman" whispered raggedly into her ear: "Liked that, huh? Do you like being our bitch, Mylène?"

"Ahhhh... yessss..." Mylène heard herself moan wantonly as Juno stepped forward, grabbed her left leg and hoisted it up in the air, exposing her dripping, greedy snatch.

"We knew you would," said Juno, rubbing the tip of that massive cock against her slit, tapping it teasingly against her sensitive nub, making her body jerk as Deja grabbed her wrists and held them behind her. "And you’re not the only one, are you? Maybe your friends inside want a piece of this too, huh? Are they sluts like you, Lainey? Maybe we should call some of our friends... our friends, you know, like us... we could have ourselves a big party. They’d like that, wouldn’t they?"

The mention of her friends tripped an alarm bell in the lust-addled heroine’s mind, some vestige of old, deep instincts trying to surface. But then Juno’s rampant prick was skewering into her, filling and stretching her hot fuckhole with delicious, dangerously addictive sensation, shredding her mind. It was so big, so hard, and she has so little will to resist it: "AAAAHHHAAAAHHHHHHH!" The climax tore brutally through her body, mastering her as the perverted she-males started sawing their cocks into her, their sweet plaything powerless to stop them from pounding her as hard and fast and deep as they could. She was squirting again, squealing again, cumming again, too weak, too wet to do anything but give in to the lust as both her holes were reamed out. "AHHHHHHH MON DIEU AHHHHH! UUUGHHH! UGGHHHHH! UUGHHHHH! AUUUGHHHH!"

"Yeah," taunted Juno as she rammed into her quivering prey. "Take it all... take it... just like your little friends are gonna take it... maybe I’ll bend that Asian bitch over a table... let her suck your ass-juices off Deja’s dick while I teach her how to be a good butt-slut... maybe I’ll make you watch her squeal and sob while I fuck her in the ass..."

"UHHHH! UGGHHH! UGGGHH! UHHHH! AHHHHAHHH!" The pace of Juno’s thrusts was picking up, and Deja was matching her as she corkscrewed into Mylène’s butt. Juno’s fantasy-narrative was wreaking havoc on the Foxx’s mind, where a searingly erotic image of Keiko Takeda trapped between this pair of demons – Juno’s bitch-taming shaft ramming her ass while she sucked Deja’s filthy prick – was stirring a whirlwind of conflict inside her. On the one hand, the spasming in her cunt was growing even more convulsive at the thought of watching her friend get treated like fuck-meat – she’d spent their "farewell party" tied up across from Keiko and they’d often looked soulfully into each other’s eyes, turning each other on even more as their pussies squirted and their asses were plundered. But the mental image was stirring other things, too; her conditioned lust was spawning jealousy and envy at the thought of having to give up the satisfication of a gargantuan cock like Juno’s. And underneath the lust was something else...

That tiny, faraway voice was drowned out swiftly as the she-males tensed up again, drove their pricks deep into her, filling her nether holes with volley after volley of hot spunk as she bucked and squealed and sobbed in the throes of another all-powerful orgasm: "AWWWHAWWWWWWW! AUUUUUHAUUUUGHHHH! AUUUUHAUUUUGHH! AAAAAAHAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!" Cock... cock... cock... MORE COCK... don’t ever let it stop... DON’T EVER LET IT STOP... her mind was chanting deliriously as she squirted and spasmed and shuddered to release, and if the cocks inside her had stayed hard and kept thrusting she knew she would be lost for good, that Max would be spared the trouble of slave-training her.

But her incredibly tight and delightful holes had taken their toll on her ravishers, and she felt their cocks begin to slacken as they stood silently, shuddering along with her in appreciation of the aftermath of their own pleasure. And suddenly her mind was coming back to her. The image of Keiko getting fucked by these two... freaks... boiled back up in her mind’s eye... and waves of jealousy, fear, guilt, arousal, shame washed over her. Behind them came a tsunami of self-hate and furious embarrassment, and as it broke and oh-so-briefly doused the burning lust in her body, that voice inside Mylène’s head, the voice of her deeply-submerged instincts, was back.

Now! it said. And she acted.

She abruptly slammed her head forward, the top of her skull making a crunching impact with the unsuspecting Juno’s nose, dropping her bonelessly before she could even make a sound or twitch a muscle in response. Deja reacted sluggishly: "What the..." – and didn’t process events in time to dodge Mylène’s hard skull as it cracked back into her face. She rocked back a couple of steps with a brief, burbling sound of pain... and then a spinning kick from the Parisian Foxx knocked her out cold.

Mylène stood over her two erstwhile assailants, breathing heavily, their spunk still running down her thighs, her chin, dripping on to her heaving breasts. Her orgasm-weakened body had had to fight through waves of subliminally-conditioned panic at the mere thought of violence... but luckily she could still manage more than enough to deal with a couple of civilian pervs like Deja and Juno. She noticed the latter was wearing a watch and bent down to check it: twenty-two minutes. She still had time to clean up!

And to take out the trash, she thought suddenly, looking back and forth from the unconscious she-males to the smelly dumpster. And she found herself smiling for the first time that day.

* * * * *

The dinner ended and farewells said to Siouxsie and her various bigwigs, Max Power headed back to the "operations centre" the Syndicate had set up for him.

It was a mess of computer equipment and monitors set up on the tiered observation platform above the bleachers in Siouxsie’s bizarre mini-stadium, the aerodynamic dome that stood out bizarrely from the rest of the colonial architecture on the little riverine island that comprised The Sands Estate. It was from that platform that he’d watched an unfortunate group of oil-wrestlers fall to Siouxsie’s cruelty... and it was where he’d watch the Foxxes finally surrender to him, their destined master. As he strolled toward it in leisurely fashion, flanked by Cleanheads, Raven crawling happily on her leash behind him, he was thinking ahead with satisfaction to the coming evening.

When the Syndicate had injected the Foxxes with their permanently-altering forms of the breast-enhancement serum and the Alethex drug, they’d also included a mild radioactive isotope that could be detected from considerable distances with the right monitoring equipment. It was another advantage he wasn’t supposed to know about – no doubt a measure to allow Siouxsie to reacquire the Foxxes any time she chose after Max was disposed of – but the Goblin, who was proving to have a surprising flair for cloak and dagger, has smuggled the isotopic signature to him. The isotopic tracking obviously wasn’t one of the Syndicate’s pieces of amazing proprietary science, this time; Max had used similar technology in a mission for the Company in Cambodia, and he knew for a fact that one of the Operation Freedom satellites had the ability to track this very isotope. His access to those satellites would last another day at most, but it would be enough – and while he had it, he could pinpoint their location any time needed to.

They’d be coming closer, of course.

Raven let out one of those unnatural, agonizing barks as he handed her leash to one of the Cleanheads, and was looking up at him with shining please-let-me-suck-your-cock eyes... he contemplated it for a moment, but then patted her gently on the head before she was led away to her cage in the mini-stadium’s basement. There’s work to do.

As he mounted the platform and looked at his monitor screens, in particular the one trained on the seedy little Eagle Eye dyke bar in Edlers, he smiled and gave a little wave to the satellite’s-eye infrared view of Mylène Desanges packing the first two bounty hunters into a dumpster. If there was anything left of her old instincts, her observant nature, she’d... yes, there she was, rummaging through the she-males’ little cutoff shorts before tossing the garments in after them, finding the cellphone one of them had been carrying. A phone packed with images of the Foxxes and with detailed descriptions of their vulnerabilities... except for the Syndicate’s deep conditioning... and a number on speed-dial to call once they’d been acquired. All information he’d put up that morning, disguised as a "celebrity sex tape" link, on one of the websites the Syndicate used for sending coded messages about their human trafficking.

He watched Mylène tie the tattered pieces of her top between her breasts, pull on her tiny sheer thong – it wasn’t much by way of modesty but something was probably better than nothing – and then begin to look through the contents of the cell-phone. It wouldn’t take long... there. Her body went rigid with alarm and she was hurrying back into the bar.

As he waited, Max looked at a second monitor screen, this one displaying the contents of a mini-disc that the Goblin had smuggled to him along with the isotope tracking signature. He opened the first document: an old news story: "BIZARRE YACHTING ACCIDENT AT CASA DE CAMPO LEAVES SOCIALITE DEAD." The Dominican Republic, some eight years ago. History... the key to the last pieces of the puzzle: what was Siouxsie Sexcrime selling? How had she tempted China and the MSS into operating in Island City? And at the heart of that question lay another: what was Siouxsie Sexcrime?

Max had come to the conclusion some time ago that Siouxsie’s story about being a product of Alethex was a lie. He’d observed the effects of Alethex, the pattern it produced, with too much intimacy to believe that its real function was to bring out the "true" repressed desires of anybody. No, with a few exceptions (all among women, maybe caused by some kind of unusual chemical imbalance, who knew) it was extremely consistent in producing exaggerated submissiveness in women, the mad lust for dominance in men; the innate nature it was interacting with, he was convinced, wasn’t repressed preferences but simply sex itself, the differing structures of the male and female brain. It took the male urge to drive for dominance, the female urge to try to reconcile and appease, and warped those urges into exaggerated forms, amped them up and tied them almost exclusively to lust.

As had been done to him. And the Foxxes. Unfortunate that he hadn’t worked that part of it out before they’d all been exposed to too much Alethex to ever go back to the way things were... but there was no sense in regret, and he didn’t waste a solitary second in self-flagellation. Max Power was about looking forward, warped or not. You worked with reality as it came to you.

Siouxsie was warped too, of course... but it wasn’t the same. The outsized lust that always characterized Alethex use was alien to her. Something else had to have produced Siouxsie Sexcrime. He clicked on another document: "YOUNG MODEL MYSTERIOUSLY VANISHES FROM DOMINICAN HOSPITAL." Also eight years old. He clicked in on the grainy accompanying photograph; it looked like...

His cell phone rang. Max picked up without breaking away from his study: "Hello."

"Max?" There was no mistaking the slightly husky voice on the other end.

"Hello, Summer," he said companionably. "Good to hear your voice."

She hesitated for a moment, then said, an open wound in the sentence: "Why... why are you doing this?"

"It’s complicated," he said. "Soon enough, you’ll understand."

"Didn’t you... don’t you... care about us?"

The old Max would have been shafted to the core by the raw pain in her voice. Max Power was almost too focused to notice it. "I’m a Company man," he said. "Love is never more important than the mission. We’re going to complete the mission, Summer."

"The mission... was about freeing people. You’ve destroyed everything we’ve worked for... for years..."

"Life is a more important right than freedom," he said absently. He was zooming in closer on the grainy photograph in the news article: Yes, it’s her! Incredible! "I’m doing what has to be done, Summer. What we’re all going to do. From this day onward, none of us are free."

Another hesitation, Summerset gathering herself, trying to cope with the utter coldness in his voice. Then she said: "We’ll fight you to the end. You have to know that."

"You’re Foxxes. I’d expect nothing less."

"Have you hurt Raven?"

He smiled to himself. A warm swell of remembered screams and blubbering and begging engorged his cock. "No more than I needed to."

A pause again. There was true hatred in Summerset’s voice when she said: "Whatever you’ve done to her... you’re going to pay, Max. I swear it. Traitors always pay. Traitors who’re stupid enough to trust people like Siouxsie Sexcrime pay with interest."

"I’m no traitor, Summer," he said, reading the article intently. "Far from it. And believe me, whatever else there might be between Siouxsie and I, trust isn’t part of the picture. You’ll understand soon."

"As soon as your bounty hunters snare us, you mean? Don’t count on it."

He smiled again, breaking away from his reading, looking affectionately up at the indistinct infrared smears the four remaining Foxxes presented on his monitor as they sat tensely around their barroom table. "Come on, you didn’t think I’d make it easy, did you?" he asked. "I trained you, remember? How could I resist seeing you run a gauntlet? At best there’s a few dozen of the Syndicate’s underground contacts between you and me. Perverts, gangsters, bikers, corrupt cops, what-have-you. They won’t all be pushovers like poor Deja and Juno, but I figure at least a couple of you should make it through."

"We’re all going to make it," said Summerset fiercely. "We’re all coming for you."

"I doubt it," he said. "But then, one of the things I’ve always liked about you Foxxes is your capacity to surprise me. If you all reach me under your own steam, so much the better. I really..." he let a hint of the dark anticipation he was feeling slip into his voice, his cock stiffening even more as he reached up to trace Summerset’s abstract, pixellated form on his monitor: "I really look forward to seeing you. Especially you, Summer."

The infrared shape on the monitor jolted, as if she could somehow feel his lewd finger tracing over her outline. "Fuck you, Max," she replied with tears of pure fury at the edge of her voice. "Fuck. You. You’ve fucked with the wrong Foxxes." And with that, she hung up abruptly.

Oh, I haven’t begun to fuck with you. Max clicked off his own phone. He was ready to deal with them, no matter how far they made it. But I will. Soon.

He momentarily dismissed them from his mind as he was riveted back in on the old article, the grainy image of a teenaged Swedish model on the screen. There was no doubt about it. The "vanished" model was her, exactly her. No coincidence. "The aspiring young model, Elin Andersson, had been injured in the same freak yachting accident that claimed the life of New Amsterdam socialite Susanna Sands only seven days ago..." It was her.

No... he clicked back to the other article, read a little bit more about Susanna Sands, who’d been in her forties when she died. When she’d... appeared to die. He read about what her interests had been, and whose yacht she’d been on at the time. Well met, friend Goblin, he gave a mental salute to the nerd who’d ferreted out the information as the pieces fell into place. They’re both her. Hello, O Red Queen.

Now he knew what she was... and what she was selling. Now, he was fully prepared. And not a moment too soon.

And now... a little something for my lovely Foxxes. Using a third computer, he logged into the Syndicate’s website. It was time to post an update on their whereabouts for all the rest of his bounty hunters. Don’t want to make things too easy on them, now do we?

* * * * *

Evan Danton watched the security tapes on the Foxxes’ Den in shock. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this whole day was a nightmare, that he’d wake up feeling slightly silly. But if that was going to happen, it had better happen soon.

"And these tapes are from..." he prompted Agent Fields.

The balding, moustached man next to him cleared his throat and said: "A few hours ago. It runs up until right when we were landing at the airport. After that the Foxxes and the Kitts were both gone."

Danton watched, disbelieving, the images of four Foxxes with their arms painfully bound behind their backs and suspended in the air above them, bending them forward, their legs in spreaders and their eyes glazed with humiliated lust as the agents of Operation Freedom gangbanged them brutally. He found himself fascinated to see petite Summerset O’Neale’s ripe ass jiggle while she was pounded gleefully from behind by a man he’d worked a case with not four years ago. DEA guy... Agent Moss. He was a nice guy, conscientious, had a plump, sweet-natured little wife and five adorable children, made a good barbecue sauce. And there he was in living colour, grinning like a dervish as he went balls-deep in the tight sphincter of the Number One Foxx, slashing a wooden paddle across her taut ass-flesh while he did it... her pussy squirting powerfully as the punishment clearly brought her off and she moaned and choked around the stiff cock of an equally depraved-looking older man who’d famously taught demolitions for the Company at Ashford. The other three Foxxes were writhing and bucking under similar punishment, and the Kitts, clad in little black PVC bikinis, were arrayed around the room’s edges, stroking more waiting cocks and urging the rapists on.

He felt a stirring in his pants and rasped, abruptly, "Turn it off."

Fields nodded and clicked the image off without a word.

Jesus. I just watched the end of over seventy careers in law enforcement. And what a tacky, sordid end it was. But it explained why the Foxxes’ Den more closely resembled a mental institution than an ops centre, everyone listless and dazed as though they’d just been in a bomb blast. In a way, they had been. "Gather everyone together in the cafeteria," he said briskly, thinking back to the grisly hanging corpse that had greeted him in Lonnie James’ office. "And keep an eye on them. I don’t want any more suicides. We’re going to interrogate every one of these shitheads, I want to know everything. We’ll go all night if we have to. Where was Raven McCoy in all this?"

"Already gone, apparently," said Fields. "Kidnapped a few days ago."

Fuck. Judging by the contents of those security feeds, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what had probably been happening to her. "Call Washington," he said. "Get me a taskforce. Hard tactical, every man they can spare from anywhere we can find them on the whole goddamned Eastern Seaboard. I want them assembled and here by tomorrow, you understand me? No later than four, earlier if they can manage it."

"What about the local cops?"

Danton shook his head. "Can’t risk it. People who could gut Operation Freedom like this had to be able to get inside the ICPD, too." He took out his cell phone as he strode hard out of the Den’s monitoring centre, Fields hot on his heels. "And keep an eye on those security tapes, for God’s sake. I’m holding you personally responsible, you hear me, Fields? The last thing we need is this winding up on the Internet."

Fields nodded. "What’s your plan?" the Agent asked as he took his own phone out of his pocket to dial Washington.

"We need to plan for something big," Danton replied, tapping in the number of the Governor’s mansion and hitting send. "Someone threw enormous resources into undermining Operation Freedom. The only reason to take that risk is if they were planning something—hello? This Governor Kevin’s office? Yes, Special Agent Danton here, I need to talk to the Governor immediately... yes, immediately means now... well I guess you’ll have to interrupt his fucking dinner, now won’t you?"

He left Fields behind and climbed into the Den’s elevator as he waited for the Governor, hitting the button for street level as he seethed. The last line of Summerset O’Neale’s clandestine message was haunting him. Please help us. A message of sheer desperation, and they’d heard it far too late... but Danton was damned if he wasn’t going to do everything he could to salvage whatever was left out of this debacle.

His mind catalogued other possible resources as the elevator went up... and something suddenly occurred to him. Hadn’t a major private military company just relocated to Island City? Executive Results something-or-other? They’d worked in Jazira before, one of the few companies with a really professional reputation. He’d have to call them as soon as he was done with the Governor... give them a chance to show a little civic spirit and do some pro bono work in chipping in to clean up this mess. If he knew anything about these modern-day mercs – and he did – they’d jump at the chance.

A clipped, slightly out-of-breath voice finally answered the phone as he stepped out of the elevator. "Governor Kevin," he said before the man could get a word in. "This is Special Agent Evan Danton of the FBI, on emergency assignment for the Island City Vice Taskforce by order of the President. We have a crisis situation here, sir, and I think we may need your help."

* * * * *

This is worse, thought Keiko Takeda despairingly, worse even than the dreams.

The rest of their planning meeting scotched after the lewd assault on Mylène and the horrible phone-call with Max, the terrified Foxxes had fled the Eagle Eye in a flurry of flouncing pigtails and mouth-wateringly jiggling tits... and it hadn’t been a moment too soon. As they’d roared out of the parking lot on their bikes, the sound of sirens could be heard wailing into the other side of the lot just behind them. None of the Foxxes had hesitated to gun their engines into high gear; they all remembered that "corrupt cops" had appeared in Max’s casually-recited list of the men now hunting them.

Was it only that morning that Keiko had sat trapped with the others in that horrific trance, listening to Siouxsie Sexcrime ruthlessly revealing what a lie their lives had become, unearthing the memories their conditioning had suppressed until now? It already seemed like a lifetime ago in what was proving to be undoubtedly the longest day of all their lives. But Keiko thought that perhaps it was worse for her than the others. To have not just the horrible dreams that had accompanied her conditioning revealed to her – the dreams of helpless vanquishment and brutal rape at the hands of her long-dead father – but the memory of her enforced humiliation at the hands of the Syndicate, a humiliation that had been forced on her by a man speaking a simple phrase... it had left an utterly hollow core of terror and despair at the core of her being. To know that all her skills, her training, her accomplishments could in the end be made to count for nothing, nothing at all.

And now she felt like she was living an even worse version of those terrible dreams. Wearing next to nothing, the erotic throbbing in her ultra-sensitive tits sending pulsating shafts of distracting lust into her aching, slippery cunt even now, the purring of the motorcycle engine between her legs driving her mad with a horrible need made all the worse the more her mind tried to deny it, and knowing that her famous skills were but a shadow of their former selves since they’d all been conditioned to panic at the presence of violence... and that in this condition she was being hunted by the worst bottom-feeding dregs of perversion that could be dug up from the Red Queen Syndicate’s rolodex ... it all combined to make her feel more utterly overwhelmed and terrified than anything she’d ever known.

The lust was the worst, a lust she was horrified to contemplate having to cope with for the rest of her life now that the horrible Alethex drug was a part of her. They were hurtling into the unknown, puppets dancing to the tune of a Max who’d turned to the foulest evil, one step ahead of their hunters and not even having the luxury to come up with a decent plan of attack... and still her holes ached with frustration, with the urge to submit to a hot, penetrating shaft of man-meat. Her own fingers weren’t enough, as she’d discovered in sobbing frustration in the bathroom at Eagle Eye while she’d made a futile attempt to sate the feeling with her own fingers and succeeded only in worsening the itch. And as she’d seen Mylène come in from the back alley, flushed and wide-eyed and looking sweet and vulnerable and freshly-fucked, she’d intuited something of what had happened to the Parisian beauty, and had felt a hateful stab of jealousy deep in her guts.

A perverse reaction, but everything was upside-down. She didn’t even know which of her feelings belonged to her anymore and which to the conditioning. She didn’t even know what memories of shame and humiliation she might still be missing, what other landmines Siouxsie had left hidden in the landscape of their subconsious minds. She didn’t know Max anymore, she was as unsure of her fellow Foxxes as she was of herself, she didn’t know anything. For the moment, a simple animal dread of the unknown, of slavery, held the slimmest of edges over the roiling storm of lust inside her, and she was shamed to know that was the only thing keeping her going.

The four of them sped almost blindly north up Highway 9, toward Ryckskill, the road winding beside the broad expanse of the Mohegan. As the minutes ticked past, Keiko was dreading the sound of sirens coming up behind them, but there was nothing. Soon they were in scenic upstate countryside, and she felt herself starting to calm somewhat. But only somewhat. It was a sure bet that Max was still tracking them somehow, still relaying their whereabouts to his bounty hunters – or more accurately, booty hunters.

Could they find a place to stop even for a moment, to gather themselves and get their bearings? The Foxxes exchanged glances among themselves, and Summerset gestured forward. Onward. They had to be sure.

Dusk was starting to descend, the dying sunlight dappling the waters of Mohegan beside them as they pulled through Parrytown at the crossroads with the I-87, getting flashes of shocked faces and pointing fingers from the residents of the little burg that they clenched their jaws and managed to ignore as they kept on tense watch for anything suspicious, as they kept moving at the best speed the law would allow them. But they were through quickly, without incident, and in a few minutes the streets of Parrytown were giving way to those of the next village on their route: none than Sleepy Hollow itself. Just forty minutes away from their final destination.

And as the village’s "Welcome to Sleepy Hollow" sign pulled into view, Keiko could see the jaws of the nightmare opening wide. A police cruiser, marked Sleepy Hollow Police Department, was parked right there, at the juncture of Highway 9 and Debford Road... obviously waiting for them.

Decision time. The Foxxes carried out a lightning-fast visual conference among themselves as the intersection approached... and as they whipped past the cruiser, which was instantly screeching onto the road behind them, sirens wailing, Summerset and Satin abruptly forked east on Debford, while Keiko and Mylène sped straight on into the village.

It only took a heartbeat to know which of them he would choose to follow – and Keiko found herself, again with a miserable sense of shame at her cowardice, breathing a sigh of relief as the sirens turned to follow the Number One Foxx and the Black Bombshell, leaving her and Mylène to speed down the quiet streets of Sleepy Hollow. Summerset will find a way to lose them, she told herself as firmly as she could. Stay... stay focussed... you’re not out of the woods yet.

Literally not. As they passed the awakening lights of Sleepy Hollow and found themselves on a quiet stretch of the highway flanked by deep woods, her blood froze as the sound of sirens cut through the dusk again. There were police cruisers pulling on the road in front and behind – four of them!

A roadblock! A trap!

Exchanging looks of terrified dismay, the two Foxxes stopped and turned at bay, wondering if they could simply drive off the road and into the woods... but there were flashlights on either side, small knots of men in uniform, and more cruiser just hidden in the bushes, blocking any escape! Between all of them, there had to be at least dozen cops surrounding the barely-clothed heroines... was the entire Sleepy Hollow PD corrupt?

And what could they do? Keiko and Mylène exchanged glances again, this time trying to stoke what was left of their resolve. They could sense, even if they couldn’t quite see, the ugly leers on the faces of the cops. No way were they on official business... and if they’d been detailed to trap the Foxxes, they’d be under orders not to shoot them.

They were going to have to fight their way free.

"Okay, freeze!" said a bull-horn amplified voice from behind the screen of glaring flashlights in front of them. "Keiko Takeda and Mylène Desanges, you are wanted on suspicion of assault, conspiracy to commit assault, lewd conduct and public indecency! Come quietly, ladies."

Floating on a weird cocktail of fear, lust and despair, Keiko suddenly found herself emerging into a place of complete uncaring. What did it matter what she said or did? What did anything matter? Why play by the rules when the dice were loaded? It was almost like the freedom, the absolute ruthlessness she usually had in combat, and she found herself laughing and shoving out a pair of middle fingers at the disembodied voice of authority. "Screw you!" she said eloquently, her usual mannered diction vanishing in the rush of disobedience, and she was turning and digging swiftly into the duffel bag on her motorcycle seat. She could see Mylène doing the same.

"Freeze!" the voice thundered. "Hands up! Take your hands out of the bags!"

"Oh, I’ll take them out, alright," said Keiko merrily... and wheeled on one heel to fire at the cruisers in front of them, four rapid rounds from the snub-nosed pistol she’d retrieved.

The shots were aimed high, to disperse rather than kill, and Myléne was doing the same at the cruisers behind them, then wheeling to rake the east side of the road with fire as Keiko took the west. As the gun kicked in her hand, Keiko could feel her body quailing from the violent action, panicking, trying to freeze – but the wave of nihilistic glee inside her made her buoyant, helped her to grit her teeth and fight through it. All around them, men were swearing and diving for cover, the consternation in their voices giving her a quick thrill.

Part of her knew it couldn’t last; there were simply too many of them. And corrupt or not, could she nor Mylène bring themselves to actually kill cops? Experimentally, Keiko tried lowering her aim as she turned back on the cruiser in front of her. But she couldn’t pull the trigger.

Old instincts? Or conditioning? Was the choice really hers? Who cared?

She watched in slow motion as the first big, bulky shape hurtled toward her in an attempted tackle. She fought against her own rigid muscles, the panic rising in her throat, to bring her pistol smashing down into the bridge of his nose, sending him reeling back with a yowl of pain. A weak blow by her standards, he’d survive it, but enough... for the moment. She turned, barely dodging a second tackle, managing to throw her assailant into the path of another incoming cop and send them both tumbling. Again... weak. Slow. They’d be able to get back up. She wasn’t herself. There were too many.

She heard a sound, then, a shrill caterwauling: "AIIIIIIIIIII!" And she turned.

It was Mylène being taken down... and the sight transfixed her. The Parisian Foxxes’ eyes were saucer-wide in shock, her arms gone rigid, the pistol dropped from her fingers: a big, leering cop had come in behind her, ripping aside the tatters of her top and taking brutal hold of her ultra-sensitive tits. Keiko’s breath caught as she imagined the bolts of agonizing lust that must be going through the writhing heroine’s body, shafting into her wet, needy twat – and there was a man stepping toward Mylène, again seeming to move almost in slow motion as he pressed the mouth of a small brown battle to a rag, lifted the rag slowly toward her fearful face –

WHAM! Keiko felt a huge, muscular man collide with her from behind, knocking her wind out and taking her down to the ground like a rag doll. As she found herself face-down on the pavement, struggling to draw breath back into her lungs as her hands were pulled roughly behind her and cuffed, she felt the brief, fragile bubble of nihilistic resolve that had kept her in the fight pop. And there was nothing left in its place but craven terror, hot molten lust, the despairing knowledge of what was to come. The men were in close, the pheromone-enhancer had to be working on them, turning them into deranged, frenzied bulls, it’d be only seconds before...

"Nooooo pleeeeheeease NNNMMMMHHMMMPHHHH," she whined as she was yanked up on her haunches by her pigtails and a stinking rag pressed over her mouth and nose by a man in front of her. The world began to spin as she wriggled in futile denial. "NnnnnmmmmhhhMMMMPHHH HMMMmmmphhhh nnnnmmmmmhmmmmphhh..."

His voice seemed to come from far away. "You have the right to remain chloroformed," he was rasping, a low, ugly growl. There was something weirdly nasal in his voice, as though he were talking through a broken nose... the one she’d hit with her pistol, she realized distantly as a pair of hands mauled her hot tits from behind, sending a thunderbolt of erotic agony through her and forcing her into a shuddering breath that made the world spin faster. "If you decide to waive this right, any orifice you have can and will by fucked by a hard cock instead. You have the right to cum on these dicks like the filthy slut you are. You have the right to be thrown in the trunk of a car and sold to a slave-trading scumbag. If you can’t afford a trunk, one will be provided for you. Do you understand these rights?"

"MMMMMMMHHHMMMMPPPHHHHH," she moaned again as the world began to fragment and dim... but they weren’t going to be merciful enough to put her entirely out. The rag was removed and she felt something stiff and warm and spongy push up against her lips in place of it. Barely understanding what she was doing, she opened her mouth.

"GLLLCCKHHHH!" It was like the choking, gagging sound was coming from someone else as the hard cock slid in, hammering to the back of her throat as her nose was buried in a musky, hairy crotch. Involuntarily, she swallowed around it, sending a shiver of pleasure along the man’s shaft as her world reeled, lurching sickly and nightmarish around her, the sensations of depraved lust and abuse the only things left to anchor her: the cock thrusting again into her wet mouth, spears of powerful sensation emanating from her tits as her top was shredded away and they were mauled and slapped by an unseen cop on her left, her thong being ripped aside to bare her snatch. Cock... was all she could think, and somehow the thought was grateful. Give... me... cock...

"UUUGGHHHHLLCKHHHH UCHHKKKHHHH!" she gurgled around the cock in her throat as another shaft penetrated her sopping pussy. Her whirling, chloroform-shattered mind had no defense against the sensual onslaught, and that single thrust combined with the abuse of her tits and throat to bring her off in a hard-squirting climax that had her bucking back against the ravishing dick, swallowing hard around the one in her face, convulsing and writhing as hot, throbbing pieces of flesh started to pound her at either end in earnest. "GLLCHKHHH HHCKHHH CCKKHHHH HHHCKKKK GLLLGGCKHHHHH!" There was hard steel around her wrists, utter helplessness and submission swamping her, dragging her through the sick, awful lurching down into a mire of pure lust, of surrender. Her pussy exploded wetly as she came again: "GLLLHHCCCKKKHHHHHH!!"

She could hear someone shouting, far far away, something about hey-what-are-you-guys-doing-just-pack-them-in-the-trunks. "Fuck that," she distinctly heard her face-rapist rasp in reply above her. "Call up the auxiliaries and get them to set up a cordon. That fuckhead owes us a party on these bitches before we turn them over ohhhhh fuuuck yeaahhhh suck it bitch!" The cock in Keiko’s mouth was pulsing, his balls tensing where they rested on her spittle-drenched chin, and suddenly a hot pungent river of spunk was splattering its way down her gullet. He was holding her head in place to savour the sensation of her swallowing throat milking his prick... it felt like the most natural thing in the world to swallow everything down like a good little slut... but if that was so, why could she feel tears rolling down her cheeks? Why was she... so dizzy?

"Yeah, yeahhh," grunted the man behind her coarsely, and she felt hot, stinging slaps begin to punish her butt as his thrusts grew faster and more frantic. "Swallow that cum, bitch. That’s what skanks like you get around here when they resist arrest... that... aaannd thhiiiisss!" His big tool plunged, pulsed and throbbed inside her, and she felt thick jets of jism splattering up into her womb as the combination of spanking and spunk brought her off even harder than before. "GAAAHAAAHHHHAAAAAAHHHH!" she cried out as the cock was finally pulled out of her mouth. She heard a mewling sound come from deep in her throat as she unconsciously ground her hips and humped back against the man painting her insides, as though her body were running on automatic trying to pull every ounce of sperm it could from him.

She looked around her in a daze, the nightmarish spinning of the world starting to slow a little as the man behind her pulled out. "Wh- whhh- ?" she moaned dizzily, looking over to see Mylène spread-eagled on the hood of one of the police cruisers with men enthusiastically thrusting away in her mouth and snatch. "Puhhh... please..." she said to no-one in particular, her voice aimless, not sure herself where the sentence was going. Please stop? Please give me your dicks? Please let us go? Please fuck us until we don’t know our own names?

"You have the right to remain silent, bitch," said the same nasally, broken voice she’d heard before, and suddenly the chemical stench of the rag was invading her senses again as the cloth was held over her face. "This is why they call it Sleepy Hollow..."

"NNNMMMmhmmmmphhh MMMMmmmmphhhh mmmmmhmmmmphhhh mmmmmmhMMMmmmphhh," she sobbed helplessly as the world was set lurching and spinning again, as though some giant hand were winding up a top. She struggled, slow, languid, weak as the man on her left kept firm hold of her by her painfully swollen tits, her sounds of protest dwindling into whimpers as she writhed. "Mmmmmmmhmmmphhh hmphhhh mmmhmmphhh mmmphhhh..."

As the rag was taken away again, she could vaguely sense more men gathering close around her. A new pair of hands took up the painful mauling of her tits as someone stepped in front of her, unzipping... her fractured mind reeled even further as she felt her swollen titties being wrapped around a throbbing member that started to thrust between them obscenely. Oh God fucking cocks yes cocks, babbled her chemical-seared brain as she felt another musky presence beside her... something was slapping against her cheek... she tried blearily to focus on it, realizing suddenly that it was another cock as someone took hold of her pigtails with either hand and was swinging his hips from left to right and back again, insultingly slapping his massive cock-meat back and forth, back and forth across her adorable, freckled face.

Fingers dug harshly into the soft flesh at her hips, and she felt an enormous cock nudge up against the entrance to her poop chute, already well-fucked from earlier in the day and opening easily to accept and then clench tightly around his tool as he slammed it home. "UUHHHHHUGGHHHHHUUHHHHMMMMmmmmHMMMMPPHHHHhhhh," she squealed as the cock-slapper drove his meat into her open mouth and used his hold on her hair to corkscrew her hot, wet mouth up and down his length.

The world span, the cocks pumped, the overmastered slut sucked and bucked on pure instinct as she felt a sweet pressure starting to build in her abused tits, more brutal slaps raining down on her thoroughly-stuffed hiney, her brain increasingly failing to keep itself from capsizing on the perfect storm of wanton sensations overtaking her... she could feel a terrible explosion of pure pleasure building in her body, she was helpless to stop it... it... was... coming...

Time seemed to stop.

For a moment – just a moment – Keiko suddenly felt as though she were looking down on a scene from above. She was like a bird, able to swoop in and out, see every detail. There, on the hood of a police cruiser, a woman who looked exactly like the famous Mylène Desanges had been maneuvered on top of a gross-looking fat man, her hands cuffed behind her, her gushing pussy being skewered on his bloated dick and stretched almost grotesquely as it simultaneously took a shafting from the fat tool of a leering deputy who was dangling a big drop of spittle into her face. Her breasts were frozen in mid-bounce, slick with someone’s spunk, and another pair of deputies were approaching her with cocks in hand. Her face was frozen too, her eyes glassy and unfocussed but with just a touch of fear in their depths, her lips open to accept the slimy stream of spit and curved in a weirdly tentative, languid half-smile as though she didn’t know quite what was happening to her or whether to like it.

A swoop to the south brought several speeding trucks into view, one with a logo or a décal on the side that said Sleepy Hollow Auxiliary Police Volunteer. Their occupants were pointing at the lurid scene in front of them with expressions of awed wonderment, like they were sighting the Ark of the Covenant coming down from the heavens.

A swoop back into the circle of cars brought a super-hot, athletic-looking Eurasian girl – a girl who looked a lot like Keiko – into view, her hands cuffed too and crouching on her haunches. A madly grinning black deputy was balls-deep in her gorgeous, glistening, reddened rump, one massive hand raised and plainly about to come slashing down over her vulnerable flesh, a big bright splash of liquid spurting from her gaping, slutty pussy as she took it. A second man was at her left, grimacing like an enraged baboon, his arms around her torso and a white-knuckled grip on each of her big breasts, holding the swollen and engorged fun bags around the cock of a third man in front of her who had his head back, looking ready to howl at the moon as he fucked her soft, slick, welcoming cleavage. A big, blond, beefy man at her right had a hold of each of her cute pigtails and was looking down into her face as his drove his cock to the back of her throat, a big sloppy rope of her spit running over his balls and dangling down beneath them.

This girl’s eyes too were glassy and unfocussed... but there were hints of shame and defeat and despair in their depths, and her dark eyeshadow was streaked messily down her cheeks, her face wet with tears.

What a lucky little bitch, she thought enviously. All the hard cock she can take and more on the way. What’s she blubbering about? Ungrateful whore. She must know all she’s good for is being tied up and fucked... tied up and fucked... all she’s good for is being tied up and fucked...

The echoing thought was like a tether, and suddenly her floating eye wasn’t floating anymore. She tried to swoop away but couldn’t move, she was being pulled slowly down toward the lewd scene. Wait this isn’t right, that isn’t me, she thought uneasily and tried to swoop away again, but it was like she was being reeled in, the force pulling her down growing more and more powerful as she tried to fight it. She was in the grip of a gravitational force now, of a powerful vortex, spinning and spinning, faster and faster, the world lurching sickly around her as she was sucked back down toward the Asian girl’s skull, time was starting to pick up speed again... she thought belatedly: oh no oh no WAIT not me NOT ME that isn’t me please not me please not ME don’t do it to MEEEeeeeee please not to me PLEASE DON’T DO IT TO MEEEE...

And she was trapped back in the flesh of a wanton slut, the world a riot of fragments and nightmare visions around her, the foul cocks abusing her the only reality she could cling to. And her back was arching, the climax was hitting her like the shock wave of an A-bomb. "ANNNNNNGHHHHANNNNNGCKKHHHHHH!" she squealed as the hot pricks in her mouth and ass began to spurt at the same time as milk began to stream from her aching titties, juices jetting from her snatch as she was forced to another climax, and another, and then the man in her mouth was pulling out and the tit fucker was holding his cock over her face as he jerked it madly and the still-spewing cock in her ass somehow went on ramming her. "AWWWWWWHAWWWWWW! AWWWW! AIIIIIIIIIII!" she wailed as thick ropes of cum landed on her forehead, her nose, her chin, splashed into her open mouth, her tongue instinctively licking up whatever it could, her throat instinctively swallowing it down as the cock thrust back into her ass and she came again.

Finally the devastating string of orgasms ebbed, and the bound bitch was face-down on the pavement, slumped and whimpering with her ravaged, spunk-filled ass in the air and jism dripping down her face, her young body shuddering in the aftermath of a supreme tsunami of lust. The world was still spinning... spinning... but she was coming back to herself, enough to swallow the snivelling whimpers and try to lift her head.

When she saw a big white-haired man with a bloodily broken nose, a brown bottle and a rag in his hand coming toward her, and when she saw that new arrivals were coming on the scene with cocky, delighted grins on their faces, and that several of the deputies had taken off their leather belts and were swishing them through the air... she suddenly remembered a moment during the ambush in Devil’s Banquet. It was right before Grayson, the Cleanhead in charge, had kicked and beaten her cringing form into unconsciousness, when a sandy-haired beauty named Sabrina had looked down on her and said: "When the time comes, when we’re finished using you and all the other Foxxes, the fate Grayson had planned for you today will look like a picnic compared to what we finally do to you. Know that... and fear it. But know above all that you can’t escape it."

She had swallowed and nodded in fear. Cowardly, probably-conditioned fear. But she hadn’t really, truly understood. Now, as the filthy chemical rag came toward her cum-stained face, as she whimpered and made a futile and abortive attempt to wriggle away from it... she was starting to understand.

This is the end, she knew, her heart sinking, the last of her spirit fleeing, her wet, quivering fuckhole spasming in helpless anticipation. The beginning of the end. And you can’t escape it, Keiko... you can’t escape it... you were right, Sabrina, wherever you are... you were right...

And the rag clamped over her face again, the fumes sent her back into the nightmare world, and for a time she couldn’t hope to measure she was passed around, stumbling and moaning and squealing as she was cussed and whipped and slapped and had every one of her orifices stuffed and fucked again and again in a whirl of disorientation, and suffering, and shame, and humiliation... and pleasure.

It lasted a long, long time before she finally passed out.

* * * * *

Sabrina Lockhart was humming happily to herself as she watched the latest of the bidders’ DVDs, enjoying her last night in her office at the Sabrina Lockhart Sex Research Centre. There was a young man in a three-piece suit on the screen – one of the higher-ups in the Matrillo Cartel – calmly discussing the slave-training methods he’d learned to use on Marxist guerillas of the female persuasion back in his homeland. There was a coiled bullwhip in his hand and his rich-bodied, naked mistress was tied and struggling in a bondage frame next to him, her voice muffled by a gag and her firm round ass and glistening, Brazilian-waxed gash presented invitingly to the camera. Hmmmm, this one’s got promise, she thought. Can’t wait to see his technique with that whip.

It had been a lovely dinner at the Sands Estate. She truly had regretted having to leave without seeing the rest of those miserable Foxxes meet the fate they deserved... but watching Raven McCoy forced to bark like a fox and give sloppy head to every man at the table had been pleasure enough. And she’d thoroughly enjoyed watching that overconfident fool Max Fawkes comporting himself with harsh pride, trying to bluff like he knew something the rest of them didn’t, no doubt completely unaware that Siouxsie was setting him up, along with the bulk of the Cleanheads, as the true mastermind of the Syndicate’s criminal rampage. No doubt about it: he was a dead man.

Kind of a shame about that, actually, she amended slightly to herself. He would’ve had a gift for this business. What he did to Raven, and that with limited time and no access to Cornelius’ conditioning methods... that’s pretty impressive. Even if I did soften the bitch up for him. But there was nothing to be done. Someone had to take the fall.

Those few remaining, meanwhile, all the true Syndicate hands, were about to retire on the proceeds of perhaps the greatest fake-out in American history, after disposing of their enemies in one of the riskiest, most audacious operations of all time. It was a good time to be Sabrina Lockhart. She could picture the vacations she’d take in the Caribbean, on the French Riviera, vacations studded with cute little Latin pool boys and maybe a few of her new playthings to keep her company. Bailey, she’d definitely need to take Bailey Phillips and her talented, wet, willing little tongue.

But no matter how big the score, it always paid to have a backup plan, a second source of income if something went wrong. Or, as was entirely possible, if Siouxsie tried to screw her out of her share. It was as a job came to fruition that the biggest risks were to be found... people might crack, get paranoid, try selling their colleagues out like poor Jimmy Beam and his little crew of vets. Rest in peace, Jimmy, she thought, you dumb bastard. At the same time, she knew she’d have to step carefully to avoid the landmines... and that she’d need an out if worst came to worst.

There was no honour among thieves, so there had to be plenty of precautions among thieves. In which case, why let years of accumulated skills and experience as The Mistress go to waste?

She watched the curvaceous body of the bound Colombian beauty begin to jolt and writhe and shudder as her boyfriend started to stripe her with the wicked whip. She noticed how wet the girl was becoming as the lash laid into her; Alethex was starting to get around, she knew that Ernesto Matrillo had bought a supply, she wouldn’t wonder if this man – his nephew? second cousin? she could never keep all the relations in the huge Matrillo clan straight – had bought some and dosed his mistress with it. And maybe himself... ahhh, yes, there it was, the bitch was letting out a despairing cry as she arched and squirted under the whip, her ripe ass lifting up lewdly to meet the painful strokes, a classic Alethex orgasm. First of many, no doubt. Be that as it may, he does have promise. She put a check mark beside his name on the sheet in front of her, marked LIST OF INVITEES, and started fast-forwarding the images a little bit to see where he was going with his routine.

The grand "Buy, Sell or Trade Slave Market" event, scheduled for the next night at Le Salo, was her backup plan, her out. It had been born of a brainwave she’d had while watching the Kitts being taken down at the Soliko Grand Hotel; they’d used a "classic superheroines" theme there, dressing the hapless teen dreams up in the sluttiest possible variations of comic-book heroine outfits, having them playfully "vanquished" by a "supervillain" before they were sent out to be fucked... and the crowd had gone wild for it. Positively wild. As she’d watched the frenzy, she’d thought: there’s real money in this. Much, much bigger money than regular sex shows.

She’d put the word out on the street discreetly, through the right channels, that she was selling off her old stock – lovely as the Pony Girls were, most of them had been used for waif appeal, they just weren’t built to sell the new "superheroine" theme – and buying new. She wasn’t going to invite just anyone to sell or trade her their stock or snap up hers, of course; they had to be proven, dyed-in-the-wool bondage perverts, she had to know whatever sluts she bought had been well-broken, and whatever sluts she sold would be treated and controlled the way they needed to be if they didn’t want any of them escaping into the wild.

There’d been quite a response, too. Three dozen credible applicants, and a few more she’d had to reject just because they were too prominent in society to risk bringing them out. One of the rejectees had been an Evangelical preacher, even, which had been amusing but which she supposed shouldn’t be a surprise. As she watched the young Matrillo bravo start to playfully drip hot wax on his squealing paramour, she amended the total: thirty-seven credible applicants. She put a second check beside his name. Welcome aboard, Ramon.

One more DVD to watch. Unmarked. The name down on her list was "El Terrifico." It was probably going to be one of the weird amateurs who’d snuck in, there were always a couple. She contemplated giving it a miss, she had enough people... but no. Something worth doing was worth doing right. She popped Ramon Matrillo’s disc out of her computer, replaced it with the unlabelled disc, and clicked "play" on her media player.

The man introducing the video was visible from the neck up, decked out in a black domino mask, his eyes cold and glittering... and mad. "A proposition for Buy, Sell & Trade Slave Market Day," he said. "My name’s El Terrifico. What follows is a selection of clips from my party, El Terrifico’s Disco 666. I have a property for trade who I think might interest you... a real-life superheroine."

Sabrina sat up suddenly, her interest piqued.

After the brief introduction, the video simply segued into what were obviously edited clips from a lengthy, and quite perverted, bondage event. Three women bent over in wooden stocks were the centrepiece, and as the camera zoomed on the middle one, she recognized her from a recent magazine article on "heroines inspired by the Foxx Force Five." Fantastica, the Single Girl’s Champion! That’s pretty amusing, she thought wryly, watching the helpless masked girl in the blonde Brunnhilde wig. There were several shots of her being whipped by a hot blonde in a white dress whose face was obscured from the angle, more shots of her – considerably later – taking cock at both ends, cumming wetly (another Alethex assist, obviously), her soft ass jiggling as it was paddled.

Meh, not bad, she thought. She’s a cutie, no doubt. But using Alethex to get a good bondage session out of an evidently hapless, crazy twit like Fantastica wasn’t really much of a feat. Sabrina was on the fence as she forwarded the video, looking for something more... and there was one shot that seemed to show a general orgy in the room, more girls added to the mix, most of whom she didn’t recognize. Then she stopped, pausing the video to study it intently. Wait a second...

Unbelievable. Could that really be –

She slapped a button on her speakerphone. "Gerald, can I borrow you for a second?" she said into it, letting some of the urgency show in her voice.

His voice came back after a moment, sounding a little ragged. "Uhhhh, sure thing Doc, can you just give me... a minute..." There were quiet but clearly audible slurping sounds in the background.

"Dammit, you can wait a few minutes to get Chloe and Zoe to finish you off, you dickhead," she growled in irritation. "This is urgent. Get down here."

"Gotcha, Doc," he answered more snappily. "Right away."

Another reason you won’t be coming along with the winning team, Gerald, she thought in irritation, but it quickly faded as she looked back at the screen, zooming the shot in and out. It was too good to be true, surely. It had to be coincidental similarity, but they looked damn close.

In a few moments, the big Cleanhead appeared at the door in his obviously hastily-donned orderly uniform. "What can I do for you, Doc?" he said a little breathlessly.

"Come here and look at this. I need a second opinion."

He walked over and looked at the monitor screen. His eye was as jaded as hers, and at first he had an almost bored just another orgy look, seeming about to ask what he was looking for... but then suddenly his expression changed. "Fuck me," he breathed, pointing at the screen, his finger alighting on the figure of a slender, gorgeous blonde with her wrists tied to her ankles, her face transfixed in a comical look of horror and her pussy squirting as she took a hard cock up the butt. "That’s Mercedes Sheraton."

She nodded, letting the excitement rise. He would know; Gerald had the most intense full-time crush on the famous hotel heiress of anyone she knew. "It is, isn’t it? And do you recognize the redhead, in the stocks nearest the camera?"

He looked at the voluptuous red-haired woman confined in the stocks, a river of spunk dripping down her chin from her ring-gagged mouth, clearly bawling like a child as she was raped in the ass. It took him a second, but he nodded again. "I’ve seen her picture in the paper. Connie whatshername, does the Amazing Woman of the Week column."

"Connie Phillips," Sabrina nodded. "Mixes with the cream of the Island City social elite. Does pieces on socialites, Broadway stars, movie stars, rap divas, female politicians, artists, models, you name it."

"Is this... are they who this guy is selling?"

"No, that’s just the thing," she said. "I don’t think he actually realizes what he has here. He’s just offering to trade Fantastica, the chick in the wig."

The implications sunk in, and Gerald nodded. "So we’re inviting him, then."

"Absolutely." She handed him her invitation list, and continued: "These plus El Terrifico are the guest list. Contact them and let them know. And let El Terrifico know that I’m willing to do a generous deal with him for Fantastica and a full-length DVD of his event. Those are the terms. No DVD, no deal."

"Got it," he said, and walked promptly out the door. Motivated to efficiency, no doubt, by the waiting orifices of a pair of Pony Girls upstairs, but no matter.

Sabrina was almost giddy. She’d just had a second major score fall into her lap, completely unexpected, courtesy of a bastard too crazy to know what to do with it. Mercedes Sheraton and Connie Phillips in an Alethex-fuelled bondage gangbang! she thought. If I hadn’t seen it, I’d call anyone who’d told me the story a liar! There were sex tape scandals, and there were sex tape scandals; even in this hard-to-shock era, she knew to a certainty that figures like Sheraton and Phillips would do more than just pay through the nose to keep something like that quiet.

They’d pay anything. They’d do anything. Betray anyone. The images from that party could destroy them utterly as credible media and entertainment-industry figures in ways no regular sex tape scandal could hope to achieve.

The hell with superheroines! I could have these women lure in their friends, have those friends lure in theirs... I could have my very own celebrity brothel with a rotating cast of whores, from the A-list right through to the D-list! The thought of the money that could pull down in a week made her catch her breath. Combined with her take from the caper with Siouxsie... she’d be a very, very rich woman indeed. She clicked play on the DVD again, watching the ravishing and defilement of the two celebrities with relish, every one of their pitiful screams and moans like the ching-a-ching! of a cash register. El Terrifico, you magnificent bastard... I can’t wait to meet you.

* * * * *

It was ironic, thought Max as he watched his monitors with satisfaction. When Summerset and Satin had drawn off the police cruiser in front of Sleepy Hollow, they’d probably thought they were sacrificing themselves. It would horrify them, no doubt, to learn that they’d simply sent poor Keiko and Mylène ahead into the real trap... sent them to their doom. Sorry I forgot to mention the Syndicate owns pretty much the entire Sleepy Hollow Police Department, Foxxes, he thought wryly. A little white lie.

As the fall of the Enchantress and the Tiger Princess had begun at the hands of the Sleepy Hollow PD, he’d felt his cock stiffen again – insistently this time – and had one of the Cleanheads bring Raven up from her cage. He was monitoring the scene with a powerful satellite camera that could see amazing amounts of detail from its orbit, and had ordered her to watch what was happening on the monitor as she ran her tongue demurely over his cock and balls, lapping at the salty man-meat like hard candy.

As the two heroines were abused, the cast of cocks growing as more and more of the village’s "auxiliary" volunteer cops started to arrive on the scene, others cordoning it off to look like a traffic accident from a distance, Max kept up a running commentary, pointing out interesting clinical details of the amateurs’ technique: "See how they keep on going in for Keiko’s ass? That’s good, you can tell that really fucks with her head." Or: "Damn, I think those two black guys just made Mylène’s night. Look at her bounce on those things!" Or: "Now that’s a little more creative, there. See how he’s strangling Keiko just slightly with that belt while the other guy whips her? You just know that’s going to get her off... ahhhh, there we go."

Through it all, Raven licked and sucked obediently, her eyes glued to the screen, probably unaware that she was making little helpless noises of distress deep in her throat.

"The only mistake," he added, grabbing the back of her head and pushing her mouth down, down to the root of his throbbing cock as he watched the last few of Sleepy Hollow’s pigs bend the beaten Foxxes side-by-side over the hood of a cruiser and start to run a train on their wriggling asses: "Their only mistake is the chloroforming... They’re taking the whole ahhh Sleepy Hollow moniker a bit literally... See, ahhhh, see, there they go again, I think their rule is to do it anytime one of the bitches looks ahhhh looks coherent enough to say something.... It’s a good control device, keeps the sluts from any kind of resistance, but it ahhhh it takes them... takes them out of the experience... when they wake up in their cages here, it’ll ahhhh it’ll just seem like something slightly more than a nightmare... it won’t ahhhhhhhh it won’t permanently rip out their core of their being... will it? It won’t strip them right down to their most basic ahhhhhhh animal essence... But we can ahhhhhhhhh we can fix that, can’t we, Raven? Yes... yes we can ahhhhhhhh..."

Max stopped talking for a few minutes, the only sounds on the observation platform thosee of him enthusiastically fucking Raven’s wet mouth as she choked and gulped and slurped noisily on his tool, all the while looking up with blank saucer eyes as two of her best friends in the world were anally raped into unconsciousness by a group of leering rural thugs passing themselves off as cops. As Keiko and Mylène’s writhing forms finally went limp and stopped responding, the men around them laughing and high-fiving each other, Max suddenly tensed up, hissed, drove his pulsing shaft to the back of her throat.... and she swallowed, and swallowed, and swallowed, and swallowed some more as he pumped his spunk down her throat. "Mmmmmhhmmgllmmpphhh," was the only sound she made as it happened.

"Ahhhh," Max said, letting her up off his cock and gesturing her to kneel at his side, wiping up a few stray droplets of cum from her chin with his finger and feeding it to her with a fond look in his eyes as he took out the cell phone. "Jerry," he said, glancing up at the images of the two heroines being tossed together in the trunk of a cruiser. "Sleepy Hollow PD’s coming our way with two of our specimens. They’ll be arriving in about forty minutes. Get somebody over here to set up the machines, and then I want you to take a party out and meet them." He paused for a moment, and then said: "Yeah, I know it’ll be pushing midnight. Don’t worry, we’ve got time. No rest for the wicked tonight, my friend, we’re going right until sunup on this one. Let’s get it done, Jerry... for Jimmy and the boys."

He just barely kept an edge of hilarity from his voice as he said those last words. As Raven licked the flavourful spunk from his finger, she looked up at him... just the way he’d trained her to. For all the world as though this was the only place she ever wanted to be. It’s okay, my pet, he thought amusedly as her stroked her cheek. I know that isn’t quite true... yet. But we’re going to fix that, too. "One more thing, Jerry," he said. "Right now, the other two Foxxes are hiding out in a stand of trees just by the ferry dock, praying for some sign of Keiko and Mylène. I want you to make the transfer in plain sight. Make sure they get a good, long look. But you stay sharp while you do it, you hear me? Summerset can still shoot the quills off a porcupine."

He paused again, then chuckled. "No, let’s not take them at the perimeter. I think we should let them all the way in... they’ve earned it."